st then, Franz caught his last lucky break As he hit the ground, the ship lurched back up into the air. This gave him just enough time to run out from underneath the falling immensity of the burning ship.
Franz would survive wet, uninjured, and alive. Later, Franz asked for permission to return to the Hindenburg to look for a watch his grandfather had given him. Amazingly, he found his watch in the burned and twisted wreckage.
8 John Cruickshank
Last Living Victoria Cross Winner For Action During World War II
The highest award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces is the Victoria Cross. Today, John Cruickshank is the only living World War II combatant to have won this prestigious military award, and boy did he earn it.
John Cruickshank was the pilot of a PBY Catalina airplane whose mission it was to seek out and destroy German U-boats during World War II. It carried six 113-kilogram (250-lb) depth charges to get the work done. On his 48th mission and cruising at 610 meters (2,000 ft) above the Arctic Ocean, he and his crew spotted U-347 on the surface and moved in for the kill. They came in low over the U-boat, but the depth charges failed to drop.
The PBY circled around to come in again, but the element of surprise was lost and the Germans were ready for them with their deck guns. As they brought the PBY in low for a second attack, the Germans opened fire. Bullets and shells from the U-boat shredded the PBY, killing one man and wounding several more. Cruickshank took the worst of it, having been hit an incredible 72 times. Riddled with bullets in his limbs and lungs, he held the PBY steady and dropped all six depth charges, sinking the sub.
The injured crew now had to fly the badly damaged PBY five hours back to their base in Scotland. Bleeding and lapsing in and out of consciousness, Cruickshank refused morphine so he could fly the plane if needed. It was a smart choice, because when the PBY reached its base, the copilot could not land it. Cruickshank took the controls and landed the PBY on the water, keeping the front of the plane above the waterline long enough for the flying boat to reach shallow water.
7 Reinhard Hardegen
The Last Living German U-Boat Captain
Fortunately for Captain Reinhard Hardegen, he was not on U-347 when John Cruickshank and his PBY crew sank it. If he had been, today he would not be the last living German U-boat commander. In many ways, Hardegen was the peer of Cruickshank. He wasn’t just the pilot of his war machine, but the winner of a prestigious war decoration from his country, the coveted Knights Cross.
Hardegen was the captain of U-123 and was one of the most successful killers of Allied vessels and crews in the entire war. Like all German submariners, he was exceptionally proud of the German U-boats, believing them to be far superior to those of the Americans. Hardegen recalled visiting an American submarine before the war and coming away with the impression that the American submarines had great creature comforts and spacious room compared to the German subs, but were not as well-designed as ultimate fighting machines. He also felt the discipline and devotion to duty of the German submariners far exceeded that of their American counterparts.
The Germans demonstrated their dedication to killing during Operation Drumbeat in the first six months of 1942, when German U-boats sank Allied ships in what another German U-boat commander called a “duck shoot.” The Germans called this period of their submarine war “the Happy Time” as they sank Allied vessels along the North American coast almost at will.
Hardegen would sink more Allied ships than any other U-boat commander during Operation Drumbeat. He contributed to the loss of 500 Allied ships and 5,000 merchant mariners. The Happy Time would soon give way, however, to what the German submariners called “the Sour Pickle Time,” the period in 1943–1945 when Allied sub detection and killing technology made almost every U-boat mission a death sentence. Hardegen survived the Sour Pickle Time a