NEW ZEALANDERS HURT.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 259, 30 September 1940, Page 6

NEW ZEALANDERS HURT.

CASUALTIES FROM BOMBINGS.

(From the Official War Correspondent with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in Britain.) ENGLAND, Sept. 27. •The Second Echelon’s, first casualties in enemy action were sustained to-day, when an aerial bomb burst 15ft ■ahead of a full bus containing members of the Auckland Battalion. The bus was overturned and two men were slightly wounded, in the lace and thigh respectively. The bus was' returning from a swimming parade. The bomb was one of several dropped in a south-eastern town when a formation of 16 enemy planes heading toward London were broken up by' anti-aircraft guns and British fighters. Two of the raiders suffered severely at the hands of the British fighters. One German pilot who landed his machine intact but was himself badly wounded was captured and rushed to hospital by members of the Wellington Battalion.

During the 6ame fight a member of a composite battalion formed from the reinforcements with the Second Echelon was severely but not dangerously wounded in. the face hv a fragment of an anti-aircraft shell which did not burst till it struck the ground. Three New Zealanders, a major, a sergeant and a private, who tvere close at hand to the burst of another bomb which entombed a number of civilians earned high praise from civilians for their instant and energetic rescue work.