What Does It Take To Earn The British Medal Of Honor? | Victoria Cross: For Valour | Timeline

one of the great privileges of working at history here and making films together with our team at timeline is the access we get to extraordinary historical locations like this one stonehenge i'm right in the middle of the stone circle now it is an absolutely extraordinary place to visit if you want to watch the documentary like the one we're producing here go to history hit tv it's like netflix for history and if you use the code timeline when you check out you'll get a special introductory offer see you there in september of 1944 the allied armies were advancing fast towards germany but a huge obstacle stood in their way the river rhine an audacious plan to capture eight of the bridges across it in one fell swoop started well but everything went disastrously wrong with the final quarry the bridge at arnhem twelve thousand airborne troops came by glider and parachute to fight for the bridge it was the biggest airborne assault ever [Music] but it didn't work [Music] in fact it would turn out to be one of the biggest disasters in the entire war of the 12 000 men who came here only 3 900 got out again however the battle produced some of the most astonishing feats of bravery in british military history one of the men fighting here was major robert kane of the south staffordshire regiment he arrived in the war zone by glider on september the 18th just another ordinary man who'd given up his ordinary job to fight in the war but ten days after his glider landed in this very field this ordinary man would have done something extraordinary he would have won the world's highest award for valor the victoria cross [Music] it is almost impossible to win a vc in 150 years since it was created the number of british and commonwealth troops who've seen action is in the tens of millions but only 1351 of them have been awarded the victoria cross the chances of surviving a vc action are just one in 10 but if you do survive the medal can never be taken away from you you can go to the gallows wearing it and no matter how many letters you have after your name vc always comes first the vc to my mind has a place above all other national awards it is the highest regarded award for gantry people have it in their minds that the victoria cross is something special and anybody who's got the victoria cross must be somebody special and they're right i could have centered this program on any vc winner all of them are remarkable but the most special for me is this man robert kane this then is his story but it's also the story of the medal that he won [Music] in official speak the military say the victoria cross is awarded only for gallantry of the highest order but what does that mean well let me give you a typical example this is the story of lieutenant ferdinand west an raf pilot who won his vc in the first world war on august the 10th 1918 west was flying his biplane far over the enemy lines when he was attacked by seven german aircraft at the start of the fight one of his legs was blown off by an explosive bullet and fell into the controls west lifted his leg clear of the controls and although wounded in the other leg maneuvered his machine so that his rear gunner was able to get several good bursts into the enemy aircraft and drive them off all seven of them through sheer grit and determination west then landed his plane safely and although rapidly weakening and semi-conscious from the loss of blood insisted on filing his report on the enemy troop positions before receiving medical attention the extraordinary thing is the report here filed by his rear gunner said that he didn't know that the pilot had been wounded until after they landed west never thought to mention that his leg had been blown off [Music] the story of the vc began 150 years ago when britain was in the thick of another empire building dust-up the crimean war there was huge bravery but the system for rewarding this gallantry was a shambles the medals that did exist were only for officers of a certain rank there was nothing for the common man sometimes an ordinary soldier would be mentioned in dispatches but that was no good because army commanders tended to list everyone who'd taken part it was a bit like passing your chartered accountancy exams today you get your name in the paper but so does everyone else the crimean conflict however saw the advent of a new weapon to fight the cause of the foot soldier the war correspondent one of them was william howard russell from the times [Music] his stories from the front line meant that for the first time people back home could read accounts about the immense bravery of the bloke next door one of the people who read these reports was captain thomas scoble an mp who proposed a motion in the commons on december the 19th 1854 that the queen should create some kind of medal an order of merit he said for distinguished and prominent personal gallantry to which every grade an individual from the highest to the lowest may be admissible unfortunately the idea met with strong resistance from army commanders they argued that the success of the british army was based on the discipline of its formations and