WWII tank hero’s VC to sell for £370,000
Gong one of conflict’s ‘hardest-won’
A TANK commander’s Victoria Cross considered one of the “hardest-won” of the Second World War is to fetch up to £370,000 at auction.
Lt Col David Currie earned the gong for the battle that paved the way to liberating Paris. He and his 15 tanks and 130 men plugged the Falaise Gap in Normandy – where 60,000 surrounded Nazis fought desperately for three days to break through.
Lt Col Currie saw all of his officers killed or wounded and ordered Allied artillery to keep firing even though rounds were landing 15 yards from his own tank. And he took up a rifle to shoot German snipers from his turret after they had sneaked to within 50 yards of the position.
In all, 50,000 Germans were captured and 10,000 killed in the Battle of Falaise Pocket. The heroics meant the Allies won the Battle of Normandy and went on to liberate Paris three days later, in August 1944.
When his VC was announced, Lt Col Currie hitched a lift across the Channel in a torpedo boat to collect it in person from King George VI. He died in Ottawa, Canada, in 1986, aged 73. Widow Isabel sold his nine medals three years later to the current owner, a private collector.
The VC will be sold as part of the medals lot in London on September 27 but the winning bidder must get a permit to permanently take them out of Canada.
Tanya Ursual, of auctioneers Dix Noonan Webb, said: “David Currie’s is one of the hardest-won of the war.”