SECOND ECHELON

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 September 1940, Page 5

SECOND ECHELON

TWO MEN WOUNDED BY BOMB ANOTHER STRUCK BY SHELL FRAGMENT. RAIDERS SUFFER SEVERELY. (From the Official Wai- Correspondent with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in Britain). ENGLAND, September 27. The Second Echelon’s first casualties from enemy action were sustained to-, day when an aerial bomb burst 15 feet ahead of a full bus containing members of the Auckland Battalion. The bus was overturned and two men were slightly wounded, in the face 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 was 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 wiounded was captured and rushed to hospital by members of the Wellington Battalion. During the same fight a member of a composite battalion formed from the reinforcements with the Second Echelon was severely but not dangerously wounded, in the face by 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 were 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.