John Baskeyfield - Legacy

Legacy

After Arnhem was liberated in April 1945, Grave Registration Units of the British 2nd Army moved into the area and began to locate the Allied dead. Over 1700 men were buried in the Arnhem Oosterbeek War Cemetery, but Baskeyfield's body was never identified. Although several hundred burials in the cemetery are unidentified, there are no records of any unidentified soldiers being exhumed from Acacialaan. Instead Baskeyfield's name is inscribed on the Groesbeek Memorial which commemorates all those Allied servicemen killed between August 1944 and the end of the conflict who have no known grave. Four more VC's were awarded after the battle, including one for Major Robert Cain, commander of B Company, 2nd Battalion, South Staffordshire Regiment. The 2nd Battalion thus became the only British battalion to receive two VCs during one engagement in the Second World War.

His Victoria Cross is displayed at the Staffordshire Regiment Museum in Whittington, Staffordshire. A memorial statue of him was erected in 1990 at Festival Heights in Stoke-on-Trent, and the John Baskeyfield V.C. Church of England Primary School in Burslem is named after him. The artist Terence Cuneo made a painting of Baskeyfield's action, and in 1969 a Staffordshire filmmaker spent three years making a short film about his role in the battle, entitled Baskeyfield VC. A tree on the site of Baskeyfield's second gun, on the corner of Benedendorpsweg and Acacialaan, has been named the Jack Baskeyfield Tree.