Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria, to include the Brian Ritchie Collection (Part III)

Six: Temporary Major M. M. “Mickey” Wardle, Leicestershire Regiment, attached 2nd Battalion, Parachute Regiment (A.A.C.) with whom he was killed in action in North Africa in March 1943

India General Service 1936-39, 1 clasp, North West Frontier 1937-39 (2/Lt., R. Leicesters); General Service 1918-62, 1 clasp, Palestine (2/Lieut., R. Leicesters); 1939-45 Star; Africa Star, clasp, 1st Army; Defence and War Medals, the first with officially re-impressed naming and all late or replacement issues, generally extremely fine (6) £250-300

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Collection of Medals to the Leicester Regiment and Yeomanry formed by the late Trevor Harris.

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Michael Mark “Mickey” Wardle was born in October 1917, the son of Colonel M. K. Wardle, D.S.O., M.C., who commanded the 2nd Battalion, Leicestershire Regiment in Palestine 1938-40, and was educated at the Imperial Service College. Commissioned into his father’s regiment as a 2nd Lieutenant in October 1938, he quickly witnessed active service out on the North West Frontier and in Palestine, and was advanced to Lieutenant in January 1941.

By the time of his death on 28 March 1943, he was serving as a Temporary Major and Brigade Intelligence Officer in the 2nd Battalion, Parachute Regiment (A.A.C.), commanded by John Frost of Arnhem fame, and had already seen a good deal of action. As described by Frost in his well known memoirs, A Drop Too Many, Wardle was wounded in a Battalion attack during ‘Phase Two’ of the battle of Tamera in Tunisia:

‘ ... ‘B’ Company, on the other hand, had gone well ahead, but had been checked by an unsuspected minefield. They had come under heavy fire while trying to find a way round, and both Mickey Wardle, the Company Commander, and Victor Dover had been wounded. I was able to talk to Douglas Crawley, who had taken over the Company, but we were unable to tell each other exactly where we were. I asked him to put up Very lights from his position, but when he did so, the Germans immediately followed suit from other places and succeeded in confusing the issue ... Among those waiting [to be evacuated] was Mickey Wardle, and we were delighted to see him being carried off by four hefty Germans, for it was he who had seemed to feel so depressed before the battle. All the greater was the shock when we learned later that he and the four Germans were all killed when a shell landed on a small hut in which they were sheltering on the way down ... ’

Wardle, who was 25 years of age, is buried in the Tabarka Ras Rajel War Cemetery, Tunisia.