Soldier in the Foreign Legion and British Army who later commanded the Sultan of Oman’s Special Force
Tony Hunter-Choat’s military career focused on an endless search for excitement. He also had an artistic bent, leaving school early to train as an architect but abandoning his studies after four years to enlist in the French Foreign Legion. His service coincided with the concluding stages of the war in Algeria which, while generally supported in France, was condemned abroad for its colonial image and the callousness allegedly practised by both sides. Hunter-Choat served with the 1st Régiment Étrangère Parachutistes (1REP) from 1957 to 1961, being awarded la Croix de la Valeur Militaire — comparable with a British mention in dispatches — twice in 1958 and again in 1960, on the final occasion as a sergeant.
When the support given by 1REP to the French generals’ abortive coup in 1961 led to the unit being disbanded, Hunter-Choat transferred to the 1st Régiment Étrangère. The same year he was awarded the Médaille Militaire. This is France’s most prestigious award for gallantry and was the only decoration worn by Marshal Pétain, received for his defence of Verdun in 1916, during his treason trial after the collapse of the Vichy regime in 1945. Hunter-Choat left French service after five years, having acquired much useful operational experience.
He applied successfully for officer training in the British Army but at 26 was too old to go to Sandhurst under the rules of that time. But he received a short-service commission in the 7th Gurhka Rifles in 1962 and joined the 1st Battalion in Malaysia during Indonesia’s “confrontation” with the new Federation over its incorporation of the former British provinces of Sarawak and North Borneo into East Malaysia.
After two operational tours of duty in East Malaysia with 1/7th Gurkhas, he transferred to the Royal Artillery, where a regular officer’s vacancy had been found in his age group. He began his Gunner service with 45 Light Regiment, also stationed in Malaysia. Two further tours of duty in Borneo followed, in one of which he commanded a small group of gunners countering Indonesian incursions around Sematan in western Sarawak, where the international border runs down to the northern coastline He attended the Staff College, Camberley, in 1968 and it is a measure of the reputation he had earned with his new regiment that he was selected to command “J” (Sidi Rezegh) Battery 3rd RHA — one of the top-flight battery commands — immediately following his post-Camberley staff appointment with Headquarters 3rd Division. He took his battery on two emergency tours to Northern Ireland, both in the infantry role, then became second-in-command of 3rd RHA on the regiment’s move to Hong Kong.
After being the artillery instructor at the Junior Division of the Staff College, 1975-77, he was promoted to command 23rd Special Air Service Regiment, the Territorial Army volunteer unit of specialists with a series of classified tasks on mobilisation. From 1981 to 1983 he commanded the Intelligence and Security Group Northern Ireland, responsible for undercover work in the Province in co-operation with the police and the Security Service. It was the sort of task Hunter-Choat relished. On completion of this command he was appointed OBE, promoted to colonel and posted to the Nato Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe section planning special forces operations in the event of war.
In early 1989 he was called at his office in Heidelberg, where he was C-in-C Rhine Army’s liaison officer with Nato’s Central Army Group, and asked whether he would like to volunteer to command the Sultan of Oman’s Special Force, although this would require his resignation from the British Army. He accepted without hesitation and took over command in the rank of Aqeed (colonel).
The insurrection in Dhofar Province had been defeated by this stage, but the Sultan wished to build up his Armed Forces and make them self-sufficient. Hunter-Choat trained and expanded the Special Force to brigade size during the eight years of his command, being awarded the Omani Order of Achievement and promoted Ameed (brigadier). His British commission was subsequently reinstated with the honorary rank of brigadier.
Anthony Hunter-Choat was the son of Frederick and Iris Choat, an insurance manager and a headmistress. He attended Dulwich College until 16, when he left to start his training at the Department of Architecture at Kingston School of Art. He changed his surname to Hunter-Choat on joining the British Army in 1962.
He left the service of the Sultan of Oman at 60. From 1999 he was employed by the Aga Khan as a security adviser on his interests in southwest Asia and East Africa, and in 2003, while based in Baghdad, he was a security adviser on the programme for the reconstruction of Iraq.