they didn't want a medal that recognized individual acts of heroism in case it encouraged soldiers to break ranks and disappear off on their own however the top brass was about to be outgunned queen victoria and prince albert saw the sense of scobel's idea and told the war office to come up with a plan not being terribly adventurous or enthusiastic the civil servant suggested something traditional an ancient order of some kind perhaps this is the document that they prepared and as you can see from the notes and the squiggles put on it by prince albert he was less than impressed you can see here he's crossed out this bit where it refers to the order because he didn't want it to be seen like joining a masonic lodge here in the margin look he's he's actually referred to it as a cross granted for distinguished service which will make it simple and intelligible that is very forward thinking for the time and here he even suggests a name for it the victoria cross nearly a hundred years after prince albert wrote those words major robert kane was preparing to go into battle at arnhem he was no career soldier just an oil company executive from the isle of man so what sort of chap was he he was very kind and he had a great sense of humor i used to drink in the bar he always bought the drinks well my strongest memory is that you hadn't got to be frightened of him that you could go to him and speak to him of anything i would personally if i've been asked to follow anyone i'd have followed robert cain i had complete confidence in men the battle plan that brought cain to arnhem was called operation market garden and it was very simple allied forces would parachute into holland and seize a line of strategic bridges this would create a highway that would allow the second army to charge north over the enemy defense lines and down into germany itself the war it was said would be over in a matter of weeks now the most difficult bridge to capture would be the one furthest north in the dutch city of arnhem but a small band of british paratroopers from the first wave of landings did manage to capture the north end of what's now known as the bridge too far [Music] major cane arrived in this field 24 hours after the first landings there had been a problem with his glider back in england but his job remained the same he had to get his company of 22 men to the bridge as fast as possible to help out sounds simple but it wasn't first of all the whole point of airborne troops is surprise you don't know they're coming until they're there but because kane arrived 24 hours after the first wave the surprise was gone and to make matters worse the landing zone was some eight miles from the bridge so thanks to some incompetent planning from the top brass in england the germans knew that kane and his men were coming they knew where he'd landed they knew where he was going and they had the wherewithal to do something about it by sheer coincidence the german army had parked two divisions just outside arnhem that meant tanks artillery guns half tracks and 12 000 ss panzer troops [Applause] lined up against this wall of armor was the airborne british soldier who by the nature of his job travelled light he only had a stem gun a rifle knives grenades only a few anti-tank weapons were brought because no one thought they'd be needed the british troops simply didn't know about the strength of the german opposition as they started out on the eight mile walk to the bridge kane's men made it with no real problems at all to this very spot just 2 000 yards from the bridge they could actually see it over there and they could almost certainly hear the small company of british soldiers fighting to hold on to the northern end but they couldn't get there [Music] the germans had had all the time in the world to get ready and they were ready down there on the other side of the river they had artillery on the other side up there behind that modern building there's a piece of high ground they put mortars on that dead ahead were tanks and infantry in desperation some of the british tried to run down this bank but there were more tanks and more infantry down there on the lower road this was the perfect place for an ambush the british had walked right into it and they were slaughtered of the 400 south staffs who fought here only a hundred would escape [Music] kane called it the regiment's waterloo [Music] two of his close friends were among the casualties and in his diary he wrote for the first time since childhood tears sprang in my eyes i turned away swallowing hard and with rage in my heart it must have been a savage kind of rage because on his way back down this road for more ammunition he ran into a party of five germans and even though he was alone he opened up with his bren gun and killed all of them later on the easygoing married father of two wrote of the killings i cannot describe the surge of dreadful unholy joy which i felt when he got back the battle scenes were horrific he wrote we passed taffy williams a grand little welshman and one of my originals only his head and face were untouched the rest of him was unrecognizable and so with his company decimated kane was ordered to retreat he'd bagged five germans