Resolute Prime Minister of Israel who helped to found the Israeli state and was a key figure in both the Stern Gang and Mossad
Yitzhak Shamir, Israel’s long-serving Prime Minister, was also a senior leader of the terrorist Stern Gang responsible for the assassination of Lord Moyne, the Minister of State for the Middle East, and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN representative in the region. Shamir started his public career as a politician and statesman late in life after long cloak-and-dagger service for his nation.
In a statement on Saturday, Binyamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, said that Shamir “belonged to the generation of giants who founded the state of Israel and fought for the freedom of the Jewish people”. Shimon Peres, the President of Israel, described him as “a brave warrior before and after the founding of the Israeli state”.
By force of habit, perhaps, Shamir retained his low profile when he surfaced as a parliamentarian and later as a cabinet minister. As Speaker of the Knesset after Likud attained power in 1977, his position required him to be above politics but he provided a glimpse of his hardline stance by abstaining in the vote on the Camp David accord negotiated by Menachem Begin, then Prime Minister, and President Sadat of Egypt. When he moved to the cabinet in 1980 to succeed the dashing Moshe Dayan as Foreign Minister, he seemed content to be overshadowed not only by the charismatic Prime Minister but also by Ariel Sharon, the volatile Defence Minister. He seemed to play a very minor role in the controversial Lebanese adventure, the main international event of the period.
A government inquiry sharply drew attention to this situation. The Kahan Commission investigating the Phalangist massacre of Palestinians in West Beirut refugee camps in September 1982 heard evidence that a cabinet colleague had telephoned the Foreign Minister with an early report that the Phalangists were running amok. “The Foreign Minister did not make any real attempt to check,” the commission found. “It might have been expected that the Foreign Minister, by virtue of his position, would display sensitivity and alertness to what he had heard.”
When he was made Prime Minister after Begin’s sudden resignation in 1983, Shamir inherited a crumbling coalition of nationalist and religious parties, staggering economic difficulties and a decline in public support for the government. He hoped to hold the coalition together by compromise or defending decisions on controversial matters, but after six months it broke up and new elections were held.
Like most of his contemporaries in Israel’s founding generation, Shamir was raised in Eastern Europe. His family name was Yezernitsky. Shamir was one of the aliases he used in the Palestine underground and he kept it when he surfaced. He was born in Ruzino, Poland, to parents once active in the Russian revolutionary movement in 1905 who became thorough Zionists when they grew older. They instilled Zionist ideals in their son, who at the age of 14 joined the right-wing Revisionist youth movement, Betar. He enrolled in the Warsaw University law school but discontinued his studies in 1935 at the age of 20 to emigrate on a student’s visa. He studied literature and history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and held various jobs. When an accounting firm where he was employed transferred him to Tel Aviv, he dropped out of school.
In 1936 the Palestinian Arabs launched a campaign of murder, arson and sabotage against the Jewish community. The Zionist Establishment ordered the Haganah, its illegal selfdefence organisation, to exercise restraint. This was rejected by the right-wing Irgun Zvai Leumi, which planted bombs in Arab market places. Shamir joined the Irgun, participating in what he later called “retaliatory actions”.
When the British Government published the White Paper of 1939 declaring its intention to grant Palestine with an Arab majority independence in a decade, Irgun turned its attention to British targets in Palestine, but then proclaimed a ceasefire to co-operate with the British in fighting Hitler. A faction under Abraham Stern favoured continuing the fight against the British “occupiers” of the historic Jewish homeland, the war against the Nazis notwithstanding. In contrast to the Irgun which sabotaged institutions symbolising British authority, the Sternists went in for assassination. Again Shamir went with the hardliners. He was arrested in 1941 and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for possession of a forged government seal. After completing his sentence, he was sent to Mizra internment camps.
He was there in February 1942 when British police trapped Stern in his rooftop hideout in Tel Aviv and an officer shot him dead. The organisation tapped Shamir for a position of leadership and arranged his escape from Mizra. A Polish army officer’s uniform was smuggled into the camp. Shamir put it on and walked coolly past the British sentry to a waiting taxi. In Tel Aviv, disguised in black rabbinical clothes and a full beard, he became one of the triumvirate that replaced Stern. Shamir was in charge of operations.
