| Private Joergen Christian Jensen
Private Joergen Christian Jensen
Unit: 50th Battalion, 13th Brigade, 4th Division
Action: 2 April 1917, Noreuil, France
The 50th and 51st Battalions were ordered to clear the outpost villages, a series of villages along the Hindenburg Line.
They met fierce resistance at one barricade. Jensen, 26, Private William Quinlan O'Connor and four men attacked the barricade, which held about 45 Germans and a machine-gun.
O'Connor shot the machine-gunner. The citation says: ``Jensen, single-handed, rushed the post and threw in a bomb. He had still a bomb in one hand, but taking another from his pocket with the other hand, he drew the pin with his teeth and by threatening with two bombs and by telling them that they were surrounded, he induced them to surrender.''
Jensen sent a prisoner to a nearby post of Germans, instructing them to surrender too. Ignorant of their surrender, Australian troops began firing on the second group of Germans until Jensen, at great risk, stood on the barricade waving his helmet until the firing stopped.
Jensen was awarded the VC while O'Connor received the Distinguished Conduct Medal.
Biography: Jensen, who was born in Denmark on 15 January 1891, became an Australian citizen a month after Australia, along with Britain, declared war on Germany.
Having migrated with his family in 1909 and worked as a labourer, he enlisted in March 1915 and was posted to Gallipoli.
He was sent to France with the 10th Battalion, wounded and then transferred to the 50th in January 1917. He was severely wounded at Villers-Bretonneux on 5 May 1918 and spent several months in hospital.
When he returned to Australia, he worked in an Adelaide bottle shop. He married Katy Herman on 13 July 1921 but died within a year. He is buried at West Terrace Cemetery, Adelaide.
__________________ Spidge,
------------------------------------------------------- My Avatar is the memorial to the 22 Commonwealth Coastwatchers at the Temakin Cemetery on Betio (Tarawa Atoll) who were beheaded by the Japanese on 15th October 1942. http://www.dva.gov.au/media/publicat...mem_beito.html
"You were given the choice between war and dishonor.
You chose dishonor and you will have war."
(Winston Churchill made this prophetic pronouncement in a House of Commons speech in 1938, just after Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich agreement with Hitler. Chamberlain returned from Germany with the signed agreement in hand, proclaiming that "peace in our time" had been achieved. Churchill attacked Chamberlain's "politics of appeasement" in this and many other speeches.)
What did the Australians do in ww2 and other conflicts? Check out this site:
http://www.diggerhistory.info/00-pag...ster-index.htm |