Highly decorated wartime photo-reconnaissance pilot who coaxed his Spitfire home after the engine cut out at 30,000ft over Cologne
During a wartime flying career spent very largely on photo-reconnaissance operations Alfred (Freddie) Ball successively commanded three PR squadrons, two of Spitfires and one of Mosquitoes, between the Torch landings of October 1942 and the end of hostilities. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Distinguished Service Order and the US Air Medal as well as being mentioned twice in dispatches for his initiative and leadership in sorties ranging from reconnaissance over Germany and the French ports, through North Africa to the North West Europe theatre after D-Day.
Ball had the essential quality of a reconnaissance pilot, complete self-reliance, both as a pilot and navigator, and this quality enabled him to get himself out of many scrapes when attacked by superior numbers of enemy aircraft or plagued by mechanical failure, as well as helping him to get himself and his aircraft and precious photographs home afterwards. At the heights at which PR aircraft flew, 30,000ft and later in the war more than 40,000ft, air temperatures outside might be well below -30C, and electrically heated gloves might either burn the pilot’s hands or not work at all.
After the war Ball alternated staff and operational appointments, flying Canberras and commanding a V-bomber base and occupying senior staff posts at the Ministry of Defence en route to his final appointment as Deputy C-in-C Strike Command in the 1970s.
Alfred Henry Wynne Ball was born in Rawalpindi in northern Punjab in 1921, the son of an army engineer officer who was later to become chief engineer of the Bengal Nagpur Railway. He spent his early years in British India before being sent home to the UK to be educated at Campbell College, Belfast. From there he entered the RAF College, Cranwell, in 1939, coming through pilot training in time to be posted to 13 Squadron, flying Lysander spotter planes as part of the Air Component of the British Expeditionary Force in France in March 1940.
It was a period of lull, but the storm was soon to break. When the Blitzkrieg burst on the Western Front on May 10, 1940, the squadron was caught up in a destructive whirlwind of hostile air activity, attempting to spot enemy activity and locate roads for the ground troops while the Luftwaffe’s Ju87 Stukas pounded BEF units, and Messerschmitt 109 and 110 fighters attacked everything that flew. The aircraft of 13 Squadron suffered heavily, but by evolving effective very low-flying tactics Ball survived. The remaining Lysanders of 13 Squadron were flown back to the UK while he, with a group of the squadron’s airmen, commandeered a lorry which he drove to Cherbourg from where they made their way home by ship.
After a spell back in the UK flying Lysanders on anti-invasion and air-sea rescue patrols, Ball volunteered as a photo reconnaissance pilot and after being accepted for training was posted to No 1 Photo Reconnaissance Unit (1 PRU) at Benson, in Oxfordshire, which was to become the home of photoreconnaissance for the rest of the war. He was soon photographing a variety of targets in occupied France and Germany in 1 PRU’s high-speed, high-altitude Spitfires. Later in 1941 he was posted to Cornwall where his principal task was to photograph the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in their heavily defended lair in Brest, where they were regularly attacked by the RAF’s bombers. Anti-aircraft fire was intense and dangerous even at high altitude, and one PR Spitfire was shot down at 30,000ft. Ball took some of the last photographs of these warships in harbour before their audacious “Channel Dash” to the greater safety of German ports on February 11, 1942. He was awarded the DFC in 1942 for his exceptional services.
Promoted to squadron leader later that year he was given command of 4 PRU, later to become 682 Squadron. With the Anglo-American Torch landings in North Africa in the offing he took this to Gibraltar from where his unit photographed targets on the North African coast. After the invasion the unit moved to Maison Blanche in Algeria where, on February 1, 1943, it became 682 Squadron. During the early days of the operations the squadron’s Spitfires suffered severely at the hands of the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter, and the Messerschmitt 109 G (“Gustav”) but Ball’s pleas to Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder resulted in the delivery of later marks of Spitfire with which the squadron was able to get back on terms. He was once set upon by four Fw 190s, and hit by a burst of cannon fire, but managed to out-turn his assailants and returned safely to base. During Operation Torch Ball also advised the American 7th Photo Group, which had arrived in the theatre straight from the States, and the two nations formed a joint PR wing. For this he was awarded the US Air Medal and the DSO.
