Robert Henry Cain

It's not an accident that the British PIAT is, by far, the shittiest anti-tank weapon in basically any World War II video game ever produced.

It's not just that this heavy-ass, cumbersome, overly-complicated and impossible-to-handle weapon had to compete with the likes of the US Bazooka the German Panzershreck as the only mass-produced anti-tank explosive of the war that didn't have a rocket-powered projectile (it was spring-loaded!), or that it could only penetrate 75mm of armor at a distance of 100 yards, which was fucking generous because most PIAT operators didn't trust this thing to take out a real-life tank at a range of anywhere outside 50 yards (which is too close for comfort for a tank). And it wasn't even that that it had such a powerful spring in there that you couldn't cock the weapon while laying prone because you needed to hoist it up to a good position where you could really put your back into pulling the hammer back. No, what made this thing a weapon that was basically an uglier, even-more-dangerous-to-the-user version of Fallout's Fat Man launcher is that this thing required two fingers to pull the fucking trigger, and then, when you had the trigger pulled, you had to HOLD IT DOWN for a second and a half to activate it, and THEN, AFTER THAT, when the round dropped into the chamber it added a twelve-pound weight to the front of the weapon just a tenth of a second before the shot went off, and if you weren't ready for it you were going to splash-damage the fuck out of yourself like you were trying to do a rocket-assisted jump in the original Quake.

Yet, somehow, in September of 1944 a British battalion commander named Robert Henry Cain managed to use one of these monstrosities to blow the fuck out of four Waffen SS Tiger tanks, two Panzer IVs, and a couple other self-propelled guns over the course of just five days. And he did it while half-blind, almost completely deafened by a pair of ruptured eardrums, and with at least a couple of 7.92 millimeter bullet holes strategically placed at various points in and around his abdomen.

Robert Henry Cain was born in Shanghai on January 2, 1909 (110 years ago next Thursday), and was raised on the Isle of Man, a little island off the coast of England with a badass flag that kind of looks like what you should envision when someone mentions the idea of a one-legged man in an ass-kicking competition. Today I learned that people from here are called Manxmen, which sounds equally believable either as a Forgotten Realms style race of cat-man warriors or a Facebook group of dudes who are into some kind of weird freaky sex shit, which has nothing to do with the plot here so I'll just move on and say that he enrolled in the British Army in 1928, served two years, and left in 1931 to join the reserves. When all that Hitler shit went tits-up in 1940 he was called back into service, serving as Second Lieutenant (Leftenant? That doesn't look right and autocorrect is pinging it but I really can't be bothered to get sidetracked by a Wikipedia hole right now) in the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers during the early part of World War II. By '42 he was commanding the Second Battalion of the South Staffordshire Regiment, which was part of the British elite First Airborne Division – a hardcore unit of ass-stomping Brits better known as "The Red Devils" because they wore badass red berets that all the other Allied military units were totally jealous of. In 1943 he was promoted to Major, and in July of that year he took part in the para drop into Sicily and saw action in the Italian Campaign.

But, sure, jumping out of a fucking airplane and parachuting through flak into enemy territory while wearing a dope beret is pretty rad and all, but what earned Cain his reputation as a true Hero of the Manx Men happened in September of 1944, when the 35 year-old Major was tasked with leading his battalion into combat during Operation Market Garden – the ambitious, daring, aggressive Allied plan to drop paratroopers into the Netherlands in a balls-out sneak-attack and seize a couple critical bridges over the Rhine River into Germany. Success would have ended the war six months sooner, and all the intel the Allies had pointed to the fact that the German defenses in the region amounted to dozen old geezers on bicycles with bolt-action rifles and six big Fraulines in Viking helmets.

Unfortunately for Cain, the Red Devils, Democracy, and All of Humanity, somehow the SOE missed the fact that the entirety of the motherfucking and Ninth and Tenth SS Panzer Divisions had been deployed to the AO for rest, relaxation, re-fitting, re-arming, and re-diculously kicking the shit out of a bunch of unsuspecting light infantry who just so happened to be slowly floating towards their tanks on parachutes.

Maj. Robert Henry Cain didn't end up landing with the first wave of British Paratroopers, but it wasn't because he didn't want to. He had gone up with them, but, as luck would have it, the fucking glider he was in somehow became detached from the plane carrying it just 30 seconds after liftoff, and he ended up having to survive a hardcore plane crash where his pilot ditched in some field in southern England, skidded through farmland, crashed through a fence, and split in half. Luckily everyone on board was uninjured by the crash-landing, but Cain remembers laughing because the glider pilot was basically like, "Motherfucker! The same thing happened to me on D-Day!"

Well, ok, the day after his plane crash Cain got back into another identical glider and took off again, and this time he was lucky enough to be air-dropped into the middle of two hardcore Nazi SS Panzer Divisions. He hit the ground on the night of September 18, 1944, and immediately assembled his battalion and started moving off towards the Dutch city of Arnhem, hoping to link up with the Brits fighting there and help capture the bridge before it was too late.

They didn't make it that far. At 4:30am on the morning of September 18, Cain and Second Battalion came into contact with the SS in a field outside an old hospital on the outskirts on the city. Cain and the Red Devils fought heroically, but, one of the down sides of being a paratrooper is that you basically can only go into battle with whatever you can physically carry on your person, and fighting Tiger tanks with bolt-action rifles and Bren guns is really only exciting to the suicidal or the criminally insane. Cain fought heroically, however, and spent the first hours of his Battle of Arnhem running from building to building, in full sight of the enemy, dodging bullets, artillery, and tank shells as he scrounged the LZ and the dead bodies for any PIAT anti-tank rounds he could find.

