Îò Chestnut
Ê Chestnut
Äàòà 21.04.2011 13:05:36
Ðóáðèêè WWII; Ñïåöñëóæáû; Àðìèÿ; ÂÂÑ;

[2Chestnut] Âîåííûå íåêðîëîãè èç áðèòàíñêèõ ãàçåò

Captain Hamish Pelham-Burn
Fighter pilot and SOE saboteur who flew low-level raids and caused havoc behind enemy lines

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/special-forces-obituaries/8464307/Captain-Hamish-Pelham-Burn.html

Dr David Wright
Medic who worked deep behind enemy lines with the Paras in North Africa

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/army-obituaries/8459320/Dr-David-Wright.html

Lieutenant-Commander Bill Filer
Decorated wartime diver who defused a new type of enemy torpedo and laid bare its secrets for the Allies

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/naval-obituaries/8457100/Lieutenant-Commander-Bill-Filer.html

Captain Bernard Halsall
Army glider pilot who survived catastrophe in Sicily and at Arnhem, where he was sheltered by locals

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8451689/Captain-Bernard-Halsall.html

Lieutenant-General Sir Michael Gray
Para who served in Northern Ireland and rose close to the Army’s highest rank

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/army-obituaries/8444071/Lieutenant-General-Sir-Michael-Gray.html

Major Colin Carr
Royal Engineer who kept cool in Korean minefields even after being blown up

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/army-obituaries/8441548/Major-Colin-Carr.html

Captain Stephen Perry
Troop commander who withstood heavy shellfire to take on and disable a Tiger tank in Normandy in 1944

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8435995/Captain-Stephen-Perry.html

Harold Biles
Artificer whose ship returned again and again to Dunkirk during the evacuation

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/naval-obituaries/8433130/Harold-Biles.html

Flight Lieutenant Don Nelson
Pathfinder navigator who supported the D-Day landings and won two DFCs

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/air-force-obituaries/8430462/Flight-Lieutenant-Don-Nelson.html

Colonel Roger May
Officer awarded an MC after charging a German gun emplacement who captured a man in a compost heap

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8416894/Colonel-Roger-May.html

Lt-Cdr Stuart Jewers
Fleet Air Arm pilot who hunted Tirpitz, fought in the Pacific and chased enemy bombers in North Africa

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/naval-obituaries/8414423/Lt-Cdr-Stuart-Jewers.html

Lt-Col Val ffrench Blake
Soldier awarded a DSO in Italy who later became an authority on dressage

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/army-obituaries/8409776/Lt-Col-Val-ffrench-Blake.html

Lt-Cdr Barklie Lakin
Wartime submariner in the Mediterranean whose bravery earned him a DSO and two DSCs

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/naval-obituaries/8404844/Lt-Cdr-Barklie-Lakin.html

Lieutenant-Colonel Terry Willett
Pioneering artillery spotter pilot who later became an expert on the criminal aspects of dangerous driving

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8396329/Lieutenant-Colonel-Terry-Willett.html

Group Captain Tom Barrett
Station commander at RAF Northolt who led his squadron into war zones

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/air-force-obituaries/8393882/Group-Captain-Tom-Barrett.html

Lieutenant-Colonel Eric Cooper-Key
Commander who rallied his exhausted men as they advanced in the Netherlands after D-Day

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8388987/Lieutenant-Colonel-Eric-Cooper-Key.html

Colour Sergeant Charlie Bowden
Royal Marine who took part in an extraordinary escape from Crete to North Africa in a landing craft

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8388987/Lieutenant-Colonel-Eric-Cooper-Key.html

Sergeant Bill O'Leary
Tough NCO with Popski’s Private Army who specialised in silent ambushes

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8384029/Sergeant-Bill-OLeary.html

Jack Plant
PoW who survived the horrors of the infamous 'Death Railway’ on Sumatra

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/air-force-obituaries/8379382/Jack-Plant.html

Diana Geddes
Brigadier’s daughter who, aged 16, bluffed her way into a nursing job at a front-line hospital in the Far East

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/8377092/Diana-Geddes.html


'Á³é â³äëóíàâ. Æîâòî-ñèí³ çíàìåíà çàòð³ïîò³ëè íà ñòàíö³¿ çíîâ'
Îò bedal
Ê Chestnut (21.04.2011 13:05:36)
Äàòà 21.04.2011 13:22:21

ïîëêîâíèê, ðàñêîïàâøèé âðàãà â íàâîçíîé êó÷å - âíóøàåò. (-)
Îò Chestnut
Ê bedal (21.04.2011 13:22:21)
Äàòà 21.04.2011 13:35:40

Îí íå ðàñêàïûâàë )))

Later that night, during the battalion’s attack on the town, May led his platoon across open country and through five wired obstacles. These had to be negotiated in complete silence. When he was within 30 yards of the gun emplacement, he called for rapid fire, shouted to his platoon to follow him and charged straight into the German fortified position.

The enemy was stunned by the sudden uproar. The first German that May saw had his fingers in his ears and his head in a compost heap. May’s training had not covered this situation, and he did not know whether to shoot him or run him through with a bayonet. In the event, he simply tapped him on the helmet and said “Oi!”

May captured the gun and killed or captured the crew together with an armoured car before leading his men on to the final objective. He personally disposed of six of the enemy and his small force took 43 prisoners. He was awarded an immediate MC.

ó íåìöà ïîõîæå êðûøà ñúåõàëà, èíà÷å ñëîæíî çàñóíóòü ãîëîâó â íàâîçíóþ êó÷ó

'Á³é â³äëóíàâ. Æîâòî-ñèí³ çíàìåíà çàòð³ïîò³ëè íà ñòàíö³¿ çíîâ'
Îò bedal
Ê Chestnut (21.04.2011 13:35:40)
Äàòà 21.04.2011 14:25:33

òîæå íåïëîõî (-)
Îò Chestnut
Ê Chestnut (21.04.2011 13:05:36)
Äàòà 21.04.2011 13:13:09

Âîåííûå íåêðîëîãè èç áðèòàíñêèõ ãàçåò

Bernard Halsall

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article2990687.ece

Wartime glider pilot who was awarded an MC for gallantry during the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943

Bernard Halsall was an early volunteer for the Glider Pilot Regiment formed during the Second World War. After Germany showed the effectiveness of troop-carrying gliders in the invasion and capture of Crete in May 1941, the British Army began to raise and train its own force in February 1942.


The first large-scale Allied glider-borne operation formed part of the invasion of Sicily in July 1943 — involving American and British pilots of towing “tug” aircraft and gliders. The operation indicated all too clearly that the Allies had much to learn. Of the 144 gliders, 78 came down in the sea and most of those that made landfall did so within only five miles of their target.


Halsall was the second pilot of a US Waco glider, renamed the Hadrian for British use, carrying 14 infantrymen of 2nd Battalion the South Staffordshire Regiment bound for the Ponte Grande over the double canal one mile south of Syracuse on Sicily’s southeastern tip. Much thought and training had gone into the preparation of the glider pilots but the majority of the tug pilots were inexperienced and navigation depended on flying in groups of six tug-glider combinations with a navigator in just one of the tugs.


Two hours before take-off from Sousse on the Tunisian coast on the evening of July 9, 1943, the weather report indicated a 35mph offshore wind over the target area, 20mph more than expected. It was decided to keep to the plan to release the gliders from the tugs 3,000 yards from the coast but raise the release height from 1,400 to 1,800ft to give longer glide-down time to offset the headwind. Due to heavy flak, many of the gliders were released farther out to sea.


Halsall’s Hadrian flown by Captain Tom McMillen took off in a cloud of dust and headed for Sicily flying at 250ft and 125mph. Keeping flying station with the tug aircraft was difficult as the guiding lights along the trailing edge of its wings were hard to see, and it was not long before the pair lost their group of aircraft with the all-important navigator. Even so, the American tug pilot found the target area and, after release from the tug, Halsall spotted a fire below, for which McMillen headed. Their glider landed at 80mph in a stone-walled tomato orchard, hitting the base of a tree in the wall, knocking out crew and passengers.