Rested from operations in July 1943 he went as chief flying instructor to an operational training unit that August. But by March 1944 he was back in the front line as CO of 542 Squadron, based at Benson and tasked with locating and photographing the “ski sites” in northern France from which the V1 flying bombs were shortly to be launched against Britain and carrying out the intensive photography of other targets in France in preparation for the Normandy landings. The routine photography of German targets was also a constant task, and on his last Spitfire sortie Ball’s aircraft engine cut out at 30,000ft over Cologne. However, he found that he could obtain bursts of power by hand cranking the starting primer pump and after almost an hour in a shallow semi-power glide at 180mph he was relieved to drop down through thick haze to find himself over the Thames Estuary at 600ft. Locating Eastchurch airfield on the Isle of Sheppey he was able to make a perfect landing.
In September 1944 he was given command of 540 Squadron flying the Mosquito. He commanded the squadron until the end of the war in Europe, in which time it flew 1,000 sorties. Ball was several times chased by Me 262 jets, with their top speed of more than 550mph, and once by the 650-plus mph Me 163 Komet rocket plane.
Based in Europe after the war the squadron carried out mapping surveys before in January 1946 Ball was sent to take command of 680 (Mosquito) squadron first in the Suez Canal Zone and later in Palestine, where he and colleagues were lucky to escape with their lives when their quarters were sprayed with machinegun fire by terrorists.
With the RAF entering the jet age Ball converted to Canberras in 1953, commanding the PR wing at RAF Wyton, and later taking a Canberra to the Pacific as part of the monitoring operation on US nuclear tests. From 1963 to 1964 he commanded the V-bomber base RAF Honington, operating the Valiant and Victor bombers, before going as Air Officer Administration to Aden the following year. Among his subsequent senior appointments were Director-General Organisation (RAF), 1971-75, and he was Assistant Chief of Staff of the Automatic Data Processing Division at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, 1975-77, before his final posting as Deputy C-in-C Strike Command. He was appointed KCB in 1976.
Retiring from the RAF in 1979 he was from that year until 1983 Military Affairs Adviser to International Computers. From 1979 to 1984 he served as vice-chairman (air) of the Council of Territorial, Auxiliary and Volunteer Reserve Associations. He was also Honorary Air Commodore of No 2624 (County of Oxford) Royal Auxiliary Air Force Regiment Squadron from 1984 to 1990.
He married in 1942 Nan McDonald. She died in 2006, and he is survived by three sons and a daughter.
Air Marshal Sir Alfred Ball, KCB, DSO, DFC, wartime reconnaissance pilot and Deputy Commander-in-Chief RAF Strike Command, 1977-78, was born on January 18, 1921. He died on January 25, 2012, aged 91
Lionel Savery
военный разведчик, боровшийся с террористами в Малайе и на Кипре
Army field intelligence officer in Malaya and then Cyprus where he became a marked man and was badly wounded by terrorists
As an army captain, Lionel Savery served with field intelligence in two counterinsurgency campaigns.
Although courteous and discreet, he did not flinch from fighting for information when necessary. In Malaya patience and subtlety proved to be the key due to the willingness of defectors to co-operate; in Cyprus, his relentless quest for intelligence almost cost him his life. He was later to become an adviser on labour relations in the magazine publishing industry.
Commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1948, he was posted to Hong Kong as the naval gunfire control officer aboard a cruiser on the Far East station, but when applications to learn Chinese were invited he volunteered for a course at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. This led to a posting as a military intelligence officer (MIO) in Malaya, where the communist emergency was mounting in intensity after the ambush and murder of the British High Commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney, in 1951.
Despite creating alarm throughout the peninsula, the communist terrorists (CTs) of Malaya represented only a fraction of the minority Straits Chinese population. Aside from a few criminals, the Malay population wanted nothing to do with terrorism or, until prompted by the British administration, with national independence. But the Chinese rubber tappers scratching a living in kampongs (villages) on the jungle edge were highly vulnerable. Their choice was to support the communist leader Chin Peng and his CTs with food and subscriptions or have their throats cut.
The MIOs provided the link between the police Special Branch and the British and Gurkha infantry battalions that came and went, or reinforced a particular area because of an increase in the terrorist threat. The communists’ strategic aim to take over the country district by district until a red flag flew everywhere enshrined Maoist doctrine; but local intelligence was scarce — at least until some CTs were captured or surrendered. Surprisingly, without the least coercion, many switched allegiance and would lead a security force patrol to the jungle base camp of their erstwhile comrades with enthusiasm.