single-handed but that made him a soldier not a hero there was still no hint that this man would win a victoria cross [Music] this the world's ultimate medal was deliberately designed to be simple in fact when it was unveiled in 1857 the critics were horrified the times called it poor looking and mean in the extreme people were used to medals like chandeliers as big and as glitzy as firework night it was always assumed that the grander the medal the brighter it should be this is the actual prototype of the vc made to prince albert's specifications a simple cross now when queen victoria saw it she loved it in fact if we look on a real one which i've got here we can see the only change she made is to the bar she added some laurel leafs and a little v and that's it the highest award for gallantry [Music] strangely the metal from which all vcs are made is not kept at the palace or under the bank of england it's to be found here at an army supply base near telford in shropshire [Applause] [Music] it's in these sinister buildings that the army stores its rifles its machine guns its artillery pieces its nuclear and chemical warfare suits a quarter of a million items with a combined value of 1.4 billion pounds enough to win a small war bear in mind that what you're looking at here is just one aisle and there are eight aisles in every unit and there are four units in every building and there are 20 buildings the security is fearsome but even so the most precious thing they have here is kept in its own safe a safe with its own alarm and its own all-seeing cctv camera this is it it's a lump of bronze from a chinese-made cannon that was captured from the russians at sevastopol in the crimean war and it's from this lump of metal that all victoria crosses are made now you'd expect the delicate job of creating a vc to be handled by a household name like garage or asprey but no every time a new batch of medals is needed a slice is peeled from the original lamp and taken by military escort to a tiny jewelers in london's burlington arcade hancocks have made the medal since the day it was created and it's always given their craftsman a bit of a headache it's made of very insignificant valueless metal the metal itself is i suppose the right wood is unstable it's not nice metal like pure copper or pure silver or pure gold or even pure bronze it comes as most people seem to know from cannons which were captured so it's already been used once and the more often you use it the less stable it becomes down in the vaults of these jewellers you will find seven vcs the last of a batch that was cast over 30 years ago they're all unengraved they're all waiting for an owner all vcs are going to look alike but what makes them unique of course is the information on the back the engraving of the man's name and regiment and the date and until they are issued they are literally valueless 1948 that sort of time hancocks were charging one pound 10 150 in in our modern language to each of the services and now a vc which may have cost those sorts of sums in 1943 could well be worth on the market 150 to 200 000 pounds it does actually become priceless once it's been issued because it can be identified for a particular man on a particular day in a particular action and it's the history which is carried forward so as a piece of jewelry the victoria cross is worthless but as queen victoria understood all along the medal itself isn't important it's the story that goes with it that matters and back in arnhem major robert cain's vc story was about to begin [Music] despite the losses suffered by kane and the south staffs in the german ambush earlier that day the british still saw this as a setback rather than a defeat and kane's next task was to come here to a nearby hill called den brink his orders were to seize the hill hold it and use the high ground to provide covering fire kane made it to the high ground no problem at all but he and his men couldn't dig protective trenches because unsurprisingly the whole area was crisscrossed with tree roots look they're everywhere and all they had were these pathetic little trenching tools so they were completely exposed when the tanks came it was another massacre tank shells and mortar fire rained down on caine's men who couldn't find any protection in the ground for the second time in a day he was forced to retreat writing later it would have been a sheer waste of life to stay there i felt extremely dejected i knew our particular effort to get through to the bridge had been a failure kane took a hundred men to the top of that ridge but when he came down 90 minutes later 40 of them were gone now he says he was dejected but eyewitnesses say he was anything but they say he was bloody angry robert kane the affable man who bought the drinks in the bar had now become an angry warrior so is anger the fuel which stokes the fire of a vc winner many vcs are one in the heat of the moment and undoubtedly the adrenaline gets going and inspires people but and their emotions will come up to the top and anger is likely to be one of them because it will um they've been seeing their own people being killed and but i believe very firmly that the vc winner has complete focus on the job in hand and