GALLANT RESCUE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 97, 24 April 1940, Page 8

GALLANT RESCUE.

MEN'S FORTITUDE. Wounded Sailors Given Aid By Norwegians. SURVIVORS FROM HARDY. British Official Wireless. (Received 12.30 p.m.) LONDON, April 23. Captain Warburt on-Lee was lashed on a stretcher and lowered into the water and towed ashore by Mr. MeCracken, a gunner, and one rating, but he was dead when they reached the shore. There were several wooden houses about half a mile from the shore, and the survivors distributed themselves among these for warmth and shelter. The majority went into the house of Mrs. Christaasen, where about SO men huddled together trying to restore their circulation. Mrs. Cliristansen and her daughter distributed food and all the clothes they had. Surgeon-Lieutenant Weind, though himself wounded, did what he could for the wounded, the bearing of whom was very courageous. Particularly was this so of Able Seaman Bailey, who. half frozen with cold, and with one hand shot off, sat for one and a half hours and never once murmured. A Norwegian succeeded in getting an ambulance from Ballanger, a small town 15 miles away, which took some of the wounded. Others were lashed to a sledge and dragged to Ballanger over a track full of holes. It must have caused great pain to the wounded, but they bore their sufferings with the greatest fortitude. On the way the survivors fell in with British merchant seamen from North Cornwall, captured by the Germans the day before, and released during action, when the supply ship on which they had been prisoners was, among others, sunk. At Ballanger the British survivors made contact with the Norwegians, and reorganised and consolidated. Thev were taken off by H.M.S. Ivanhoe after the Warspite and other British naval forces had accounted for the whole of the German naval forces in Narvik and Rombaks Fiord. i