He was thus directly involved in the decision to assassinate Lord Moyne in Cairo in October 1944. In a subsequent interview, he was unrepentant. “Forty years later it’s difficult for a person not familiar with the circumstances at the time to understand such things properly,” he said. He claimed that Moyne in 1942 had persuaded the Turkish government to turn back a 180-ton cattle boat crowded with 769 Jewish refugees who had escaped the gas chambers and reached Istanbul hoping to proceed to Palestine, in defiance of the British blockade. Returned to the Black Sea, the shop sank a mile off the Turkish coast. There was one survivor.
Shamir was arrested a second time in 1946 during a four-day house-to-house search in Tel Aviv. He was banished with other terrorists to Eritrea. This time he escaped with others, crawling through a tunnel they had dug under the fence of the internment camp. Travelling eight days with three others crammed in a specially prepared compartment in a tanker truck, he reached Djibouti via Ethiopia. The French in Djibouti recognised the fugitives as political refugees, and sent them to France abroad a warship.
Shamir came home to a sovereign Israel, but again he went underground when the government outlawed the Stern Gang after members of the organisation assassinated Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden. A United Nations mediator, the count had outraged Zionists by proposing that the Negev and Jersualem should be detached from the newly created Jewish State. Shamir contacted officials close to Ben Gurion, then the Prime Minister, and persuaded them that he had no intention of operating underground against the Jewish State that he had helped to create. He was allowed to surface and he became a businessman.
After a few unhappy years in business, he joined Mossad in 1955. He was reticent about his activities but confirmed that he had operated overseas under various aliases and often carried a gun. Iser Harel, the first director of Mossad, recalled: “Shamir was one of the most central figures in the Mossad. He was involved in daring operations.”
Shamir retired in 1965 and entered another frustrating interlude in the business world. He began his relationship with the Herut Party in 1967 as a volunteer in the department for Soviet Jews. In 1973 he was elected to parliament and two years later was chosen as chairman of the party’s executive committee. He was thrust on to the world political stage when his party became the ruling party.
As Prime Minister, Shamir promoted continued Jewish settlement of the West Bank and increased the Jewish population in the occupied territories by nearly 30 per cent. He also encouraged the immigration of tens of thousands of Soviet Jews to Israel.
In December 1987 he and his defence minister Yitzhak Rabin deployed thousands of Israeli troops throughout the occupied territories to crush the Palestinian Intifada. In 1991, during the Gulf War, Shamir, at the request of the United States held Israel back from attacking Iraq even though Iraqi Scud missiles fell on Tel Aviv. Later that year, under pressure from President George H.W. Bush, Shamir agreed to represent Israel at the Middle East peace conference in Madrid. It was Israel’s first summit meeting with the Arab states but he proved as unyielding as ever in the negotiations.
Shamir retired from politics at the age of 81 after stepping down as the Likud party leader, effectively ending his 20-year political career. He suffered from Alzheimer’s disease for the last six years of his life.
Shamir’s wife, who acted as a courier in his underground career, died last year. He is survived by a son and a daughter.
Yitzhak Shamir, Prime Minister of Israel, 1983-84 and 1986-92, was born on October 15, 1915. He died on June 30, 2012, aged 96
>Ron Jewell
>Special forces soldier with Popski’s Private Army who helped preserve the artistic treasures in Ravenna
Soldier in ‘Popski’s Private Army’ who took part in special operations with partisans in the Italian campaign
Ron Jewell was a veteran of No 1 Demolition Squadron, the official name of the unit generally known as “Popski’s Private Army”. Raised in 1942 by the Russian émigré Major (later Lieutenant-Colonel) Vladimir Peniakoff (Popski), the squadron was used as a raiding and special operations force during the Western Desert and Italian campaigns, earning a formidable reputation for ferocity of action and individual initiative.
The unit comprised three fighting patrols each of six Jeeps with three-man crews, a small mobile headquarters and a remarkably small administrative and maintenance section. Jewell served as a lance-corporal in “S” and then “R” patrols in the later stages of the Italian campaign, taking part in operations with Italian partisan groups around the Pineta di Classe, the forested area of the coastal plain ideal for guerrilla operations south of Ravenna on the Adriatic coast.
Under Peniakoff’s command, PPA formed part of “Porterforce” put together in the autumn of 1944 to help to compensate for the lack of strength of the 8th Army in the Adriatic sector, which had been brought about by the withdrawal at the end of 1943 of British divisions to prepare for the Normandy invasion.
Working with the 11th Armoured Division’s reconnaissance regiment — the 27th Lancers equipped with “Staghound” armoured cars — PPA patrols were able to suggest the presence of a much larger force by utilising their mobility and 0.50-inch Browning machineguns to good effect.
It was typical of the PPA ethos that when Jewell was sent to Naples to check whether Peniakoff was in need of anything to speed his recovery from malaria, he was ordered by the patient to take six of the nurses caring for him to a beach at Sorrento each day to show his appreciation. Jewell did so but called the PPA’s base to ask an incredulous radio operator to arrange his recall because he was bored.
Jewell was with “R” patrol in the push north after the liberation of Ravenna in December 1944 when two dismounted armoured car troops of the 27th Lancers were pinned down by enemy fire at a canal crossing. In the intense and prolonged exchange of fire Peniakoff lost his hand, but the arrival of two of his patrols, including Jewell’s “R” patrol, tipped the balance of firepower allowing the canal crossing to be secured.
In the following April offensive that brought the Italian campaign to a close Jewell became involved in the most extraordinary event of his wartime career. At that time, “R” patrol, led by Lieutenant Steven Wallbridge, was co-operating with an operational group of the United States OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the American equivalent of the British Special Operations Executive) during the advance on Chioggia on the southern tip of the Venetian lagoon.
The campaign was almost over, but the German Army remained in significant strength in northern Italy and a number of formations refused to surrender without orders from their C-in-C, General “Scheel” von Vietinghoff. A Lieutenant George Hearn of the OSS drove into Chioggia and offered the German commander an opportunity to surrender to avoid an Allied air attack on the town with consequently serious casualties to his men.
Although no air attack on Chioggia was planned and Hearn had no means of arranging one in a hurry, such was his self-assurance that the German commander took him at his word and agreed to surrender his force of some 1,100 men, subject to Hearn providing troops to protect the surrendered Germans from the wrath of the Italian partisans.
Hearn called for assistance from the nearest PPA patrol and Jewell accompanied “R” patrol as it drove up the main street of Chioggia to assure the German commander of protection against the partisans and to accept his surrender. The Germans kept faithfully to the terms, despite some provocation from the Italian partisans, and at one point Jewell’s patrol had to re-arm a German platoon for their own protection.
Richard Ronald Jewell was born in Swansea in 1923 but added a year to his age to allow him to enlist in September 1940. He served as a driver in the Royal Army Service Corps until recruited by PPA in Italy in January 1944. After demobilisation he worked in a Swansea steel factory until finally retiring in 1995.
Throughout his postwar life he retained his love of opera and theatre that had begun in Italy, when he took every opportunity to attend performances in Naples and Rome during breaks in operations.
He married Kate (Kitty) Morse in 1959. She survives him with a son and two daughters.
Ron Jewell, veteran of Popski’s Private Army, was born on January 24, 1923. He died on April 7, 2012 aged 89
>Brigadier Ronnie Eccles
>Officer of the Green Howards decorated for his service in Ulster at its toughest
Battalion commander during the Troubles in Ulster who won a DSO for his imperturbable leadership
The award of the DSO to Ronnie Eccles in 1972, and to another battalion commander who had also served in Northern Ireland the previous year, marked the British Government’s recognition that the Army was not there “to keep the peace” but faced a vicious insurrection costing lives day by day. Until then, commanding officers whose units had dealt competently with riots, bombings and shootings might be appointed OBE.
Ronald Eccles was born in South Shields, the son of Rowland and Penelope Eccles. Educated at Barnard Castle School, he was commissioned from Sandhurst into the York and Lancaster Regiment in 1948. Subsequently he saw active service in Aden in 1958, served a secondment to The Parachute Regiment and attended the Staff College in 1962.
