[Tripper]

K, lately I've been reading through the Victoria Cross, Medal Of Honour, winners etc, and I've found some really amazing stories, it's totally made me think...

Post some up if you got 'em, any war, conflict, whatever - If you know someone or your grandad/dad was involved in anything like that post it up in here too...

Heres some stuff I found:

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[img]http://www.diggerhistory.info/images/vc-winners/ngarimu.jpg[/img]

NGARIMU, Moananui-a-Kiwi (1918-43)

b.Kokai Pa, near Whareponga, Ruatoria.

The only full Maori to have won the Victoria Cross of the Maori Battalion during World War Two. (Tebaga Gap in Tunis in March 1943)

Over 24 hours, Second Lieutenant Ngarimu and his platoon attacked and held a hill which enabled the Germans to fire on other units of the New Zealand Division at Tebaga Gap.

Greatly outnumbered, he and the few members of his platoon still able to fight, actually met a German attack by charging.

He died firing his sub-machine gun from the hip, 'defiantly facing the enemy', said the citation, coming 'to rest almost on top of those of the enemy who had fallen to his gun just before he fell to theirs'.

[url:3705a]http://www.diggerhistory.info/pages-medals/nz-vc-winners.htm[/url:3705a]
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[quote:3705a] Sergeant James Ward (RNZAF)

"On 7/8 July 1941, while returning from one of the attack's on Münster, Sergeant James Ward of No 75 (NZ) Squadron was a second pilot in a Wellington attacked by an Me 110 over the Zuider Zee. The rear-gunner was wounded, much damage done, the starboard wing set ablaze. The crew were preparing to abandon the aircraft when Ward volunteered to go out on the wing and try to smother the flames with a cockpit cover which had served in the plane as a cushion. Attached to a rope and with the help of the navigator, he climbed through the narrow astro-hatch - far from easy in flying gear, even on the ground - put on his parachute, kicked holes in the Wellington's covering fabric to get foot and hand-holds on the geodetic lattices, and descended three foot to the wing. He then worked his way along to behind the engine, and, despite the fierce slipstream from the propeller, managed while lying down to smother the fire. Isolated from the leaking petrol pipe, this later burnt itself out. Ward, exhausted, regained the astro-hatch with great difficulty: "the hardest of the lot," he wrote, "was getting my right leg in. In the end the navigator reached out and pulled it in." Despite all the damage, the crew got home to a safe landing - perhaps the most remarkable thing, apart from Ward's exploit, being the fact that the pilot had no idea at the time what Ward was doing.

This deed performed by Ward, a young schoolmaster before the war, earned him the Victoria Cross, and which must surely be unsurpassed for calculated bravery. Sadly, Sergeant Ward was killed on a Hamburg raid only ten weeks later - before he received his Victoria Cross."[/quote:3705a]

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