Wartime gunner officer who flew perilous sorties to find targets and guide shell fire
Bob Carr made his name as a gunner officer flying light aircraft for the direction of artillery fire. Techniques for aerial acquisition of ground targets had been developed during the First World War but corrections to fall of shot and reporting results brought only patchy returns. Teaching gunners to fly became the solution.
By the time Carr joined 654 Air Observation Post Squadron RAF in 1942 new techniques were in use, together with good radio communications. Gunner pilots spoke directly to the gun line, gave corrections with professional expertise and reported fire effect. But it was dangerous work. The Auster aircraft were vulnerable to ground fire and easy targets for enemy fighters.
They were flimsy aircraft; being caught in a thunderstorm in one was often likened to being blown about in a brown-paper bag. Yet they could land and take off from short and hastily prepared strips, making them ideal for close co-operation with ground forces. Radio contact between aircraft and the gun line was by two-way high-frequency radio.
The squadron received its baptism of fire in Algeria in early 1943 flying Auster Mark 3 high-wing, single-engined mono-planes. Support for gunner regiments of the British 1st Army was switched to the more battle-experienced 8th Army towards the end of the North African campaign, by which time Carr and his surviving fellow pilots regarded themselves as professionals.
As a flight commander of 654 Squadron, Carr flew artillery target acquisition sorties for the Allied invasion of Sicily in July, 1943 and in support of the landings at Salerno in September. In preparation for Salerno, the pilots learnt the art of directing naval guns designed primarily for ship-to-ship attack, using a shot correction system different from that for field artillery.
As the Allied advance up the Italian peninsula slowed during the winter of 1943-44 so the importance of accurately directed artillery fire increased and target spotting from the air became more hazardous. The relatively slow Austers were highly manoeuvrable, allowing contour flying to avoid being spotted, but the Italian terrain was not ideal for the construction of landing strips. “Crasher Carr” — as he became known — had several narrow escapes on landing close to trees and an emergency landing on a hastily prepared strip alongside Mount Vesuvius.
He flew sorties in Italy in support of the British 10th Corps, the 1st Canadian Corps and the 2nd Polish Corps, for which service he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in March 1944 — the citation praising his courage and tenacity in finding targets. The squadron was also granted the honour of wearing the Sirena (Syrenka) Badge (Maid of Warsaw) by the Polish Corps before being re-equipped with the larger, three-seat Mk 4 Austers.
Robert Michael Carr was the son of a gunner officer who had served in the First World War. Educated at Marlborough and RMA Woolwich, he was commissioned in July 1939. He reverted to standard staff and regimental appointments after attending the first postwar course at the Staff College, Camberley.
From there he went to Burma and was appointed MBE for his service with Headquarters Burma Command before the grant of independence in 1948.
He qualified as a parachutist in 1951 to join 33 Airborne Light Battery RA in the Suez Canal Zone, to which unit he returned after a staff appointment in England to take part in the 1956 Suez operation. From 1961 to 1962 he commanded 45 Field Regiment RA with the Army of the Rhine and subsequently went to the Imperial Defence College, still as lieutenant-colonel, as one of the three junior Directing Staff members, one from each service.
This unusual appointment indicated that he was exceptionally well thought of and two years later he was promoted directly to brigadier to be CRA of the 42nd Lancashire Division of the Territorial Army. This was one of several postwar periods when the TA was in the process of reduction and reorganisation and Carr found himself fighting to retain the artillery capability he considered essential for the 42nd Division on mobilisation.
Following a brigadier’s staff appointment in the Ministry of Defence, he left the Army in 1968 to take up a managerial appointment with Hambros Bank, initially in London and later in Essex and Hampshire. On retiring, he became treasurer of his local Conservative Party Association and also travelled the UK to chair inquiries and produce reports for the Department of Transport.
He married Annabel, daughter of Brigadier Philip Yorke, in 1963. She survives him, with a son and daughter.
Brigadier Robert Carr, MBE, DFC, air observation pilot, was born on March 5, 1920. He died on April 11, 2013, aged 93
Cubiss: he adopted the hook on being reprimanded for failing to salute correctly
Fearless Korean War veteran of formidable appearance and sharp, subversive wit
Quite aside from the sinister hook which had replaced his right hand, Malcolm Cubiss was a formidable figure. He had a swift and forthright intelligence, a rasping voice and pitiless wit — uninhibited by any great respect for authority. He would think nothing of saying to some senior officer over the radio or telephone, “For God’s sake speak up man, there’s a hell of a lot of noise down here.” He was a natural raconteur and as fearless of giving offence to the pious or pompous as he was of the Queen’s enemies.