When his regiment was scheduled for disbandment under defence costs savings in the late 1960s, he was the staff officer responsible for working out how the serving officers and men should be distributed among the other Yorkshire regiments. Noting that they were short of officers in his age group, he sensibly arranged that he should be transferred to the Green Howards.
In 1969 he took over command of 1st Battalion Green Howards in Minden, where they were stationed with the Army of the Rhine. From July to September 1970, the battalion was temporarily redeployed to West Belfast where it was involved in riot control, security patrols and cordon and search operations.
The battalion’s second tour of operational duty in Ulster a year later began during an upsurge in Provisional IRA violence designed to make the Province ungovernable. Thirteen British soldiers had been killed since the start of 1971. The Green Howards had responsibility for one of the most volatile areas of North Belfast: the Ardoyne, Old Park and Shankill Road districts.
Eccles was the ideal person to handle such an acutely demanding sector. Physically fit and imperturbable, he had a natural affinity with his soldiers having been born in the North East of England from where many were drawn. But a new terrorist tactic — sniping — was to test these qualities almost to their limit.
A period of intense violence between mobs of Catholic and Protestant youths broke out at the end of his first week in charge. Baton charges, rubber bullets and tear gas were used to disperse the mobs, while incidents of sniper fire were reported from the Ardoyne. On Sunday August 8, while the battalion was confronting rioters, one soldier was killed by a sniper.
The operation to arrest and intern known IRA leaders and members was carried out the following day, when any goodwill towards the Army retained by the Catholic community was dissipated. A second soldier was shot dead by a sniper on August 12 during a barricade-clearing operation. Far from lowering the level of violence as forecast, internment had caused it to intensify.
The scale of bombing, rioting and sniper activity increased through the Green Howards’ four month tour of duty. During this time the battalion suffered five men killed, 20 seriously wounded by sniper fire or bomb explosions and 75 slightly wounded. Intelligence reported IRA casualties in their area of responsibility as seven killed and 14 wounded; considerable quantities of arms and explosives were found by the battalion and confiscated.
Towards the end of the tour, Eccles received a letter: “Dear Sir, I express my deepest sympathy to the wife and children of Corporal Peter Herrington (killed by a sniper) and also to your men. This latest barbaric act is a crime against God and a stab in the back towards the vast majority of the Ardoyne people. Your men have behaved most admirably and have proven themselves to be the best disciplined and well mannered regiment in the British Army. Yours sincerely, Ardoyne Christian.”
In addition to the DSO awarded to Eccles, two subalterns were awarded the MC (one was Lieutenant Richard Dannatt, CGS, 2006-2009), together with four Military Medals and two mentions in dispatches to NCOs and soldiers.
On giving up command of the battalion in 1972, Eccles undertook two staff appointments, the first with the Nato staff in Norway — a country with which the Green Howards have long-standing connections, the Norwegian King being their Colonel-in-Chief — before he returned to Ulster as the Deputy Commander of 39th Infantry Brigade responsible for the security of Belfast.
On promotion to brigadier in 1980, he was appointed Defence Attaché to the British High Commission in New Delhi. He retired from the Army in 1983 but was the representative Colonel of the York and Lancaster Regiment from 1979.
He is survived by his wife Glenys (Glen) and two daughters.
Brigadier Ronald Eccles, DSO, was born on August 23, 1928. He died on May 18, 2012, aged 83
>Maureen Dunlop de Popp
>Wartime pilot and cover girl who delivered Spitfires, Mustangs and Wellingtons to the front line
>Âî âðåìÿ âîéíû ïåðåãîíÿëà èñòðåáèòåëè è áîìáàðäèðîâùèêè íà ôðîíò
ATA pilot who delivered bombers and fighters to RAF squadrons during the war and once appeared on the cover of Picture Post
Born and bred in Argentina, where she grew up with joint British and Argentine nationality, Maureen Dunlop came in 1941 to England, where she volunteered for the Air Transport Auxiliary, an organisation formed soon after the start of the war to deliver aircraft from factories to squadrons and maintenance units. In the ATA she served as a ferry pilot until the end of the Second World War, flying aircraft ranging from such single-engine aircraft as the Spitfire to the four-engine Lancaster.
