[2Chestnut] Военные и топичные некрологи из британских газет
Wg Cdr Pat Lee
Мальта-Сицилия-Италия-Индия (в том числе охрана Ганди) и в конце 60х командование ВВС Ближневосточного направления со штабквартирой на Кипре, во время тамошней грекотурецкой заварухи 1967 года. После отставки возглавлял службу безопасности Института химических и бактериологических исследований Министерства Обороны
The British government was embarrassed about the number of British officers serving in the Arab Legion and fighting the soldiers of the nascent Israeli state. Ernest Bevin, the then Foreign Secretary, made a statement to reassure Parliament that there were no British officers on either bank of the river Jordan. The declaration was carefully timed: Bromage and his comrades were positioned in the middle of the Allenby Bridge that spanned the river.
Rear-Admiral Sir Morgan Morgan-Giles
Прошёл всю войну на Средиземном море (от Орана 1940 до взаимодействия с партизанами Тито), в отставке стал депутатом парламента от консерваторов
Vote Conservative: Morgan-Giles on the campaign trail in Micheldever, Hampshire, in the run-up to the 1970 election
Highly-decorated naval officer noted for his resourcefulness who became a forthright Conservative MP
Morgan Morgan-Giles’s achievements in the Royal Navy and in politics were founded in his courage, energy and resource, coupled to a self-confident, direct and uncomplicated good humour which disarmed opposition and made him an easy man to follow even under the most exacting conditions.
He entered the Royal Navy from Clifton College in 1932, after a tour as a junior officer on the China Station he qualified in 1938 as a torpedo specialist. His early war experiences included operations in northern waters in the obsolete cruiser Emerald and the evacuation of Norway while serving in the cruiser Arethusa. Joining Force H in the Mediterranean, Arethusa took part in the destruction of the French fleet at Oran in July 1940.
After participating in a Churchillian madcap idea to threaten the French invasion ports with fireships — fortunately cancelled — he was sent to Alexandria. For several months he was busy dealing with mines in the 100-mile length of the Suez Canal, organising huge numbers of spotters and diving teams to search for and explode those that were found. This was a dangerous business requiring ad hoc methods until minesweeping technology caught up with German magnetic and acoustic firing mechanisms. Morgan-Giles was awarded the George Medal for his bravery in recovering survivors in mined waters after the destruction of one of his motor boats. He was also mentioned in dispatches.
Ordered to take command of an ex-Norwegian trawler with a cargo of 100 small floating mines to interdict Benghazi harbour before the Germans arrived, he found that he was too late and, instead, took part in the siege of Tobruk from April to September 1941 as second-in-command of the naval base. He and his men were repeatedly attacked by Ju87 dive bombers — there were more than 1,000 air raids during a six-month period.
Recalled to Alexandria, Morgan-Giles’s next experience of the ad hoc was the fitting of torpedoes into the bomb bays of Wellington bombers, necessary since the advance of the Afrika Korps had put Rommel’s seaborne supply lines out of range of the Fleet Air Arm’s Swordfish torpedo-bombers. This technique was eventually successful but at some cost. Pilots had to be trained to fly at a much lower altitude than was safe for Wellingtons and during one practice flight with Morgan-Giles on board, the aircraft hit the sea, killing three of the crew. Morgan-Giles was in hospital for many weeks with his jaw wired together.
After recovering, he rejoined the Fleet Air Arm base at Dhekelia, Cyprus, where he improvised flare-dropping equipment to enable Swordfish to illuminate Axis forces by night, thus acting as pathfinders for Wellington bombers before the battle of Alamein. He survived a second crash on landing in a Dakota transport.
At the end of 1942 he was sent to Malta as operations officer for Coastal Forces, motor torpedo boats and gunboats. This was followed by a staff planning tour at Algiers. Having survived a third aircraft crash unscathed, he took command of three landing craft at the Salerno landings in 1943.
He had previously been noticed by Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean and, against the wishes of the Admiralty but supported by Churchill, was selected to be Maclean’s naval liaison officer in his mission to support Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia. Maclean had been influential in the decision to switch British support from the royalist general Draza Mihajlovic to the Communist partisan leader Tito on the ground that “Tito was killing more Germans”.
