SOE agent decorated for hindering the Nazi retreat and for his tact in uniting rival Resistance groups
Bon vivant, fluent French-speaker and adventure seeker, Frederick Cardozo was recruited into the Special Operations Executive (SOE) after joining in a song, sung in French, by a stranger in a Scottish bothie, where he and his comrades were carousing after an exercise in the Highlands in 1943. The stranger was Henry Thackthwaite, a former schoolmaster but then a senior staff officer with SOE. Their meeting was entirely coincidental but it changed the war for Cardozo.
Having joined the Army’s Supplementary Reserve before the Second World War, he was called up on its outbreak and went to France with the South Lancashire Regiment. After escaping via Dunkirk in 1940 he had spent a year watching the coastline in anticipation of a German invasion before starting training for the assault on Normandy. What Thackthwaite had to offer appeared more immediate and challenging.
Cardozo’s knowledge of French made him a candidate for covert operations in France. After training in sabotage and other aspects of irregular warfare, he parachuted into the Massif Central in charge of a four-man SOE team on May 8, 1944. His team, codenamed Benjoin, had the task of establishing contact with a group of the French Maquis in the Auvergne. This was a far from straightforward assignment, as there was uncertainty whether the leader of this particular Maquis group supported General de Gaulle or headed a communist group seeking weapons from the Allies in order to seize political power once the occupying Germans had been driven out.
The “insertion”, as the parachute drop was termed, was twice postponed over the target area as the pilot was unable to find the fires marking the drop zone. The drop on the third night was made into mist, and the team’s radio operator injured his foot on landing. There was no time to be lost in finding the Maquis as although the precise date was unknown to them, Cardozo’s team knew the invasion of Normandy was imminent. It was important that French Resistance groups, whatever their political objectives, should help rather than hinder operations.
Cardozo found the Maquis group almost at once in the Margeride forest, but his relations with their leader, Emile Coulaudon, were not easy in the opening stage. Coulaudon was a staunch socialist, and his 2,000-strong force included many communists. Further, he was already working with another SOE team, inserted earlier, arousing his suspicious of Cardozo’s motives. It was only after Coulaudon had requested and received a series of arms drops between May 20 and June 9 that he came to accept the Benjoin team’s credentials.
By the end of this period Coulaudon’s Maquis had doubled in strength as news of the arms drops got around and new recruits to the Resistance came streaming in from the surrounding towns. These could not be rejected but nor could they be armed. Moreover, feeding and organising them into companies alone presented formidable problems. Worse, on June 2 the German Army launched an attack in regimental strength against the Maquis’s forest redoubt.
The enemy penetrated to within 800 yards of the headquarters of a Gaullist Resistance group operating around Mont Mouchet, with which Cardozo was also in touch. A move by the Resistance group to the rear of the main German column precipitated its retreat and, subsequently, Cardozo was able to advise on the better layout of Maquis lookout points and defence positions.
At the end of June the Germans attacked the Resistance concentration in the Gorge de la Truyère using artillery and ground-attack aircraft. In view of the overwhelming enemy strength, Cardozo advised immediate withdrawal but severe casualties were sustained. Many of the Maquis wounded were caught as they were being loaded on to bullock carts and killed. Cardozo led another group to safety.
Finally, following the liberation of Paris on August 25, 1944, as the Germans began to extricate themselves from central France, Cardozo led a Maquis operation to prevent the escape of a German battalion from Aurillac by cratering the roads and picking off stragglers. His personal gallantry and leadership during his four months in France won him the Military Cross. Further, his diplomacy played a crucial part in welding the Gaullist and socialist Resistance groups in the Auvergne into a single effective force.
His service to the French Resistance was recognised by appointment to the Legion of Honour and the award of the Croix de Geurre. He also served the interests of the country for which he held such affection when he acted as a liaison officer between British and French units during the Suez operation in 1956.
Frederick Henry Cardozo, known as Freddy, was the son of Charles Cardozo of a family of Portuguese descent. He was born in Newhaven, East Sussex, in 1916, the first of seven children, and lived with his parents in the Loire valley from 1923 until three years after his father’s death ten years later, his mother having decided that England would be a safer place for the family as war loomed.
He remained in the Army until 1958, serving in India and then in Palestine with the 6th Airborne Division as an instructor at L’Ecole de Guerre in Paris and as a College Commander at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Subsequently, he worked as a press attaché for the US forces stationed in France until the US pullout of the Nato command structure in 1966. On return to London, he became the secretary to the president of the Latin Mass Society, Harman Grisewood, his first cousin. When the society became too extreme for his comfort he moved to Morocco in the late 1960s to work for Save the Children Fund and later joined De Beers in Sierra Leone. He finally retired to his beloved Loire valley.
He married Simone Bigot, a childhood Loire acquaintance, in 1949. She survives him with a son and daughter.
