A tribute was held at the BC Aviation Museum at Victoria International Airport Saturday (Aug. 9) to honour the only member of the Royal Canadian Navy to be awarded the Victoria Cross.
As the Royal Canadian Navy was naming the sixth Arctic offshore patrol ship HMCS Robert Hampton Gray at a ceremony in Halifax, representatives of the Canadian Armed Forces joined members of the Vancouver Island Branch of the Naval Association to remember the navy pilot at a ceremony at the North Saanich museum.
The ceremony, which included laying of wreaths and the sounding of the Last Post and Rouse, marked the same day 80 years earlier in 1945 when Lt. Robert Hampton Gray, flying from the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Formidable, led an attack on Japanese ships in Onagawa Bay. Hit by anti-aircraft fire, he released his bomb to sink the destroyer Amakusa before his plane crashed into the bay.
One of the last Canadians to be killed in combat in the Second World War, he was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. He is the last Canadian to be so honoured. An annual ceremony is also held Aug. 9 in Onagawa, Japan at a monument dedicated to Gray that is located near the community hospital. It is the only monument to a former enemy ever erected in Japan.
