On his return from Normandy, Davidson joined Combined Operations, and after further training was sent to the Far East as first-lieutenant of the 380-ton Landing Craft Infantry (Large) 166. When his commanding officer fell sick, Davidson took over; his captain had abused his access to the rum locker, and one of Davidson’s first tasks was to borrow rum from a neighbouring ship to square the accounts.
His first action came in Operation Dracula, the amphibious attack on Rangoon by British and Indian forces in early May 1945. The Japanese Army and the Indian National Army had largely abandoned the city. As they withdrew, Davidson passed up the Irrawaddy to rendezvous with British teams which had been dropped behind enemy lines.
His war formally ended on September 12 1945, with the surrender at Singapore of more than half a million Japanese troops in south-east Asia. Davidson stayed on, however, to assist the French in their attempts to resume their colonial administration of French Indo-China; landing French commandos on enemy strongpoints in the Mekong delta, he frequently came under heavy artillery and sniper fire. In March 1946, in Saigon, Davidson was awarded a Croix de Guerre for his calm courage and total disregard for danger.
Osama bin Laden
World's most wanted terrorist leader and the architect of the 9/11 attacks on America which killed nearly 3,000 people
On September 11, 2001, the Saudi-born Islamic fundamentalist Osama bin Laden propelled international terrorism into a new and terrible dimension when a series of suicide attacks on the United States, sponsored by him, caused colossal damage to property in New York and Washington and cost thousands of lives. In New York, the twin symbols of American economic domination of the globe, the towers of the World Trade Centre, were utterly destroyed after two large Boeing jet airliners, laden with fuel, were crashed into them in a kamikaze attack. Made at a time shortly after most staff would have entered the building to begin work, they were timed to cause the maximum loss of life, besides killing the hapless passengers who were on board when they were hijacked. This was compounded when, after an interval of about an hour, the towers collapsed, killing all those who had failed by then to escape from them, as well as hundreds of firefighters, police and rescue workers in the streets below.
An assault unprecedented in the two-and-a-quarter centuries of America’s history as an independent state, the New York attack was also a huge blow to the national psyche, destroying, as it did, the country’s most famous city skyline. In the meantime, a similar kamikaze attack on the Pentagon, again by an airliner whose passengers were forced to share in the terrorists’ self-immolation, struck at the very heart of America’s defence establishment, causing great damage and loss of life. A fourth aircraft crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after a struggle between the passengers and their hijackers. The shock of the attacks, in which more than 3,000 people died, swiftly spread round the world, drawing sympathy for the victims and condemnation of the terrorists from friend and foe alike.
The son of a self-made Saudi billionaire from whose businesses he inherited a considerable fortune, Osama bin Laden had, long before this, become one of the world’s most notorious sponsors of international terrorism and one of the world’s most wanted men. Since his career began in the early 1980s he had been blamed for atrocities ranging from the explosion at the World Trade Centre in New York in 1993 to the bombing of American Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam which killed 224 people five years later.
The first targets of Bin Laden’s campaigns of bombing were the Armed Forces and agencies of the Soviet Union, which attracted his attention when the Red Army invaded Afghanistan in 1979. A man thoroughly disillusioned with what he saw as the materialistic rottenness of the oil-rich Arab kingdoms of the Middle East, exemplified par excellence by his native Saudi Arabia, he went to Afghanistan and threw in his lot with the Mujahidin in their jihad against the Soviet oppressor.
The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan within ten years left him, momentarily, without an object for his hatreds. One was soon to present itself. When, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Saudi Arabia put both its territory and its Armed Forces at the disposal of the US-led coalition which fought the Gulf War, the humiliation of America became his prime object. From then on all his efforts were directed against the destruction of American property, life and prestige, wherever in the world he could strike at them.
His activities, which put a price tag of up to $25 million on his head in the US, made him a hero in Peshawar and the mountain villages of the AfghanPakistan border where Islamic fundamentalist terrorists are trained. There he achieved cult status as a kind of Islamic Che Guevara, and a picture of him, clutching a Kalashnikov AK-47 rifle adorned many a wall.
Although with his tall stature, fine features and piercing eyes, he could never have hidden in a crowd, bin Laden remained nevertheless a somewhat shadowy figure. It was not until after the attacks on New York that his image became familiar to the world, through video footage of him released by his organisation.