Lieutenant-Colonel F. H. Cardozo, MC, SOE veteran, was born on December 1, 1916. He died on October 7, 2011, aged 94
Burnett: he was decorated for flying non-stop from Egypt to Australia and for attacks on German docks and battle cruisers
RAF pilot who commanded a bomber squadron during the war and later spent a challenging decade as chairman of Wimbledon
In a career that had begun in the RAF in the 1930s, Brian Burnett first came to public notice when the RAF achieved its remarkable long-distance and endurance record in flying with two single-engined aircraft more than 7,000 miles non-stop from Egypt to Australia in 1938.
He went on to command a bomber squadron during the war. Afterwards he rose to high command in the RAF in the era of Britain’s airborne nuclear deterrent in the 1950s and 1960s, and was subsequently responsible for coordinating the momentous withdrawal of the UK’s forces from their bases in the Far East in the following decade.
After retirement from the RAF in 1972 he had a very different career as chairman of the All England Lawn Tennis Club at Wimbledon, at a time when tennis was changing out of all recognition as a game. The job of coming to terms with the attitudes of a new breed of professional players such as “superbrat” John McEnroe required qualities very different from those he had been used to exercising in the disciplined ethos of the Armed Forces. Yet, although this naturally shy man at first found the egos of the tennis stars and their way of expressing their sense of their worth difficult to cope with, he accepted that times were changing and that the prestige of Wimbledon among tennis tournaments meant that it had to go down the road of increasing the prize money and tolerating the sometimes difficult-to-control sense of player self-esteem that went with that.
He had the advantage of having been RAF squash champion before and after the war, and knew something of what was meant by the burning desire to win.
Brian Kenyon Burnett was born in 1913 in Hyderabad, India, where his father was principal of Nizam College. He was educated at Charterhouse and Wadham College, Oxford, graduating BA. He had learnt to fly in 1932 with the University Air Squadron and, on graduating, joined the RAF in 1934. After pilot training he was posted to 18 Squadron operating the Hawker Hart biplane bomber. In 1938, as a navigation specialist, he joined the Long-Range Development Flight based at Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire, four of whose Wellesley single-engine monoplane bombers were dispatched in November that year to Ismailia in Egypt to attempt a long-distance record.
On November 5, 1938, three aircraft, led by Squadron Leader R. Kellet, took off for Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia. In one, captained by Flight Lieutenant Andrew Coombe, Burnett flew as second pilot and navigator, with Sergeant Gray as third pilot and wireless operator. Coombe’s aircraft nearly came to grief in the early stages, when problems in raising the undercarriage developed. In the event it was retracted manually, and it was the third aircraft that had to withdraw from the attempt, compelled to land 500 miles from Darwin when it ran short of fuel. The other two aircraft arrived in Darwin with very little fuel left, having covered 7,162 miles in 48 hours at an average speed of just under 150mph. For his part in this remarkable performance Burnett was awarded the Air Force Cross.
At the outbreak of war in 1939 he was posted to the staff of the Advanced Air Striking Force in France. Later, back in Britain, he served in 4 Group Bomber Command and commanded 51 Squadron, which operated the twin-engined Whitley. After his first operational tour, which included raids on docks in Kiel and Hamburg and attacks on the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in their lair at Brest, he was awarded the DFC. He next went to Canada to command the navigation training school at RAF Mount Hope, 1942-43, returning to the UK as senior air staff officer of 25 Group. At the end of the war he completed the RAF Staff College course.
Among his later appointments was command of RAF Gaydon, the first of the V-bomber stations, 1954-55, and he became director of bomber and reconnaissance operations in the Air Ministry in 1956-57. As such he observed the Christmas Island-based Operation Grapple thermonuclear tests, during which a Vickers Valiant bomber dropped Britain’s first hydrogen bomb. In 1961 he was appointed AOC of 3 Group.
His last appointments were as Air Secretary at the MoD, 1967-70, and C-in-C Far East, 1970-71. In the latter post, based in Singapore, he was responsible for implementing the decision of the Labour Government to withdraw all Britain’s forces based east of Suez, and at the same time for organising a tripartite force, Anzuk, formed by Australia, New Zealand and the UK to defend the Asian-Pacific region in concert with the forces of Malaysia and Singapore, after the withdrawal.
In 1974, two years after retiring from the RAF, Burnett was appointed chairman of the All England Lawn Tennis Club, a post he was to hold for the next nine years. He had served on the committee of the club since the early 1960s. It was a challenging period when Wimbledon’s conservative traditions came up against not only the tempestuous temperaments of some of the modern players, but the need to increase the tournament’s size and the players’ earnings. During his stewardship, prize money rose from £97,100 to £904,246, the women’s draw was expanded to make it as large as the men’s, Sunday play was introduced, play was started earlier, and the facilities of the club were greatly improved.