His reputation for having a charmed life was enhanced in 2005. While staying in a hotel in Amman, Jordan, he and a friend took their seats in the bar behind a large column just minutes before a suicide bomber blew herself up 20ft away. Thanks to the protection of the column, they were unhurt.
In 2001 he was appointed an Officer of the Legion of Honour.
His marriage to Maureen McCabe in 1962 was dissolved in 1982, when he married Linda Wood. She survives him with their son and two daughters, and two daughters from his first marriage.
Brigadier A. Hunter-Choat, OBE, Commander of the Sultan of Oman’s Special Force, 1989-97, was born on January 12, 1936. He died on April 12, 2012, aged 76
Major-General Colin Wallis-King
Âîåííûé ðàçâåä÷èê, èãðàâøèé âàæíóþ ðîëü â Ñåâåðíîé Èðëàíäèè â 1970õ
Cool-headed Director of Service Intelligence who played a significant role in Northern Ireland in the 1970s
Colin Wallis-King had an unusually varied military career between enlistment as a Guardsman and becoming Director of Service Intelligence. This included a spell at sea with the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet, service in Norway, command of a battalion and then a brigade in Northern Ireland. He had a characteristic stillness about him, so that in a situation of intense activity he could be seen watching quietly, taking mental note.
Colin Sainthill Wallis-King was the son of Lieutenant-Colonel Frank King of the 4th Hussars. As with others educated at Stowe, his approach to army life was unconventional and he enjoyed it. Although he enlisted directly from school in the spring of 1944, the war in Europe was over by the time he had completed his recruit and officer training. He joined the 4th (Armoured) Battalion Coldstream Guards in Germany as they were handing in their tanks to revert to their traditional infantry role. Twenty years later he was to command 2nd Coldstream Guards during the reverse process, when they became an armoured mechanised battalion.
Modern languages having been his forte at Stowe, his fluent German led to his appointment as the battalion link with the local population and, after transfer to the 1st Battalion in Berlin, the junior member of a court of the Allied Military Government trying civil criminal cases in the interregnum before the restoration of the German civil justice system.
After staging in England during the bitter winter of 1947-48, his battalion left for Palestine and the strain of intense anti-British Jewish terrorist activity for the final months of the League of Nations mandate. Although brief, this experience provided a useful insight into sectarian strife with which he was later confronted in Northern Ireland.
Two further out-of-the mainstream appointments followed. In Libya, to where his battalion moved after Palestine, he trained and led the battalion’s desert rescue team responsible for finding the crews and passengers of crashed aircraft. This involved learning to navigate using azimuth tables and a theodolite, although his team was never called out in an emergency. In 1954 he volunteered for training as a carrier-borne army liaison officer and subsequently joined the light carrier HMS Albion of the Mediterranean Fleet. He found the change stimulating, in particular flying as an observer on air-photography missions and interpreting the results.
Return to regimental duty in 1956 took him back to the Mediterranean as part of the landing force for the Suez operation but, as he would wryly reflect with thanksgiving, his battalion was never required to go ashore. Perhaps because of his inclination towards the unusual, he found the rigour and formalistic training at the Staff College tedious. Whether his efforts there were appreciated is difficult to judge, as instead of a post-Camberley staff appointment he became the Regimental Adjutant in London.
Again in search of change, in 1963 he volunteered for secondment to the Parachute Regiment, passing the physically demanding “P” course at Aldershot aged 36 in company with fit young men half his age. This led to a couple of happy and militarily useful years commanding a rifle company of 1st Battalion the Parachute Regiment, including a six-months emergency tour of duty with the United Nations Force in Cyprus — before the Turkish intervention but during a period of intense hostility between the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities.
His marriage in 1962 to Lisabeth Swanstrøm, a Norwegian, put him in touch with a Nordic culture that fascinated him and, doubtless, led him to volunteer for a logistics staff appointment with the Nato command in Oslo. Norwegian sensitivity over any Soviet military deployments in the border region in the Arctic far north kept him and his movements staff on constant alert planning emergency reinforcement by Nato forces.