McMillen injured his leg in the landing, so Halsall took charge of the infantrymen and led them towards the Syracuse bridge in the face of heavy enemy fire. On reaching the bridge which had already been captured, he and the South Staffordshires from his glider took over a sector of the defensive perimeter.


During the following night the Italians counter-attacked the bridge and an intense battle began. By 1530 hours the next day, shortage of ammunition forced the defenders to surrender but 45 minutes later men of the British sea-landing force arrived to free them. Halsall was awarded the MC for his actions after landing, one of the few gallantry awards to members of the Glider Pilot Regiment for action on the ground.


Halsall returned to England to join the newly formed C Squadron of the Glider Pilot Regiment at Tarrant Rushton in Dorset to train on the Hamilcar glider. The Hamilcar was designed as a heavy load carrier and could lift a Tetrarch Mark IV light tank or a 17-pounder anti-tank gun with towing vehicle and crew.


As a first pilot of a Hamilcar, Halsall stood ready with the 1st Airborne division in case a second glider-borne operation was required to follow up the 6th Airborne Division that landed in Normandy on D-Day. He took off in a Hamilcar for Operation Market Garden — the attempt to capture the Rhine bridges — but due to a fault in his tug aircraft his glider had to be released over Belgium. He crash-landed in a field without loss of life.


His final wartime operation was Operation Varsity, the crossing of the Rhine in March 1945. He piloted a Hamilcar carrying a 17-pounder anti-tank gun, a Dodge towing vehicle and an eight-man crew and landed near Hamminkeln, five miles beyond the river exactly as planned. Varsity benefited from the experience gained in the three earlier glider-borne operations. Nevertheless there were significant casualties, chiefly due to intense anti-aircraft fire and the smokescreen blowing across the landing zone.


Bernard Holt Halsall was born in Southport and educated at Stonyhurst. When required to lay claim to property in Scotland for acceptance into the The Liverpool Scottish Territorial Army battalion in 1939, he deposited a pair of trousers for repair with Pullers of Perth in the city.After the war he moved to Leicestershire to become an agricultural merchant and pioneered delivery of bulk fertiliser direct to the field.


He is survived by his wife, Constance, a son, Air Commodore Martin Halsall, and a daughter.




Bernard. H. Halsall, MC, wartime glider pilot, was born on March 18, 1921. He died on March 4, 2011, aged 89


Michael Ward

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article2990690.ece

SOE agent who endured a 500-mile trek in occupied Greece while gathering information on the enemy and the divided partisans

Michael Ward was hauled back from Tunisia in March 1943 to be interviewed in Cairo for undisclosed duties. Leaving 7th Battalion the Green Howards, he reported to GHQ Middle East to discover that his aptitude for classical Greek qualified him as a potential recruit for undercover work for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Axis-occupied Greece.


He was given time to polish up on modern Greek, train as a parachutist and do some intensive research on SOE operations in Greece. He was then put in charge of preparing and dispatching small groups of agents to join the Allied Military Mission there.


When his turn came, he was flown by RAF Dakota aircraft into a secret landing strip on the plateau over the crest of the Pindus mountains in northeastern Greece on October 20, 1943.


The Italians had agreed an armistice with the Allies by then, leaving their forces in Greece in an invidious state vis-à-vis their former German allies — and with the Greek partisans. On entering Neraida, close to where he landed, Ward was surprised to find the village swarming with Italian soldiers from the Pinerolo Division who had been relieved of their arms by the communist National Liberation Front ( ELAS).


The local leader of the SOE Mission, Major Philip Worrall, explained that ELAS was preparing to seize control of the country the moment the Germans left and, meanwhile, were being decidedly obstructive. This had followed the outbreak of hostilities between ELAS and two other — politically right wing — groups of partisans, which had led the mission to halt supplies of arms.


After a long trek to meet the overall SOE commander in Greece, Colonel Chris Woodhouse, (later Lord Terrington) it was decided that Ward should visit as many of the Mission’s area HQs as he could reach before the next Dakota was due and return to Cairo with a comprehensive report.


Ward began an intended round journey of 215 miles by foot, mule and the occasional lorry that evolved into one of more than twice that distance, gathering details of German dispositions and the activities of Greek andartes (guerrillas) en route. He found that the German tactic of motorised sallies into the hills rendered them vulnerable to ELAS road mines, stocks of which were being built up from Italian sources. The penalty for mine laying was murderous vengeance against the local population, but the ELAS leaders considered that a price worth paying.


His travels little more than half completed, Ward heard over the SOE radio link that the German Army had overrun the plateau landing strip. This extended his route to 500 miles to the Aegean coast, from where he and his companions were picked up by an SOE caique for voyage to Turkey and then by train to Cairo.


Ward returned to Greece towards the end of 1944 to join the advance HQ of Force 133, of which as the Mission in Greece was by then part, principally to wind up SOE business there, which took 18 months to complete. These months sealed his love of Greece and in 1948 he returned a second time as a member of the UN Special Committee on the Balkans (UNScob).


In October 1947 the UN General Assembly called upon Albania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia to provide no aid to guerrilla forces in Greece and set up a special committee to aid the four nations involved and to monitor compliance. Ward’s reports to the UN mission headquarters revealed that the communist guerrillas in Greece continued to receive aid from all three northern neighbours.


Michael Ward was born in Newchurch, Lancashire, son of the Rev D’Arcy Ward, and educated at Sedbergh. After leaving the UN Mission to Greece, he served with the Sudan Political Service until Sudanese independence in 1955. Later he worked with BP, mainly in Athens and Baghdad, and in 1971 became the British Consul General in Thessaloniki. He was appointed OBE in 1982 for his services in Greece and retired to live and write in Athens.


In 1947 he married Avrilia Diamantidou. She predeceased him. He is survived by a son.




Michael Ward, OBE, officer of the SOE, was born on September 29, 1918. He died on April 8, 2011, aged 92


Lieutenant-General Sir Michael Gray

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article2963938.ece

Energetic officer in the Parachute Regiment who saw service in a number of the world’s trouble spots

As a young officer Mike Gray’s ebullient energy, broad grin and dedication to the job made him popular with fellow officers and soldiers alike. Initially, due to his obvious keenness, they regarded him in a bemused way, but they quickly learnt that his close attention to their wellbeing, whatever their individual merits, was relentless.

This characteristic persisted throughout his service and received a broader focus after his retirement, in particular with regard to former members of the Parachute Regiment. His contemporaries would speak of him with a wry smile, recognising his ability as a general but wary of his restless vigour.

Michael Stuart Gray was born in the East Riding county town of Beverley, the eldest son of Lieutenant Frank Gray, RNVR, who was killed at sea in 1940. From his grammar school he won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital, Horsham, Sussex, from where he went to RMA Sandhurst. He was commissioned into the East Yorkshire Regiment in 1952 and served for two years with the 1st Battalion in Malaya, during the communist insurrection. Having undertaken parachute training at Sandhurst — and volunteered for secondment — he was called for service with the Parachute Regiment in 1955.

Aside from attending the Staff College, Camberley, he alternated regimental and staff appointments in the airborne forces, at that time comprising two brigades, one regular and one Territorial Army, for some 14 years. He saw further active service in Cyprus, as Intelligence Officer of 2nd Battalion The Parachute Regiment during the EOKA terrorist campaign and in the 1956 Suez operation. He went to Jordan during the emergency deployment of 16 Parachute Brigade to block the main approach road from Iraq, after the assassination of King Faisal II by Baath Party extremists in July 1958.

