WON V.C. AT EIGHTEEN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 26 December 1940, Page 9

WON V.C. AT EIGHTEEN

“BUDGIES” HIS ONLY LOVE. Old enough to win the V.C. but not old enough to have a girl—that is a friend’s description of Sergeant John Hannah, the 18-year-old R.A.F. hero who was awarded valour’s highest award for beating out. a fire in the bomb-rack of a machine in mid-air. “My boy is too young to have any girls yet,” his mother said recently. “But maybe all that will be different now that he’s a V.C.” , John, however, has another love —his pet budgerigars. He never fails to ask about them in his frequent letters to his home in Glasgow. ’ There is one thing that the young hero will never part with —the lucky bean that his father gave him when he joined up. “I gave him that lucky bean just before he went away. It was a very tiny thing, made in India, and inside of it there were five very small carved ele-* phants,” Mr Hannah said. Burned black, his eyes only just saved from blindness by a fortnight’s frantic work by the doctors, John Hannah grins cheerfully in hospital. When, an enemy A.A. shell burned out the bomb rack of his ’plane, Sergeant Hannah fought the flames for ten minutes while ammunition exploded all. round him.