Coincidentally, his next appointment, as second-in-command of 1st Coldstream Guards at Tidworth, Wiltshire, also had a Norway connection. As part of the Nato Allied Command Europe Mobile Force, the battalion had responsibility for contingency deployments there and in Salonika in each case to show solidarity with national forces in the event of threatening Soviet moves towards either of the extreme flanks of the alliance.
When he took over command of 2nd Coldstream Guards in Germany in 1969, the battalion was converting from marching to mechanised infantry mounted in the FV (Fighting Vehicle) 432 armoured personnel carriers. In mid-1970, they were obliged to revert to the marching role when assigned to a tour of duty at the Belfast Catholic Lower Falls interface with the Protestant Shankill Road, at the end of which Wallis-King was appointed OBE.
Bloody Sunday, on January 30, 1972, led to his extraction from the Senior Officers’ War Course at Greenwich, promotion to colonel and urgent despatch to Londonderry as Deputy Commander 8th Infantry Brigade. The commander, Brigadier Pat MacLellan, who had been the CO when Wallis-King was second-in-command of 1st Coldstream, was under pressure giving evidence to the Widgery Inquiry and needed support. Wallis-King took the strain and undertook much of the planning of Operation Motorman in Londonderry, the clearing of the so-called no-go areas.
He returned to England to join the MoD Combat Development staff until appointed to command the 3rd Infantry Brigade in Ulster. This five-battalion group was responsible for security of the southern border with the Republic and the countryside between the two cities. In 1975 Wallis-King was advanced to CBE and sent back to the MoD as the Brigadier Intelligence.
It is not unusual for someone without previous intelligence experience to join the military intelligence hierarchy. This ensures that a user’s view is available on what is being collected and analysed; it also helps to prevent the experts, who can spend their entire careers addressing the same related issues, coming to perceive their work as an end in itself rather than as a tool for others to use in reaching informed decisions.
Although then focused primarily on the threat from the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, the work of the Brigadier Intelligence and that of the Director of Service Intelligence, which post Wallis-King assumed in 1977 on promotion to major-general, was regularly deflected into the acquisition and interpretation of intelligence on the Northern Ireland terrorist groups. Thus the final decade of his military service was either wholly or indirectly concerned with the Northern Ireland security situation.
After leaving the Service in 1980, he was the UK agent and a director of the Norwegian defence manufacturer Kongsberg from 1982 to 1987 and the UK Agent for Norsk Forsvarsteknologi A.S. from 1987 to 1993. He is survived by his wife and two daughters.
Major-General C. S. Wallis-King, CBE, Director of Service Intelligence 1977-1980, was born on September 13, 1926. He died on April 10, 2012, aged 85
Beatrice Jackman
Ïåðåâîä÷èöà è êóðüåð SOE ê Äàòñêîìó ñîïðîòèâëåíèþ, ïîìîãàâøàÿ ïåðåïðàâêå ïèëîòîâ ÊÂÂÑ ñ òåððèòîðèè âðàãà â Øâåöèþ
Beatrice Jackman’s ball dress, below, which was crafted from a Nazi flag, sold for £2,100 in 2011
SOE translator and courier for the Danish Resistance who helped downed RAF crews to escape to Sweden
English-born but the stepdaughter of a Danish aristocrat, Beatrice Jackman was a courier for the Danish Resistance during the Second World War until coming to the notice of the Gestapo. She escaped to neutral Sweden, where she was recruited by the British legation section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
Her father, Captain John Darlow, died when she was 12 and her mother married Count Fredrik Brockenhuus-Schack and joined him on his country estate in South Zealand, Denmark. Beatrice continued her education at Eastfield, Ascot, but by spending her holidays in Denmark and through contact with the estate staff and her stepfather’s friends she soon became bilingual.
The German invasion of Denmark and Norway on April 9, 1940, took both countries by surprise because they had sought to remain neutral in the war declared by Britain and France against Germany the previous September. Indications that the Western Allies were planning to occupy Norwegian ports to prevent their use by Germany precipitated a pre-emptive strike ordered by Hitler. Denmark was occupied in 24 hours and Norway in a matter of weeks.