He seemed, too, to emerge to the world through a thicket of myth. An affluent background yielded no key to his undoubtedly strong hatreds, and there seemed no reason why the erstwhile playboy should have turned mass murderer. He liked to pose as an Islamic warrior but, unlike other Mujahidin warlords, there were no military feats that could actually be ascribed to him. Yet, he undoubtedly acted as a powerful magnet to disaffected Muslims everwhere. And, to the end, the mechanism of his feats as an enabler of terrorism remained a secret.
Osama bin Muhammad bin Laden was born in Riyadh in 1957, the 17th child (of more than 50) of Muhammad Bin Laden, a self-made construction billionaire from Yemen. A close friend of the late King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, Muhammad Bin Laden and his company had prospered through huge contracts to renovate the mosques of Mecca and Medina and to build the greater part of Saudi Arabia’s road network. At his death in 1968, in a helicopter crash while inspecting a construction site, his son Osama inherited a fortune worth many millions.
Although brought up in an atmosphere of conventional, though by no means excessive, Sunni Muslim piety, the children of the bin Laden family were also exposed to Western influences. Photographs exist of some of them on holiday at Oxford and in Sweden. Contemporaries recall Osama behaving no differently from the average rich Arab playboy as a young man.
As if intending to follow in his father’s footsteps, Osama bin Laden studied engineering at the University of Riyadh after which he embarked on a master’s degree in business administration at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah. The Lebanese civil war appears to have set him thinking about the effects of commercialism on the purity of Islamic tenets, and he soon abandoned his master’s for a course in Islamic studies, falling under the influence of the extremist Islamic thinker Abdullah Azzam.
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and set up a puppet socialist government, bin Laden went out to Peshawar and threw in his lot with the Afghan Islamic militias being trained there by Pakistan and funded by Saudi Arabia and — ironically in view of what happened later — the United States. His record as a guerrilla fighter is a matter of some dispute. He liked to model himself on the great medieval Muslim leader Saladin, and adopted the nom de guerre Ubu Abdullah. But undoubtedly his greatest use to the Mujahidin lay in the large sums of money he could both contribute and raise in Saudi Arabia for the cause.
When the struggle against the Soviet Union came to an end with the latter’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, bin Laden set up al-Qaeda — “the base” — a support network for veterans from all over the Islamic world who had volunteered and fought against Soviet domination, and their families. He also promoted Wahhabism, the strictly conservative brand of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia.
But he soon became disillusioned by the inability of the various Afghan groupings to settle their differences, and returned to Saudi Arabia. There, the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq and the permission given by his native country to permit its territory to be used by a Western military coalition against another Arab state gave him a much clearer target for his activities. The US and Israel became the focus of his hostility and he began to plan and organise attacks against the former. At the same time, appalled by the presence of American soldiers and their accompanying culture of immodest dress, pin-ups and sexually suggestive music and dancing, he vociferously castigated the Saudi royal family for what it had allowed to happen in what he called “the land of the two holy places”.
For his criticisms, and for accusations by the governments of Egypt, Yemen and Algeria that he had funded militant movements in their countries, he was eventually stripped of his citizenship and expelled from the country in 1994. Thereafter he operated for a while from Sudan before Khartoum came under US pressure to expel him. After that, he returned to Afghanistan to live in Kandahar, where he set up terrorist “universities” whose students were trained in guerrilla tactics.
The first atrocity to be reliably ascribed to him was in December 1992 when a bomb exploded in a hotel in Yemen which had only recently been vacated by American troops. The following year he was regarded as having provided the financial support behind the bombing of the World Trade Centre. Seven people were killed and 700 injured when an explosion ripped through three levels of the parking garage and started a fire whose smoke ascended through the 110 storeys of the twin-towered complex. Later that year the deaths of 18 US troops in a failed raid in Somalia was also ascribed to his having organised the armed opposition.
In 1995 he was linked with an assassination attempt on President Mubarak of Egypt and he renewed his calls for guerrilla attacks on American forces stationed in Saudi Arabia. In the following year President Clinton called — in vain — for the use of “any and all means” to destroy bin Laden’s network. But by that time he seemed secure in his mountain fastness in Afghanistan, apparently a more than welcome guest of the country’s Taleban regime.
Then, in 1998, came bin Laden’s most spectacular atrocity to that date, when two bombs, planted in the US Embassies in the capitals of Tanzania and Kenya, killed 224 people and injured several thousand more. Bin Laden’s stated aim had been to kill Americans, but in the event most of the dead and injured were Africans. By that time President Clinton had put a $5 million bounty on his head, but bin Laden continued to demonstrate his ability to attack American targets with impunity. In October 2000 an American guided missile destroyer, USS Cole, was severely damaged while refuelling in Aden when she was rammed by a rubber boat packed with explosives. Nineteen sailors were killed and 40 injured.
