>Lieutenant-Commander Peter Twiss
> Pilot who was decorated in war and then became the first man to break the 1,000mph barrier
>Ïèëîò, íàãðàæä¸ííûé çà õðàáðîñòü âî âðåìÿ âîéíû, êîòîðûé ñòàë ïåðâûì ÷åëîâåêîì, ïðåîäîëåâøèì áàðüåð ñêîðîñòè 1000 ìèëü â ÷àñ
Naval fighter pilot whose postwar exploits included setting a world air speed record of 1,132mph in 1956
After a distinguished wartime career as a naval fighter pilot, Peter Twiss joined Fairey Aviation as a test pilot after the war, and came dramatically to the world’s notice when in March 1956 he established a world air speed record of 1,132mph in the Fairey Delta 2.
This raised the world record to above the 1,000mph mark for the first time, in the process shattering by more than 300mph the previous record, 822mph, which had been set by an American F100C Supersabre, piloted by a USAF colonel, in October 1955.
With its delta-wing planform, elegant lines, and “droop snoot” needle nose, the FD2 represented a triumph for British aviation, seeming to place the British aircraft unassailably ahead of its competitors, and ushering in the era of Mach 2 flight.
It made Twiss, who had won the Distinguished Service Cross twice, for his record as a convoy escort pilot and in support of the Operation Torch landings in North Africa in 1942, a hero and household name in Britain overnight. Yet, as Twiss was later to recall in his book Faster than the Sun, published in 1963, one of the greatest challenges to getting the record accepted was the difficulty in obtaining the decisive evidence for it with the photographic methods then available.
It was a triumph for Fairey Aviation, whose most famous plane before 1956 had been the “Stringbag” Swordfish, that biplane veteran of Second World War convoy escorts whose air speed was barely a tenth of that of the FD2.
Lionel Peter Twiss was born in 1921, and was educated at Sherborne School. He had at his first attempt been rejected by the Fleet Air Arm, which he wanted to join as a pilot.
It was a different story when war broke out. He was accepted as a Naval Airman Second Class in 1939 and after training at 14 Elementary and Reserve Flying Training School at Castle Bromwich and Yeovilton, he was posted to the unglamorous work of target towing in Orkney.
He was next posted to the Merchant Ship Fighter Unit, piloting Hawker Hurricane fighters on a “one way” launch from catapult merchant ships (known as CAM ships), an early form of convoy air defence in that era when aircraft carriers were still scarce.
The idea was that the Hurricane was catapulted from the ship into the air with rocket assistance, to engage any enemy aircraft menacing the convoy. Having done so, the pilot then had to ditch or bale out and hope to be picked up by a passing ship. It was not an inviting prospect for the pilot, offering limited odds for survival. Twiss survived the experience, and was drafted in 1942 to 807 Squadron, flying Fairey Fulmar fighters from the carrier Argus in the Mediterranean on Malta convoys and on night intruder operations. For this work he was awarded the DSC in June 1942. No 802 subsequently converted to Supermarine Seafires (the naval version of the Spitfire) in which Twiss flew air cover from HMS Furious in support of the Anglo-American Torch landings in North Africa in November 1942.
For his role in support of the Allied landings in Algeria and Morocco he was awarded a Bar to his DSC which was gazetted in March 1943.
After serving with a night fighter interceptor unit in the United Kingdom he was detached to the British Air Commission in Washington, as Night Fighter Representative, 1943-44. During his stay he travelled all over the United States, flying various operational and prototype American fighter aircraft, and investigated nightfighter radar equipment. He also served for a time at the US Naval Test Centre at Patuxent River, Maryland.
He returned to the United Kingdom in early 1944 and took part in several intruder raids on Germany from Ford Naval Air Station, helping to develop night fighter tactics with the RAF’s Fighter Interception Unit.
In September 1944 he returned to Patuxent for a few months and finally came back to England in 1945 to join No 3 Empire Test Pilots School. From there he was sent to the Naval Squadron at the Aeroplane and Armament Experimental Establishment at Boscombe Down, Wiltshire. He ended the war with the rank of lieutenantcommander.