Unlike Norway, where experienced skiers could take refuge on the snow-covered Hardanger Vidda, Denmark’s agricultural landscape was ill-suited to Resistance operations, which were consequently slow to start. After RAF aircraft began to crash in Denmark on return from missions over Germany, however, an organisation sprang up to hide and shelter surviving crews until they could be smuggled to safety by sea to Sweden.
At the time of the German invasion, the 19-year-old Beatrice had a leg in plaster as a result of a skiing accident in Norway. As soon as she was able to discard the cast, she resumed her custom of riding around her stepfather’s estate and in the autumn of 1941 went to Copenhagen University to study English. In Copenhagen she met Eric Münte, a pioneer of the Danish Resistance, who needed couriers able to travel inconspicuously around Zealand with messages concerning help and shelter for fugitive airmen without arousing suspicion.
Invited by Münte to join his escape line organisation, Beatrice went home each weekend and carried messages on horseback or bicycle in the districts adjacent to the Brockenhuus-Schack estate, where friends of her stepfather were sheltering airmen until they could be shipped out. Her English was also helpful in explaining to the airmen the strict routine that they needed to follow while in hiding and the plans for their eventual escape.
March 1943 marked the end of a comparatively benign German occupation when, supported by a small cell of the SOE, the Resistance movement began a programme of sabotage against factories, shipyards and shipping supporting the German war effort. Then in August Danish Jews were rounded up for deportation to Germany. Both events led to an upsurge of support for the Danish Resistance, but Jackman was warned that she had fallen under the suspicion of the Gestapo for her courier activities, and she was advised to leave for Sweden.
Münte, although himself hunted by the occupying power, arranged for her to be hidden aboard a fishing boat with other refugees and taken to the Swedish port of Trelleborg. She was met there by a representative of the SOE working in the British legation in Stockholm, and was taken on as a Danish-English translator and for the debriefing of Resistance workers who were forced to leave Denmark for safety in Sweden.
At the end of the war in Europe, she returned to Denmark, where she met the ADC to General Sir Evelyn “Bubbles” Barker commanding the British Army in Schleswig-Holstein, which had supervised the German Army’s evacuation from Denmark. The ADC had “liberated” from the German Army a large Mercedes convertible and also a red-and-black Nazi flag, allegedly from the ruined Reichstag building in Berlin, which he gave to Jackman. In the absence of material of comparable quality, she and a friend unpicked the swastika and had the flag made into a ball dress which she wore with pride on a number of occasions.
She returned to England in 1948 and married Squadron Leader Edward Jackman, formerly of the RAF Pathfinder Force, by whom she had a daughter. In 2011, she put the dress that she had kept but seldom worn up for auction, accompanied by the story of its provenance. As reported in The Times on September 22, 2011, the dress was sold for £2,100 to an anonymous buyer.
She is survived by her daughter.
Beatrice Jackman, courier for the Danish Resistance and SOE translator, was born on February 10, 1921. She died on April 20, 2012, aged 91
Philip Malins
Âåòåðàí êàìïàíèè â Áèðìå è äåéñòâèé âî Âüåòíàìå â 1945 ãîäó, ïîçæå èñêàâøèé ïðèìèðåíèÿ ñ áûâøèìè âðàãàìè
Philip Malins with Ambassador Masaki Orita at a Japanese Embassy reception in London on 1st August 2002
Decorated veteran of the Burma campaign and of the 1945 conflict in Vietnam who later sought reconciliation with former enemies
After the Japanese surrender in the Far East in September 1945 the 20th Indian Division was sent to French Indochina to take the surrender of 70,000 Japanese troops. As the supply and transport officer of the leading brigade, Philip Malins flew from Rangoon with the advance party to arrive in Saigon amid scenes of mounting hostility. He won his Military Cross leading a small group of Gurkha orderlies and surrendered Japanese infantry in an urgent sortie from Saigon.
