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Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Peek
The senior gunnery officer of a warship that survived five direct hits by Japanese suicide aircraft during the battle for the Philippines in the Second World War, Richard Peek went on to become Chief of Staff of the Royal Australian Navy in the early 1970s.
As a lieutenant-commander he was the squadron gunnery officer on board the heavy cruiser HMAS Australia in 1944-45. He had played a key part in bringing to a high level of efficiency the Australian ships operating as part of the American-led covering forces and went on to make a vital contribution to Australia’s resistance to the kamikaze onslaught.
On Trafalgar Day, 1944, in Leyte Gulf the first kamikaze aircraft hit the ship’s foremast and bridge, killing 30 and wounding 61. Peek’s action station was close to the point of impact, and he was fortunate to escape with burns. Australia withdrew to Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides for repairs to her gunnery control systems and radars, and the installation of additional 40mm and 20mm mountings to supplement the anti-aircraft defences. For his “skill, determination and courage” at Leyte Gulf, Peek was appointed OBE.
Australia rejoined her task group in time for the landings in Lingayen Gulf in January 1945. Although her sister, Shropshire, survived unscathed, Australia seemed to be a magnet for kamikazes. Over five days she suffered four direct hits and one near-miss. Despite 44 dead and 69 wounded, the cruiser supported the assaults with bombardment and counter battery fire.
Peek had to reorganise the depleted gun crews and improvise new control arrangements but Australia met her assigned tasking. Only on January 9 did the battered ship finally withdraw. Peek received one of five DSCs awarded to Australia’s officers for “skill, gallantry and devotion to duty”. Fittingly, he led the RAN contingent at the victory celebrations in London in 1946.
Richard Innes Peek, known in the RAN as “Peter”, was born in Tamworth in New South Wales in 1914. He joined the Royal Australian Naval College in 1928 and survived the reductions of the Depression to graduate with distinction. He went to sea as a junior officer in HMAS Canberra, subsequently qualifying as a gunnery officer in 1939, and joining the British battleship Revenge at the outbreak of war. He later instructed in gunnery in Australia before joining the cruiser Hobart in May 1941.
He took part in operations in the Mediterranean and in the disastrous campaign against the Japanese in South-East Asia. At the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942, Peek’s — unofficial — efforts to acquire extra antiaircraft weapons paid dividends in defending the Hobart against the heavy air attacks that ensued.
He was present at the Battle of Savo Island in August 1942 in which the Japanese inflicted a significant defeat on a combined Allied force covering the invasion of Guadalcanal. Although Hobart was not directly involved in the action, Peek was conscious of the deficiencies in training and tactics which had been revealed and determined to prevent a repetition.
After 1945 his career flourished. He commanded the destroyer Tobruk in Korean waters in 1951-52, for which he received the US Legion of Merit. He was to command Tobruk again in 1956-57 when he also served as Captain (D) of the Tenth Destroyer Flotilla. He later commanded the aircraft carrier Melbourne and, in 1967, as a rear-admiral, was Commander of the Australian Fleet. He undertook the Imperial Defence Course in London in 1961 and served in senior staff appointments.
He was promoted vice-admiral and appointed Chief of Naval Staff and First Naval Member of the Australian Commonwealth Naval Board in 1970. His three-year tenure was very difficult. Australia’s role in the Vietnam War was terminated by the incoming Labor Government in 1972. “Forward defence” was no longer accepted doctrine, and defence policy and organisation were subject to increasing debate inside and outside the armed forces.
Peek was concerned by the trend towards centralisation, which led to the abolition of separate service ministries and boards in 1973. He was also critical of a tendency of the central defence organisation to present key policies as fait accompli to the Service chiefs.
Disappointed by Labor’s decision to cancel the new Australian destroyer project in 1973, he nevertheless continued to push the Navy’s case for new ships until (and after) his retirement and laid the groundwork for much of the future force. Appointed CB in 1971, he was created KBE in 1972.
In retirement he became a pastoralist in the high country near Cooma in New South Wales. He supported both the Navy League and veterans’ associations. In 2002 he gave evidence at the Senate committee inquiring into the “children overboard” affair of the previous year. His criticism of what he considered to be improper political interventions in the Navy’s operations to deal with illegal immigrants reflected what many others Australians thought.
His first wife, Margaret, whom he married in 1943, died in 1946. His second wife, Catherine, died in 2005. He is survived by the son of his first marriage and two daughters of his second.
Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Peek, KBE, CB, DSC, Chief of the Naval Staff, Australia, 1971-73, was born on July 30, 1914. He died on August 28, 2010, aged 96
A dour Soviet technocrat with a knack for malapropisms, Viktor Chernomyrdin was an unlikely figure to steer Russia through the turmoil of the post-communist period. Yet as the head of Boris Yeltsin’s government for two turbulent periods, he was Russia’s longest-serving Prime Minister, and his steady and sometimes plodding style reassured his countrymen bewildered by rapid political change.
He founded and ran Gazprom, the world’s biggest gas company, led the Moscow response to the bloody terrorist capture of a hospital during the first Chechen war and he stood in as president while Yeltsin had heart surgery — achievements that few expected from a bureaucrat plucked from obscurity to hold Russia together during economic and political free-for-all.
In the West Chernomyrdin is chiefly credited for his crucial role in ending the Kosovo war in 1999 by persuading President Milosevic of Yugoslavia to accept the terms offered by the Western allies. At home he was celebrated for his endearingly mangled phrases. Indeed, his famous summary of the outcome of the Russian Central Bank’s bungled economic reform in 1993 has passed into folklore: “We wanted the best, but it turned out as always.”
Chernomyrdin has never been fully credited for his role in delivering the coup de grâce to Milosevic’s hopes that Moscow would save him from his blunders in Kosovo. Throughout the Nato bombing campaign Russia was highly critical of the West, leading many Serbs to imagine that Russia would come to their rescue.
But Yeltsin knew that he had to respond to pleas from Washington to use his influence in Belgrade. Having just left office as prime minister, Chernomyrdin was sent to Belgrade to deliver the harsh message that, whatever the ties of culture and religion, Moscow was not prepared for a confrontation with the Clinton Administration.
Chernomyrdin saw early on that the embattled Milosevic would not listen to a Western negotiator, so he suggested to Madeleine Albright that it would help to have someone from a non-Nato country to join him. He was offered Martti Ahtisaari, the former Finnish President. The two were well matched: both low-key, both dogged in explaining the threat of a full-scale Nato ground campaign. It was Ahtisaari who presented the main terms, but it was Chernomyrdin’s silence in not dissenting from the threatened consequences if Milosevic refused to sign that probably forced the Yugoslav to realise that the game was up. Ahtisaari won a Nobel peace prize for his efforts; Chernomyrdin, by contrast, won little praise for his shuttles between Moscow and Belgrade, and was regarded by many in his own country of having sold out Russia’s spiritual and political ally.
Chernomyrdin’s career followed a typical pattern for party officials in the Brezhnev era. The son of a labourer, he was born in 1938 in a village in the Orenburg region, near Kazakhstan, one of five children. After school he did three years of National Service until 1960 and then worked in an oil refinery in Orsk.
Like other promising technocrats, he sought to improve his education with an engineering qualification, and enrolled in the Kuybyushev Industrial Institute in 1962. His academic credentials were weak — he only just passed the maths entrance test — but his political aims were clear. He joined the Communist Party in 1991, and rose steadily through the ranks.
With experience in the mid-1970s of management of a natural gas refinery, he was promoted to a key role in the heavy industry arm of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party in 1978, and in 1982 he was deputy minister of the natural gas industries of the Soviet Union.
This turned out to be a decisive step. Soviet gas exports were growing rapidly, and were vital in earning the country hard Western currency. From 1983 Chernomyrdin directed the industry association for natural gas development in the Tyumen region, the centre of Soviet oil exploration. And in 1985 he was made minister of gas industries.
