Îò Chestnut
Ê Chestnut
Äàòà 11.07.2012 13:52:21
Ðóáðèêè WWII; Ñïåöñëóæáû; Àðìèÿ; ÂÂÑ;

[2Chestnut] Âîåííûå íåêðîëîãè èç áðèòàíñêèõ ãàçåò

Capt Tony Denison
Îôèöåð SAS, ïîä ÷üèì êîìàíäîâàíèåì áûëè âçÿòû â ïëåí 500 ñîëäàò ïîòèâíèêà è óíè÷òîæåíû òðè ïðîòèâîòàíêîâûå ãðóïïû

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/special-forces-obituaries/9390480/Capt-Tony-Denison.html

Maj-Gen Colin Wallis-King

Âîåííûé ðàçâåä÷èê, íàáëþäàâøèé çà âîçìîæíûìè ñèãíàëàìè ïîäãîòîâêè ê âîéíå ñî ñòîðîíû ÑÑÑÐ

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/army-obituaries/9387557/Maj-Gen-Colin-Wallis-King.html

Zvi Aharoni

Èçðàèëüñêèé ñåêðåòíûé àãåíò, âûñëåäèâøèé Ýéõìàíà è ó÷àñòâîâàâøèé â åãî ïîõèùåíèè

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3471441.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00314/109496677_Aharoni_314668c.jpg



Israeli secret service agent who first identified Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960 and helped to smuggle him back to Israel for trial

He lived quietly in a village near Exeter until his death, helping abandoned animals, keeping chickens and running the barbecue at local tennis club events. Blending into the background had always been one of Zvi Aharoni’s great skills. Few locals had any idea that this modest, amiable, German-accented man, living under the name of Hermann Arndt, had once been a key part of the Israeli team that carried out one of the most audacious and controversial missions of secret service history: the 1960 tracking down and kidnapping in Argentina of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

Eichmann had held various key bureaucratic roles in the Nazi leadership’s planning for the expropriation of Jews and others and their deportation to the death camps. He had managed to evade capture at the end of the war and was believed by many to be dead but in fact had escaped to South America. One of the most famous “Nazi hunters”, Simon Wiesenthal, continued to research Eichmann’s whereabouts, and in the late 1950s the Israeli authorities were told by a Frankfurt prosecutor that he was living under an alias in Argentina. An earlier tip-off by a blind member of the Jewish community in Argentina had been initially disbelieved by the Israeli authorities, but provided valuable information when the search was begun in earnest.

Aharoni, working for a special Mossad unit pursuing Nazi war criminals, was sent to track Eichmann down and prepare for his capture. Armed with an old SS photograph of Eichmann he travelled in March 1960 to Buenos Aires, and located the house on Garibaldi Street where Eichmann was living as Ricardo Klement. Hidden under a tarpaulin in a truck outside the house Aharoni first spotted Eichmann “collecting the washing”, and shadowed him and his family’s movements for some time. Posing as a local he used a concealed camera to approach the family, and was able to take photographs so that Israeli specialists could confirm that this was Eichmann. He even sat behind him on a bus and, he recalled later, had to resist the temptation to take personal revenge on the man involved in the murder of so many of his fellow Jews, as he wanted Eichmann to have “a free and fair trial”.

Plans were now laid for a special Mossad team to kidnap its target. It was a tense affair, as the Israelis knew they were acting outside international law. On May 11, 1960, the team of seven lay in wait near the bus station where Eichmann used to return home from his work at a Mercedes-Benz factory. Aharoni confirmed Eichmann’s identity as he got off a bus; he was jumped on and bundled into a car driven by Aharoni, who warned him: “If you move, you will be shot.” Eichmann replied in German: “I accept my fate.” That, Aharoni said later, “was the moment I knew for sure we had the right man. I was elated”.

Eichmann was taken to a safe house where Aharoni, who had learnt fluent German in his childhood, led the initial interrogation. “Who’s going to look after my wife and children?” Eichmann is said to have asked Aharoni, who replied: “You worry so much about your wife and children, but how could you and your associates murder children in the tens and hundreds of thousands?”

“I did what everyone else was doing” was among Eichmann’s excuses, a foretaste of the defence at his trial which led the philosopher Hannah Arendt to write of “the banality of evil”.

“When I looked into his eyes,” Aharoni reflected later, “I am sure I should have felt revulsion, or anger, or even wonder at what he had done, but I have interrogated so many monsters that it had no effect on me.” He added that he respected the way that Eichmann “answered all my questions, he didn’t try to hide anything or mislead me”.

The Israeli team spirited Eichmann out of Argentina nine days later on an El Al plane after he had been drugged, dressed in an El Al uniform and passed off as a crew member who was ill. Eichmann then stood trial in 1961 in Jerusalem, and was hanged after being convicted of crimes against humanity.