For much of the three years from 1952 to 1955, Savery was the MIO for the area around Bentong, a small town on the road cutting across the peninsula from the capital, Kuala Lumpur, to Kuantan on the east coast. It was his job to handle the captured or surrendered terrorists after they had agreed to co-operate and, with Special Branch support, brief the battalion in whose area the former terrorists could be used to best advantage. He was mentioned in dispatches for his success in this work in May 1955.
The insurgency in Cyprus also had its origin in a minority view, but there it was within the majority Greek-Cypriot population. The campaign for the union of Cyprus with Greece, Ethniki Organosis Kypriou Agonistou or EOKA, was led by a retired Greek Army colonel, George Grivas. It began with minor bombing outrages in the main towns of the island in April 1955 and spread quickly as Grivas, signing himself “Dighenis” after a legendary Byzantine soldier, captured the imagination of the politically volatile Greek-Cypriot population.
Savery arrived in 1956, fresh from his success in Malaya, to take over as district intelligence officer in the Páno Plátres area of the Troodos mountains, north of Limassol on the south coast. Woods and caves on the southern slopes provided ideal hideouts for small groups of terrorists and initially there were few deserters from EOKA who might have been “turned” — like the CTs in Malaya — to work with the security forces. After a series of security force successes in the Troodos, however, a trickle of defectors began and Savery was able to build up a team of ex-EOKA sympathisers ready to work with him against their former comrades.
The most significant achievements of this unit occurred while Savery was operating alongside 2nd Battalion The Parachute Regiment whose commander, Lieutenant-Colonel (later Major-General) “Barla” Bredin had worked with the “special night squad” in Palestine during the Arab Revolt in the 1930s. Savery led his ex-EOKA team on intelligence gathering and terrorist-hunting patrols by night and day, bringing about the capture of 12 leading terrorists complete with their weapons. This marked him out for murder by EOKA.
While leading a patrol in the Páno Plátres area in June 1957, he was severely wounded in the firefight with a group of terrorists that his small unit had cornered. A long period in hospital ensued, but he returned to duty in time to complete his tour in Cyprus; in 1958 his resourcefulness and courage in the face of the constant threat of murder was recognised by the award of the Military Cross.
On return to England he transferred to the Intelligence Corps and served on intelligence-related assignments until leaving the Army in 1963 to work with the Special Branch of the Royal Malaysian Police in Sarawak. This was the period of the Indonesian “Confrontation” with Malaysia in which some cross-border intimidation of the indigenous population posed a threat together with communist-inspired insurrection among the Chinese workforce.
On leaving Malaysia in 1968, Savery joined the International Publishing Group (IPC) Magazine division as a labour adviser. IPC Magazines had more than 70 publications with a staff of 4,500 working in 30 buildings spread over London. Savery dealt with about 30 trade unions and chapels at a time when the printing industry was intensely unionised, not invariably with productivity high on the union agenda. When the organisation was concentrated in a tower block on the South Bank, he added “Personnel” to his portfolio of labour relations for the magazine section.
On leaving IPC in 1980, Savery joined the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, again as a labour adviser, dealing in particular with the negotiations between the advertising industry and the printing unions. In 1988 he began work on the introduction of an advertising industry pension scheme that, from a modest start, had established a fund of more than £6 million when he finally retired some years later.
For more than 40 years after leaving public service he maintained his interest in security issues. He was for some years the chairman of the historical sub-committee of the Special Forces Club and went out of his way to enhance the public perception of the Second World War Special Operations Executive (SOE) and protect the security of the Special Air Service (SAS). His first-hand experience in the field gave him useful insights into how to approach, or fend off, both Whitehall and the more intrusive elements of the news media in these respects.
Lionel Francis Savery was born in Cardiff, the son of Ernest Savery, a cinema manager, and was educated at Cathays High School, Cardiff.
He married Marisa, the daughter of Major “Hank” Hanscome of the Intelligence Corps, in 1954. She predeceased him. He is survived by their two sons.
Lionel F. Savery, MC, intelligence officer and labour relations adviser, was born on August 17, 1929. He died on January 4, 2012, aged 82
'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