With Gorbachev’s attempts to reform the underperforming economy, the gas ministry was converted into a government company, Gazprom, with Chernomyrdin as its chairman.
Gazprom was one of the rare economic successes of the early Yeltsin era, and Chernomyrdin’s reputation for competence was linked to that of the huge energy concern. In May 1992 Yeltsin appointed him deputy prime minister in charge of fuel and energy, and later that year he was appointed Prime Minister.
It was a difficult time to hold office. Russia was reeling from a botched privatisation that suddenly concentrated huge power in the hands of a growing oligarch class, and economic turmoil was widening the gap between rich and poor, spawning displays of wealth by a corrupt few to the fury of the bewildered many.
Chernomyrdin, an economic conservative of the Soviet school, found it difficult to accept the “riotous” reforms of Yegor Gaidar, the theorist of the economic Big Bang and acting prime minister before Chernomyrdin’s appointment. But he plodded on, often mocked as he attempted to reconcile Yeltsin’s whims and the pro-Western policies that had alienated many Russians with the need to keep up national morale at a time of falling production, job losses and the dismantling of ideological certainties.
Chernomyrdin was Prime Minister during the bloody confrontation in October 1993 between Yeltsin and the recalcitrant Duma, the parliament that refused to implement constitutional changes demanded by the Kremlin. Parliamentarians barricaded themselves in the so-called White House, and Yeltsin ordered his troops to open fire. The extraordinary episode shook the fragile new state, but Chernomyrdin carried on behind the scenes, leading the business of government.
A big test came in June 1995, when some 200 terrorists in Budyonnonsk seized more than 1,500 people in a hospital. After a four-day stand-off Chernomyrdin had to negotiate with Shamil Basayev, the rebel leader, by telephone on live television. He granted Basayev and his fighters free passage back to Chechnya in exchange for more than 1,000 hostages. Many Russians saw the deal as a capitulation.
In March 1998 Chernomyrdin was suddenly sacked — a move that was unexplained and may have contributed to the financial crisis a few months later. By the summer the Russian economy was so unbalanced, so reliant on unaffordable imports and so skewed by the drain of money stashed abroad by the oligarchs that the rouble crashed and was forced into a big devaluation Yeltsin’s response was to try to bring back Chernomyrdin to steady the markets, but the Duma refused to confirm him and instead he was sent to deal with Milosevic.
In 2001, a year after he came to came to power, President Putin appointed Chernomyrdin ambassador to Kiev — it was seen by many as a way of removing him from the centre of power. It was not a happy appointment. Chernomyrdin, who had displayed such patience and political skills in dealing with Milosevic and Basayev, was seen in Kiev as a bully, a man sent to challenge Ukraine’s independence and a mouthpiece for the assertive new doctrine towards the former Soviet republics.
During his eight years in Kiev Russian policy met spectacular reverses, with the Orange revolution that threw out Putin’s chosen pro-Russian president, and the splits among the squabbling revolutionaries that brought Viktor Yanukovich back to power. Chernomydin was recalled to Moscow last year and made a special presidential adviser, a post that appeared to hold little power or significance.
In recent months Chernmoyrdin appeared to be in poor health. He was said to have been strongly affected by the death of his wife this year. His funeral, which will be shown on TV, is likely to evoke widespread sympathy among ordinary Russians who saw him as an old-fashioned Soviet patriot, an honest figure at a time of dishonesty and a man whose linguistic gaffes caused amusement and not a little sympathy.
Among those sayings which have often done the rounds are: “Better than vodka there is nothing worse,” “From the very beginning there was nothing like that, and there it is again,” and “We need to do what our people need, not what we are doing now.”
His main achievement probably was the negative one of not letting the country collapse under the weight of its political and economic challenges in the cowboys years. He tried to keep going the old channels of administration in an atmosphere of lawlessness and to some extent succeeded, making it easier for Putin to reimpose “order”.
Viktor Chernomyrdin, former Prime Minister of Russia, was born on April 9, 1938. He died on November 3, 2010, aged 72