He joined the Fairey Aviation Company as a test pilot in 1946 and was engaged in flight testing the Firefly fighter, Gannet airborne early warning aircraft and experimental Fairey Delta 1. He won the High Speed Handicap race in the International Air Races at Lympne, Kent, in 1947, flying a Fairey Firefly IV at a speed of 305.93 mph.
He also piloted the Fairey Rotodyne vertical takeoff transport convertiplane, which in 1959 established a world record for rotorcraft with a speed of 190.9 mph over a 100km circuit.
On October 6, 1954, he piloted the Fairey Delta 2 high speed delta-wing research aircraft on its maiden flight. In February 1955 he was awarded a Queen’s Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air when, by a brilliant feat of pilotage he safely landed the FD2 after a fuel system failure. He had taken part in the deck landing trials of all Fairey aircraft since 1949.
Then, on March 10, 1957, came his historic challenge in the skies over Chichester to the existing world air speed record held by America. Flying at 38,000 feet he achieved a mean Mach number of 1.731 for the two runs on which his attempt was measured.
The Queen, the Prime Minister and Colonel Hanes, from whom he had wrested the air speed record, were among those who offered Twiss congratulations. He was appointed OBE the following year. He had flown more than 140 different types and had probably piloted more high performance aircraft than any other Englishman.
Twiss was Chief Test Pilot of Fairey Aviation from 1957 to 1960. For the film Sink the Bismarck! (1960) he flew a Fairey Swordfish.
When, in 1960, Fairey Aviation was sold to the helicopter manufacturer Westland, Twiss joined Fairey Marine where he was responsible for the development and sales of day cruisers.
He appeared in the James Bond film From Russia With Love (1963) driving one of the company’s speedboats. In 1969 he also took part in the Round Britain Powerboat Race driving a Fairey Huntsman 707 Fordsport. Twiss was a director of Fairey Marine, 1968-78, and he was a member of Lasham Gliding Club.
Twiss was five times married: to Constance Tomkinson, 1944; Vera Maguire, 1950; Cherry Huggins, 1960; Heather Danby, 1964; and Jane Mary de Lucey, 2002. He had a son who predeceased him, three daughters, one of whom predeceased him, and several stepchildren.
Peter Twiss, OBE, DSC and Bar, test pilot , was born on July 23, 1921. He died on August 31, 2011, aged 90
Much decorated RAF fighter pilot credited with 18 combat victories who also destroyed many enemy aircraft on the ground
In a remarkable career on the front line that lasted effectively from the first days of the Second World War, when he was posted to France with No 1 (Hurricane) Squadron, to the summer of 1944, Billy Drake not only became an “ace” (five kills) more than three times over, but was also an expert in ground attack. As such he destroyed numerous enemy aircraft on the ground during his period in command of a Kittyhawk fighter bomber squadron in the Western Desert, and later commanded a Typhoon wing that bombed German V1 sites in France.
In what was an extraordinarily long career in combat by the standards of Second World War fighter operations, he was officially accredited with 18 combat victories, though the total may well be much nearer the 24½ destroyed and nine probables claimed by himself. Drake also destroyed 13 aircraft on the ground and damaged several more. He ended the war with the DSO and two DFCs and had also been decorated with the US Distinguished Flying Cross.
Continuing his RAF career after the war, he entered the jet age, flying the first-generation fighters Gloster Meteors and De Havilland Vampires in the late 1940s and graduating to the Hawker Hunter as the RAF entered the supersonic age.
Born in London in 1917, he was educated at various schools there and in Switzerland where he gained his lifelong love of skiing. He joined the RAF in 1936, and after basic flying training was commissioned and posted to 1 Squadron, the RAF’s oldest, then flying the Hawker Fury biplane. In early 1939 it was re-equipped with the Hawker Hurricane with which, in September that year, he was sent to France as part of the Advanced Air Striking Force (AASF), flying from Berry-au-Bac, within flying range of German airfields.
On October 29, 1939, the squadron claimed the RAF’s first combat victory over the Western Front when one of its pilots shot down a Dornier Do17 bomber. This was one of the few incidents during the “Phoney War” that was then to ensue, with little other air activity on the Western Front save for leaflet drops over Germany carried out by the AASF’s bombers. That was to change with the Blitzkrieg of May 1940, but in fact Drake had opened his account before then, scoring his first combat victory on April 20, when his squadron was attacked by Messerschmitt 109s over Thionville. He shot down one Messerschmitt and claimed another that day as 1 Squadron repelled the Luftwaffe’s fighters.