It was a losing effort, of course, and by 11:30am, after 7 straight hours of combat against two of Nazi Germany's most badass military units, the British were out of ammo, badly fucked-up, surrounded, and cut off from their reinforcements. All that was left was to retreat and try to link up with any other Allies who managed to survive the drop.

Cain and his men regrouped with the 11th Parachute Battalion, but things weren't looking good. The Germans knew the Brits were there, an they were planning a counter-attack. Cain heroically led a motherfucking BAYONET CHARGE on a German defensive position in a forest called Den Brink (the Dutch language is freakin' bonkers), but even after shanking every Nazi in reach they realized that not only was the ground there not great for digging in (the weather and the root systems of the trees made for difficult work), but, oh yeah, the Nazis had also sighted that ridgeline in on their mortars and the second the Brits took it they started taking super-accurate mortar fire from the enemy. Cain had to fall back. All he could do now was dig in to some hedgerows and wait for German Tigers to start rolling in like:

So, let me paint the picture for you here. It is the morning of September 20th, 1944. Maj. Robert Henry Cain had gone into this battle with a battalion under his command – roughly 1,000 men – and a mix of bad luck, Nazi machine guns, and other misfortunes had reduced his force down to just 100 guys. They'd had 12 hours to set up a defensive perimeter, and the only things they were armed with were bolt-action rifles, a couple Bren guns, a few of those PIAT things I mentioned in the opening paragraph, and a couple bigger anti-tank cannons that belonged to the 11th Battalion but could be called on in a pinch. They were low on ammunition, most of those 100 guys were wounded, and there were no reinforcements coming. And they were about to be attacked by aircraft, heavy armor, and mechanized infantry who not only massively outnumbered them, but were attached to the most elite units in the entire Wehrmacht.

It wasn't looking good.

But Robert Cain didn't give a fuck.

Cain may have been a battalion commander, an officer, AND a gentleman, but when Nazi Panzers started rolling through his perimeter wasting Brit paratroopers this motherfucker morphed from Lord Grantham to Jason Statham faster than you can say "shaken, not stirred", grabbed a PIAT, and started laying waste to Fascists in a manner so hardcore it would make BJ Blaskeiwicz pop a boner big enough to hoist a flag on it. Two Tiger I tanks were rolling down the street he was on, but Cain hid under some rubble, waited until they were TWENTY YARDS from him, popped up, and launched a Fat Man at the lead tank. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, the fucking PIAT was a complete piece of shit, so even at that range the round didn't do jack shit to the German tank, which then immediately turned its guns on Cain, opened fire, blew up the goddamn house behind him, and slammed a few rounds of machine gun fire through his torso. Cain dodged the fucking chimney that collapsed within four feet of him, absorbed several dozen splinters of shattered masonry and drywall into his back, shrugged off the bullets, ducked behind a shed, RELOADED, and fired a round underneath the tank that disabled it, blew off a tread, and set a small fire. When the tank crew popped the hatch and started climbing out of the flaming tank, Cain pulled his Webley revolver, opened fire, and killed the crew.

Then, of course, the second Tiger opened up on him.

Cain ducked back behind the shed, reloaded, popped out, and fired the PIAT again – and this time the gun jammed, which is bad under normal circumstances, but extra bad when you're firing a timed explosive round.

The PIAT blew the fuck up in Cain's face, sending him flying backwards into the rubble and blinding him in the process. But instead of punking out, Cain lay on his back and started pointing an, in his words, "screaming like a hooligan," using "some very colourful language" (the u of course being added for accuracy, the "King's English" and all) until one of those howitzers I mentioned earlier ranged in on the Tiger and took it out.

Wounded, blind, and shot in multiple places, Cain was dragged back to a field hospital, but his vision came back 30 minutes later so he got out of his stretcher, ignored his orderlies (as a Major he outranked all of them anyway) and ran back to the front lines to start blowing up more tanks. He single-handedly fought off three more tanks, killing or damaging all of them, but the explosions from the tank cannons and his PIAT ended up blowing out both of the dude's eardrums, rendering him basically deaf, but Cain literally just jammed bandages into his ears to plug up the bleeding and kept on launching RPGs at Nazi armor.

Cain fired PIATs until his entire battalion ran out of ammo, so then he manned a 6-pounder anti-tank gun (think like a WW2 version of one of those cannons you'd see in a Napoleon or a Civil War battle) blew up another Tiger, and fired the gun so much he broke it. After that he picked up a 2-inch mortar tube and started firing it point-blank at enemy tanks and infantry like it was a freaking bazooka, standing to-to-toe with goddamn FLAMETHROWER TANKS and somehow driving them back.

After five days of non-stop fighting, Robert Henry Cain – who, I should remind you, was the commanding officer of his battalion – personally destroyed six tanks (four of which were Tigers) as well as a couple StuG III self-propelled guns (basically just tanks with fixed turrets). When he received the order to fall back, he stopped, found a dirty mirror and an old razor, and shaved a week's worth of scruff off his face so that he'd look like a Real British Officer when he left the battlefield, and wiped away the shaved-off hair with a rag that was basically soaked in some combination of his blood and the blood of his enemies. He was the last member of his battalion to board a boat and escape across the river, only leaving after he was sure that every surviving man in his command had evacuated. When he arrived on the other side, his Regimental commander was like, "Well, there's one officer at least who's shaved."

Cain responded, "I was brought up well, sir."

Robert Henry Cain received the Victoria Cross in December of 1944, but that wasn't the end of the war for him. He deployed to Norway, helped liberate that country, then, after the war, he worked for Shell Oil, was elected to the Nigerian House of Representatives (?!), got his face on a Postage Stamp on the Isle of Man in 1981, and lived to the age of 65. His daughter married the guy from Top Gear, and, to this day, Cain is the only Manxman to receive a Victoria Cross.

Links: