[2Chestnut] Военные некрологи из британских газет (с аннотациями по-русски)
Group Captain Billy Drake
Один из самых результативных британских асов Второй мировой войны, сбивший 25 самолетов противника (а также прямой потомок того самого Дрейка)
John McAleese
ветеран SAS солдат, чья команда помогла завершить осаду иранского посольства в Лондоне в 1980 году (за штурмом наблюдали в прямом эфире миллионы телезрителей)
Air gunner with Bomber Command who was decorated for the remarkable feat of shooting down at least seven enemy aircraft
For air gunners in Bomber Command there was no equivalent of the “ace” classification awarded to fighter pilots who had scored five or more combat victories. If there had been, Tom McLean, who served as a tail gunner in Halifaxes and then Lancasters between 1942 and 1944, would certainly have featured on any such list. With his tally of seven confirmed enemy aircraft shot down and two more “probables”, he was one of the most remarkable air gunners in wartime Bomber Command.
The vigilance of the tail gunner was of the utmost importance to the survival of a bomber on night raids. The majority of bombers who fell victim to night fighters were shot down by an assailant that they never saw. If a night fighter was spotted astern McLean would immediately order his pilot “Ready to corkscrew port/starboard.” And then: “Go, go, go!” before the fighter could get into effective range. After throwing the pursuer off its aim through the violence of the bomber’s turns, he would order the pilot to reduce airspeed, suddenly exposing the bewildered fighter pilot to fire from the bomber’s tail guns and with luck, mid-upper turret as well.
Absolute trust between pilot and rear gunner, who was effectively in charge of the aircraft’s manoeuvres during the combat, was vital. During his second tour of operations, with 617 Squadron, McLean and his pilot practised their tactics until they were sure that they had established the basis for surviving fighter attacks.
As a sergeant McLean was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal in 1942 while flying with 102 Squadron. In 1944, having been promoted to warrant officer, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his services as a tail gunner in 617 Squadron.
Thomas Joseph McLean was born in Paisley, Renfrewshire, in 1922. At the age of 18, he enlisted in the RAF in 1940 and was trained as a ground defence gunner, a role involving the protection of RAF assets (the kind of duties that were assumed by the RAF Regiment, when it was formed in 1942). He took a keen interest in all aspects of operating the weaponry that came with this role, as well as studying ballistics and types of ammunition. The effective use of machinegun fire was something that particularly intrigued him and he assiduously practised deflection shooting.
In 1942 he volunteered as an air gunner and after training he was posted to 102 Squadron flying Halifaxes. On his first operational sortie, on August 28 that year, his aircraft was attacked by a Messerschmitt 109 which he shot down. On December 6, 1942, when on a raid to Mannheim, the Lancaster of which he was tail gunner was attacked by a Ju88 night fighter that opened fire from 600 yards astern, too great a range to be really effective. Ordering his pilot to take evasive action, which eventually brought their attacker closer, McLean returned fire ably assisted by the mid-upper turret gunner, and the Ju88 burst into flames and crashed. Two more Ju88s took up the running, but the Halifax’s gunners shot one down, and forced the other to break off its attack. Both men were awarded an immediate DFM.
On February 16, 1943, when his Halifax was attacking the U-boat base at Lorient on the French Atlantic coast the aircraft was assailed by two Messerschmitt 110s. Again he ordered evasive action from his pilot, during the course of which he shot down one of their assailants. He also fired on the other, but would do no more than claim it a probable. In the event, intelligence later received from France confirmed that it had been destroyed. With five kills McLean was thus effectively an “ace” before the end of his first tour of operations.
In April 1943 McLean was rested from operations after 30 sorties and posted to Bomber Command as a gunnery instructor. He was subsequently sent in a similar capacity to a remote Coastal Command station, but fretted under the lack of action, and opportunity to exercise his skills. It was a relief when he was approached to join 617 Squadron, which was then under the command of Leonard Cheshire, who was to add lustre to the reputation it already had as the famous Dam Busters squadron.
At 617 McLean found an ethos congenial to his temperament, aircrews who were always anxious to try something new to increase their operational effectiveness — and their chances of staying alive. Cheshire put him in the crew of a tough Canadian, Flight Lieutenant Bill Duffy, whose men were known in 617 as “Duffy’s Mob”. With Duffy at the controls, McLean was able further to hone his evasive tactics over the Wash with the pilots of pursuing Mustang fighters often reduced to despair by the Lancaster’s manoeuvres.
These tactics were put to the test on a freezing night in March 1944, when 617 was sent to attack an aero-engine factory at Woippy, north of Metz, in Lorraine. With cloud thick over the target there was no chance of bombing, and the aircraft turned for home. As they did so, Duffy’s aircraft was jumped by two Ju88s and an FW190, one of which, in spite of the Lancaster’s violent corkscrewing, sent a machinegun bullet through McLean’s hand. After a few well-aimed curses, McLean told his skipper that he was OK, and got down to the business of repelling the attack, shooting down both Ju88s, and possibly the FW190 too.
After a period in hospital McLean returned to 617 and continued to fly with it until after D-Day, when he was rested having flown 51 sorties. He received his DFC insignia from King George VI at Buckingham Palace.
After demob he found it difficult to settle in civilian life and rejoined the RAF in 1946, serving for a further ten years as a gunnery instructor and later in photographic interpretation. After 1956 he worked for some time as a barber and then as a caretaker. He was still working part-time in his eighties.
McLean was twice married and is survived by his second wife, Kay, the four children of his first marriage, which was dissolved, and the daughter and two stepchildren of his second.
