Col4Cats

Scottish. Sometimes found at sea. Been around the Earth a few times, but still not seen enough of it.

[Col4Cats @candersonabc]

@alexwc1964 @specialopsmag Not a sailor. He was a Gurkha that chose to go SBS after SF selection.

[Col4Cats @candersonabc]

@marycatedelvey "me on the left" 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[Col4Cats @candersonabc]

@BootneckStuff Lad on the left is an Army Commando (from his flashes)

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

Seventy-two. That is how many separate wounds John Cruickshank had in him, two of them through his lungs, while he lined up a burning flying boat for a second run at a U-boat that had just shot his aircraft to pieces. Most men have one of those wounds and they are finished. He had seventy-two and he pressed the attack.

He was 24, a former bank clerk from Aberdeen, flying a Catalina flying boat out of the Shetland Islands with Coastal Command. The job was the long, freezing, mind-numbing patrol, fourteen hours over the grey Atlantic hunting the U-boats that were strangling Britain. On the 17th of July 1944, far out over empty water, they caught one on the surface, U-361, and Cruickshank took the big slow flying boat down to attack.

The first run failed. The depth charges would not release. Any sane man makes a note and turns for home. Cruickshank swung the aircraft around and came back for a second pass, low and straight, and this time the submarine's gunners were waiting. Flak ripped through the Catalina. It killed the navigator, wounded half the crew, and tore into Cruickshank again and again, those seventy-two wounds, two punching into his lungs, ten into his legs.

And he flew the attack home anyway. Bleeding everywhere, in agony, with the fuselage holed and on fire, he held the aircraft dead level, aimed, and released the depth charges himself. They straddled the U-boat perfectly. It broke apart and sank beneath him.

Then came the part that should have killed him. He collapsed from blood loss, and the wounded co-pilot, who had never landed a Catalina, took the controls for the long flight back. Cruickshank refused the morphine that would have knocked him out, because he knew the man flying needed him. Drifting in and out, he had himself carried back up to the cockpit again and again through the night to help nurse the shot-up aircraft down, and at dawn they got it onto the water safely. He had lost so much blood the doctors said he had no business being alive.

He lived. He took the Victoria Cross from the King, went quietly back to banking after the war, and rarely spoke of it. And he kept on living, and living, and living. John Cruickshank died in 2025 at the age of 105, the last man on earth wearing a Victoria Cross earned in the Second World War. Seventy-two wounds over the Atlantic, and he outlasted every other hero of that war by decades.

[Col4Cats @candersonabc]

@Poppy_yyyyyyyy Was it Frances Baabaa?

[Col4Cats @candersonabc]

@fesshole I'm not putting up with this shit...not on my watch.

[Col4Cats @candersonabc]

@RussellFindlay1 Well done for what you did to Postman Fat and his black and blue pus.

[Col4Cats @candersonabc]

@WeRtheMods Too much toilet hassle, I'd imagine? 🕺🏻

[Col4Cats @candersonabc]

@BootneckStuff Marizza is roughly where the modern airport is. Anyway, thanks for all your research and dits - great stuff.

[Col4Cats @candersonabc]

@blake_sara64710

[Col4Cats @candersonabc]

@Rab_Dickson1 You weren't suckered, then? I'll get my coat...

[Col4Cats @candersonabc]

@dsav1988 @JordanGrant2203 @ygceojennie @BBCScotlandNews Adam Smith never even visited North America and spent his entire life in Scotland, other than some European travel. On the other hand, Andrew Carnegie, David Buick, John Muir and Alexander Graham Bell all emigrated.

[wokeandwoofing @wokeandwoofing]

My great grandmother was an amazing person who was brave enough to come out as a Trans woman decades before it was socialy acceptable. She did this in 1912 whilst standing on the deck of the Titanic, just before they began loading the life boats. What a hero🙏

[Col4Cats @candersonabc]

@CarolMaps

[Col4Cats @candersonabc]

@fesshole What a fucking pathetic Gen Z flex.
What happened to rimming coffee cups and putting sugar in fuel tanks?

[Col4Cats @candersonabc]

@Rab_Dickson1 Why do they get severance pay at all when resigning? Boils my piss.

[Col4Cats @candersonabc]

@XiomaraSH1 I'll never admit how I know this, but it 100% works.

[Col4Cats @candersonabc]

@CliveWardauthor 66s were more fun and didn't knock the shit out of you. Mind you, they wouldn't have taken the paint off a T-55 either!

[Col4Cats @candersonabc]

@AnasSarwar "These are my principles and, if you don't like them, I have others."