he may have these emotions but he's got them under control anger without being under control uh is a useless emotion to have but anger controlled and directed towards defeating the enemy is a most effective weapon this man is a classic example in november 1965 rambohada limbu lance corporal in the gurkhas was fighting in the indonesian war during one battle he ran across 60 yards of open ground completely exposed to a hail of murderous machine gun fire so he could rescue a wounded soldier it seemed to unlock as like a suicidal run the first time but then he did it all over again to come back with a second soldier and then again for a third time to retrieve their bren gun which he used to charge down and kill the enemy he won his victoria cross in just 20 minutes and afterwards said that it was the anger of seeing his friends wounded that had driven him on limbu is a rare breed one of only 15 vc winners who are still alive today [Music] they've all faced death in its most horrendous way almost obvious way and they've cheated death and they don't have to prove anything to anybody they're at peace with themselves if anyone can shed light onto the character of a vc winner it's the secretary to the victoria cross and george cross association daddy graham she's known more vc winners than anyone else the principal common quality amongst victoria crossholders i've known is an overriding humility and the huge inner strength which doesn't need to show off or throw their weight around in any way at all commander ian fraser typifies this modesty in 1945 he and his crew piloted a [ __ ] submarine through 80 miles of mined waters in their mission to blow up the japanese cruiser takao in order to sink it they had to place their explosives right under its keel but the operation went wrong when the tide went out and the 13 000 ton cruiser settled onto the tiny submarine pinning it to the sea bed when we got stuck and the time was going out and the cruiser sat down on us then i really got worried because i wasn't quite sure how i was going to get out because i still determined to get out the other side and we sort of went full ahead on the engine and forced on the motor sorry for the head on the motor and we dug a trench in the in the in the seabed by going backwards and forwards and eventually we came out from underneath it fraser and his crew did manage to blow up the cruiser and escape and it's yet another amazing vc story but he doesn't see it that way it always appeared to me that i was doing something that i'd been trained to do i mean i'd worked for months with this team of people that i had in the boat 12 of them all together only four in the boat at any one time and we'd work for months on attacking ships sticking olympic mines on then you go and do it in an action and they give you a vc for doing it it all seemed uh it always seems a bit seems a bit a bit odd to me i've never come across a victoria cross helder who said that they felt that they definitely did earn that award another common characteristic is that they all seem to show a sense of responsibility there's an interesting statistic with the vcs uh which is that 75 percent of them were the responsible child of an early widowed mother or the responsible child in a large family so it means that they spent the whole of their childhood looking after their siblings or their mother so they're used to taking looking after other people and not thinking of themselves i was feeling probably more for my soldiers than anything else you know [Music] i was a i was just there i was a secondary secondary thing to the to the whole thing and i i was uh upset that i was losing soldiers and the enemy was shooting my wounded in 1969 during the vietnam war warrant officer keith payne was leading a company of trainee soldiers when they were attacked and routed by massively superior vietcong forces separated from his fellow officers and wounded payne went behind enemy lines time and time again to rescue as many of his raw recruits as he could that night he saved the lives of forty men i i felt it was my responsibility to get my soldiers out of that situation and not ask anybody else to go and do it so vc winners do seem to have some things in common a responsibility for others and a temper perhaps but does that mean they're all the same does that mean there's a type well the truth is it's almost impossible to say it could be something in the water there's one street in canada that's provided us with three winners it could be something in the blood four times it's been won by people whose brothers had already won it and three times by people whose fathers had already won it it's been won by rogues scoundrels introverts extroverts aristocrats you probably think you don't have it in you to win one but you probably do once people do meet us we're just ordinary people i know we're ordinary people and we you know shave and all the rest of the things that people do but i think they also recognise the fact that we've been tested and uh stood up to the test in holland in 1944 major robert kane had been tested twice but worse was to come this was the picture at arnhem 40 miles to the south the second army seen here in red was bogged down and with