Although Aharoni disapproved of the death penalty, seeing Eichmann brought to justice was some compensation for the persecution he had witnessed as a young Jew growing up in Germany. He had been born Hermann Aronheim in Frankfurt an der Oder in Germany in 1921. His family moved to Berlin in the mid-1930s, and had planned emigration to Palestine, but his father, a lawyer, was too ill to do so. After his father died the rest of the family finally left, shortly before the Kristallnacht pogroms against Jews in Germany hinted at the Holocaust to come. It was, he reflected later, a bitter irony that his father’s death had saved the family from the death camps. “If he had lived another year, I would have gone up the chimney at Auschwitz.”

In Palestine he changed to his Hebrew name, Zvi Aharoni, enlisted in the British Army to fight the Nazis, and was used as an intelligence officer interrogating German PoWs in Italy.

After the war he fought for the Zionist military organisation Haganah in battles over the creation of the state of Israel, and then worked for the domestic Israeli intelligence service, the Shin Bet, before joining Mossad and the hunt for Nazi war criminals. He was involved in the protracted and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to find and prosecute Josef Mengele, who had conducted experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz. Aharoni was convinced that he had located Mengele, but the Israeli government decided not to continue the attempt to bring him to justice.

He retired from Mossad in the 1970s and worked for a time for a bank in Hong Kong where he met his second wife, Valerie Arndt (his first wife,Teulah, had died in 1973). He then worked in China for one of the first foreign enterprises to have permission to do business there. Afterwards he moved with Valerie — who had been born in Britain — to live in the UK, working initially as a security officer in a London hotel. Eventually they moved to Devon, where, Aharoni said, he could “escape the horrors I have known”. He lived quietly apart from a brief flurry of publicity in the 1990s when he published a book, Operation Eichmann, about his most significant operation.

He is survived by his second wife and by a son and daughter from his first marriage.

Zvi Aharoni, Israeli secret service agent, was born on February 6, 1921. He died on May 26, 2012, aged 91


'Á³é â³äëóíàâ. Æîâòî-ñèí³ çíàìåíà çàòð³ïîò³ëè íà ñòàíö³¿ çíîâ'
Îò Chestnut
Ê Chestnut (11.07.2012 13:52:21)
Äàòà 16.07.2012 18:51:14

Âîåííûå íåêðîëîãè èç áðèòàíñêèõ ãàçåò

Denis Warner

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9401822/Denis-Warner.html

Âîåíêîð, îñâåùàâøèé ÂÌÂ, Êîðåþ, Èíäîêèòàé, Ìàëàéþ è Âüåòíàì


>Zvi Aharoni

>Èçðàèëüñêèé ñåêðåòíûé àãåíò, âûñëåäèâøèé Ýéõìàíà è ó÷àñòâîâàâøèé â åãî ïîõèùåíèè

> http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3471441.ece

è åãî ñîðàòíèê

Yaakov Meidad

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3476104.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00316/109661538_Meidad_316167k.jpg



Mossad agent who masterminded the daring operation to seize the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann from the streets of Argentina

With his leading involvement in two of the most daring Nazi-hunting missions carried out by Mossad, Yaakov Meidad was one of the Israeli secret service’s most successful operatives. Balding, and with a slight paunch, Meidad cut more of a George Smiley figure than that of a James Bond, although his exploits were indeed like something from one of the most exciting of thrillers.

Meidad’s most renowned mission was the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann off the streets of Buenos Aires in 1960. It was Meidad’s job to rent two apartments that were to be used as safe houses, as well as the hiring of suitably large cars that could transport the Mossad team and their victim around the Argentine capital. Finding such vehicles was no easy task, although the resourceful Meidad managed to rent a Chevrolet that was destined for the breaker’s yard for the huge sum of $5,000 — some $35,000 today.

Eichmann had earlier been identified with the aid of an old SS photograph by another Mossad agent, Zvi Aharoni (obituary, July 11, 2012). After Eichmann was snatched, Meidad was one of the agents who had to guard the former Nazi while the team waited to take their prize to Israel. Meidad later recalled how their captive was a “small nervous man”, whose physical presence somehow did not measure up to the enormity of his crimes.

Before the team left Buenos Aires, Meidad told the operation’s leader, Isser Harel, that the Chevrolet should be returned to the garage so that the State of Israel should have its deposit refunded. A reluctant Harel agreed, and Meidad took back the car and got back the money.

Meidad very nearly did not make it on to the El Al Bristol Britannia that flew Eichmann and the kidnap team out of Argentina. His hire car burst into flames en route to the airport, and he had to catch a taxi instead. He was the last person to board the plane, which eventually landed in Israel on the morning of May 22.

At 4pm the following afternoon, the Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben- Gurion, informed the Israeli parliament and the world that “Israeli security forces” had located Eichmann, and that he was under arrest in Israel. Naturally, the identity of Meidad and all those who were involved was kept secret for years.