As a company commander with 2nd Battalion in the mid-1960s he served in Bahrain, the Trucial States and in Aden and the Western Protectorate during operations to counter the violence fostered by the National Liberation Front and the Front for the Liberation of South Yemen. After two years with Military Operations in the MoD he was appointed to command 1st Battalion The Parachute Regiment in March 1969. That August the British Army was deployed in Londonderry and Belfast.

His early experience in Northern Ireland was during an emergency tour of duty in Belfast in 1970; then he took his battalion back for an 18-month stint as Province Reserve, based near Belfast. His main task was to reinforce any unit facing excessive pressure anywhere in the Province. He was twice sent with his battalion to Londonderry, so he knew the city and the circumstances well. This unit was to be involved in “Bloody Sunday” six months after he had given up command.

With his former experience of counter-terrorist operations, Gray’s instructions on opening fire were specific. His men were to shoot only if shot at and only if a man with a weapon was identified. There were ten ranges in Palace Barracks and every man fired not less than ten rounds a day at a variety of practice targets. This was a hard but very professional battalion commanded by as experienced a CO as the Army had at the time. He had confidence in the Belfast brigade commander, Brigadier Frank Kitson, as the latter had in him — and in the GOC, Major-General Anthony Farrar-Hockley.

He was appointed OBE after his battalion command and went to the Staff College as a member of the Directing Staff. Two years later he was posted to the British Army of the Rhine as Chief of Staff of the 1st Division. In the Cold War the principal threat to the Central Region sector of the 1st (British) Corps was an armoured onslaught over the open ground facing the 1st Division. This was forecast as predominantly a tank battle, and the divisional commander, immersed in armoured tactics, awaited the arrival of his new parachutist chief of staff with interest. It proved a sound partnership, and Gray never looked back.

He attended the Royal College of Defence Studies as a colonel in 1976 before returning to 16 Parachute Brigade as commander. He saw through the conversion of this veteran formation to become the 5th Field Force, as part of the late 1970s Defence Review, and then went to Washington as Head of British Army Staff and Military Attaché in 1979.

The US Defence establishment had come to expect the British MA to be unusual and highly professional. Gray was both and it was a measure of his success that, for the final half year of his tour of duty, he took on the additional responsibilities of Head of Defence Staff and Defence Attaché in the acting rank of major-general.

On return to England in 1981 he was appointed to command South West District, which carried the additional responsibility of commander of the United Kingdom Mobile Force. This was assigned for the reinforcement of the Nato flanks in war, or to the Central Region. The programme of contingency planning and exercises was intense, and Gray’s ebullient personality did much to ease relations with host countries, some of which were less enthusiastic about having British troops trampling over them in peacetime, however much they might welcome them in war.

From February 1984 he was Chief of Staff HQ British Army of the Rhine until promoted to lieutenant-general to take over the 3-star post of GOC South East District housing the largest number of troops in the UK. The post also provided the ground force element of the Joint Force Headquarters, introduced after the Falklands War, to which his previous service made him well suited.

He left the Army aged 55 in 1988 and threw himself into many projects, of which probably the most ambitious was the preparation of the airborne forces’ part in the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landings in 1944. For this service France appointed him an Officer of the Legion of Honour in 1994.

He was chief executive of Rainford Developments 1990-94, Colonel-Commandant of the Parachute Regiment 1990-93, Lieutenant of the Tower of London as well as a patron, chairman or associate of more than 30 charitable organisations. The strain of this huge voluntary workload was exacerbated by recurrent trouble with a leg damaged in a parachuting accident in his mid-thirties. When this necessitated the shortening of the leg, he insisted on a further operation to restore it but he became increasingly lame. Despite this and heart problems, he maintained a strenuous working schedule.

He married Juliette Noon of Northampton in 1958. She survives him with two sons and a daughter.

Lieutenant-General Sir Michael Gray, KCB, OBE, was born on May 3, 1932. He died on March 13, 2011, aged 78


Major-General Dennis Shaw

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article2956541.ece

Soldier and engineer who served in Cyprus, Ghana and Northern Ireland and became head of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering

As a mechanical engineering specialist, Dennis Shaw spent a notable proportion of his military career on active service. Commando-trained, he served with 3rd Commando Brigade of the Royal Marines and later commanded their Logistics Regiment, never subsequently losing his close interest in the force, even in retirement. He was also an exceptional cricketer with a speciality of hitting sixes over cover point.

After a few years as an engineering apprentice in the steel industry, in 1955 he enlisted as a regular soldier in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and was granted a short-service commission a year later, subsequently becoming a career officer.

Active service began almost immediately with an assignment to the REME recovery and support team of 46 Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment as the unit was deployed to Cyprus in the infantry role in 1958. This was at the height of the EOKA terrorist campaign for the union of Cyprus with Greece, an objective opposed by the Turkish Cypriots, Turkey and the Greek Government. It was, nevertheless, a particularly nasty business with the murder of civilians, including women, featuring in EOKA tactics until stability of a kind imposed by British security forces permitted a negotiated settlement.

On return to England in 1960, Shaw studied for a mechanical engineering degree at the Royal Military College of Science, from where he graduated with 1st class honours. He then completed the notoriously rigorous commando training course at Lympstone in Devon. With that behind him, he qualified to accompany 3rd Commando Brigade to Singapore and then on to his next stint of active service in North Borneo during Indonesia’s “confrontation” with the Federation of Malaysia.

After the two-year technical staff course at Shrivenham, Oxfordshire, and Camberley, Surrey, in 1968, he spent 1969-70 in Ottawa as a member of the British Defence Liaison Staff in the Canadian capital, a period that saw a consolidation of his conversion from cricket to golf and, subsequently, a move to Germany to command No 1 Field Workshop REME, part of the corps troops of the 1st (British) Corps in the Army of the Rhine.

Promotion to lieutenant-colonel after the National Defence College course at Latimer, Buckinghamshire, in 1975 led to his appointment as CO of the Commando Logistic Regiment based in Plymouth. Over the next three years he was involved in support for 3rd Commando Brigade on exercises in the Netherlands, Norway and Turkey and, markedly less exotically, deployment to the West Midlands to provide emergency fire service cover during the firemen’s strike of 1977. He was appointed OBE in January 1978.

Another representative post took him to Ghana, where he joined the Commonwealth Military Advisory Team in 1978. CMAT’s task was to help Ghana develop its own Armed Forces, but its work was interrupted by a coup d’état and the execution of six former heads of state by firing squad. A request by the head of the Revolutionary Council to CMAT to assist in restoring order within the Ghanaian Armed Forces was rejected on the advice of the Foreign Office and Shaw returned home.

Further active service followed his promotion to colonel and appointment as Assistant Chief of Staff (Logistics) at Headquarters Northern Ireland in 1981. As the Army prepared for a long haul in the campaign to curtail the terrorist outrages of the Provisional IRA, Shaw was involved in building up the requisite support infrastructure; the success of which was recognised by his advancement to CBE in 1983.

After staff appointments in the Logistic Executive at Andover, Hampshire, and Headquarters UK Land Forces, he was promoted major-general in 1988 to become the Director-General of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering at the Ministry of Defence, where he faced three redoubtable challenges. The first entailed providing the maintenance and repair back-up facilities for the wide range of complex military equipment being accepted into service and the second the programme for absorption of all the logistic corps, including his own, into the Army Logistic Corps with all the structural and personnel changes that entailed.

The third and most difficult challenge was the provision of electrical and mechanical support for the armoured division hastily assembled to fight the Gulf War of early 1991 with tanks, vehicles and radios designed for war in Europe. The compromises and cannibalisation this demanded made clear the need for the modernisation of the logistic support for the Army as a whole, as well completion of the structural changes already begun. He was appointed CB on retiring from the Army towards the end of that year.

The son of Nathan and Frances Ellen Shaw, Dennis Shaw was educated at Scunthorpe Grammar School and the Royal Military College of Science, Shrivenham. On leaving the Army he joined Greig Fester insurance brokers in the City, eventually to become a director of Greig Fester Group Services in 1995.