reinforcements unable to get through the men holding the north end of the bridge were soon to surrender kane and the remaining airborne troops were ordered to pull back three miles west to the village of osterbake a horseshoe of defenses was then erected in the hope of holding off the germans until the second army could break through so picture the scene try to put yourself in the head of someone who was here that day you were part of the largest airborne assault ever but your mission has been a complete failure that's the first thing you were supposed to have been here two days but you've been here for four you landed with twelve thousand men but at this point only three 3 900 are left so it's almost certain that you've watched close friends get killed you've been fighting pretty much non-stop for those last four days so it's unlikely you've had any sleep you've no food you're low on ammunition and the germans have cut off the water supply to the village that you holed up in and there's no way out of the village because you're surrounded on all sides by tanks and artillery and mortars and flamethrowers and 6 000 german troops and then someone gets a radio working and you find out that the second army which was supposed to have been here two days earlier is still five days away imagine how that must have felt that sense of desolation and isolation that sense of well we're gonna die here to make matters even worse the raf was dropping vital supplies of food and ammunition at pre-arranged landing zones not realizing they'd been overrun by germans the british soldiers in oyster bay actually watched almost 90 percent of the drops fall into enemy hands so the germans must have felt optimistic but they were reckoning without robert kane his job was to defend the tip of the horseshoe by the river this was the short straw because if the germans came through here they'd cut everyone off and the brits would be finished that night an eerie silence descended on the bridge everyone knew that meant the british holding the north end had finally surrendered and as a result the germans could now turn all their attention to the siege of oasterbake what's more as the british forces grew weaker the germans were being reinforced with men and equipment from home equipment that included their most formidable battle weapon the tiger tank was the king of the german divisions the biggest armored vehicle they'd ever made it weighed 57 tons its armor plating was four inches thick the shells it fired were from an 88 millimeter gun it could blow anything to kingdom come with complete impunity and a herd of them was headed straight for kane's position on the second day of the siege a tiger tank rumbled down the street at the top of that bank over there now major kane was down here on this piece of waste ground armed with a piat gun the british troops hated these things it was a botched piece of design it was heavy it was ungainly it was inaccurate and the shell it fired was virtually useless against all known sorts of german armor and those were the good things about it the uh the bad thing was trying to [ __ ] it you had to stand on the end like that and then pull it up to tighten the spring which isn't so bad now because the spring's 60 years old and quite weak but back then that would often take two guys and then once it was done you had to seat the shell which meant feeding it in like this it's immensely fiddly even today so what it must have been like when you had 50 tons of tiger tank bearing down on you and they're thinking about kane managed to load the pit by himself and take a position behind a little hut he waited for the tiger to be 30 yards away took aim and fired it was a good shot the shell went right underneath the tank and blew up causing no damage whatsoever all it did was alert the crew inside to the fact that he was there a shell from a tank's 88 millimeter gun blew the hut to smithereens but at the last second kane grabbed his piat gun and ran for cover pass the tank's machine gun to a laundry and once he got there he reloaded the pier and got ready to fire it again the second shot was as good as the first but the effect was exactly the same as well nothing so the tank turned its gun again and fired again and this time it killed kane's spotter lieutenant ian now at this point a sane man would have got out of there but you've got to remember kane had lost a hundred of his men by this stage he wasn't in the mood for getting out so as the dust cleared no one could quite believe their eyes because he was lying in completely open ground facing down a tiger tank i was close enough to see exactly what happened i think he altered his position to kneeling and we can see in the distance uh a tank it was absolutely certainly he was going to die there kept on shouting load load and firing at the tank he fired for a third time and this time his shell hit the tiger's only achilles heel he blew one of its tracks off immobilizing it and you could see the track of the tank come away and lob on its sides kane had no time to celebrate though because almost immediately another tiger rolled into view on the road up there he dived behind the wall of the laundry again reloaded his piat again and then