Having been recalled as a reservist in August 1950, he was awarded one of the first immediate Military Crosses of the Korean War. At the end of November 1950, the 1st Royal Northumberland Fusiliers were holding a position near Sibyon-ni at the limit of the autumn advance into North Korea. The defence was dominated by “Gibraltar Hill” and the platoon Cubiss commanded held the summit. The citation for his MC tells the story, “At 0330 hours on November 30 he was attacked by the enemy in well over four times his own strength. The fighting was bitter and quarter was neither asked nor given. By dawn the enemy was beaten off. The total number of casualties will never be known, as the enemy took pains to remove their dead. He was again attacked on the following two nights and again he inflicted many casualties in hand to hand fighting. He knew his feature was the key to the battalion’s position and there was never the slightest doubt it would be held.”
He emerged unscathed from this incident but was twice slightly wounded in the Battle of the Imjin River in April 1951. Two months later he was seriously injured when a mine he was arming in preparation for laying exploded prematurely. He lost his right arm to the elbow, was injured in the head and had both eardrums destroyed. He had already applied for a regular commission in his parent regiment, The West Yorkshires, but the severity of his injuries technically precluded it. Fortunately, Field Marshal Lord Slim, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, was Colonel of the West Yorkshires and a word from him settled the matter.
For several years his medical category restricted him to home postings but, as a keen shot, he devised a contraption which allowed him to fire a rifle with one hand. While shooting at Bisley the springs in the mechanism took over control and he was left struggling on his back on the firing point like an upturned beetle. Using a modified version, he became a marksman with all small arms weapons.
As a young officer he wore a prosthesis which terminated in a clenched artificial hand but, after being reprimanded in the street in York by a major in the Royal Army Education Corps for not saluting correctly, he adopted the hook or wore an empty sleeve.
He attended the Staff College, Camberley, in 1959 and after two years as brigade major of a Territorial Army brigade in Nottingham was passed fit enough to serve in Germany. Later, he became a College Chief Instructor at Sandhurst and was then promoted to lieutenant-colonel to command the training depot of the King’s Division at Strensall, north of York.
On the day before the new General commanding the District was due to visit the depot, Cubiss was passing his adjutant’s empty office when the telephone rang, so he took the call. It was the ADC who, thinking he was speaking to the adjutant asked, “How is your CO known to his friends? The General wishes to know?” “Piggy” said Cubiss promptly. “Throughout the Army he is known as Piggy,” and put down the telephone. Predictably, the General stepped from his car next day with the greeting, “Good morning Piggy.” Cubiss allowed his undamaged left arm to fall from the salute. “Piggy?” he gasped. “My name is Malcolm — always has been.” It turned out to be a satisfactory visit. Put at some disadvantage, the General expressed delight in all he saw.
Cubiss was GSO 1 (chief of staff) at the School of Infantry, Warminster, 1971-73, then promoted colonel and sent to Belfast as Deputy Commander of 39 Infantry Brigade responsible for security of the city. This was a peak period of Provisional IRA terrorist activity and Cubiss shared time on the streets with the brigade commander. After being blown against a wall by an explosion, he recognised the doctor helping to pick him up as the one who had dealt with his injuries in Korea 20 years earlier. “Stay away from me can’t you,” he rasped. “I always get blown up when you’re around.” He was mentioned in dispatches at the end of his tour in the Province.
In 1974 he was appointed Chief of Staff of the Allied Command Europe Mobile Force (Land). The task of the force was to reinforce the extreme flanks of Nato in a period of East-West tension. Two or three flank nations were inclined to raise last-minute objections to exercises on their territory. The Chief of Staff’s custom of tapping the table gently but persistently with his hook proved persuasive, as it was in training his staff to be punctual.
He returned to Northern Ireland in 1977 as colonel in charge of logistic support for operations and was appointed CBE in 1979. After a period as chief of the Crisis Management Staff at SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe), he was promoted brigadier to be Deputy Commander Western District at home in 1980.
John Malcolm Cubiss was born in Knaresborough, North Yorkshire, and educated locally. His first wife, Ann, predeceased him. He is survived by his second wife, Wendy, and two sons of his first marriage.
Brigadier J. M. Cubiss, CBE, MC, infantry officer, was born on October 12, 1929. He died on August 7, 2013, aged 83
Jean Elshtain
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Maverick American political philosopher who infuriated liberals with her staunch defence of George W. Bush’s War on Terror
As she watched thousands of New Yorkers trudging home after the collapse of the Twin Towers, Jean Bethke Elshtain wept. Television pictures of mass refugees reminded her of her own family’s flight from tsarist Russia to freedom in America.
September 11, 2001 was a turning point in her life and, she felt, the life of America. “Americans don’t have living memories of what it means to flee a city in flames,” she said to herself. “Americans have not been horrified by refugees fleeing burning cities. No more. Now we know.” Elshtain, whose mix of conservative, feminist and Christian views made her hard to categorise, was determined to take a prominent part in the debate about how to respond to al-Qaeda’s attacks. She believed that with America’s great power and wealth came responsibilities.
She argued that 9/11 was not merely a “bad accident” but marked a shift in the history of warfare that was “evil” and needed a robust response if it was to be defeated. She became a defender of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and, that rare thing, a distinguished intellectual unafraid to defend George W. Bush’s neoconservative interventionist foreign policy. In her 2003 book Just War Against Terror she drew upon her Christian faith to argue for the notion of a “just war” and that ridding the world of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein was as justifiable as defeating Hitler and Mussolini.
Her pro-war stance did not endear her to American liberals as she found herself having to put a brave face on the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians in the wake of Saddam’s overthrow and the torture by Americans and their allies of al-Qaeda suspects. Her failure adequately to condemn the gratuitous cruelty inflicted on detainees and her defence of extended solitary confinement and sensory deprivation was thought by many to sit oddly with her Christian faith. She dismissed moral outrage against bad behaviour by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and an insistence on the rule of law in wartime as “moralistic code fetishism” and “rule-mania”.
Nor was Elshtain a comfortable ally of George W. Bush, who took her advice and endorsement and rewarded her with a place on the Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She was critical of the triumphalism of his “Mission Accomplished” boast to returning armed forces and of his failure to plan the occupation of Iraq, which she put down to American impatience. “We want this good thing and believe it should happen. And then when it doesn’t happen immediately we start to engage in recriminations and become more cynical about what was going on in the first place.
“Be certain before you intervene, even in a just cause, that you have a reasonable chance of success,” she wrote. “Don’t barge in and make a bad situation worse.” In Kosovo, she believed that the Anglo-American intervention was performed without understanding the tragic consequences in terms of frightened refugees fleeing across borders. In Somalia, she believed that US intervention was not powerful enough to achieve its stated aim of restoring “minimal civil peace”. In Rwanda, the US failed to prevent the genocide of 500,000 because its fear of intervention meant it did not even condemn the killers. “By refusing to even use the word genocide . . . and by describing what was going on in Rwanda as just one of those tribal conflicts that they have in Africa all the time, the moral issue was never really engaged.”
Until the last ten years, Elshtain was often mistaken for a liberal because she regularly wrote for The New Republic and The Nation, yet her ideological stance was always ambiguous. Although critical of the American worship of heroic individualism, she was wary of the insistence on individual rights, of gender, race and sexuality that typifies American progressive politics, and suspicious of the state intruding into social units such as families, schools and religious communities. She favoured more public investment on welfare for married couples and on countering poverty, but questioned the ethics of scientific “progress”, particularly in genetic engineering, abortion and the treatment of the disabled. Her 1993 tract Democracy on Trial warned against multiculturalism — a point recently remade by the outgoing Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks.
The importance of her faith — she was brought up as a Lutheran and was a devotee of St Augustine — and her eagerness to introduce Christian ethics into discussions of the traditionally secular subject of politics set her apart from most academics. She was simultaneously appointed to the department of political science and the divinity school at the University of Chicago. “What I do is political theory with ethics as the heart of the matter,” she explained.
Despite questioning the trends of modern life, she counted herself a feminist and deplored the way women were demoted when it came to important challenges to society such as war. (She grew up a tomboy and begged her parents to buy her a gun. Her earliest ambition was to be a war correspondent.) Her first book, Public Man, Private Woman (1981), described women as “a silenced population . . . taken for granted or assigned a lesser order of significance and honour compared with the public, political activities of males.”
Elshtain was born Jean Paulette Bethke in 1941, the oldest of five children, into “a very hardworking, down-to-earth, religious, Lutheran family”, in the farming town of Windsor, Colorado. Her grandparents were immigrants: her father, Paul, was a teacher and her mother, Helen, a housewife. She was an unusual child, reading books about war and sports heroes, and cropping her hair to look like Joan of Arc. She wanted to be “a leader of men, too. Maybe a warrior. Maybe a martyr, though there didn’t seem to be much call for martyrs any more.”
Aged 10, she was struck by polio and after years in hospital in Denver walked for the rest of her life with a limp. “If you are a very active, athletic child, as I was, and a tomboy, and all of a sudden you are flat on your back and you can’t walk, it does something to you,” she said. She started a BA in history at Colorado State University then switched to the University of Colorado, Boulder, and gained masters’ degrees from there and the University of Wisconsin and a doctorate from Brandeis in 1973. After teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, she joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1995. In 2006 she delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh.
She married at 18, giving birth to her first child the following year, and became a single mother of three when she divorced in 1964. The following year she married Errol Elshtain. In 2011 she became a Roman Catholic, arguing that the Reformation had served its purpose. Last year she suffered two heart attacks. She died of endocarditis, a heart valve infection, and is survived by her husband, three daughters and one son.
Jean Elshtain, political philosopher, was born on January 6, 1941. She died on August 11, 2013, aged 72