With the opening of the Blitkrieg on May 10 the tempo was to change dramatically, the squadron flying a hectic programme of sorties as the Wehrmacht swept forward into the Netherlands, Belgium and France supported by its powerful tactical air forces. In nine days from the opening of the campaign, No 1 submitted 114 claims for combat victories with Drake shooting down two bombers, a Heinkel He111 and a Do17 on May 10 and May 13, with a second Dornier unconfirmed, though it was almost certainly destroyed.
As he attacked the second bomber, which he saw catch fire, he was himself assailed from astern by a Messerschmitt 110 whose cannon shells set his aircraft on fire. He baled out, badly wounded from shell splinters in the back, which required an operation to remove them. He was invalided home to the UK where, after he recovered, he was posted as an instructor, thereby missing the combat opportunities of the Battle of Britain.
When he recovered he was briefly posted to 213 (Hurricane) Squadron, but almost immediately volunteered for the new 421 Flight, a Spitfire unit that was being formed for low-level fighter reconnaissance over the Channel. This provided ample opportunities for air combat and Drake was credited with four more victories between November 1940 and January 1941, and was awarded his first DFC.
After a period with an operational training unit, he was posted in November to Sierra Leone to 128 Squadron, a Coastal Command unit whose role was to defend against the intrusions of Vichy French aircraft. As it was, Drake was to score one of the unit’s rare victories, when on December 13, 1941, he shot down one of the Vichy’s Martin M167F bombers over Freetown.
In April 1942, thirsting for more concentrated action, he was posted to command 112 “Shark” Squadron, whose Kittyhawks flew bomber escorts, fighter bomber and ground strafing operations over the Western Desert. Both his leadership and his performance as a fighter and groundattack pilot made this a highly successful period for the Sharks as they operated over the fluctuating fortunes of the Eighth Army between June and December 1942. During the retreat to Alamein, Drake was in almost constant action, and was awarded an immediate Bar to his DFC, followed not long afterwards by a DSO. On December 11, after claiming two fighters, shot down, one German and one Italian, his Kittyhawk was hit but he managed to bring it into a controlled crash landing.
At the end of the year he was rested from operations, promoted to wing commander and given a staff post with HQ Middle East. This was not much to his taste and he was glad in June 1943 to be posted to Malta commanding a Spitfire wing and escorting US Army Air Force bombers in attacks on airfields in Sicily. His last official victim was a Macchi 202 fighter of the Regia Aeronautica, shot down over Gerbini, west of Catania, on July 7, 1943, shortly before the Anglo-American invasion of the island. His services to the USAAF earned him the US Distinguished Flying Cross from the Americans.
Returning to the UK at the end of the year, Drake was given command of 20 Wing in the 2nd Tactical Air Force, which in the first half of 1944 was carrying out softening-up and disruption operations on military targets in France in the run-up to D-Day. His wing’s Typhoons were involved among other operations in attacking concealed V1 sites in the Pas de Calais.
With his vast experience of fighter and ground-attack operations he was a natural candidate as chief flying instructor at the RAF Fighter Leaders’ School, where he nevertheless wangled himself on to the odd operation against targets in occupied France. In August 1944 this “unofficial” operational career finally ended when he was sent to the US Staff School at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, as a prelude to his returning to the UK to join the operations staff at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), where he spent the remainder of the war.
Granted a permanent commission at the end of the war, he served in Japan, Malaya and Singapore, before returning to the UK as an instructor on rocket-firing from Vampires as the RAF embraced the jet age. A posting as air attaché in Switzerland was not uncongenial to him on account of his love of skiing, and his final appointment was command of the ground-attack base RAF Chivenor in north Devon.
He retired from the RAF in 1963 and went to Portugal where he established and ran a bar and restaurant in the Algarve, eventually returning to the UK in 1993.
Twice married, and twice divorced, he is survived by the two sons of his first marriage.
Group Captain Billy Drake, DSO, DFC and Bar, US DFC, fighter pilot, was born on December 20, 1917. He died on August 28, 2011, aged 93
Cambodian artist who escaped death because the Khmer Rouge set him to painting portraits of Pol Pot
The Cambodian painter Vann Nath was one of a handful of prisoners who survived incarceration in Pol Pot’s secret prison code-named S-21. There, between 1975 and 1979, more than 14,000 people were interrogated, tortured and put to death as “enemies of the state”.