stepped out to take a shot at it but he pulled the trigger a fraction of a second too soon so the shell clipped the wall of the laundry and blew up just a few feet in front of his face there was a flesh and he immediately fell over and it was horrifying when i got to him his face was black but totally black and with little pipe of spots of blood all the way around what 30 40 50 whatever it was and uh he was saying i'm blind i'm blind i can't see so several of his men carried him away to the cops 10 15 yards away i stayed with him no more than six or seven paces i shouldn't think holding his hand it seemed like he was finished but 45 minutes later he was back his sight had returned and that was enough the shrapnel rooms he would cope with and this chap came out of the cops with his face blackened and he got down immediately on the pier gum i was staggered utterly staggered i thought well he must be a very brave man to be knocked out probably and then come back and take up the same position and still hit tanks i couldn't understand why such a brave man didn't say well i've had enough he'd done his lot and still kept going going but he was still firing when we left by the end of that day day two of the siege cain according to eyewitnesses had destroyed three tanks and no one had ever done that before he had begun to win his vc this lump of bronze is only big enough to produce 80 more medals but there's no need to panic about it running out just yet because over the years it's become harder and harder to win a victoria cross in the early days simply whirling your sword at a heathen was often enough but that changed toward the end of the first world war and the figures backed this up in world war 1 634 medals were awarded but in world war ii that dropped to just 182 the bar had been raised to an almost impossible height during the arnhem battle a glider pilot called lieutenant mike daunci found himself defending a sector very close to where robert cain was here's the report it says the position was continually attacked by superior forces of enemy tanks and infantry on three occasions the enemy overran the sector necessitating a counter-attack dawnsy led each sortie with such determination that the positions were regained with heavy loss to the enemy in the face of heavy small arms and mortar fire he personally attacked machine gun posts with complete disregard for his own safety the next day uh the germans attacked again with uh tanks and self-propelled guns this time daunsi lost the sight of one eye in spite of the pain there he refused to be evacuated and then on the next day they came back with tanks again his men withdrew and he was left alone facing down a tank he threw a gammon bomb through its hatch and blew it up now for this he was recommended for a vc but they turned him down that's how hard it had become to win one [Music] since the end of the second world war to the present day only 11 vcs have been won and this creates a problem the fewer vc winners there are the greater the burden of living in its spotlight i'd soon have back with me the pals my buddies my comrades back with me rather than any middle in 1951 private william speakman was part of a battalion of the black watch regiment defending a hilltop in korea the hill was attacked by 6 000 chinese soldiers and with the blackwatch troops outnumbered by 12 to 1 the situation looked bleak but as the hill was about to be overrun speakman appeared like a six foot four inch human grenade launcher and i thought well all this stuff has been done we pride them i might as well use the bloody things you know so uh that's it and we went up there and we we just did it ten times he went back for more grenades and then when they ran out he lobbed beer bottles and ration tins at the chinese anything he could get his hands on eventually the attack was broken and speakman was a hero but he found it hard to cope with the attention the vc brought he told one reporter that the medal made him feel like a freak in a freak show sometimes it gets a little bit too much not sometimes a lot of the time you get to me you um people draw trying to do something for you they're trying to say thank you in their own little way to say well tell me what happened you you just you either don't want to or you just sometimes you just say well no i i've forgotten all about it and that's the truth it's a bit overwhelming for an ordinary person the difficulty with the victoria cross or an award of that standing being awarded is you you were just beginning to get over the shock and the horror of what you've been through and then you're given this award and you have to relive it all over again probably for the rest of your life because people will be asking you about it for the rest of your life they're just incredible people and being soft about them because they they were tough men in that day but i've have you know when i first started um being involved with the association there were 450 alive and neither any 15 so there's been a lot of sadness but i've we've had some incredible times together [Music] the last two vc's both posthumous were won in the falklands war 21 years ago and the reason it's been such a long time is quite straightforward