Yaakov Meidad was born in 1919 in Breslau in Germany –— now Wroclaw in Poland. His father was a doctor who had won the Iron Cross in the First World War, and his mother was a language teacher who passed on her linguistic skills to her only child. These would prove invaluable for Meidad in his career as a spy. After Hitler came to power in 1933, Meidad’s parents sent him to Palestine, where, at the age of 17, Meidad joined the Haganah, the Jewish underground army, and he enrolled in that organisation’s secret officers’ course.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Meidad was said to have been the first Jew in Palestine to volunteer to serve in the British Army, in which he served with distinction. Both his parents were murdered in the Holocaust. After the creation of the State of Israel, Meidad served in the Israeli Defence Forces as an artillery officer, and he fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. After serving in several more military posts, he joined Mossad in 1955, where his languages, easy-going manner, military experience and unremarkable appearance quickly saw him rise through the ranks.

Although the Eichmann kidnap was the most famous operation in which Meidad was involved, his leading role in the assassination in Montevideo in February 1965 of the Latvian war criminal Herberts Cukurs would prove to be his most remarkable.

Posing as an Austrian businessman called Anton Kuenzle, Meidad had pretended to befriend Cukurs since the previous September. Cukurs was running a seaplane joyride business on the shores of an artificial lake near São Paulo, although the business was barely surviving, and the promises made by “Kuenzle” of exciting new money-making opportunities seemed to eradicate Cukurs’s natural suspicion of strangers. The Latvian had every reason to be cautious. His name had been mentioned during the Eichmann trial, in which it was revealed how Cukurs — nicknamed the “Hangman of Riga” — had collaborated with the Nazi death squads, and had personally killed Jewish women and children.

Over the next few months, Cukurs and “Kuenzle” formed a friendship and a nascent business partnership, during which Cukurs tested the shooting ability of Meidad, whose cover story claimed that he had served in the Wehrmacht during the war. Meidad passed the test, although he would later recount how he was more worried that Cukurs would spot the fact he was circumcised during a roadside rest break on a long car journey. Fortunately, Cukurs did not appear to notice.

By the New Year of 1965, Meidad had sufficiently gained the trust of Cukurs to entice him to Montevideo under the pretext of establishing a business in the Uruguayan capital. At the beginning of February, Meidad cabled for a four-strong Mossad hit team to fly to South America to join him and within a few days a small house some 100 metres from the sea was chosen as the place for the Mossad execution.

Cukurs arrived in Montevideo on Air France flight 083 on the morning of February 23, where he was greeted by Meidad and then driven in a black VW Beetle to the prospective “office”. Meidad got out the car, and bid a wary Cukurs to follow him up the garden path.

After the two men entered the house, Cukurs was jumped on by the Mossad agents, who were dressed only in their underpants in order to avoid staining their clothes with blood. Although the plan had been to overpower the Latvian and make him face a form of trial before killing him, Cukurs put up such a tremendous fight that he was shot twice in the head during the struggle. It is not known who pulled the trigger, and Meidad never revealed it.

Cukurs was packed into a trunk, and the Mossad agents quickly left the country. After his body was discovered, Cukurs’s family was convinced that the mysterious “Kuenzle” was responsible, and Meidad’s face was splashed in newspapers across the world.

Safely hidden back in Israel, neither the press nor police found Meidad, who would never admit publicly to his role until he published his memoir — under the name of Kuenzle — in Hebrew 15 years ago. The book was eventually published in English in 2004, to surprisingly little attention.

After his retirement from Mossad, Meidad took up the study of psychology in 1977. In February this year, he was able to attend the opening of the exhibition of the Eichmann kidnap at the Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, where, despite being in a very weakened state, he managed to smile.

Yaakov Meidad, soldier and spy, was born in 1919. He died on June 30, 2012, aged 93



'Á³é â³äëóíàâ. Æîâòî-ñèí³ çíàìåíà çàòð³ïîò³ëè íà ñòàíö³¿ çíîâ'
Îò Chestnut
Ê Chestnut (16.07.2012 18:51:14)
Äàòà 20.07.2012 19:29:08

Âîåííûå íåêðîëîãè èç...

Assef Shawkat

Ãëàâà ñëóæáû áåçîïàñíîñòè Ñèðèè

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/politics-obituaries/9410079/Assef-Shawkat.html

Col Hugh Toye

Âîåííûé ðàçâåä÷èê, áîðîâøèéñÿ ñ ðÿäîì íàöèîíàëüíî-îñâîáîäèòåëüíûõ äâèæåíèé

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/army-obituaries/9406872/Col-Hugh-Toye.html

Major Alastair Coke

Âîåííûå Êðåñòû çà Ýðèòðåþ è Áèðìó

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/army-obituaries/9404106/Major-Alastair-Coke.html

Tom Unwin

Áåæåíåö èç ×åõîñëîâàêèè, ïîñòóïèâøèé íà Êîëîíèàëüíóþ Ñëóæáó è ïîçæå ïûòàâøèéñÿ îðãàíèçîâàòü ïîáåã Äóá÷åêà