He was the Representative Colonel Commandant REME from 1992 to 1993, a liveryman of the Turners Company and a Freeman of the City of London. It gave him special pleasure to be made an honorary member of the Royal Marines Officers’ Dining Club in recognition of his service with 3rd Commando Brigade RM 1963-66 and command of the Commando Logistic Regiment from 1975 to 1978.

He is survived by his wife Barbara, née Tate, and two daughters.

Major-General Dennis Shaw, CB, CBE, DGEME (Army) 1988-1991, was born on May 11, 1936. He died from cancer on January 20, 2011, aged 74


Lieutenant-Colonel Eric Cooper-Key

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article2956608.ece

Infantry commander who rallied his flagging troops during a battle for control of a river crossing in the Netherlands in 1944

Eric Cooper-Key achieved success as a soldier and a businessman thanks to a calm insouciance combined with a clear grasp of what was required at any given moment. Unusually, the citation for his Military Cross conceded that his exhausted men wavered when yet another attack was demanded of them, but he led them forward, encouraging and turning round the odd waverer until the objective was reached and taken.

He came from a predominantly naval family, the son of Captain A. D. C. Cooper-Key, RN, and grandson of Admiral Sir Astley Cooper-Key, a former First Sea Lord. Educated at Beaumont and RMC Sandhurst, in 1938 he was commissioned — appropriately enough — into the Royal Norfolk Regiment, which had Rule Britannia as its quick march. He served in Gibraltar and India until the outbreak of war required his battalion to return to England.

On D-Day (June 6, 1944), 1st Royal Norfolk landed on Sword Beach with 185 Infantry Brigade, the second wave of the 3rd (British) Divisions assault designed to capture Caen before last light. That objective was not achieved because of the intensity of German resistance and the battalion suffered more than 150 men killed or wounded in the first 24 hours.

Cooper-Key survived the initial battles and two months later, on August 6, while the battalion was holding the Normandy town of Sourdeval, his company position was attacked by units of the German 10th SS Panzer Division. The ensuing battle lasted for five hours at the end of which, after launching a counter-attack, he eliminated an enemy wedge to restore his position.

On October 14, 1944, after taking over from units of the 82nd (US) Airborne Division following Operation Market Garden — the failed attempt to lay an airborne carpet over the bridges leading to the Ruhr — 1st Royal Norfolk fought a three-day battle at Venray in the Netherlands. On the third day, in foul weather and with his men seriously fatigued, Cooper-Key’s company was required to make an assault river crossing.

Shortly after forward movement began, enemy machinegun and mortar fire caused one of his three platoons to hesitate. He went to it at once, rallied the men and led them onto the objective with the others. Again he survived unwounded and seven months later, at the end of the war in Europe, was still in command of the company with which he had landed on the Normandy beaches; it is believed that he was one of only two officers in the 3rd Division to have done so. He was awarded the MC and mentioned in dispatches for his part in campaign.

He attended the Staff College, Camberley, after the war and in 1950 was appointed Brigade Major (chief of staff) of the 18th Infantry Brigade in Malaya. The communist insurrection had begun two years earlier and at that point of the 12-year emergency the terrorists still held the local initiative in much of the peninsula.

For his successful co-ordination of the work of the units of the brigade with the Malay police, Special Branch and supporting squadrons of the RAF he was appointed MBE.

Later he was a college chief instructor at RMA Sandhurst, served in Korea with his own regiment and at Suez as second in command of 2nd battalion The Parachute Regiment. He was appointed a lieutenant-colonel on the staff butthe views of the Colonel of the Royal Norfolk Regiment about divorcés precluded him from command of its only regular battalion, so he left the Army and embarked on a successful business career.

He joined De La Rue and within two years was appointed managing director of Security Express. During the next seven years he developed the company from a handful of armoured vans for the transportation of cash and valuable goods to one operating a fleet of 700 vehicles. He was a founder member of the British Security Industry Association and in 1971 became managing director of AngloInternational Military Services.

A fine sportsman, he represented the Army at cricket, tennis and squash and Buckinghamshire at squash. He was vice-chairman of the Army and Navy Club from 1994 to 1996.

He was married three times, on the third occasion to the former Betty Southall who predeceased him. He is survived by two daughters of his first marriage and a stepson and a stepdaughter.

Lieutenant-Colonel E. A. Cooper-Key, MBE, MC, was born on December 8, 1917. He died on March 5, 2011, aged 93


Lieutenant-Commander Barklie Lakin

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article2948587.ece

Distinguished submarine commander who fought in the Mediterranean and became chairman of Vickers-Armstrongs after the war

During the Second World War, Richard Barklie Lakin commanded three submarines, two of which took part in the desperate campaign to establish control of the Mediterranean, ensure the survival of Malta and starve Field Marshal Rommel’s Afrika Corps of essential supplies. For his gallantry and professionalism he was awarded the DSO and two DSCs.

At the age of 8 he survived a car accident that killed his father. His subsequent survival through many perilous occasions has been attributed to having been born with a caul, believed by some societies to be an omen of good luck.

After graduating from Dartmouth naval college in 1932 and serving in the cruiser Sussex in the Mediterranean, Lakin volunteered for submarines and was first appointed to the Narwhal to learn the ropes as the “4th hand”. Lakin’s lively hobbies included racing a Bugatti at Brooklands and riding the fastest motorbike then available — a 1000c HRD Rapide — for which he had obtained a one-piece waterproof garment from Barbour. In May 1938 he joined the Ursula as navigating officer, captained by the celebrated Lieutenant-Commander George Phillips, DSO, GM, who, fed up with standard Admiralty oilskins, quite unsuitable for the really wet conditions on the conning towers of small submarines, seized upon Lakin’s garment and adapted it to a two-piece version which, after testing with a fire-hose, became standard submariners’ clothing, famously named the “Ursula-suit”.

Lakin’s appointment to the new submarine Thetis was luckily cancelled in favour of a Lieutenant Frederick Woods who was the torpedo officer on March 3, 1939 when Thetis sank during her initial trials in Liverpool Bay as a result of some enamel paint having blocked a torpedo tube test cock, thus not revealing that the tube bow door was open. Despite frantic rescue attempts, 99 lives were lost.

At the outbreak of war he was appointed instead as second-in-command of the elderly H32, operating in the North Sea. He was mentioned in dispatches before being sent to the submarine Utmost in November 1940, again as second-in-command. Arriving off Gibraltar, Utmost was mis-identified and rammed by the destroyer Encounter and took a month to repair. Subsequently, a successful series of patrols which sank Italian supply ships and landed or recovered agents on three occasions resulted in the award of Lakin’s first DSC, his captain earning a DSO.

Returning home for the submarine commanding officer’s course, or “perisher”, Lakin was appointed in December 1941 in command of the H43 which, with a hurriedly assembled crew of trainees, was deployed with several other submarines to attack the battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau with the cruiser Prinz Eugen as they made their celebrated “Channel Dash” from Brest to safety in Germany.

He took command of the Ursula at home in March 1942, joining the “Fighting 10th” submarine squadron in Malta during the protracted Mediterranean battle in which British submarines suffered a 50 per cent loss rate. In early November Ursula was stationed off Oran as one of 21 submarines protecting Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa. Later a sabotage team was successfully landed and recovered near Genoa and an anti-submarine vessel sunk by gunfire. Ordered to divert Axis activities away from invasion beaches, Lakin was commended by the expeditionary force commander for his efforts which included bombardments of oil tanks and railways and the sinking of a supply ship by gunfire. In December he sank a large heavily escorted steamer but got too close to another and was run down, losing his periscopes. For his part in Operation Torch and kindred operations he was awarded the DSO.