modern warfare with remote control weapon systems arguably separates you from the enemy in a way that hasn't happened in past wars it gives you an idea of how rarely you can justify vc and how infrequently the opportunity and it doesn't need an opportunity the opportunity to win a vc comes past your door [Music] the days of soldiers sticking their heads above the parapet and taking out half the enemy with nothing but a fruit knife are gone the days of soldiers like this man gurkha rifleman lackeyman gurung in burma on may the 13th 1945 gorham was manning the most forward post of his platoon when 200 japanese soldiers attacked the position grenades were thrown into his trench which rifleman gurung snatched up and threw back unfortunately the third grenade exploded in his hand blowing off his fingers shattering his right arm and severely wounding him in the face body and right leg for the next four hours wave after wave of fanatical attacks were thrown in by the enemy and all were repulsed even though gurum alone in his trench had to load and fire his rifle using only his left hand of the 87 enemy dead counted in the vicinity after the battle 31 lay in front of gurung's position 31 [Music] so is the greatest medal in the world in danger of becoming extinct will those seven in the safe hancock's jewelers ever be engraved i think it would be quite wrong to say that there will never be an opportunity for a victoria cross to be won in future warfare there will be opportunities there'll always be personal braveries in an intensive operation a long drawn-out operation that deserves that reward there would be certainly plenty in this generation who would be candidates being awarded a victoria cross courage isn't lost from mankind it's just just the circumstances back on the banks of the rhine major robert kane was into the third day of the siege of oyster bake and the germans had changed their tactics possibly fed up with losing so many tanks they decided to batter the british into submission with constant shelling and mortar fire the germans by this stage had ringed the british positions with a hundred artillery guns along with 12 of the dreaded naval virfas multi-barreled mortars which fired six bombs at a time somehow this bombardment seemed to inspire kane driving him to ever greater feats of bravery while most of the troops kept their heads down and their fingers crossed hoping a shell wouldn't land on them he went in search of tanks witnesses spoke of a madman running through a hailstorm of fire in these very streets with his trousers torn off blood pouring from wounds in his legs firing his pieta tank after tank after tank and they said he's fought in some was saying his father in the pet from the hip like a bloody cowboy there was this figure wounded bandaged dirty disheveled but still coming round still wherever the point of danger was still encouraging the men all the time some were saying knock four five six tanks out yeah you can put yourself in the german's position and saying whoever's knocking out these tanks must be well so someone out of this world i'll say in his diary he says his feet felt like they had a thousand pins sticking in them and that his socks filled with blood later in the day he says he felt something hot and sticky running down the side of his face turns out he'd fired so many shells one of his eardrums had burst he disregarded his own wounds he was wounded seriously wounded and bleeding and and torn to shreds yet uh he fought on because that was his duty he refused to go back for medical treatment until there was a lull in the battle he fought with a total focus on what he was meant to be doing and many vc holders have this sense of focus they they have a focus that sees that clearly what they've got to do and they must do that regardless of the effect it has on his own life and this selflessness is perhaps the most the key issue in winning a vc to understand just how important this business of selflessness is you need to know the story of john crookshank crookshank was the captain of a catalina flying boat which was very badly shot up during a suicidal attack on a u-boat although he sank the u-boat one of his crew was killed three others injured and crew shank himself was hit 72 times including wounds to both lungs so there he is with his lungs hemorrhaging slipping in and out of consciousness and barely able to breathe but he was determined to bring the wounded crew home safely so he kept the plane in the air for an hour until the sea conditions were safe enough for a landing and that's an amazing story but it's not as amazing as what the secretary of state has written here he says i think that the vc has been earned in this case although an element of self-preservation enters into it and that's the tricky bit you see if you're the captain of an airplane you bring it back and therefore save the lives of everyone on board you also save your own life you can't really win arnhem was a lost cause too there were so many wounded british soldiers by the fourth day of the siege that the germans sportingly arranged a cease-fire so they could be evacuated kane could have gone he was a wreck he was half blind he was half deaf his legs were perforated