In the meantime, the majority of Islamic states disowned bin Laden’s activities, and he was a wanted man in several of them. In many of the countries whose leaders condemned him, however, he retained a considerable popular following, as he did — perhaps to an even greater degree — among Islamic militants in the West.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, as he became the principal focus and target of President George W. Bush’s “War on Terror”, bin Laden was increasingly transformed from an active sponsor and director of specific acts of terror into Islamist terrorism’s almost mythical global inspiration.
Acts of terror conducted in the name of al-Qaeda in these years included the failed attempt by the “shoe bomber” Richard Reid to blow up an aircraft en route from Paris to Miami in December 2001, the bombings on the island of Bali in October 2002 in which 202 people were killed and 240 injured, the Madrid train bombings in March 2004 in which 191 people were killed and some 1,800 injured, and the suicide bomb attacks in London in July 2005 in which 56 people were killed and some 700 injured on three Underground trains and a bus.
For a decade after the September 11 attacks, despite a concerted manhunt and a substantial bounty on his head, there was little concrete news of bin Laden. Hiding — or presumed to be hiding — in the remote and almost impenetrable tribal regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan, he and his cohorts were targeted by US attacks. There were early Allied successes, such as the killing of Mohammed Atef, al-Qaeda’s military chief, in November 2001, and the hunt for bin Laden gathered momentum in 2003 with the capture in Pakistan of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the head of al-Qaeda’s operations and thought to be the mastermind behind the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001. But bin Laden himself remained elusive.
For much of the time, indeed, it was impossible — at least for anyone not privy to the most secret intelligence — to say with any certainty whether he was alive or dead. He released occasional messages on video or on audiotape, applauding some new atrocity perpetrated in his name. But there were few clues as to where or when such messages had been recorded, and they were never enough in themselves to dispel suggestions that he might have succumbed to ill health or to wounds. In this atmosphere of confusion, mystery and escalating rhetoric, bin Laden’s significance to the world came in the last decade of his life to reside less in his own murderous actions than in his role as a terrible symbol. Condemned by Western governments and commentators as the embodiment of an “axis of evil” threatening everything they held dear and responsible for the murders of thousands, he became in turn for rootless, disaffected Islamist militants around the world the absent patron of a holy war being fought against the infidel, an inspiration in what they saw as the defence of Islamic purity against the decadence and corruption of the modern West.
In this way, his name, and that of the organisation he had founded, came gradually to stand as a kind of shorthand, cited with equal passion by opponents and supporters to account for atrocities to which bin Laden’s direct personal connection, from his hideaway in Afghanistan or Pakistan (or wherever it was), may have been remote. Whether all that will come to an end with his death, or whether the process will now acquire new momentum, remains to be seen.
Located after an intelligence operation which involved tracking one of the network of couriers he used to communicate with his followers in the outside world, bin Laden was killed in an attack by American special forces on the fortified compound where he had been living at least for several months — a compound sited, extraordinarily, a matter of a few hundred yards from the Pakistan Military Academy, in a pleasant residential area on the outskirts of the town of Abbottabad in northwest Pakistan. It was announced that his body had been buried at sea.
Osama bin Laden had three wives and five children. One of his daughters married the Taleban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.
Osama bin Laden, leader of the al-Qaeda terrorist group, was born in 1957. He died on May 1, 2011, aged 54
Professor Richard Holmes
Military historian whose television battlefield tours offered erudite insights into the horrors of war
Richard Holmes made his way to celebrity status in the field of military history via the well-trodden route from the Department of War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst to the television screen.
His fieldwork and presentation, verbal or written, were characterised by meticulously detailed research transformed into words and images everyone could comprehend. While other historians concentrated on the causes and sequence of wars, he devoted himself to its impact on the individual. He brought the immediacy, humour and suffering of the 19th-century The Recollections of Rifleman Harris to every battlefield and campaign that he subjected to examination in depth.
He first came to the enthusiastic notice of the wider public with his television series of documentary programmes and “war walks” over scenes of conflict, beginning in the 1990s. In these programmes he was guided by producers able to curb the academics’ trait of allowing their fervour for the subject to lead them into the byways of scholarship to the detriment of the central topic. Even his most ardent admirers, however, would concede that invariably he was not sufficiently self-disciplined to apply such constraint to his live lectures, during which his listeners could find themselves consciously willing him back to his theme.