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9413034/Tom-Unwin.html

Gad Beck

Áåðëèíåö, åâðåé è ãîìîñåêñóàëèñò, ñóìåë íå ïîïàñòü â íàöèñòñêèé êîíöëàãåðü

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9412925/Gad-Beck.html

Omar Suleiman

Åãèïåòñêèé âîåííûé è ðàçâåä÷èê, ïðàâàÿ ðóêà Ìóáàðàêà

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/politics-obituaries/9413065/Omar-Suleiman.html


'Á³é â³äëóíàâ. Æîâòî-ñèí³ çíàìåíà çàòð³ïîò³ëè íà ñòàíö³¿ çíîâ'
Îò Chestnut
Ê Chestnut (20.07.2012 19:29:08)
Äàòà 20.07.2012 19:33:51

Re: Âîåííûå íåêðîëîãè

General Sir David Fraser

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3479877.ece

Áðèòàíñêèé ïðåäñòàâèòåëü ïðè ÍÀÒÎ è àâòîð áèîãðàôèé Áðóêà è Ðîììåëÿ

UK Military Representative to Nato and prolific writer of military history and biography as well as novels

David Fraser was a man of incisive mind. Highly articulate, he wrote with a swift lucidity, making him as formidable a staff officer as he was an able commander. His pungent comments on the views of others could be discomforting — not for nothing was he known as “Fraser the Razor” — but his penetrating analyses of the controversial military issues of the day were usually welcomed. When he wished, he could display great charm and no mean wit.

David William Fraser was the son of Brigadier the Hon William Fraser, DSO, MC, Grenadier Guards, the younger son of the 18th Lord Saltoun, Chief of Clan Fraser. He was descended from a long line of eminent soldiers. His great-great-grandfather, the 16th Lord Saltoun, served in the First Foot Guards and commanded the Light Companies at Waterloo; the 17th Lord served in the 28th Foot, the Gloucesters, and the 18th in the Grenadiers. His mother was Pamela Maude, widow of Major W. La T. Congreve, VC, DSO, MC, who won his posthumous VC at Longueval in July 1916, serving with the Rifle Brigade.

Educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, Fraser was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards in 1941. He served in the 2nd Armoured Battalion in the Guards Armoured Division in the North West European Campaign from Normandy to the Baltic, 1944-45. Later, from 1960 to 1962, he commanded the 1st Battalion, taking them to the Cameroons in 1961 during a plebiscite to decide the UN-Trustee territories’ structure on independence. The southern part of West (British) Cameroon chose to join the French Cameroon Republic with which it had little in common. Fraser was said to have reassured the local headmen in his area that all would be well, as the union of England and Scotland was not going too badly!

He established his credentials as an all arms commander when commanding 19th Infantry Brigade of the UK-based Strategic Reserve from 1963 to 1965. His headquarters and selected units were sent to North Borneo during Indonesia’s “confrontation” with Malaysia and deployed to the Sibu district, on the Rajang river, a densely forested region previously only thinly protected. His first senior staff appointment was as Director of Defence Plans (Army) in the Ministry of Defence from 1966 to 1969 during the critical years of Denis Healey’s rolling Defence Reviews, when the final withdrawal from East of Suez was being decided and the Services reshaped for a predominantly European role.

After commanding the 4th Armoured Division in the British Army of the Rhine, where his German helped to establish close relations with his Bundeswehr colleagues and the local people, he returned to the Ministry of Defence in 1971 as Assistant Chief of Defence Staff (Policy), serving Admiral of the Fleet Sir Peter (later Lord) Hill-Norton, Chief of Defence Staff (CDS). On promotion to lieutenant-general two years later, he joined the Army Board as Vice-Chief of the General Staff to deal with the 1975 Defence Review, when all three Services were faced with yet more drastic cuts.

He and the CDS, General Sir Michael (later Field Marshal Lord) Carver, decided that the Army’s field command structure, swollen by the introduction of sophisticated systems of communication and their attendant operators and vehicles, should be dramatically reduced by the elimination of the brigade level of command in the British Army of the Rhine. It was a potentially bold reform based on a concept used by Rommel in the Western Desert, where regimental commanders had controlled groups of all arms tailored to the operations in hand.

The three divisions in Germany and HQ 3rd Division from England were reorganised into four small armoured divisions, intending that the functions of the former brigades be undertaken by ad hoc “task forces” grouped from tank, infantry and artillery units within each division to deal with immediate operational demands, as they arose. The experiment failed because it was not radical enough. To match the model Rommel had used, the British regimental structure would also have had to be changed to one of large regiments with headquarters capable of controlling units of all the fighting arms and their immediate logistic support. While feasible — with monumental upheaval — in the Army of the Rhine, such a structure would not have permitted routine interchange with units of the rest of the Army designed for rapid piecemeal deployments to meet emergencies elsewhere.

