One of the veterans I had the opportunity to meet and interview was Alan Ambury. He was living in Te Awamutu at the time when I interviewed him but I was most interested to find he was actually from my home town of Cambridge originally.<\/p>\n
When WWII came along he left the farm and joined the Army. He spent a considerable time in Auckland as an officer with the anti-aircraft defence units right in the heart of the city. Luckily he never had to fire his guns in anger there.<\/p>\n
He was sent to Italy in 1944 and had not been there very long when, while approaching San Michele, \u00a0he was hit by a mortar shell, and sadly he lost both his legs.<\/p>\n
He actually became the oldest New Zealander to be a double leg amputee. When he passed away nearly two years ago in July 2012, he was aged 97. At the time when I met him a few months before he was still living at home by himself, so a remarkable man. Not many 97 -year-olds manage that sort of independence and particularly those who’ve lost both legs.<\/p>\n
His memories will appear in a future episode of Courage And Valour.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the veterans I had the opportunity to meet and interview was Alan Ambury. He was living in Te Awamutu at the time when I interviewed him but I was most interested to find he was actually from my home town of Cambridge originally.<\/p>\n
When WWII came along he left the farm and joined […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[60,59,15,30,6,61,8,63,62,56,64,65,35,52],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-productionlog","tag-alan-ambury","tag-anti-aircraft","tag-army","tag-cambridge","tag-courage-and-valour","tag-double-amputee","tag-italian-campaign","tag-legs","tag-mortar-shell","tag-new-zealand","tag-officer","tag-oldest","tag-te-awamutu","tag-veteran","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newzealandersatwar.com\/Couarage_And_Valour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newzealandersatwar.com\/Couarage_And_Valour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newzealandersatwar.com\/Couarage_And_Valour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newzealandersatwar.com\/Couarage_And_Valour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newzealandersatwar.com\/Couarage_And_Valour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newzealandersatwar.com\/Couarage_And_Valour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87,"href":"https:\/\/newzealandersatwar.com\/Couarage_And_Valour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions\/87"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newzealandersatwar.com\/Couarage_And_Valour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newzealandersatwar.com\/Couarage_And_Valour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newzealandersatwar.com\/Couarage_And_Valour\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}