By April 1943 the tide had turned in the Mediterranean. Lakin’s command of the Safari continued that submarine’s exceptional war record, he being awarded a second DSC for four successful patrols. After acting as a navigational beacon for the invasion of Sicily, for which he was awarded the American Legion of Merit, the Safari attacked and sank by torpedo and gunfire a variety of petrol carriers, barges, a minelayer and minesweeper, expending all her ammunition in a final patrol which the dry official history describes as “audacious”.

Having taken Safari home for a refit, Lakin followed the movement of the centre of gravity of the war with an appointment as British liaison officer on the staff of the American commander of all submarines in the Pacific. Never one for sitting in an office, Lakin went on patrol in several USN submarines, acting as mentor and submarine warfare instructor to inexperienced captains. Some of his experiences were alarming: penetrating into the Sea of Japan through the Tshushima minefield in the USS Crevalle and being surprised and bombed by a floatplane while on the surface off Rabaul.

During his final tour in the Royal Navy, Lakin looked after a host of surrendered U-boats at Londonderry before they were scuttled or scrapped. In 1946 he retired and joined the engineering company Vickers-Armstrongs, where he had successful 30-year career, becoming chairman and chief executive. Always an ingenious man with an enthusiasm for practical engineering that was evidenced by the well-equipped workshop which accompanied all the family moves, he was also known for his enlightened man-management. When asked why there was never a strike at Vickers Elswick, the union convenor replied: “Because the Commander will always see us right.” The Suez crisis of 1956 broke when he was managing Tel el Kebir, the British Army’s huge engineering and supply base in Egypt. While his family was repatriated, Lakin was interned for six months. He later worked for Joseph Isherwood Shipping Architects before finally retiring to the Isle of Wight.

His wife, Pamela Jackson-Taylor, whom he married in 1936, died in 1981. His second wife, Pansy Phillips, also pre-deceased him. His devoted companion, Joy Almond, supported his final 17 years. He is survived by the three sons and three daughters of his first marriage.

Lieutenant-Commander Barklie Lakin, DSO, DSC and bar, submarine captain and businessman, was born on October 8, 1914. He died on March 1, 2011, aged 96


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Ludmilla Gurchenko

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article2974008.ece

Russian film star and singer who survived official criticism for being too Western and became celebrated for her many face-lifts

Ludmilla Gurchenko made a huge splash early in her career but immediately suffered an official backlash, and, though it did not dent her popularity, her career was severely curtailed.

Ludmilla Markovna Gurchenko was born in 1935 in Ukraine. Her parents worked for the Kharkov Philharmonic Orchestra, and she spent her childhood in the city, which the Nazis and the Red Army recaptured from each other several times between 1941 and 1943. In 1944 she entered music school, and moved to Moscow in 1953 to study acting with the husband and wife Sergei Gerasimov and Tamara Makarova, at the state film school VGIK. She graduated in 1958. Her light soprano made her ideal for ingénue roles and while there, she played straight and musical roles including Keto in Viktor Dolidze’s comic opera Kote and Keto.

Gurchenko’s first film role was in The Road of Truth (Doroga pravdy, 1956), written by Gerasimov and starring his wife. But her career was launched with Eldar Ryazanov’s Carnival Night (Karnivalnaya noch, 1958), a musical that used the freedoms of Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw to poke gentle fun at stuffy minor officialdom. The new director of the economics institute wants to ensure that a new year stage show is “on-message”, but the young Komsomols, chafing at the restrictions, frustrate him at every opportunity. Such minor questioning of the regime was allowed as long as the underpinning philosophy remained untouched. It caught the mood of the time and became hugely popular, with its catchy tunes, not least Five Minutes which Gurchenko sings in the run-up to midnight.

Gurchenko was able to spin off a career as a singer, including various songs from the film, and toured extensively. It may have been ambiguities of the Thaw or perhaps professional rivalries, but there was something of a press campaign and she was denounced as too “Western” and was alleged to have accepted cash payments in addition to her state salary. She also claimed to have been punished for refusing to act as an informer for the KGB. She had already shot her next film The Girl with a Guitar (Devushka s gitaroi) but it was given limited distribution, further harming her cinema prospects. For over a decade, her film career was hobbled and she did not have the success that she deserved or might have expected. Mostly she got middle billing in middling films. However, she turned in some good performances, as in Balzaminov’s Wedding (Zhenitba Balzaminova, 1965), an amusing adaptation of Alexander Ostrovsky’s wry comedy about the difficulty of those who wish to marry above their station.

In the mid-1960s she spent time with various theatre companies, in roles as wide ranging as Roxanne in Cyrano de Bergerac, the Marquis de la Mole’s daughter Mathilde in Gerasimov’s staging of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and Bianca in Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate. Meanwhile, she continued singing, though it was a dispiriting round of mines and factories, where she wore a forced smile for the comrades.

The cinema of Leonid Brezhnev’s stagnation struggled with how reality had fallen short of the Revolution’s promises, and examined the impact on women. Gurchenko appeared in films such as Sentimental Novel (Sentimentalnii roman, 1977), based on the autobiography of Vera Panova who had suffered under the regime, and the heartbreak-comedy The Mechanic Gavrilov’s Beloved (Liubimaya zhenshchina mekhanika Gavrilova, 1982).

But the beginning of Gurchenko’s new life came in 1979, when she played the lead in Andrei Konchalovsky’s epic Siberiade, which follows two families in Siberia from 1904 to the late 1960s, opposite the director’s brother Nikita Mikhalkov. During a 25-day break she and Mikhalkov filmed Alexander Volodin’s Thaw play Five Evenings (Pyat vecher), which tries, not entirely successfully, to imply that the disappointments of that time were over. She also had a cameo in Getting to Know the Big Wide World (Poznavaya belyy svet), a slyly artificial twist on a socialist realist story, directed by her VGIK classmate Kira Muratova.

Ironically, another splash would come with Aleksei German’s Twenty Days Without War (Dvatsat dney bez voiny), which was released in 1981 but had been held up for five years, having been denounced as “the shame of Lenfilm”. The documentary-style story of a soldier-author advising on a propaganda film is based on Konstantin Simonov (who narrates part of it), but it was seen as too downbeat. Gurchenko plays his former wife, one of those who believe the official myth.

The bittersweet rom-com Station for Two (Vokzal dlya dvoikh, 1982), directed by Ryazanov, brought another huge hit. Top-billed Gurchenko played a dowdy waitress in a railway café who argues with a stranded passenger over the inedible food but ends up waiting for his return from prison.

Her singing career continued and her unconcern seemed to reinforce her popularity as she developed a talent for outrageous statements and had a series of increasingly bizarre face-lifts (ironically Gurchenko appeared in an adaptation of Karel Capek’s The Makropoulos Case, about a 300-year-old opera singer). She became a gay icon and sang duets with Russia’s only “out” pop star Boris Moiseyev, her light soprano now huskier.

She was married five times. She had a daughter with the historian Boris Andronikashvili. Her second husband was the actor Alexander Fadeyev. After a brief third marriage, to Iosif Kobzon (the Russian Frank Sinatra), she had a long but stormy marriage to Konstantin Kuperveis, who became her regular accompanist. Gurchenko fell in February and died from complications after surgery. She is survived by her last husband, the film producer Sergei Senin, and her daughter.

Ludmilla Gurchenko, actress and singer, was born on November 12, 1935. She died on March 30, 2011, aged 75



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Îò Chestnut
Ê Chestnut (21.04.2011 13:13:09)
Äàòà 28.04.2011 19:50:02

Re: Âîåííûå íåêðîëîãè...

