Worden, James Avery, II

James Avery Worden II was born on February 16, 1912 in Philadelphia. A graduate of St. Paul's School and Princeton (Class of 1935), he was studying at Oxford's Worcester College when WWII broke out. During a trip to France in August 1939 he joined Section 1 (Unit FR 40) and served as a volunteer ambulance driver in Northern France and Picardy in April-JUne 1940. After the armistice, under the protection of the American Red Cross, he visited and carried supplies to the French prisons camps. Compelled by the Vichy authorities to leave France in February 1941, he went to Spain and Portugal and sailed to Pointe-Noire, Congo, where he joined the Free French Forces. First assigned to the Hatfield-Spears Ambulance he then served in the Groupe Sanitaire Divisionnaire n^o 1 of the First Free French Brigade (1^re DFL). He participated in all the battles to rescue the wounded in Bir Hakeim and Tunisia. In spring 1944 he is at the battle of Garigliano and on August 16 at the Débarquement de Provence. He participates in the Liberation of France, served at the Battle of the Vosges, is captured in Alsace-Lorraine in January 1945 and became a German POW. His courage earned him a Croix de Guerre 1939-1945 with two citations in the ordre of the division and he was made a "Companion of the Liberation" having been awarded the Croix de l'Ordre de la Libération (France's highest WWII medal).

After the war he returned to Princeton, NJ, where in passed away on May 14, 2004.