Warrant Officer Tom McLean, DFC, DFM, RAF air gunner, was born on January 22, 1922. He died on July 20, 2011, aged 89
George Band
Самый молодой альпинист в британской экспедиции 1953 года на Эверест\
The youngest member of the historic British expedition to Everest in 1953 who paved the way for Hillary and Tenzing to reach the summit
George Band was the youngest climber of the 1953 British expedition to Everest that first climbed the world’s highest mountain. He played an important role in preparing the way for Hillary and Tenzing to reach their historic goal, helping to secure a route through the treacherous ice fall on the Khumbu glacier and up the Lhotse face as well as load carrying on what was, under Colonel John Hunt’s leadership, a military-style operation.
Many hundreds of climbers have followed in their footsteps and Everest, through tectonic shifts, may now be even higher than its original 29,028ft, but Band was quick to acknowledge that they were the lucky ones, the right team of mountaineers arriving at the right time.
George Christopher Band was born in Taiwan and educated at Eltham College in South London before reading geology at Cambridge and then petroleum engineering at Imperial College London. An early love of mountains and mountaineering put him at the forefront of a dynamic group of university climbers who were raising the standard of British achievement in the Alps, a record overshadowed by the French and by Swiss mountaineers who had narrowly failed to climb Everest on two attempts the previous year.
British climbers at the time were frustrated in their Alpine plans by the foreign exchange shortage; a £25 allowance per trip meant that any climbing expedition had to be brief. Band overcame this obstacle by taking a job with an American amateur geologist and glaciologist who wanted a tunnel dug for glaciological research high on the northern flank of Monte Rosa. Few spade wielders were keen to apply for the job but Band saw it as an excellent way to get fit and he spent nine weeks alternately digging and climbing, ending the season with an impressively long list of routes.
This record, and his presidency of the Cambridge University Mountaineering Club, so impressed John, later Lord, Hunt that Band, “big, studious-looking and bespectacled” by one description, was accepted onto the Everest team. This was despite the advice of Dr Griff Pugh, the expedition physiologist, that the ideal minimum age for a high-altitude mountaineer was 25, two years older than Band at the time of his interview.
When expedition duties were being handed out, Band’s two years of National Service in the Royal Corps of Signals qualified him as expedition radio officer. Apart from helping to secure a route up the mountain, he was responsible for recording the highaltitude weather forecasts specially prepared by the Met Office and relayed to the expedition by All India Radio.
Band was at advance base camp at the head of the Western Cwm when George Lowe led Hillary and Tenzing on the rope towards them, their heads bowed low with either exhaustion or coming to terms with what they had achieved.
A thumbs-up signal from Lowe announced their success and the fact that life would never be quite the same for any of the 1953 Everesters. Band recalled: “It was a very dramatic moment and we very happily escorted them back to our tents and sat them down for a very well-earned drink. We were all basically climbers hoping to make the first ascent which had defeated so many earlier expeditions. We did have a rather fabulous time on our return.”
Band had taken a year off for the expedition and in 1954 returned to the Himalayas to take part in an unsuccessful attempt by Cambridge University Mountaineering Club on Rakaposhi, 25,551ft (7,788m), in the Karakoram. The following year, although now qualified for a career, he was back with an eight-man attempt on the unclimbed Kangchenjunga 28,146ft (8,586m) on the border of Nepal and Sikkim, the third-highest summit in the world and acknow-ledged by Lord Hunt to be a much tougher technical proposition than Everest.
A new approach up the 10,000ft Yalung face of the mountain succeeded when Band, with British mountaineer Joe Brown, made a summit bid. After weathering a 60-hour storm they reached a point just short of the top. Because of local belief that this was a sacred place and the home of gods, they had promised not to stand on the actual summit, a simple cone of snow 20ft away and five feet higher. This decision may have been as much pragmatic as polite, the simple cone being a fragile cornice above a colossal drop.
The partnership between Band, from the Oxbridge elite, and Brown, the former apprentice plumber, perhaps signalled the shift in the sport, valuing competency more than class. The next day two other climbers, Norman Hardie and Tony Streather, also reached the same point close to the summit but it was another 22 years before Kanchenjunga was climbed again.
In 1957 Band began an international career with the Royal Dutch Shell Group, initially as a petroleum engineer concerned with oil and gas development, serving with increasing responsibility over 26 years in seven different countries. Returning to the UK in 1983, he was appointed director general of the UK Offshore Operators Association, which represents the oil and gas companies operating on the UK Continental Shelf.
He retired in 1990 and returned to his first love of mountain travel, earning a notable reputation as a writer and lecturer, drawing on his experiences in the Alps, Karakoram, Peru and the Caucasus and in recent years leading treks and visits to India, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and Central Asia.
Since the mid-1980s he had been chairman of the Mount Everest Foundation, president of the Alpine Club, council member of the Royal Geographical Society and president of the British Mountaineering Council. Latterly he was chairman of the Himalayan Trust UK, which continues to support the late Sir Edmund Hillary’s work on behalf of the Sherpas of Nepal.
On the 50th anniversary of the successful Everest expedition Band wrote an official history of the mountain, a thorough and handsomely produced work followed by a book celebrating 150 years of the Alpine Club, the world’s oldest mountaineering club. In 2009 he was appointed OBE for services to mountaineering and to charity, which honoured a kindly and generous man who was modest about his achievements as a mountaineer.
He is survived by his wife, Susan, their two sons and daughter.
George Band, OBE, mountaineer, was born on February 2, 1929. He died on August 26, 2011, aged 82
'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