Morgan-Giles immediately saw the necessity of setting up an arms supply organisation in the Italian Adriatic port of Bari and arranging the required communications, motor launches and supplies. Despite a catastrophic air raid which blew up an ammunition ship and sank 16 others, operations went well. His gallantry and initiative during this attack earned him advancement from MBE (1942) to OBE (1943).
In October 1944, with the Germans in retreat in the Balkans, Morgan-Giles embarked his HQ into a landing craft and conducted operations off northern Yugoslavia until relieved in December after four years in the Med. He was awarded the DSO for his contributions to this campaign and for the success of an attack on a German base on the Croatian island of Lussino (Losinj).
After attending the naval staff course, he arrived in the Far East in time for the Japanese surrender, and after helping to pick up the pieces in the Dutch East Indies, took leave in Australia where he married Pamela Bushell, whom he had met in Cairo in 1942.
He was promoted to commander while in the cruiser Norfolk on the East Indies station. He then spent two years as naval liaison officer in Trieste. He went on to command the destroyer Chieftain. Promoted to captain, he was sent in 1954 to Singapore as chief of naval intelligence.
On return he commanded the frigates of the Dartmouth Training Squadron and, in 1958, the torpedo and anti-submarine specialists school, HMS Vernon, at Portsmouth. His final seagoing command was the cruiser Belfast, then the Far East fleet flagship. A happy commission during 1961 and 1962 included 74,000 miles of steaming, spanning the Indian Ocean as far west as Kenya and east in the Pacific, then to Panama and eventually home. Promoted rear-admiral, he was appointed Admiral President of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich in 1962.
For some years Morgan-Giles had wanted to get into Parliament. A vacancy at Winchester, his home constituency, gave him his opportunity and he won a by-election there in 1964. His maiden speech was on the peaceful use of the Armed Forces, drawing attention to the many occasions that they had been employed in restoring law and order around the world.
Not surprisingly, the MP affectionately dubbed “the Admiral” by his fellow members ended up on the Conservative Defence Committee, on which he served as vice-chairman, 1965-75.
His forthright views — he was in sympathy with Ian Smith and Enoch Powell — denied him a place in Edward Heath’s Government. His greatest regret in politics was that having won the ballot for a Private Member’s Bill, he did not, under party pressure, introduce an Abortion Bill when he had the opportunity — he took the view that the issue should be decided by women not men.
A diligent constituency MP, he courted local unpopularity by supporting the route of the M3 past Winchester and campaigning against the locally restrictive planning system for more and better low-cost housing, but he was re-elected at each general election until retirement at the age of 65 in 1979.
From 1971 to 1978 as chairman of the trust formed for the purpose, he played a big part in the preservation of HMS Belfast, now moored in the Thames. He was knighted in 1985.
In retirement he continued to make his views known through the letters page of The Daily Telegraph. In 2001 he said that the idea of women in frontline combat was “not only grotesque and revolting, but also entirely impractical”.
His first wife, Pamela, died in 1966. They had two sons and four daughters, one of whom died in 1988. His second wife, Marigold, died in 1995.
Rear-Admiral Sir Morgan Morgan-Giles, DSO, OBE, GM, MP for Winchester, 1964-79, was born on June 19, 1914. He died on May 4, 2013, aged 98
Ilona Horthy: as a young Red Cross nurse she was tending the wounded on the Eastern front in 1944 when German troops crossed the border into Hungary
Hungarian aristocrat who became the daughter-in-law of her country’s ruler, Hitler’s ally Admiral Horthy
Ilona Bowden, née Countess Ilona Edelsheim Gyulai, was the daughter-in-law of Admiral Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya, Regent of Hungary from 1920 to 1944. She witnessed at first hand the falling out between Hitler and his Hungarian ally. When the Nazis toppled the Horthy regime in 1944, Ilona was taken into custody by the SS. In later life she married an English colonel, settled in Sussex and converted to the mystical Islamic sect of Sudrun.
Ilona Edelsheim Gyulai de Marosnémethi et Nádaska was born in 1918 in Budapest, the third and youngest daughter of Grof Lipót EdelsheimGyulai and his Croatian wife Gabriella née Pejacsevich. Ilona and her sisters and stepsister grew up in the care of governesses between the family estate and Budapest, where they spent the winter. In 1937 she attended the Coronation of King George VI in London.
