Ìîðïåõ, ó÷àñòâîâàâøèé â çàõâàòå îñòðîâà íà Àäðèàòèêå â ÂÌ è â ïëàíèðîâàíèè Ñóýöêîé îïåðàöèè â 1956
Gallant marine decorated for his part in the wartime capture of the Adriatic island of Solta who later helped to plan the Suez operation
As a wartime Royal Marine, Ian Gourlay won the Military Cross for his gallantry, zeal and skill during the seizure of the island of Solta off the coast of Yugoslavia. After the war he helped to plan Britain’s amphibious landings in Egypt during the Suez Crisis. He later served as Commandant General of the Royal Marines from 1971 to 1975 during a period of great change in Britain’s naval strategy.
Commissioned into the Royal Marines in 1940, Gourlay joined the fleet carrier HMS Formidable in September 1941 and saw action in the Mediterranean, including the Allied landings in North Africa and the occupation of Sicily. In early 1944 he was posted to 43 Commando as a Troop Commander and fought in operations among the Adriatic islands and in Yugoslavia. During the seizure of Solta, he sustained a minor scalp wound from long-range artillery fire from the mainland at Split.
In the winter of 1944 the commando had been harassing the 30,000 men of the German XXI Mountain Corps in the freezing highlands of Yugoslavia when the British became no longer welcome to Tito’s communist partisans who were already looking ahead to the political evolution of their country. The Marines were redeployed to the wet and bleak marshes around Lake Commachio near the Italian coast just north of Ravenna. With other commando units, Gourlay’s unit fought a bitter battle throughout April 2 and 3, 1945, with little natural cover to help their advances across minefields towards well-prepared German positions.
In this action, the Royal Marines’ tenth Victoria Cross was posthumously awarded to Corporal Thomas Hunter of 43 Commando — the only one of the war. The aim of drawing Field Marshal Kesselring’s reserves away from a thrust elsewhere was achieved.
At the end of the war Gourlay was selected for the army Staff Course in 1954 and afterwards was appointed Brigade Major to 3 Commando Brigade. He took part in counter-insurgency operations against the EOKA pro-Greek terrorist organisation in Cyprus.
The 1956 demand for an amphibious landing in Egypt as a result of President Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal found Britain woefully under-equipped.
Material and political considerations resulted in a delay of some four months between Nasser’s action and the ill-starred Anglo-French invasion. This made time for plans to be laid and practised for the innovative use of helicopters in an opposed assault from two light fleet carriers. On November 6, two of the three commandos in the brigade were landed conventionally over the beach, but the third arrived by helicopter at a point near the de Lesseps statue on the canal bank.
The Royal Marines had to deal with some of Nasser’s Russian-made tanks before establishing control over Port Said, taking several casualties. Gourlay was appointed OBE for his role in the planning and execution.
His next foreign deployment was to the Far East in 1959 as second-incommand of 42 Commando. Embarked in the newly converted “commando” carrier HMS Bulwark, much experimentation was needed to develop this flexible operational concept.
Promoted Lieutenant Colonel in 1963 and commanding 43 Commando, Gourlay found himself in the jungles of Borneo contributing to Britain’s largest, and indeed final, military commitment of the postwar East of Suez period.
This was the “confrontation” with Indonesia who, by a campaign of subversion and infiltration, intended to disrupt the newly instituted Federation of Malaysia. Gourlay and his men defended the borders of Sarawak and Sabah, protecting the indigenous tribespeople from murder and harassment by President Sukarno’s dacoits.
Gourlay was promoted brigadier in 1966 and posted to Singapore in charge of the commando brigade during the period when Britain’s military commitment in the region was being reduced.
His subsequent tours as a Major General in command of all Royal Marines training and, from 1971, his lengthy tenure as Commandant General, coincided with the shift in naval strategy that occurred in the early 1970s as a result of defence reviews and the end of empire. This shift largely renounced the “east of Suez” roles and fell back on a major contribution to the Nato doctrine of forward defence and flexible response in the Eastern Atlantic theatre.
For the Royal Marines this meant swapping jungle and desert for the mountains and glaciers of north Norway where they became, save for the Norwegians themselves, the most proficient of Nato troops in the business of cold weather survival and fighting in the sparsely populated but vital northern flank of Nato.
Gourlay’s task was to oversee this transition and to initiate co-operation with the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps, a relationship that has since prospered enormously by reason of a shared humour and a hearty attitude in favour of the militarily irregular.
On retiring as a general in 1975, Gourlay was appointed KCB and was invited by Earl Mountbatten to become Director-General of the United World Colleges. He held this post for 15 years, serving under the presidency of both Mountbatten and the Prince of Wales and was appointed Vice-President himself in 1990. He was also appointed to the Royal Victorian Order (CVO).