Within the limited scope of reform undertaken in Germany, spans of command proved too wide and unmanageable. Nevertheless, when brigades were reintroduced a few years later, they were given smaller, more easily redeployable headquarters and spans of command did not shrink back completely to those of the pre-Fraser period. Had the Fraser concept been a success, he would have had a strong claim to the post of Chief of the General Staff. As it was, his final years in the Army were spent as United Kingdom Military Representative to Nato from 1975 to 1977 and as Commandant of the Royal College of Defence Studies in Belgrave Square in 1978-80. His political sensitivity, intellectual breadth, command of languages and imposing presence made him ideally suited to both assignments.

On retirement from the Army in 1980, he undertook the task of completing the biography of Field Marshal Viscount Alanbrooke, begun by Sir Arthur Bryant. This was followed by his highly regarded And We Shall Shock Them: The British Army in the Second World War, and a social history, The Christian Watt Papers, before turning to a successful series of ten historically based novels, including A Kiss For the Enemy, The Dragon’s Teeth, A Candle for Judas, The Pain of Winning and then, on return to history, Knight’s Cross: A Life of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, which appeared in 1993. Subsequently, he published biographies of William Douglas Home and Frederick the Great, this last being acknowledged as probably his finest work. His memoirs, Wars and Shadows, published in 2002, reveal a man more sensitive than his public persona, devoted to his parents for their individualism and care for him, to the Scotland of his boyhood and the friends of his youth killed in the war.

He was appointed OBE following his battalion command in 1962, knighted KCB in 1973 and advanced to GCB on leaving the Army in 1980. He was an ADC General to the Queen, 1977-80 and Colonel of the Royal Hampshire Regiment, 1981-87. He was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant of Hampshire in 1982 and served as Vice-Lord Lieutenant of the county, 1988-96.

His first marriage, in 1947, to Anne Balfour, by whom he had a daughter, was dissolved. His second in 1957 was to Julia de La Hey. He is survived by his second wife and the daughter of his first marriage and two sons and two daughters of his second.

General Sir David Fraser, GCB, OBE, UK Military Representative to Nato, 1975-77, was born on December 30, 1920. He died on July 15, 2012, aged 91

Admiral Sir David Williams

Ãëàâíîêîìàíäóþùèé Õîóì Êîììàíä è ãóáåðíàòîð Ãèáðàëòàðà

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3481075.ece

Sailor of calm and imposing presence who was commander in chief of Naval Home Command and Governor-General of Gibraltar

Held in great affection by all who served with him, David Williams was possessed of a magisterial dignity and presence, an imperturbable manner, an acute mind, an absence of pomposity and a dry wit. He was a career gunnery specialist and innumerable lesser mortals on parade have a memory of this imposing figure, resplendent in the shiny knee-length patent leather gaiters privileged to be worn by the “Commander (G)”, progressing regally towards that hallowed terrain, the parade ground of HMS Excellent, the Portsmouth gunnery school and fount of the Navy’s spit-and-polish smartness, precision of drill and loud voice of command. “Even trees got out of his way,” records an observer.

He was at sea throughout the Second World War. From August 1939 he served as a midshipman in the light cruiser Emerald on the Northern Patrol, blockading Germany’s remaining merchantmen. By November 1940 he was in the destroyer Jaguar escorting convoys to Malta; the ship also took part in the Battle of Cape Spartivento against the Italian Navy as well as capturing French merchant shipping off Oran. Williams was noted as having “acquitted himself well in action”.

After a brief interlude of professional courses in Britain, Sub-Lieutenant Williams was appointed to the battlecruiser Renown in October 1941 and remained in her until May 1944 during which period this celebrated ship covered four Russian convoys, was the “Force H” flagship and escorted two convoys flying off Spitfire fighters to Malta.

In November 1942 Renown took part in the Allied invasion of North Africa and subsequently carried Winston Churchill home after the “Quadrant” planning conference in Quebec. In December 1943 Renown joined Admiral Somerville’s Indian Ocean fleet and assisted in carrier aircraft attacks on Japanese installations at Sabang and Soerabaya.

On departure to the destroyers Paladin and Nizam, Williams was adjudged an “outstanding officer”. Noted for his zeal, he rose to be second-in-command of the Nizam and was present at the final attacks on the Japanese mainland before the atom bombs concluded the war.

After the year-long gunnery specialisation course in 1946, Williams served in the Mediterranean as flotilla gunnery officer and spent two years working for the Ministry of Supply on the development of guided weapons. When gunnery officer of the newly built destroyer Diamond he was promoted very early to commander and his association with weapon development continued as the trials officer in the cruiser Cumberland, then devoted to guided missile system firings.