Burnett retired in 1983, but he remained a vice-president of the All England Club. He continued to play tennis and golf, and to ski until well into his eighties.
His wife, Valerie, whom he married in 1944, died in 2003. He is survived by their two sons.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Brian Burnett, GCB, DFC, AFC, C-in-C Far East Command Singapore, 1970-71, and chairman, All England Lawn Tennis Club, 1974-83, was born on March 10, 1913. He died on September 16, 2011, aged 98
Major-General John Cordingley
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Determined Royal Artillery officer who in 1957 was chosen to form, train and then lead the British Army’s first nuclear missile regiment
After what he would characteristically describe as a personally uneventful war, John Cordingley was selected, on the strength of his expertise as an artilleryman, to command the British Army’s first nuclear missile regiment.
This was at the stage of the Cold War when defence of Western Europe against the Warsaw Pact was crucially dependent on Nato’s nuclear capability. He tackled what his expertise told him was a doubtful project with the robust good humour and determination that had been the hallmark of his service up to that time.
The 47th Guided Weapons Regiment (Field) Royal Artillery — so numbered not because there were at least 46 others in the order of battle, but because it happened to be the next number to be allocated to a newly formed unit — was equipped with the US Corporal missile, a battlefield tactical nuclear delivery system not dissimilar to the German V2 rocket but with a shorter range.
Cordingley formed the new regiment from officers, NCOs and gunners who, in 1957, saw themselves in the vanguard of the new technology of war. The rockets had a liquid fuel propellant comprising nitric acid and hydrazine, the delicate handling of which required several hours of preparation for firing. Once ready, the rocket could deliver a 20 kiloton nuclear warhead with a range of 80 miles.
Apart from the problems associated with readiness time, the guidance system — although state of the art for its day — was far from absolutely reliable. It was estimated that the success rate of hitting the target was rather less than 50 per cent. This uncertainty and the cost of the missiles led to practice firing with dummy warheads being limited to annual visits to the out-to-sea range in the Hebrides.
Once the glamour of the nuclear role had worn thin, Cordingley needed all his ingenuity and enthusiasm to keep his regiment motivated for what was essentially a deterrent operational role. Fortunately, although the German civilian population had serious reservations about the stationing of nuclear units on their soil, there were no demonstrations against them.
His success in forming and training the first nuclear guided weapons regiment led to his appointment as OBE in 1959 and promotion to command the 1st Artillery Brigade, comprising the nuclear missile regiments assigned to the support of Nato’s Northern Army Group. He attended the Imperial Defence College, now the Royal College of Defence Studies, and completed his career as the Major-General Royal Artillery at HQ British Army of the Rhine, with responsibility for all nuclear and conventional artillery. (The nuclear delivery systems remained part of the order of battle until the fall of the Berlin Wall rendered them anomalous).
John Edward Cordingley was born in 1916, the only son of Air Marshal Sir John Cordingley. He was educated at Sherborne and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, from where he was commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1936. He went to France with the British Expeditionary Force in 1939 but after evacuation through Dunkirk did not see active service again due to being employed as a gunnery instructor in England and India. He commanded the Chestnut Troop RHA for a period before his selection to command 47th (GW) Regiment and was a Colonel Commandant Royal Artillery from 1973 to 1982.
After leaving the Army in 1971 he became the bursar of Sherborne School until a return to regimental service was offered as the Controller of the Royal Artillery Institution in 1975. This marked the beginning of what almost amounted to a second career in the service of the Royal Artillery. At that time there was inevitable competition for funding between the institution, with its personnel interest, and Artillery House containing the archives and museum. Cordingley neatly bridged this gap by becoming the first Controller of the Institution to become chairman of the board of management of Artillery House.
He also devoted his considerable organisational skills to the detailed financial and historical interests of the Royal Regiment. He engineered the formation of the RA General Charitable Trust, initiated studies into regimental subscriptions, the operation of the RA Association and control of RA publications and established the RA Historical Trust. He also oversaw the celebrations to mark the 200th anniversary of the Rotunda at Woolwich, housing the Congreve collection of early artillery exhibits, and the 300th anniversary of the Office of the Master Gunner and the diamond jubilee of the RA Association.
Despite all these demanding preoccupations, he was president of the Alpine Club and captain of the RA Golfing Society.
His marriage in 1940 to Pamela Boddam-Whetham was dissolved, and in 1961 he married Audrey Beaumont-Nesbitt, who predeceased him. He is survived by two sons of his first marriage — one of whom, Major-General Patrick Cordingley, commanded 7th Armoured Brigade in the First Gulf War — and two step-daughters.
Major-General J. E. Cordingley, OBE, Major-General Royal Artillery BAOR 1968-71, was born on September 1, 1916. He died on October 14, 2011 aged 95