Gourlay is survived by his wife Natasha, whom he married in 1948, and their son and daughter.
General Sir Ian Gourlay, KCB, CVO, OBE, MC, Royal Marine was born on November 13, 1920. He died on July 17, 2013, aged 92
Ïèëîò áîìáàðäèðîâùèêà, ïðèíèìàøèé óëàñòèå â ïîäãîòîâêå ïîáåãà èç Stalag Luft III
Wartime pilot who helped to plan the ‘Great Escape’ from Stalag Luft III but miscalculated the length of the breakout tunnel
John Nunn had a minor but significant role in the escape of Allied prisoners of war from Stalag Luft III in Silesia in March 1944. He was reading mathematics and statistics at University College London and was a member of the University Air Squadron when he was called up on the outbreak of war, and in time found himself a prisoner. It was his slight miscalculation that resulted in the escape tunnel being too short.
He was piloting a twin-engined Avro Manchester bomber on a mission to bomb Düsseldorf on the night of August 16, 1941, when atmospheric conditions forced him to fly low over the German searchlight belt in Belgium. He was caught in a beam, and an attack by a night fighter killed one of his air-gunners, wounded the nose gunner and set the starboard engine alight.
Finding that the mechanism for jettisoning the bomb load had jammed and knowing that with their weight on board the low-powered Manchester would be unable to reach base on a single engine, he ordered the crew to bale out. But the nose-gunner was unable to move because of his wounds so Nunn took the courageous decision to remain at the controls and attempt a crash landing — an exceptionally hazardous undertaking.
He was injured on landing and miraculously the bombs did not explode. He was able to extricate the wounded front turret gunner, Sergeant Currie, waiting with him for the inevitable arrival of German troops. The first person to arrive on the scene was a 6-year-old Belgian girl to whom Nunn gave his service watch, knowing that he would be relieved of it on capture.
Although Sergeant Currie survived the crash landing, he died later as a result of a punctured lung not being discovered by the usually thorough German medical staff. Nunn was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his skill in bringing the damaged bomber down safely, although he remained conscience-stricken by the loss of two of his crew members.
After the standard interrogation by Luftwaffe intelligence officers, Nunn was sent to the Stalag Luft III prison camp, which had been purpose-built for captured Allied air crew. It was isolated in dense woodland well away from railway stations but it was relatively comfortable as Goering, commanding the Luftwaffe, wished for his own captured air crew to be at least as well housed in Britain, as they were.
The camp had an extensive educational programme, and Nunn was appointed head of the mathematics faculty in the north compound. His expertise was also sought by Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, organiser of the plan to dig three escape tunnels codenamed Tom, Dick and Harry from different starting points as insurance against the discovery of any one of them.
Tom was discovered after earth was found close to its starting point. Shortly afterwards several of the dedicated tunnellers were transferred to a different camp. Bushell decided to focus all efforts on the rapid completion of Harry and asked Nunn to calculate precisely how long the tunnel should be to reach the woodland beyond the perimeter wire, because the distance could not be paced out without inviting discovery.
Nunn made the calculation by trigonometry and it was to his lifelong regret that, for a reason he was never able to discover, the tunnel ended short of the surrounding trees. This led to its discovery during the breakout on the night of March 24, 1944.
It had been planned that 200 prisoners should escape through Harry with priority given to fluent German speakers, but discovery of the exit by a perimeter sentry meant that only 76 got away. As is now well known, 50 of those who were recaptured, including Roger Bushell, were shot on Hitler’s order. Only three escapers made a home run: two Norwegians and one Dutch airman.
John Leslie Nunn was born in Finchley in 1919 and educated at Mill Hill School. After repatriation in 1945 he took a regular commission in the RAF specialising in navigation and intelligence. When promoted to Wing Commander in 1954 he joined the MoD’s joint planning staff to work on the setting up of the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation (Seato) for participation by countries perceived to be threatened by communist China.
He returned to flying in 1955 and commanded 210 Squadron RAF flying Lockheed Neptune maritime patrol aircraft based at Topcliffe in Yorkshire. These played a part in reconnaissance of the Mediterranean region before the Suez operation of 1956.
He served on the Seato staff in Bangkok and from 1963 to 1966 with the Operational Requirements branch of the Air Department in the MoD. On leaving the RAF in 1966 he worked for the following 16 years with the government branch of IBM. He was elected a Conservative councillor for Winchester in 1982 and served as Mayor in 1992.
His wife Joan, née Kelly, predeceased him. He is survived by a son and daughter.