His tour as Commander (G) at HMS Excellent was enlivened by the celebrated “elephant on parade” event. A graduating class of newly qualified young gunnery officers sacrilegiously decided to cheer up the passing-out parade by marching in hollow square around an elephant that had been smuggled on to the premises and duly decked out with white canvas gaiters. Commander (G) greeted this blasphemy with obligatory fury but those who knew him well detected a twinkle.

He was promoted to captain in 1960 after tours as second-in-command of the cruiser Sheffield. It was a successful commission, and was followed by command of the frigate Jewel in the Dartmouth Training Squadron.

A course at the US Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island, was followed by the post of naval assistant to the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Caspar John, “a hard man to serve”, followed by command of the large guided missile destroyer Devonshire in the Far East.

His next appointment, as director of the Plans division in the Admiralty, was highly significant. The Plans division led for the naval staff in matters of policy, managing the interface between what the Navy believes it needs to fulfil the demands of successive governments and what funding the politicians are prepared to provide. Williams’s tour as director ran from January 1966 to February 1968 and encompassed what was jocularly described as “four defence reviews” and was without doubt the most traumatic period suffered by the Navy since the Korean War. Although the capability would continue as far as possible into the 1970s, the Defence Secretary Denis Healey’s White Paper of February 1966 abolished fixed-wing carrier aviation, causing shock waves throughout the Navy. Trumpeted by the Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Healey as a blueprint for the next 30 years, it would soon be seen as yet another futile short-term attempt to make inadequate resources cover overambitious commitments.

With Williams as a member, a Future Fleet Working Party was set up by the then First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Varyl Begg, to reassess the role and structure of the Navy without its carriers. As the Foreign Office could produce no statement of the future shape of British interests, the working party had to make its own assessments. Despite arguments about whether the “through-deck cruiser” Invincible-class VSTOL (vertical and/or short take-off and landing) and helicopter ships were “carriers” and therefore flouted the dictated policy, the working party’s recommendations stood the tests of time, its members achieving high rank and maintaining a continuity of policy for the next two decades.

The shadow of Vietnam, lack of confidence in sterling, the successful completion of the “Confrontation” against Indonesia, British inconsequentiality during the Arab-Israeli conflict of June 1967 and a tendency in government to undervalue residual colonial commitments were some of the factors leading to a series of agonised reassessments culminating in a statement by Harold Wilson on January 16, 1968 (known as “Black Tuesday” in the Ministry of Defence), announcing yet further defence cuts and, apart from Hong Kong, that all forces would be gone from east of Suez by the end of 1971.

Such a radical departure from Britain’s historic role presented a huge challenge to the naval staff. How could a substantial Navy now be justified? However, developments in Nato strategy and the increasing power of the Soviet fleet enabled an undeniable case for a strong eastern Atlantic presence.

One of Williams’s staff officers reported: “His foresight had ensured that the Navy’s role in Nato affairs was well entrenched by January 1968 while ensuring enough flexibility for limited operations outside the Nato area. It was not only his judgment and sense of purpose that kept us going but his wry humour. The Navy was lucky to have him there at such a time.”

While spearheading European Nato’s maritime strategy, in subsequent decades the Navy conducted many operations outside the Nato area of which the Falklands was the most significant.

Williams was next appointed to command the naval college at Dartmouth, he and his wife Philippa (“Pippa”) forming warm relationships with local people. It was a period of change for officer recruiting and training with the introduction of university graduate entries, and Williams led a complex establishment with effortless charm.

He was promoted rear-admiral in 1970 and appointed second-in-command of the Far East Fleet until the last days of the validity of the Anglo-Malaysian Defence Agreement in October 1971 and the final reduction of Britain’s presence in the Far East theatre. Promoted vice-admiral in April 1972, Williams was appointed director-general of naval manpower and training during a period of closure of smaller, remoter training establishments and the concentration of the remainder, allied to a perennial shortage of manpower to meet the naval task.

As a full admiral, Second Sea Lord and chief of naval personnel from 1974 to 1976, Willliams continued to manage the manpower issues of the day — insufficient officer recruitment, pay, turbulence and family separation.

His final tour was CinC Naval Home Command, overseeing most of the land-based activities in Britain. He was appointed KCB in 1975 and GCB in 1977, retiring in 1979.

He was appointed Governor- General and C-in-C of Gibraltar from 1982 to 1985, a period of ameliorating relationships with Spain, culminating in the opening of the border.

Among his numerous charitable activities in later life were presidency of the Ex-Servicemen’s Mental Welfare Society, chair of the council, Missions to Seamen from 1979 to 1991, member and vice-chair of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, 1980-89, and member of the Museum and Galleries Commission, 1987-93.

A keen yachtsman, he was elected to the Royal Yacht Squadron in 1971 and, as a long-term native of the Dart river, raced his boat in successive Dartmouth regattas for 25 years.

He is survived by his wife, Philippa, whom he married in 1947, and their two sons.