Major-General Robert MacFarlane
Doctor who served in Madagascar, India and Burma before becoming the Army's Director of Medicine

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/medicine-obituaries/8478550/Major-General-Robert-MacFarlane.html

Admiral of the Fleet Sir Henry Leach
First Sea Lord who persuaded Margaret Thatcher that Britain could win back the Falklands

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/naval-obituaries/8474861/Admiral-of-the-Fleet-Sir-Henry-Leach.html

The Chief of the Defence Staff was on his way back from a visit to New Zealand, and — bypassing the Acting CDS — Leach sought out the Defence Secretary John Nott in the House of Commons, finding that the minister and his advisers were with Mrs Thatcher in the Prime Minister’s office, undecided about what to do. What happened next caused Leach to be described by Andrew Marr in his documentary series History of Modern Britain as Margaret Thatcher’s “knight in shining gold braid”.

His advice was clear: the Falklands should be recaptured, “Because if we do not, or if we pussyfoot in our actions and do not achieve complete success, in another few months we shall be living in a different country whose word counts for little”.



Major Freddie Scott
Soldier with 'The 52nd’ who braved machine gun fire and grenades in Normandy to be awarded an MC

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/army-obituaries/8472647/Major-Freddie-Scott.html

Soon after 9pm on D-Day, his glider crash-landed in the fields around Ranville, about five miles north of Caen. In his memoirs, Scott later wrote: “The Germans had erected poles all over the area but, in true Teutonic fashion, they were all in straight lines. So our pilot landed between them. The poles sheared off the wings and helped us slow down.”

In the following weeks, Scott led a number of fighting patrols into German lines and, on August 25, had the task of infiltrating a known enemy strongpoint. When his leading section came under grenade and machine gun fire, Scott pushed on ahead, opened up with his sten gun, and drove the enemy out, inflicting many casualties. The citation for his Military Cross declared that his “example, leadership and determination were largely responsible for the success of the action and were an inspiration to the men under him”.



Rear-Admiral Nicholas Goodhart
Engineer and world-class glider pilot whose carrier landing aid helped propel the Navy into the jet age

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8468948/Rear-Admiral-Nicholas-Goodhart.html
Goodhart’s idea was to position a concave mirror on the deck’s port side, flanked by green lights. A powerful beam, directed at the mirror itself, created a bright orange ball of light visible to approaching aircraft; by keeping this visual signal centred between the flanking green lights, pilots could be sure of the correct glide path for a safe landing.

The invention was promptly taken up by the Royal Navy, in 1954, and by the US Navy the following year, greatly increasing safety. Together with the angled deck (which shifted the runway five degrees off centre) and the steam catapult, Goodhart’s mirror was one of three great British inventions in the postwar development of naval aviation, and led to a dramatic fall in accident rates, from 35 per 10,000 in 1954, to seven per 10,000 in 1957. He was awarded the US Legion of Merit in 1958; the British government made a small payment.


Lieutenant Tul Bahadur Pun, VC
Gurkha who charged alone across open ground under intense fire to take an enemy position

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/gurkha-obituaries/8467379/Lieutenant-Tul-Bahadur-Pun-VC.html

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article2995084.ece

Gurkha whose lonely heroism helped to turn the tables in the fight against the Japanese in Burma

Tulbahadur Pun, from the village of Banduk in the Parbat district of Nepal, volunteered for the Indian Army in 1941 and after initial training at Abbotabad was posted to the 3rd Battalion 6th Gurkha Rifles. This unit formed part of Brigadier Michael Calvert’s 77 Brigade preparing to take part in Operation Thursday, the second and larger of Major-General Orde Wingate’s long-range penetration operations inside Japanese-occupied Burma by the Chindits — the special force he had formed and trained.

The operation began in February 1944 when 16 Brigade, under Brigadier Bernard Fergusson, set off to march from a railhead in Assam to attack the Japanese at Indaw. On March 10 two more brigades were flown by troopcarrying gliders to landing grounds in the jungle. It was a hazardous enterprise, as one of the landing grounds could not be used because of logging, but 37 of the 54 gliders landed safely or with relatively minor casualties.

After two months fighting the Japanese, the Chindit force, less 16 Brigade that was flown out having marched in, was placed under the command of the US General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, who commanded a largely Chinese army operating in northern Burma. The Chindits were sent north to support Stilwell, and Calvert’s 77 Brigade was ordered to attack the Japanese railhead at Mogaung.

Initially, Calvert resisted the order as although capture of Mogaung would prevent the Japanese from reinforcing their troops opposing two of Stilwell’s Chinese divisions, his troops were close to exhaustion. But after reinforcement by air, including new officers to replace those killed or seriously wounded, he headed for Mogaung.

The 3/6th Gurkhas took the high ground above Mogaung as the monsoon broke at the end of May, finding the enemy well dug in around the town and railway bridge over the Mogaung river. After three weeks of bitter fighting in appalling conditions of mud and monsoon rain, Calvert was ready to launch his final assault even though his battalions were down to little more than company strength. 3/6th Gurkhas, the strongest with 230 men, was ordered to lead the attack, with 180 men of the South Staffordshire Regiment on June 23, beginning at 3am.

Tulbahadur Pun was with B Company, whose commander, Captain Michael Allmand, was mortally wounded as he led the assault. The leading platoons were pinned down by intense Japanese fire, and the whole of Tulbahadur’s section killed or wounded except for the section commander, himself and one other rifleman. The section commander led a charge on the Japanese position stemming the advance, but both he and the other rifleman were wounded.

Seizing the section Bren light machinegun and firing from the hip, Talbahadur continued alone. On reaching the position he killed three of the occupants and put five to flight. He then gave supporting fire to his platoon, enabling it to reach its objective.

Allmand and Tulbahadur Pun were awarded the Victoria Cross, Allmand posthumously. Announcing the capture of Mogaung and the railway bridge over the river, Stilwell’s spokesman gave the credit to the Chinese. Calvert riposted with a signal, “Mogaung having been taken by the Chinese, 77 Brigade is proceeding to take Umbrage.” Stilwell’s intelligence officer remarked: “Umbrage must be a very small place as it isn’t marked on the map.”

In 1945 Talbahadur Pun was promoted to havildar (sergeant) and served at the 6th Gurkhas regimental centre until Indian independence in 1947, when he joined the 2nd Battalion, which was to form part of the British Brigade of Gurkhas. He served almost to the end of the Malayan Emergency campaign, reaching the rank of regimental sergeant-major. He displayed great skill on jungle operations and was an inspiration to all ranks. On his retirement on pension in May 1959, he was granted the honorary rank of lieutenant (Queen’s Gurkha Officer).

In the last few years Tulbahadur Pun had been in the forefront of the Gurkha veterans who fought for the right to settle in the UK, a campaign to which the actress Joanna Lumley, whose father Major James Lumley participated in the battle for Mogaung, gave energetic and widely publicised support. Government ministers had ruled that those retiring before 1997 did not have that right. In 2007 Tulbahadur Pun won the right to live in Britain, but many other Gurkhas were still denied the opportunity, and he continued to support their legal campaign. In September 2008 a High Court Judge ruled that the military covenant between Britain and the Gurkhas compelled the rewarding of their long and distinguished service by a grant of residence in the country. In May 2009 the Government announced that all Gurkha veterans who retired before 1997 with at least four years’ service would be allowed to settle in the UK.

Tulbahadur Pun is survived by his second wife, Punisara Pun, and by two sons and eight daughters.

Lieutenant Tulbahadur Pun, VC, was born on March 23, 1923. He died on April 20, 2011, aged 88


William Craig
Ulster Protestant firebrand who led the Vanguard movement but later moderated his stance

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/politics-obituaries/8478572/William-Craig.html
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article2999260.ece

Pugnacious Unionist politician whose hardline Vanguard party campaigned aggressively for an independent Ulster in the 1970s

William Craig was a senior Ulster Unionist and the bellicose orator and leader of the Ulster Vanguard movement, which campaigned for independence for the province in the 1970s.

His actions when serving as home affairs minister in the Stormont Government in October 1968 are regarded by some as having given the decisive impetus to the explosive development of the Troubles. Craig had placed restrictions on a march by civil rights campaigners in Londonderry which led to three days of rioting when marchers were hit with batons by police after they had strayed into an area that Craig had pronounced to be off-limits.