Wing Commander J. L. Nunn, DFC, mathematician, pilot and veteran of Stalag Luft III, was born on April 11, 1919. He died on July 3, 2013, aged 94
Íàâèãàòîð, ó÷àñòâîâàâøèé â áîìáâðäèðîâêàõ Ãåðìàíèè
Navigator whose mastery of radar helped Bomber Command to home in on German targets with precision
Withdrawn from pilot training in America in 1941 because of bouts of extreme air sickness, Robin MacIlwaine retrained as a navigator and became recognised for his exceptional skills. As a result he became a member of the elite Pathfinder Force (PFF) for which he flew more than 50 operations over Germany between 1943 and 1945, in the process winning a DFC.
After the war he was able to realise his previous ambition of becoming a pilot. After training navigators for British South American Airways, he qualified as a civil airline pilot and rose to become a BOAC captain, serving on most of the corporation’s major routes until 1975.
Robin MacIlwaine was born in Georgeham in North Devon in 1920 and grew up in the village. He intended to go to university, but when war broke out in 1939 he joined the Auxiliary Air Force. He had wanted to be a pilot, but there were no vacancies and he found himself training as ground crew, serving as an armourer tending the eight machineguns of a Spitfire in a Battle of Britain fighter squadron. But in December 1940, with the Battle of Britain won, he was selected to travel to the US where he trained to become a pilot at Falcon Field near Tucson, Arizona.
He suffered several bouts of severe debilitating air sickness, but since his general aptitude as aircrew was otherwise considered well above average, he was not grounded and sent home, but transferred to a navigator’s course at Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida, passing out top of his class. On returning to the UK he was posted to an operational training unit to learn specialist navigation on Lancasters.
This done, in early 1943 he was posted to 7 Squadron in the newly formed No 8 Group, the Pathfinder Force, which was tasked to deploy the target-marking techniques that were designed to bring a new accuracy to Bomber Command’s raids on German targets, by the use of the ground-mapping 10cm H2S radar in the use of which MacIlwaine became an expert. For the remainder of 1943 and in 1944 MacIlwaine and No 7 flew sorties against the gamut of heavily defended targets in the industrial Ruhr and to Berlin, completing 45 operations and being stood down in the autumn of 1944. By that time he had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. The member of his aircrew to whom MacIlwaine was ever afterwards to say that he and his skipper owed the most was their rear gunner “Smudge” Smith “who had eyes like a hawk” and gave them warning of the approach of night fighters from astern on numerous occasions. “He’d say: ‘There’s one coming up. Get ready. Corkscrew starboard — go!’” MacIlwaine recalled in later years. “And the fighter would just fly on.”
For the DFC awards, King George VI and the Queen together with Princess Elizabeth came to RAF Oakington near Cambridge to make the presentations, the young princess informing the aviators that a German bomb had on one occasion dropped near “her house” — ie, Buckingham Palace.
MacIlwaine was lucky enough to be able to remain with 7 Squadron in a training capacity. As such, he was able to wangle a place on several more operations when navigators were short. One of his final sorties was the Dresden raid of February 14, 1945. “It was almost like an academic exercise,” he said in later years. “The Germans had started the war. That’s how we felt. You thought of the town as a target. You had to. You couldn’t cold-bloodedly kill civilians.”
At the end of the war MacIlwaine, now a squadron leader, moved with his wife Anne, whom he had married in 1943, and their son to London where he joined British South American Airways (BSAA), set up by the PFF’s founder and commander, the Australian Air Vice-Marshal Don Bennett. When MacIlwaine asked for a job as a navigator, Bennett told him: “I don’t want navigators. You teach my pilots to navigate and I’ll get them to teach you how to fly.” And so, belatedly, MacIlwaine achieved his boyhood dream of becoming a pilot.
In July 1949, now flying for BOAC, of which BSAA had become a part, he was among a crew whose members were commended for bravery after their Avro York flew into a severe hailstorm en route to Montevideo, Uruguay. Their aircraft’s windscreen had smashed, its controls were severely damaged and one engine had been put out of action. Although both pilots were gashed by glass, they made an emergency landing at Porto Alegre in neighbouring Brazil.
MacIlwaine continued to fly for BOAC for the next 25 years, graduating to jets in the mid-1960s when he piloted the Boeing 707. He retired in 1975 but flew for a few more months after that with Iraqi Airways.
His wife died in 1967. His second marriage to Gwen Cundy was dissolved. He is survived by his third wife, Jill, by the daughter and two sons of his first marriage and by four stepchildren.
Squadron Leader Robin MacIlwaine, DFC, wartime Pathfinder Force navigator and postwar airline pilot, was born on July 24, 1920. He died on April 22, 2013, aged 92