The establishment of the ATA, which freed up RAF pilots for frontline service, offered new opportunities for the — often well-heeled — young women who had learnt to fly in the 1930s. The ATA was at first staffed only by men — “Ancient Tattered Airmen”, as they were jokingly known, as most were civilian pilots or service pilots too old for operations.
The pressing demand for more bombers and fighters as the war progressed, accelerated the flow of aircraft from factories to the squadrons, to the extent that at last the authorities bowed to the wisdom of calling on the reserve of women pilots that had been created by the enthusiasm for private flying in the interwar years. By the end of the war more than a tenth of the ATA’s 1,300 pilots were women — “Atagirls”, as they were known, from the glamour they brought to the job. Indeed, many an operational bomber squadron commander would rub his eyes in disbelief when a newly delivered Lancaster touched down and rolled to a halt on his runway, and a svelte female figure climbed out of it.
Ferrying work might sound routine, but it could be dangerous flying aircraft without radio and navigational aids in all weathers, not to mention the danger from enemy aircraft that might intrude into UK airspace. Even the veteran Amy Johnson fell victim to the hazards of ferrying, baling out when her Airspeed Oxford aircraft ran out of fuel while on a flight in January 1941 in bad weather and losing her life in the freezing waters of the Thames Estuary.
Maureen Adel Chase Dunlop was born in 1920 in Quilmes, in Buenos Aires province, the daughter of an Australian who worked in Patagonia for a British firm, Southern Land Company, managing estancias which produced wool from Australian merino sheep. Dunlop was educated for a period at an English school, St Hilda’s College in Buenos Aires, though for most of her childhood she was taught by a governess in Patagonia, where she preferred life on her parents’ farm to living in the city. She and her sister both rode from an early age.
She had her first flying lesson in England in 1936 while her parents were on UK home leave. But she was determined to continue with flying instruction on her return to Argentina, and she falsified her birth date to enable her to do this. In 1941 she and her sister Joan travelled to England, Joan to join her fiancé, an RAF Hurricane pilot, and to work for the Latin American services of the BBC, Maureen to join the ATA.
Over the next four years she was to fly 28 types of single-engine aircraft, including the high-performance Spitfire, Hawker Typhoon, Mustang and Hawker Tempest and ten types of multi-engine aircraft. These included twin-engine Mosquitoes, Avro Ansons and Blenheims and the mainstay of bomber command, the Avro Lancaster. As First Officer Mureen Dunlop, ATA, she appeared on the cover of Picture Post in September 1944.
After the war she took an RAF flying instructor’s course before returning to Argentina, where she worked as a commercial pilot and as a flying instructor to the Argentine Air Force. She was also a partner in an air taxi company in Argentina and continued flying until 1969. In 1955 she had met her husband, Serban Victor Popp, a retired Romanian diplomat, at a function at the British Embassy in Buenos Aires. They went on to have three children.
Paradoxically, given her flying aptitude, her attempt to pass the road driving test when her wartime licence ran out proved a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. Eventually she passed the test at the fifth attempt.
She loved animals, particularly horses, and during periods in England learnt a good deal about Arabs, before establishing her own breeding operation in Argentina. In 1973 she and her husband moved to England, bringing five foundation mares and settling on a farm near Norwich. At one point her stud grew to more than 50 horses, both Arab and thoroughbred.
Her husband died in 2000. She is survived by a daughter and a son. Another daughter predeceased her.
Maureen Dunlop de Popp, wartime Air Transport Auxiliary pilot, was born on October 26, 1920. She died on May 29, 2012, aged 91
>Squadron Leader Norman Crookes
>Outstanding night fighter navigator who helped shoot down four enemy aircraft in 20 minutes
Beaufighter and Mosquito night fighter navigator who shared 11 combat victories in partnership with his skipper Bill ‘Jamie’ Jameson
In wartime night-fighter operations by airborne interception radar-carrying Mosquitoes and Beaufighters, the relationship between pilot and navigator was a crucial one, of trust and reliance on each other’s skills. Such partnerships often endured far longer than those in other branches of combat flying. Although the pilot was the captain of the aircraft he relied absolutely on the skill of his navigator to locate targets and to guide him to them.
