Veteran recalls comrade

Press, 26 April 1988, Page 8

Veteran recalls comrade

NZPX-AAP ! Suva A Royal New Zealand Air Force veteran yesterday placed two;' poppies on the grave of |a wartime comrade he helped bury in Suva 43 years ago. It is the [ first time former Flight Sergeant Jim Curry, aged 66, of Upper Hutt;: has been back to Fiji since 1945. Mr Curry, a {sales engineer for Caltex Oil (N.Z.), Ltd. on holiday in Fiji with his wife, I Joyce, said he had not ! missed an

Anzac Day service. So this year he joined in Fiji’s.) held at a hillside war memorial in Suva. He I told how a colleague, Sergeant "Gibbyl’ Gibson from Christchurch, became critically ill while serving in ! the Ellice Islands (now the independent central Pacific nation of Tuvalu) a few months before World War II enifed in the. Pacific, i

Mr Curry; then chief engineer with No. 5 Flying jßoar Squadron, and

eight other crew flew Sergeant Gibson from Funafuti in the Ellice Group to Laucala Bay, Suva, aboard a Catalina filing boat. But he was dead on arrival at the Suva hospital — Mr Curry and five other members of the crew! acted as pallbearers for the burial at the war cemetery.

[Mr Curry, with five service medals on his chest, yesterday plucked two poppies from the Fiji former servicemen's

wreath on the memorial and planted them on Sergeant Gibson’s grave. "He was a good bloke,”, he said. "We were a veryclose group.” The Curry’s' lives continued to be touched bywar. They have three sons and a daughter.

One son, Paul, of Palmerston North, is confined to a wheelchair after an accident aboard a ship loading mortar bombs for Vietnam in 1969.