Horthy had been elected Regent of Hungary after the turmoil of the last months of the First World War and the revolution that succeeded it — he was theoretically keeping the throne warm for the Hapsburgs.
In 1939 Ilona met István “Pista” Horthy, the elder son of the Regent, at a ball at the Opera House in Budapest. A fighter pilot, he was 35 and officially vice-regent. He had trained as a mechanical engineer and had worked on the shopfloor at Ford in Detroit for 18 months. Returning to Hungary, he ran a steel factory before becoming head of the Hungarian railway. He proposed to Ilona on a skiing holiday, and they married in April 1940. They spent their honeymoon touring the Middle East in István Horthy’s private aircraft before receiving their own apartment in the royal palace in Buda. Their only son, another István, was born in 1941.
Although Hungarian troops were fighting shoulder to shoulder with Hitler’s armies, Ilona maintained that her husband was profoundly anti-Nazi. He died in an unexplained airplane crash over the Eastern Front in August 1942. She suspected German foul play.
Ilona Horthy, as she was now, was thrown back on her late husband’s family. In her memoirs, she insisted that “The Admiral loved his country perhaps above everything else. During his regency he never tried to enrich himself.”
She worked for the Red Cross, tending the wounded, and was in Szolnok for the unveiling of a statue of her husband on March 19, 1944 when German troops crossed the Hungarian border — Hitler believed that his ally Horthy was wavering. When Ilona returned to Budapest she found German soldiers guarding the palace.
Up till then, Hungary’s large Jewish population had suffered little, but now Jews began almost immediately to be “deported” to unknown destinations. In April 1944 two Slovaks, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, managed to escape from Auschwitz and compiled a report on conditions in the camp. There were detailed descriptions and sketches, the authors supposing that anything up to 6,000 people were being murdered every day.
Ilona became involved in a news-gathering group that met in her flat in the palace. “I read this tremendously shocking description of the gas chamber-equipped extermination camp. One could feel that every word of it is true. I immediately brought this to my father-in-law.” When he read it, she later wrote, he was “deeply shocked”. On July 6, 1944 the Hungarian government halted the further deportation of the Jews. The Prime Minister Sztójay advised the German plenipotentiary, Edmund Veesenmayer, that he had received his instructions from the Regent.
On October 15, 1944 Horthy announced that Hungary had signed an armistice with the Russians, whose army had reached Hungary’s borders. The following day Ilona Horthy and her 3-year-old son and mother-in-law, were deposited with the papal nuncio for protection. Horthy himself was arrested by SS commandos led by the Nazi daredevil Otto Skorzeny. He refused to flee when he heard that his son Miklós had already been taken prisoner. After the departure of the 76-year-old Regent, the pro-Nazi Szálasi regime took his place.
Miklós Jr was sent to Dachau while Ilona and her son joined her parents-in-law in Schloss Hirschberg in Bavaria,where they were kept prisoner until they were liberated by US troops at the end of the war. Horthy, still suspect in the eyes of the Allies, was released later. He stayed in Germany to give evidence in the various trials, not least that of Veesenmayer, the architect of the Final Solution in Hungary, who received a trifling sentence.
With funds collected in the US, Ilona, her son and her in-laws settled in Portugal in 1949. Until she remarried, she helped her father-in-law with his projects, and he would joke that she was his “minister of interior, exterior and finance”.
Horthy died in 1957. Three years later Ilona married Colonel John Wallace Guy Bowden of the Queen’s Own Hussars. At first, they lived in Baghdad, where he was British military attaché in the 1960s.
In the early 1980s the Bowdens bought a manor house in Portugal. From there she made the arrangements for her father-in-law to be reburied according to his wishes in the family vault at Kenderes in central Hungary on September 4, 1993.
Ilona Bowden wrote her memoirs in 2000. They were translated into English as Honour and Duty in 2005. Under the influence of her son, Ilona joined the Sudrun sect of Islam in 1958. She took the name of Rahmaniyah, and he Sharif, and threw herself into the business of the cult, heart and soul.
Ilona Bowden outlived her second husband by 11 years. She is survived by her son, Istvan Horthy.
Countess Ilona Edelsheim Gyulai, Hungarian aristocrat, was born on January 14, 1918. She died on April 18, 2013, aged 95
'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