with machine gun and shrapnel wounds but he chose to stay and that meant he was still here on the fifth day of the siege this in the german's eyes was doomsday the day when they'd mount their biggest push they threw everything at the british tanks artillery flamethrowers mortars the lot the british had arrived in arnhem with supplies for three days this was their ninth and the fifth in the hell of oosterbake it was shaping up to be the shortest firefight in history but major kane had other ideas kane found himself down by the church and pretty soon he was out of ammunition for his piat so he switched to a mortar like this now the idea of a mortar is that you jam it into the ground you drop the shell into the tube it fires up in the air and lands on the german positions but the germans were so close that he was firing it like this like a normal gun now imagine what that must have looked like from a german's point of view this man with his trousers blown off caked in blood with sticky stuff coming down the side of his face firing a mortar horizontally at you must have been unnerving in kane's vc citation it says of the events of that day by a skillful use of this weapon and his daring leadership of the few men still under his command he completely demoralized the enemy who after an engagement lasting more than three hours withdrew in disorder robert kane had turned the tide in the battle and this is another vital factor in winning a victoria cross your actions have to create a ripple effect they have to help save the day on the monday it was the final day of the battle and the germans that was ninth ss panzer division have been trying for since the friday to break major cain's block because that was the key to cutting us off from the whole division off from the river and we would have been finished we all knew that i mean it was obvious to us all but he made sure that they didn't get through to his great credit his action had tremendous impact on the troops as a whole and probably help them keep their resolve and help win the battle out of proportion to the size of his own personal command it was the most wonderful example to everyone a major firing at tanks is something you don't hear of really we all wanted to emulate him of course um which we tried to do to our best ability the the effect that uh major robert cain had on the men was obviously his leadership and the fact that they were on the defensive but he was moving he was showing himself he was rallying where there was the greatest danger and that has the most huge impact upon people who have just got to stay there and endure and be brave they need something to focus upon he was that focus he led by example completely i mean i'm sure that who ever got back over that river of the south staffords could owe that fact to bob kane nobody else because it was his example that rallied them his bravery was suicidal and utterly selfless his tank killing antics rallied the troops beat off the enemy and helped keep the defenses at osterbake intact these were the reasons why this man won a victoria cross and not just any vc either according to his commanding officer lieutenant colonel derrick mccarty it was the finest victoria cross of the whole war after the germans withdrew the british out of ammo food and ideas and knowing by this stage that the second army wasn't coming silently crossed the river at night to safety kane knew they were retreating but he didn't want to look beaten when they were in utter defeat by the river withdrawing over the river the battle was lost he found a razor and somehow he shaved so that at least he would go back looking respectable and like an officer above his men amazing man kane was awarded his victoria cross at buckingham palace on the 2nd of november 1944 the first manxman ever to get one but like many other vc winners he was never very comfortable with all the belly hoo and fuss kane was the only one of five vc winners at arnhem who lived to tell the tale not that he would tell the tale of course vc winners rarely do and that's a pity because kane's tale is one of how many more young men how many more teenage soldiers might have died had he not fought quite so ferociously after the war he left the army and went back to working for shell in nigeria and the far east he died of cancer in 1974. sadly that meant i never met him which is a shame for two reasons firstly because i'm absolutely fascinated by vc winners and secondly because i married to his daughter she didn't even know he'd won a victoria cross until after he'd died he never thought to mention it [Music] you know we have a rather warped sense of what constitutes bravery these days i mean even david beckham is called a hero for scoring a penalty but when you look at vc winners and hear their stories well enough said [Music] you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 689,791

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, jeremy clarkson, world war 2, ww2, wwII, ww1, great war, isle of man, medal of honor, victoria cross, british heros, military heros, military history, british history, vc and bar, ve day

Id: RbS4Ivl85GQ

Length: 58min 11sec (3491 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 10 2021