Craig went on to denounce the civil rights movement as being a political front for armed Republican activity. He was dismissed by the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O’Neill, later that year. Craig had made it clear that he supported the idea of an independent Northern Ireland, a concept that O’Neill regarded as delusional and counterproductive.

Craig went on to build up a power base for himself within unionism, preparing the ground for the later creation of his own political party. He became head of the Ulster Loyalist Association which he led from 1969 to 1972. The official Unionist Party withdrew the whip from him in May 1970.

After the Bloody Sunday massacre on January 30, 1972, in which British Army soldiers opened fire on civil right protesters and bystanders, causing 13 deaths from gunshot wounds and several more from other causes, the Stormont parliament’s authority seemed fatally eroded. Craig chose this moment to launch the Ulster Vanguard movement, and the organisation was formed on February 9, 1972.

It aimed to be an umbrella body for all hardline Unionists, although in reality it was an amalgamation of Belfast-based workers groups and vigilante factions alarmed at the recent indications by the UK Government at Westminster, which had seemed ambiguous about the nature of Ulster’s position in the UK.

At a rally in Lisburn in February 1972, Craig inspected the battledress-clad ranks of the loyalist paramilitary Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and declared: “We are determined to preserve our British tradition and way of life, and God help those who get in our way.” His words were directed mainly at Republican terrorist groups, but also constituted an unconcealed threat to any intervention by the Conservative Government of Edward Heath in London. Craig repeated these histrionic gestures the following month in Ormeau Park beside the Lagan Valley. Before an audience of 60,000 UDA men in combat jackets, he warned: “When the politicians fail us, it may be our job to liquidate the enemy.” Moderate Unionist leaders were quick to point out the ambience of fascist storm troopers that these rallies conjured up.

William Craig was born in 1924 and educated at Queen’s University Belfast. He joined the RAF as an 18-year-old, becoming a Lancaster rear-gunner, and was involved in raids on Germany towards the end of the war.

After demobilisation he became a solicitor and was elected to the Northern Ireland Parliament as MP for Larne in 1960, quickly gaining a reputation as a hardliner during the civil rights campaign of the 1960s and serving as Unionist Chief Whip in 1963.

It was in O’Neill’s cabinet that Craig first suggested that the threat by the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson to interfere in Northern Ireland should be met with a counter-threat of independence. With the introduction of troops on the streets of Ulster and the eventual abolition of Stormont in 1973, numbers of Unionists harboured the belief that Britain was seeking a direct-rule solution to cut through what had become a costly and embarrassing problem. Stormont’s suspension was met with indignation by many Unionists in Ulster, and Vanguard immediately called for a two-day stoppage, which was observed by 190,000 workers.

Craig’s and Vanguard’s stance was that the battle against Republicanism and the preservation of Ulster’s British heritage could be best achieved through greater, if not total, independence. Backed by the presence of the UDA, Vanguard then proceeded to engage in a campaign against the British Government, in which it sometimes appeared to be threatening the authority of the Crown, at others to accept it.

A deliberately spoken man, Craig had intellectual integrity, and Vanguard did attract articulate, educated and ambitious party members (among them the young David Trimble), although its involvement with Loyalist paramilitary groups was for many an unpalatable one. Most Protestants were appalled by battles between Loyalists and the Army — such as the riots in East Belfast in October 1972 that led the UDA to declare “war” on Crown forces — and Craig began to sense a growing revulsion among the small and medium business-class patrons who had originally backed him. Moreover, to most Unionists talk of independence was anathema. To placate these Craig proposed a federated United Kingdom made up of seven regions (including Southern Ireland), each having separate parliaments but with power centred in Westminster.

The failure of the Ulster Unionist council to reject the 1973 White Paper on Northern Ireland led to Craig’s departure from the Unionist Party to form the Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party, which won in North Antrim in the Northern Ireland Assembly. During the Ulster Workers’ Council strike of 1974, which sought to destroy the Sunningdale Agreement on power- sharing, Craig — along with the Rev Ian Paisley — was an important influence. He was also regarded as the link with paramilitary groups such as the UDA and UVF that gave the strike its credibility.

Paradoxically, Craig’s leanings towards independence ultimately led him to seek rapprochement with the Catholic community. He envisaged joint allegiance to a new state that would make the concept of “power sharing” irrelevant. Soon after he announced his vision of a “united Northern Ireland”, it emerged in February 1973 that he had been having secret talks with the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) to discuss how this cross-community consensus should be fostered.

However, his conciliatory approach was unsettling for the United Ulster Unionist Council (UUUC) coalition. After the collapse of Sunningdale, in the Constitutional Convention of 1974-76, Craig turned his back on the hardline taken by the UUUC in his continued willingness to talk to the SDLP. Merlyn Rees, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland from 1974 to 1976, recalled Craig paying him a visit in the wake of the UUUC’s rejection of the idea of power-sharing, saying that he was going to have to resign. Rees persuaded him to carry on, although he eventually quit as head of Vanguard in the Convention in protest at the decision by the United Ulster Unionists’ coalition to call off talks with the SDLP. He and Vanguard were expelled from the UUUC in 1975.

His condemnation of the second Loyalist strike of 1977 led to bitter denunciation by Paisley, and that year Craig eventually disbanded Vanguard. In the 1979 Westminster elections, the UDA backed the Paisleyite Peter Robinson in East Belfast against the “turncoat” Craig, now back in the Ulster Unionist Party. He lost his seat by 64 votes.

In 1982, when elections were held for the new Northern Ireland Assembly, Craig revived the name Vanguard for his candidacy in East Belfast. His failure to win the seat marked the end of his political career.

Away from the political limelight Craig was humorous, tolerant and cosmopolitan in his interests, which included travel, motoring and European politics (he was a member of the Council of Europe from 1976 to 1979). In later life he became something of a recluse.

He married, in 1960, Doris Hilgendorff. They had two sons.

William Craig, Ulster politician, was born on December 2, 1924. He died on April 25, 2011, aged 86

Captain Lisa Head

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article2995085.ece

Royal Logistic Corps officer who became a high threat bomb disposal expert

Whatever the form of warfare — full-scale, counter-insurgency or low-intensity urban terrorism — landmines pose an insidious threat to morale and, consequently, to operational effectiveness. If every step or drive is loaded with dread of a sudden blast that tears off a limb or takes a life, then concentration on the job in hand becomes secondary. An anti-personnel mine taking off the foot of one man can halt a company of infantry in its tracks. The Taleban have found a deadly weapon to which safe disposal is the only counter.

Like every ammunition specialist, Lisa Head was a volunteer and highly trained. Applicants for the basic 16-month ammunition technical officer (ATO) course must display analytical minds and a calm and philosophical disposition. Doubt on either score leads to rejection no matter how keen the candidate. Until recently, it was considered that eight years’ training and experience were essential for an ATO to qualify as an advanced explosive device operator, previously known as a “high threat” specialist. Head completed her training in June 2009 and served in Northern Ireland as a member of a counter-IED team with 321 Squadron Royal Logistic Corps to gain experience.

She had served previously in Afghanistan and Iraq as an air transport liaison officer and began her tour of duty as a high-threat-bomb disposal expert in Helmand province in support of 2nd Battalion The Parachute Regiment at the end of March. On April 18, she had already disposed of one IED in an alleyway in Nar-e-Saraj — used by Afghan civilians as well by the security forces — before she was seriously injured by a second device that she had begun to disarm.

Head joined the corps in August 2005, having studied human biology at the University of Huddersfield, her home town. Commissioned in August 2006 she found the life and profession she was seeking in the Army — and with 11 Explosive Ordnance Disposal Regiment in particular. She was regarded by those who served with her as a dedicated comrade in a demanding discipline. Four other female bomb disposal experts have served in Afghanistan.

She was unmarried.