Admiral Sir David Williams, GCB, C-in-C Naval Home Command, 1977-79, and Governor-General and C-in-C Gibraltar, 1982-85, was born on October 22, 1921. He died on July 16, 2012, aged 90


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Îò Chestnut
Ê Chestnut (11.07.2012 13:52:21)
Äàòà 13.07.2012 18:58:08

Âîåííûå íåêðîëîãè èç áðèòàíñêèõ ãàçåò

Maj-Gen Dick Gerrard-Wright

Îôèöåð, ñëóæèâøèé â Êåíèè è Ñåâåðíîé Èðëàíäèè

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/army-obituaries/9396197/Maj-Gen-Dick-Gerrard-Wright.html

Lt-Gen Stanley Menezes

îôèöåð Èíäèéñêîé àðìèè, ñëóæèâøèé â íåé äî è ïîñëå íåçàâèñèìîñòè è ïðèíÿâøèé ó÷àñòèå â äâóõ âîéíàõ ñ Ïàêèñòàíîì

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/army-obituaries/9393214/Lt-Gen-Stanley-Menezes.html

Ernest Wright

Îôèöåð êåíèéñêîé ïîëèöèè, çàñëóæèë Ãåîðãèåâñêèé êðåñò çà îòâàãó â ïåðåñòðåëêå ñ áàíäèòàìè

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/courtsocial/article3473878.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00315/109597027_Wright_315471k.jpg



Wright receives his George Medal from Sir Evelyn Baring, Governor of Kenya

Officer in the Kenya Police who won the first George Medal of the Queen’s reign for his bravery in a ferocious gun battle

Ernie Wright won the George Medal, the first of the new reign, while serving as an Assistant Superintendent with the Kenya Police Force at Illeret in the Marsabit District near Kenya’s northern frontier with Ethiopia in 1952.

Wright, with 40 men, was about to enter a village to search for illegal weapons when he and his patrol came under heavy fire from a party of between 250 and 300 marauders from over the nearby border. The raiders had raped and murdered women and children while the local men were out with their herds.

A savage seven-hour battle ensued during which, according to the citation, “Wright commanded his men with gallantry of the highest order . . . courting extreme danger in order to rescue a Section which had been cut off and surrounded. His leadership of his men throughout was exceptionally fine. He personally rendered first aid to the wounded under heavy fire showing complete indifference to his own danger.”

Neither he, nor the other officer involved, Graham Clark, who along with two other policemen, was awarded the Colonial Police Medal for their courage that day, expected to survive it. His son Thomas inherited the hat Wright was wearing during the action: it has a neat bullet hole through its crown.

Ernest George Wright was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1923, the eldest of three sons of Thomas and Norah Wright. He was educated at Dame Allan’s School for Boys. His father, who had served on the Western Front in the First World War, kept a tailor’s and outfitter’s shop.

On leaving school Wright served with his father for a year in the Home Guard before being called up in February 1941 into the RAF and beig posted to Bomber Command.

After training, partly in Rhodesia, he flew as a bomb aimer and navigator in the Halifaxes of 201 squadron, based at Pocklington in Yorkshire, flying six operations before the war ended and the squadron was transferred to Transport Command, reaching the rank of flight lieutenant. He did not quite live to see the new memorial to Bomber Command unveiled in London, but on being shown photographs of the statues, he commented that they made the aicrew look too old: “We were all children, really.”

After the war Wright, attracted by what he had seen of Africa in training, joined the Kenya Police. Apart from the battle of Illeret he saw much other service, including as ADC to the Governor-General, Sir Evelyn Baring. He won a Colonial Police Medal during the Mau Mau years and reached the rank of Assistant Commissioner.

Though Wright retained a love of Kenya and its people all his life, and spoke several local languages, he and his wife, Sarah, the eldest daughter of the 12th Earl Waldegrave, whom he had met at Government House, returned to England on Independence in 1962 with their two small sons.

He found congenial work as recreation manager for the Bristol Water Company, where his own fly-fishing skills and his love of the outdoors made him popular with the fishermen and birdwatchers of Chew Valley Lake and the other company reservoirs, though his police skills less so with poachers.

Though he remained a proud Geordie all his life (his renderings of Cushy Butterfield, Bladon Races and The Egg Song were memorable), he developed a great affection for Somerset and it for him: he became Mayor of Wells, and then chairman of the Mendip District Council in 1984/5. As well as enjoying country sports he was a keen hockey, squash and cricket player, continuing to turn out for the Chewton Mendip Cricket Club until late in life.

His sharp wit and deliberately gruff humour, based on a quizzical observation of the many different worlds he had inhabited, persisted through a long and debilitating illness which he bore with the courage he had displayed in the skies over Germany and at Illeret.

He is survived by his wife and two sons.