Vann Nath’s eloquent memoir, A Cambodian Prison Portrait, was published in 1998. He was a tireless supporter of the UN-sponsored tribunal prosecuting surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge movement and an inspiring, thoughtful witness to a dark period of Cambodian history.
Vann Nath was born in 1946 into a farming family in northwestern Cambodia. Educated through primary school, he spent several years as a Buddhist monk before attending art school in the provincial city of Battambang. As a young man he made a living by painting portraits, landscapes and advertising posters for films.
The Communist Party of Kampuchea, known in the West as the Khmer Rouge, seized power in April 1975 after a five-year civil war. Inspired by Maoist China, the party’s leaders presided over a peasant-based revolution. To achieve their quixotic ideas of a level society and to expand the labour force, they drove the country’s two million urban dwellers, including Vann Nath, into the countryside to take up agricultural work. The new regime also abandoned formal education and abolished money, markets and private property.
Over the next two years hundreds of thousands of people died of overwork, malnutrition and summary executions. Instead of blaming their Utopian policies, Cambodia’s leaders came to believe that the revolution was being sabotaged by internal enemies. Tens of thousands of suspects, including senior Communist cadres and innocent bystanders, were herded into S-21 and other provincial prisons, where almost all the inmates were put to death.
Vann Nath was arrested and taken to S-21 in January 1978, just as war broke out between Cambodia and Vietnam. He had no idea why he was there. After a month shackled to fellow inmates he was unexpectedly taken to see Duch, the director of S-21, who knew that Nath had been a painter. He showed him a photograph of Pol Pot, whom Nath failed to recognise, and told him to make a “realistic, clear, correct and noble reproduction of this photograph”.
Nath’s first painting was nine feet high and three feet wide. For the next 11 months, unshackled and well fed, he worked with three other artist-prisoners painting portraits of “Brother Number One”, as Pol Pot was known to his close associates. The prisoners worked from photographs, and Nath wrote later that Pol Pot’s “face looked smooth and calm, but I knew he must be savage and very evil”. In five months Nath completed eight large, flattering portraits. He never knew where they were sent.
Throughout 1978 fighting with Vietnam intensified, and in December Vietnam mounted a full-scale military offensive. Cambodia cracked open like an egg. Phnom Penh fell on January 7, 1979, soon after Nath and other S-21 personnel had left the city. In the ensuing confusion Nath managed to escape and after a time he volunteered for the newly formed, Vietnamese-dominated Cambodian army. In mid-1979 he travelled to Battambang and was reunited with his wife, who told him that their two young sons had died of illness while he was gone.
In the following year those in power in Cambodia decided to turn S-21 into a museum of genocidal crimes. Nath was recruited to paint scenes of life inside the prison. The museum opened in 1981, and Nath’s disturbing paintings still hang on its walls.
In the 1990s Vann Nath owned a small restaurant in Phnom Penh. He often made himself available to scholars, journalists and human rights activists, taking pains to describe in detail what had happened to him at the prison and telling them that he longed for a trial of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge.
Impressed by Nath’s integrity and thoughtfulness, the Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh recruited him in 2002 to play himself in a documentary about S-21, alongside another survivor and 12 former workers at the prison. In the grounds of the museum, these men recalled and re-enacted their time at S-21 in a chilling, largely improvised script. Nath was the conscience of the film, comforting his fellow survivor and coaxing horrifying memories from his former captors. His acting made the film, while harsh, intensely moving.
In 2009 Duch was the first Khmer Rouge figure to be tried by the UN-sponsored tribunal in Phnom Penh. For several days of eloquent testimony, Nath confronted his former captorpatron for the first time in 30 years.
This year, honouring their work together, Nath and Rithy Panh received doctorates at the University of Paris.
By then Nath’s health had deteriorated, and after several bouts of kidney failure he suffered a stroke last month and went into a coma. He is survived by his wife and by their son and two daughters.
Vann Nath, artist and survivor of the S-21 prison camp, was born in 1946. He died on September 5, 2011, aged 65