The local, mainly Annamite, population initially welcomed their liberators from Japanese occupation but their attitude changed when they realised that the former French Administration was to be re-established. The suburbs of the sprawling capital came under nightly attack by Annamite extremists, and bad weather delayed the fly-in of the main body of 80th Indian Infantry Brigade. Re-arming former Vichy French troops became the only way to protect the key installations.
On September 20 Malins set off with a convoy of vehicles protected by a scratch force of battalion HQ staff of 1/1st Gurkha Rifles, newly freed Dutch prisoners of war and 30 Japanese infantrymen. His objective was the Japanese arms dump at Laithieu, 12 miles away. He arrived without incident two hours before dark, but activity along the roadside forecast a more difficult return. With a chameleon-like adaptation to circumstances, another 50 Japanese infantry guarding the arms dump accepted inclusion in his force, and he left at daybreak with 1,000 rifles, 100 machineguns and thousands of rounds of ammunition.
Stationing the Gurkhas in the leading truck, Malins followed in a staff car with the Japanese contingent aboard the weapon-carrying vehicles and the Dutch former PoWs bringing up the rear. Trees felled across the road outside the village of Tan Thoi were cleared by the Gurkhas and Japanese under fire, but Malins recognised he could get only the first nine trucks through. He ordered the last four back to Laithieu as the leading trucks were attacked by 200 Annamite riflemen. But the Gurkhas and Japanese beat them off, and he was able to push through to Saigon.
The last four trucks were brought in by a Dutch Lieutenant, Hans Rueb, having taken a circuitous route, but five Gurhkas, six Dutchmen and an unknown number of Japanese infantrymen were killed in the operation. The arms and ammunition were distributed to French troops and the Saigon suburbs were held until the 80th Brigade arrived. Malins was awarded an MC to add to the MBE he had received for his services during the campaign in Burma.
Philip Geoffrey Malins was born in Birmingham in 1919, the son of Geoffrey and Claire Malins, and educated at King Edward VI Grammar School, Aston. He joined the Territorial Army in 1938 and went to France with the Royal Army Service Corps shortly after the outbreak of war. During the German offensive of May 1940 he was the only survivor in a truck that received a direct hit by a bomb and was later evacuated from Bray dunes, north of Dunkirk.
Commissioned into the Royal Indian Army Service Corps, he went to Burma as transport officer of a brigade in the 20th Indian Infantry Division. During the Fourteenth Army’s advance in December 1944 he supervised the swimming across the Chindwin river at Mawlaik — 600 yards wide — of 1,350 pack mules needed to supply the brigade ordered to capture the communication centre of Budalin north of Monywa. This was achieved.
On demobilisation he joined his father’s Mamod steam models manufacturing business and eventually became Midland regional manager of the British Institute of Management. His principal interest lay, however, with the situation of former Japanese prisoners of war. Together with Dame Vera Lynn, he was active in the British Legion campaign to bring about the government ex gratia payment of £10,000 to surviving prisoners, widows and civilian internees.
He was a firm believer in contact with Britain’s former German and Japanese enemies and, as chairman of the International Friendship and Reconciliation Trust, he helped to arrange services of reconciliation at Westminster Abbey and Canterbury and Coventry Cathedrals. To mark the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Kohima in 2004, he was present at the laying of a wreath at the Indian Divisions’ Memorial at RMA Sandhurst by the Japanese Ambassador in the presence of British, Indian and Japanese veterans of the Burma campaign.
As joint leader of a British and Japanese veterans’ visit to Burma, he walked the old battlefields together with a Japanese veteran who had been sheltered by Burmese villagers when desperately ill for many months during the campaign. Walking was a passion. As a former member of the Swiss Alpine Club, he was twice second in his age group in the European Veterans Championships and undertook treks each year in many countries.
In recognition of his service to Anglo-Japanese relations he was appointed to the Order of the Rising Sun in 2011.
He was unmarried.
Philip G. Malins, MBE, MC, wartime soldier and peacetime conciliator, was born on May 8, 1919. He died on April 9, 2012, aged 92