His period as lecturer and eventually deputy head of the Department of War Studies at Sandhurst, between 1973 and 1986, saw the publication in 1974 of The English Civil War, written with Brigadier Peter Young, previously Reader in Military History at Sandhurst, followed by The Little Field Marshal: Sir John French, a well-intentioned attempt to put the service of the Earl of Ypres into a broader context than his handling of the British Expeditionary Force in France in 1914-15.
Acts of War: The Behaviour of Men in Battle (1985) stripped away the perceived glamour of war to reveal its true horror and inevitable accidents. In this, his relentless survey of the effect on men — however well trained and prepared — of seeing their comrades horribly mutilated but still alive, Holmes brought to the reader all the unwelcome truths of armed conflict: soldiers vomiting up their lungs after a gas attack; an estimated 75,000 French soldiers killed by their own artillery in the First World War, some due to faulty fuses but far more to mathematical miscalculation; officers returning without notice shot by their own sentries; and countless other incidents of “blue on blue”.
His Soldiers (1985) with Sir John Keegan, Senior Lecturer in Military History at Sandhurst at the time, was followed by a period when he turned to his own Territorial Army service as commanding officer of 2nd Battalion The Wessex Regiment (Volunteers) from 1986 to 1988, at the end of which he was appointed OBE. He was subsequently promoted to colonel in the Territorial Army and then to one of the very few appointments as brigadier. He was Director of Reserve Forces and Cadets from 1997 to 2000 and was advanced to CBE (Military) in 1998. In addition to his TA responsibilities, he was Colonel of the regular Army’s Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment from 1999 to 2006, a service recognised by Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, Colonel-in-Chief of the Regiment, by award of the Order of the Dannebrog in 2000.
His TV documentaries War Walks, which started in 1996, had proved widely popular, and he continued with War Walks 2 in 1997, The Western Front in 1999, Battlefields, Wellington: the Iron Duke, Rebels and Redcoats and In the Footsteps of Churchill in succeeding years to 2005. He edited the Oxford Companion to Military History in 2001.
That year also saw a return to books on his enduring themes of the individual soldier with Redcoat, the first in a series published in co-operation with HarperCollins. No matter the popularity of his TV presentations, his books on the tribulations of the individual, the private soldier and junior officer in particular, will be the true memorial to his scholarship and empathy for the trials of his subjects. Redcoat (2001), Tommy (2004) and Sahib: The British Soldier in India (2005) all reflect prodigious research, yet they can be opened at any point to absorb the reader in the detail of the action, so freshly and poignantly is it described.
Courage and seeming cowardice are handled with equal care and understanding, with the emphasis always on how one is perceived by one’s comrades, or mates in today’s combat language. In Wellington’s day even helping to carry the wounded to the rear was considered cowardly. Perhaps most of all, Tommy gives the flavour, “Praying that the next shell would kill anyone, rather than you — and the bliss of an army blanket on a stone floor”.
Dusty Warriors: Modern Soldiers at War (2006); The World at War (2007); Marlborough: England’s Fragile Genius (2008); Shots from the Front (2008) and Churchill’s Bunker (2009) followed in swift succession. He was appointed an Officier of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques by France in 2009.
In his introduction to The World at War, the interview material from the 1973 TV series produced by Sir Jeremy Isaacs, narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier and edited in 2001 by Holmes for publication, he claimed: “I always rather dislike being called a television historian, preferring to see myself as an historian who enjoys talking about his subject.” There is the ring of truth there but, despite their exhaustive research and reader appeal, it is questionable whether his books would have achieved the success they did without his name becoming so widely recognised from the television screen.
Edward Richard Holmes was educated at Forest School, East London, and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he took his MA in 1968. He also studied at Northern Illinois University before working for his PhD at Reading during the first phase of his lectureship at Sandhurst. He became Professor of Military and Security Studies at Cranfield University in 1995, where he had been Co-Director of the Security Studies Institute since 1989. He was a JP for Hampshire and patron of the Guild of Battlefield Guides.
His wife, Katharine, née Saxton, whom he married in 1975, survives him with two daughters.
Professor E. Richard Holmes, CBE, TD, historian, was born on March 29, 1946. He died of cancer on April 30, 2011, aged 65
