John Cruickshank, the last surviving holder of the Victoria Cross from the Second World War, has died at 105. With his passing, Britain loses not only a decorated airman but the final living link to a generation of men whose courage was tested in the most brutal of wars.
Cruickshank was just 24 when, flying a lumbering Catalina patrol aircraft over the Norwegian Sea in June 1944, he carried out the mission that would define his life. His crew had spotted a German U-boat threatening a British convoy. On their first bombing run, the release mechanism failed. The submarine’s guns roared back, tearing into the Catalina’s fuselage and into Cruickshank himself.
He was hit more than 70 times. Two rounds pierced his lungs. Ten more ripped through his legs. Yet when others might have turned for home, he swung the aircraft back into line. With blood filling his lungs, he steadied the Catalina and made a second run. This time the bombs released, plunging into the sea and destroying the submarine below.
The attack saved the convoy but cost his crew dearly. His navigator, John Dickson, was killed outright. Several others were badly wounded. Cruickshank somehow guided the aircraft home, refusing morphine so that his mind would remain sharp enough to land. At Sullom Voe, Shetland, he was so gravely injured that a blood transfusion was given before he could even be removed from the cockpit.
Two months later, King George VI placed the Victoria Cross in his hands — Britain and the Commonwealth’s highest recognition of gallantry. The official citation praised his “determination, fortitude and devotion to duty.”
But Cruickshank rarely invoked that day. He preferred to speak not of heroism but of obligation. “You don’t get involved in that kind of thing thinking of decorations,” he said many years later. “It was regarded as duty.”
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Born in Aberdeen in 1920, he had joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve before the war and trained as a pilot in Canada. The attack in 1944 ended his operational flying career. Two years later, he left the RAF and quietly began a new life in banking.
He never sought the limelight. Friends describe him as private, understated, yet warm. Bob Kemp, who flew with him in later years, recalled a man whose memory of the Catalina remained astonishing. Even in his late 80s, once in the cockpit, Cruickshank could still identify every crew station, the positions of the machine guns, even the engine revolutions needed for take-off.
“He was a stoic aviator, a lovely person,” Kemp said. “He lived with quiet dignity but had a wonderful sense of humour. He just wanted to help as many people as he could.” Cruickshank supported the RAF Benevolent Fund and animal charities, giving generously but without fuss.
He outlived his wife by more than four decades and lived alone in Aberdeen. Every year, he travelled north to Shetland to lay a wreath on the grave of his navigator, John Dickson.
On his 104th birthday, as if to close the circle, a Catalina flew over his home — a tribute to the young pilot who had once steered the ungainly flying boat into history.
With Cruickshank’s death, the ranks of Victoria Cross recipients from the Second World War are gone. What remains is the memory of men like him, who in the heat of a single moment summoned a resolve that would echo across generations.