Ernest Wright, GM, CPM, public servant, was born on February 25, 1923. He died on June 9, 2012, aged 89

Squadron Leader Phil Lamason

ïèëîò "Ëàíêàñòåðà", îêàçàâøèéñÿ â ïëåíó â Áóõåíâàëüäå

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3473885.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00315/109598145_Lamason_315470c.jpg



Bomber pilot who was betrayed to the Gestapo and sent to Buchenwald from where he was rescued on the orders of the Luftwaffe

Baling out from his stricken Lancaster with four members of his crew over Paris during a raid on marshalling yards outside the city in June 1944, Phil Lamason was at first hidden by the Resistance, then betrayed to the Gestapo and, with other Allied airmen, sent not to a PoW camp but consigned to the concentration camp at Buchenwald in direct contravention of the laws of war.

There he and 167 other Allied airmen were held in grim conditions of deliberate starvation, torture, beatings and disease designed to kill as many of the inmates as possible, He might well have perished, had it not been for two things: his own determination to preserve the discipline among his fellow airmen which he knew was vital to their survival in such atrocious conditions, and “honour among combatants” , which actually brought the Luftwaffe to their rescue after several months of privation.

Lamason had on numerous occasions attempted to smuggle news of their illegal detention to the Luftwaffe, which as he knew, was responsible — not the Gestapo — for RAF prisoners of war. Eventually several senior officers of the Luftwaffe arrived at Buchenwald in October 1944, and were so appalled by the conditions in which their fellow, if enemy, airmen were being held that they ordered the camp authorities to release them immediately, and had them transferred to the PoW camp for air force officers Stalag Luft III at Sagan in Silesia, where they spent most of the remainder of the war.

This curious episode, and Lamason’s role in it, was for decades buried among the scattered factual debris of war, until elements of it were included in a Canadian film in 1994 and in a book, Night After Night: New Zealanders in Bomber Command (2005), by the New Zealand author Max Lambert. It was more fully described in a US documentary, The Lost Airmen of Buchenwald (2011).

Lamason emerged from Buchenwald with a reputation — he had already been awarded two DFCs on bomber operations — enhanced. Many airmen who found themselves at Buchenwald acknowledged that they owed their survival to the fortitude he displayed and the camaraderie he engendered, as spokesman, for the group, throughout the community of captives during their ordeal.

Philip John Lamason was born at Napier in the North Island of New Zealand in 1918. After leaving school he worked as a livestock inspector before joining the RNZAF for basic pilot training. In 1941 he came to the UK where after operational training on fourengined bombers he joined a Stirling squadron with which he flew a tour of operations.

He was awarded an immediate DFC when his Stirling was attacked by a night fighter on its return from a raid in April 1942, and set on fire. He ordered his crew to set about extinguishing the blaze while he performed classic evasion manoeuvres which threw the fighter off its aim when it came in for a second attack. After losing their assailant completely, he nursed his damaged aircraft back to base. After a period on instruction duties, he was posted in early 1944 as flight commander to No 15 (Lancaster) squadron, with which he participated in the series of raids known as the Battle of Berlin, and the disastrous Nuremberg raid of March 30-31, 1944, in which 96 out of the 795 bombers dispatched were shot down, and a further ten aircraft were written off after landing. In numerical, though not percentage, terms it was the most costly RAF raid of the war.

With the advent of the Normandy invasion Lamason’s squadron was put on to targets of tactical significance in France, whose destruction or damage might materially affect the German ability to respond to the landings. Among these was the Paris marshalling yards raid of June 8, which aimed to disrupt reinforcements to the Normandy beachhead by rail.

Two of his crew were killed by flak, but Lamason steadied his Lancaster and ordered the other four to get out, following them by parachute. For a period they were sheltered by the French Resistance, but the Gestapo discovered them and they were subjected to treatment reserved for spies rather than combatants. After interrogation in the notorious Fresnes prison they were, with a large number of other airmen, both British, Commonwealth and American, herded into cattle trucks for the journey to Buchenwald near Weimar in Thuringia. By this time Lamason had been awarded a Bar to his DFC.

After their deliverance from Buchenwald, Lamason and his fellow prisoners made a slow recovery from their maltreatment and emaciation in Stalag Luft III. Another ordeal was to await them. In January 1945, in one of Europe’s coldest winters for years Lamason joined inmates in the enforced “Long March” westwards from the camp, designed by the Germans to prevent their being liberated by the advancing Russians. Many prisoners perished on the route, but in April Lamason and other eventually reached the advancing Western Allies, and freedom.

At the end of the war Lamason returned to New Zealand, where he farmed in the Manawatu-Wanganui Region of the North Island. Towards the end of his life he was interviewed by the writer Max Lambert, for his book; Lambert was profoundly moved by the unvarnished tale of suffering and fortitude in the face of cruelty that Lamason told him.

Lamason married, in 1941, Joan Hopkins. She died in 2009 and he is survived by two sons and two daughters.

Squadron Leader Phil Lamason, DFC and Bar, wartime bomber pilot, was born on September 15, 1918. He died on May 19, 2012, aged 93


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