The partnering of Norman Crookes and his New Zealand skipper Bill “Jamie” Jameson, was just such a relationship, and in a night-fighting career together that began in Beaufighters in 1942 and continued in Mosquitoes until August 1944, when Jameson was posted back to New Zealand, they notched up 11 combat victories.
Their most spectacular feat was the shooting down of four German bombers in a single sortie on the night of July 29-30, 1944, an exploit remarkable in Second World War night-fighting annals. For this Jameson was awarded the DSO and Crookes a Bar to the DFC he had been awarded earlier.
After Jameson was posted back to New Zealand Crookes was teamed up with Ray Jeffs, another New Zealander, with whom he had had one more combat victory, flying his final patrol over Berlin in April 1945. He ended his war with three DFCs and the US Distinguished Flying Cross, which was awarded to him for night patrols flown in support of US troops during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944.
Norman Crookes was born at New Tupton, near Chesterfield in Derbyshire, in 1920 and educated locally and at King’s College London, where he read history. In 1941 he joined the RAFVR and trained as a night-fighter navigator before being posted the next year to 125 Squadron, a Beaufighter unit based at RAF Colerne in Wiltshire. There he was teamed with Jameson, and the pair had their first combat victories in July 1942 shooting down two Heinkel He111 bombers over southern Wales as the enemy raided Cardiff, Swansea and Milford Haven. After a period on training both men returned to night fighting in 1943 and had their last kill in Beaufighters when they shot down a Dornier Do17 over the Gower Peninsula.
Early in 1944 both men were posted to 488 Squadron, RNZAF, which was operating Mosquitoes. Initially they flew air defence sorties from RAF Bradwell Bay in Essex, until the squadron was attached to 85 Group as part of the Allied Expeditionary Air Force for the Normandy landings, then operating from Colerne and RAF Zeals, also in Wiltshire. From then on their air fighting was over enemy-occupied territory and on June 24, 1944, near Bayeux in Normandy, Jameson shot down a twin-engine Messerschmitt 410 fighter bomber after Crookes had vectored him on to the target, A few days later over Caen, a Ju 88 fell to Jameson’s cannon, making the pair aces, with a tally of five combat victories. Both pilot and navigator were awarded the DFC.
Then came their spectacular sortie of July 29-30, with the destruction of three Ju88s and a Dornier Do217 in little more than 20 minutes. Such feats made No 488 one of the most celebrated night-fighting squadrons in the battle for Normandy. The pair claimed another two kills before Jameson was posted back home to help his mother to run the family farm after the deaths of his father and two brothers. Crookes brought his new skipper, Jeffs, almost immediate success when they downed a Do217 near Rouen on August 18.
In November 1944 the squadron was relocated to France and was involved in intensive patrolling over the Ardennes in the bad weather that reigned over the area during the Battle of the Bulge. The German counteroffensive in the American sector designed to stem the Allied advance achieved surprise and made considerable inroads before being halted. In addition to his American DFC for his services in this campaign Crookes was awarded a second Bar to his British DFC at the end of the war.
Notwithstanding his remarkable wartime combat career, Crookes was ruled out of further service with the RAF as he was found to be colour blind. So he was demobilised, completed his studies at London University and qualified as a school teacher. After teaching posts in London he returned to his native Derbyshire, teaching at Clay Cross School and then William Rhodes School. He was devoted to the Air Training Corps, forming ATC squadrons at both schools and eventually becoming training officer of the Derbyshire ATC Wing and chairman of the East Midlands Wing. For these services he was appointed MBE in 1974.
He and Jameson maintained their friendship after the war, paying each other frequent visits until Jameson’s death ten years ago.
Crookes’s first wife, Kathleen, died in 1987. He is survived by his second wife, Sheila, and by a son and daughter of his first marriage.
Squadron Leader Norman Crookes, MBE, DFC and two Bars, wartime night-fighter navigator, was born on December 23, 1920. He died on April 17, 2012, aged 91