Captain Lisa Head, bomb disposal expert, was born on November 30, 1981. She died, of injuries sustained in action in Helmand Province, on April 19, 2011, aged 29



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Îò Chestnut
Ê Chestnut (28.04.2011 19:50:02)
Äàòà 28.04.2011 19:51:25

Re: Âîåííûå íåêðîëîãè...

>Admiral of the Fleet Sir Henry Leach

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3000361.ece

First Sea Lord who persuaded the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that Britain was capable of retaking the Falkland Islands in 1982

Two events were of particular significance in the long and successful naval career of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Henry Leach. In late 1941 he was a junior officer in the cruiser Mauritius at Singapore when his father, Captain John Leach, arrived on station in command of the battleship Prince of Wales which, with the battlecruiser Repulse, had been hurriedly sent there to prop up an inadequately resourced and politically bankrupt Far East strategy.

In a vain attempt to check the dynamic Japanese advance from Indochina, these ships were sailed to the north-east of Singapore without air cover and were promptly sunk by Japanese aircraft. This happened three days after the attacks on Pearl Harbor and on Clark Field in the Philippines.

That night Henry Leach sought news of his father among the oil-soaked and stricken survivors as they were brought ashore, to learn that he had gone down with his ship. It was a classic example of political expediency leading to the misapplication of too little force, too late.

Mauritius sailed for Colombo at night shortly afterwards, with the ship’s company gloomily silent and entirely convinced that they were all dead men. The Prince of Wales’s black cat had deserted that ship for Mauritius before sailing and now was nowhere to be found. Half-way down the Johore Straits a roar of joy from for’ard showed that the animal was still on board.

These circumstances were starkly in Leach’s mind as First Sea Lord on the eve of the 1982 Falklands crisis. Political pressures were leading to a defence review which many considered to be ill-conceived and which favoured the continental rather than the maritime role within Nato for the UK. Lack of time properly to consult allies meant that the politically visible and quantified commitments to air and land force levels contained in the Brussels Treaty overrode the more diffuse demands of defence in the North Atlantic.

The White Paper Command 8288 proposed substantial cuts in the naval programme, including the sale of the new aircraft carrier Invincible to Australia, a reduction in amphibious warfare capability and the loss of several frigates and destroyers. It was erroneously believed that an adequate defence against the increasingly powerful Soviet submarine fleet could be mounted by a combination of a few nuclear attack submarines and RAF Nimrod patrol aircraft.

Relations between Leach and John Nott, the Minister of Defence, personally and professionally, were irritable and counterproductive. The First Sea Lord believed that the Government was in danger of forgetting the influence that sea power has had upon history, while the Secretary of State was impatient with a naval élite which he saw as resting on its historical laurels and unwilling, or unable, to justify itself by rational argument.

Before the planned economies, which significantly included the Antarctic patrol ship Endurance, could take effect, the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands in the spring of 1982 provided yet another addition to a long postwar series of demands for military action outside the ambit of Nato and unaligned to the principal thrusts of formal British defence policy.

On the evening of March 31 Leach returned from visiting a naval research establishment to his office in the Ministry of Defence and read the latest intelligence reports. Recognising that an invasion was imminent and that the latest Central Staff brief for the Defence Secretary claimed that no military action to recover the Falkland Islands after a successful invasion by Argentine forces would be practicable, he sought out the Secretary of State.

Nott was not in his office but in the House of Commons. Leach followed him there, and, after a wait in the Central Lobby in full uniform until rescued by the Whips’ Office, was taken up to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s room where she, the Defence Secretary, the Permanent Secretaries from the FCO and MoD, the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary and other officials were discussing the Falklands situation. At this time the Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Terence Lewin, was absent on a visit to New Zealand and the Chief of the Air Staff, who was acting CDS, was elsewhere.

Accounts of this crucial meeting vary in detail. Margaret Thatcher’s own memoirs say that she “sent for” Sir Henry, which is clearly untrue. Others at the meeting have portrayed the pervasive atmosphere of indecision and dismay prior to the arrival of the First Sea Lord who was able to convince the Prime Minister of the practicality as well as of the military and political necessity to muster a naval task force as soon as possible.

In reply to a question from Margaret Thatcher about whether the UK should or should not respond in this way, he said, “It is not my business to say whether we should or not, but if we do not, if we pussyfoot in our actions and do not achieve complete success, in another few months we shall be living in a different country whose word counts for little.” Given the character of the Prime Minister, this statement could have only one result.

Leach also recorded that he had to remind those present that the fleet carrier Ark Royal with its fixed-wing Buccaneer strike aircraft was no longer on the strength, having — with this entire Fleet Air Arm capability — fallen victim to defence cuts some years earlier. He also was able to apprise those present that the Falklands were three weeks’ steaming from Gibraltar, not three days as they believed.

Against great odds imposed by distance, weather and the effects of previous defence cuts, British forces won a primarily maritime battle and restored the Falklands to their inhabitants. It had involved an opposed amphibious assault without adequate air cover and without allies — a possibility which successive defence policy statements had ruled out of court.

Leach’s leadership was truly inspirational. His experience of war, coolness and total confidence that the RN would rise to the challenge galvanised the Naval Staff and straight away decisive actions were taken which sliced through decades of MoD bureaucracy and greatly enhanced the task force’s capabilities in the actions which lay ahead. His careful judgment about the feasibility of the operation had proved correct. This campaign, which is likely to be the last of such to be undertaken alone by the UK, and also its final naval operation of any magnitude, brought substantial benefits to the Argentine population.

The importance of Leach’s decision can be judged by an examination of the consequences of failure. Given its unpopularity at that time, the fall of the Government was certain. Other consequences might well have included severe damage to the “special relationship” with a United States bruised in its South American policies; a permanent loss of credibility as a maritime nation; a loss of influence in Nato circles and the ceding of competence in operations outside the Nato area to the French, not to mention the effects upon the morale, effectiveness and future of the Royal Navy itself.

The virtual withdrawal of Command 8288 caused many to see Leach as the “saviour of the Navy”. Many received honours in recognition of their roles in the Falklands campaign but not Leach, an austere and somewhat private man who would have quietly valued the marked esteem in which he was held by his professionals.

Henry Conyers Leach joined the Royal Navy as a cadet in May 1937. As a junior lieutenant he was in charge of one of the 14-inch gun turrets in the battleship Duke of York during the action in December 1943 which sank the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst off the North Cape. After the war he specialised in gunnery and was promoted commander in June 1955, thereafter commanding the destroyer Dunkirk. After promotion to captain, he undertook a staff tour in the Far East and commanded a destroyer squadron before being appointed, in 1968, Director of Naval Plans during a challenging period when the Navy was withdrawing from East of Suez and formulating its contribution to a North Atlantic strategy.

After commanding the commando carrier Albion, he was promoted to rear-admiral and appointed Assistant Chief of Naval Staff (Policy), then to his final seagoing post as Flag Officer First Flotilla. As a vice-admiral he was Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff until promoted admiral in 1977 and appointed Commander-in-Chief Fleet, a post which carries with it the role of Allied Commander-in-Chief Channel, one of the three major Nato commanders. He became First Sea Lord in July 1979, retiring in December 1982.

Leach’s selfless and highly moral nature was well reflected in the many charitable activities that he undertook after retirement. Most significant of these was his chairmanship of St Dunstan’s from l983 until 1998. A tall, slender figure, angular, somewhat awkward, he was much respected for his capacity for detailed hard work and his consideration for his juniors, never forgetting a name. His memoir, Endure No Makeshifts, appeared in 1993.

He married Mary, younger daughter of Admiral Sir Henry McCall, in 1958. They had two daughters. His wife died in 1991.

Admiral of the Fleet Sir Henry Leach, GCB, Chief of Naval Staff and First Sea Lord, 1979-82, was born on November 18, 1923. He died on April 26, 2011, aged 87


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