[spidge]

CONSIDERED THE FINEST ACT OF VALOUR IN THE AWARD OF THE VICTORIA CROSS WORLD WAR 2

from: http://users.tpg.com.au/adsls7ld/middleton.html

This award was regarded after the war as possibly the finest V.C. of the Second World War and his courage moved an R.A.F. commentator at the time to write: "It doe not seem possible that even death could have had the heart to seek out and destroy such tenacious, valiant and enduring courage…No man will know what force uplifted that tortured body in its last struggle for the lives and liberty of a faithful crew. They had urged him to abandon ship over France while strength was still in him, but he refused to leave them prisoners. Rather, he elected, in that inner wisdom with which suffering transcendentalizes the mind, that in the balance their fit lives against his maimed one were the thing for which he must fight and plan with his last strength.
In proof that his plan succeeded there are now in this country five men ready to fight and fly again. They have in their hearts the memory of perhaps the greatest captain of aircraft under whom any crew will ever have the honour to serve, and of a front gunner and engineer to whom comradeship and company of that captain meant more than the certainty of safety, and who determined to be with him to the end as long as any faint hope of his rescue remained. They stuck to him to the last. …In such men as these is the finest inspiration ever sent to us as people to use our minds and our limbs - not in the same way, for only to the immortals is given such perfection of service - but for the same purpose, and in order that in our victory the foul indignity of war may be wiped forever from the earth."