10/06/2026
On a July evening in 1944, far out over the northern sea, a young flying-boat captain dived his Catalina at a surfaced German U-boat — straight into its anti-aircraft guns — and ran in to drop his depth charges. Nothing happened. They had failed to release.
He had every reason to turn for home. The element of surprise was gone. The U-boat's gunners now had his measure, and a Catalina is a big, slow target. No one would have said a word against him.
He banked the aircraft around, and flew back into the guns.
The flak found them on the way in. His navigator was killed at his station. The aircraft was holed and burning in places, and the captain himself was hit again and again — he would later be found to have seventy-two separate wounds, two of them deep in his lungs. He said nothing of it to the crew. He held the aircraft steady, ran the attack to the release point, and let the depth charges go himself. They straddled the U-boat perfectly. It went down.
Then came the long way home — five and a half hours of empty sea. He refused the morphine the crew offered him, because morphine would cloud his head, and he was still the captain. When his strength gave out, his second pilot took the controls while he drifted in and out of consciousness in the back. Each time he woke, he asked after his aircraft and his crew. As they came in at last to Sullom Voe in Shetland, he insisted on being helped back up to the cockpit, and stayed there until the flying boat was safely down on the water and secure. Only then did the medical officer get to him. He was given a blood transfusion before they dared move him ashore.
For that night's work he was awarded the Victoria Cross.
His name was John Cruickshank. He was twenty-four years old — a bank clerk from Aberdeen who had joined up even before the war came.
When it ended, he did what the quiet ones do. He went back to the bank. For the rest of his working life he was a banker, and for the rest of his long life he barely spoke of the war at all. When people pressed him, he said he had simply been doing his duty, like everyone else out there.
The decades passed, and one by one the men who wore the Victoria Cross of that war were laid to rest, until only he was left. In May 2020 he became the first holder of the Victoria Cross in its history to reach the age of one hundred. For five more years, he carried something on behalf of every one of them: he was the last man alive to have earned the Victoria Cross in the Second World War.
In August 2025, at the age of one hundred and five, he left us — and that was the end of it. There is now no one living who holds that war's highest honour. An entire generation's courage passed, that day, fully into memory.
The last Victoria Cross of the Second World War belonged to a soft-spoken Aberdeen banker who flew back into the guns — and now it belongs to us, to keep.
He kept their memory for more than eighty years. Keep his for one minute — share his name.
