SERGEANT WARD V.C.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 18 September 1941, Page 6

SERGEANT WARD V.C.

MISSING AFTER ATTACK ON GERMANY AS CAPTAIN OF WELLINGTON BOMBER. NO REPORT AFTER REACHING TARGET. (British Qfficial Wireless.) (Received This Day, 11.10 a.m.) RUGBY, September 17. Amplifying the report that the New Zealand airman, Sergeant James Allen Ward, who recently won the V.C., is missing, it is stated that his Wellington bomber, from the No. 75 Nev/ Zealand Bomber Squadron, did not return from a recent attack on Germany. The bomber took oil a few minutes after eight o'clock. Nothing was heard from it after a signal at a time when it is almost certain that the target had been reached. A few weeks ago, Sergeant Ward was made captain of the Wellington and given a crew of sergeants. They had already made one attack together against the enemy battle-cruisers at Brest, on the night of September 13. They were an experienced crew and most of them had made as many as 22 operational flights. They .were in fact the crew with whom Sergeant Ward had come to his squadron from the operational training unit. It was as a second pilot that he was awarded the V.C. in July, after an attack on Munster, in his seventh operational flight. Sergeant Ward was shortly to have received his award from the King.