Ulsterman who as a young infantry officer was awarded one of the first Military Crosses of the Korean War
An archetypal Ulsterman, Mervyn McCord was energetic, resourceful and brave, despite his sepulchral tone of voice suggesting that he was less optimistic than was the case. As a second lieutenant, he won one of the first Military Crosses of the Korean War. He was later to become deeply involved in the Northern Ireland Troubles of the 1970s and 1980s.
The invasion of South Korea by the Army of the communist North on July 25, 1950, caught the Western world unawares and ill-prepared to halt the southwards surge. The whole weight of the initial assault fell on the two American divisions garrisoning the south and seven South Korean divisions. Despite the overwhelming air superiority of the US Air Force, all but the southeastern corner of the country around the port of Pusan was in communist hands by mid-September.
Britain despatched the under-strength 27th Infantry Brigade from Hong Kong in August to join the United Nations force being built up in Korea, where it was joined by 3rd Battalion the Royal Australian Regiment from troops occupying Japan. McCord sailed from Liverpool with 1st Battalion The Royal Ulster Rifles (1 RUR) — part of the reinforcing 29th Infantry Brigade — on the troopship Empire Pride on October 1, arriving in Pusan harbour six weeks later.
By that time, General Douglas MacArthur, commanding the United Nations force, had landed two US Marine divisions at Inch’on on the west coast of the peninsula close to the South Korean capital Seoul, broken out from the Pusan perimeter and driven the North Koreans back beyond the 38th parallel frontier. But the war was far from over. The dynamics of the conflict changed abruptly when the Chinese Peoples’ Volunteers — in fact 18 divisions of the communist Chinese Army — intervened in mid-October to halt the advance of the UN Force as it approached the Chinese frontier. Using overwhelming force and oblivious of casualties, they had pushed the UN and South Korean armies back to the Imjin River, 30 miles north of Seoul, by mid-December. It was there that 1st Royal Ulster Rifles — nicknamed “The Stickies” from their motto Quis Separabit (Who Shall Separate) — began digging their defensive positions on New Year’s Eve, with McCord commanding a platoon.
During the night of January 1-2 the Chinese pushed two divisions across the Imjin and made their first attack in the 1 RUR sector, but it was not pressed home. As a result of intense enemy pressure on the flanks, the American field commander, General Matthew Ridgway, decided to withdraw behind the Han river to the south. McCord and his platoon were ordered to take up a position on the main route from the north in an effort to cover the battalion’s withdrawal. It proved impossible for the battalion to break contact with the enemy and conduct an orderly withdrawal in the dark. Heading south with his platoon at the time ordered, McCord ran into the melée. After clearing a Chinese blocking position, extricating some of his battalion’s vehicles from ambush and gathering the survivors under command, he led them to safety. The citation for his MC ended with the touching understatement, “In his first action, which took place at night, McCord showed great powers of leadership and disregard for personal danger”.
Mervyn Noel Samuel McCord was born in 1929, the elder son of Major G. McCord of the Royal Ulster Rifles and educated at Coleraine School, Queen’s University Belfast, and RMA Sandhurst. He was an outstanding athlete, captaining the Sandhurst cross-country team and representing the Academy at athletics. He was commissioned into the Royal Ulster Rifles in 1949. After the Staff College, Camberley, course in 1962, he took up an exchange officer post with the Canadian Army, becoming a logistics staff officer at Eastern Command headquarters at Halifax Nova Scotia. Towards the end of this assignment he was responsible for organising the first Canadian contingent to join the UN Force in Cyprus, with which he later served.
In 1970, he was promoted lieutenant-colonel to become the Chief Operations Officer at HQ Northern Ireland as it expanded to deal with the escalating Troubles. Appointed OBE after this assignment, he found himself the centre of a debate as to whether the award was appropriate for an officer of an Irish regiment that was itself — at the time — barred from service in the Province. He commanded 1st Battalion The Royal Irish Rangers, into which his own regiment had been absorbed, with success in Germany and with the UN Force in Cyprus.
Promoted brigadier in 1976 at the age of 46, he was given command of the Ulster Defence Regiment, then comprising seven battalions, rather than a regular brigade. Raised in 1971, the UDR was manned by part-time volunteers, predominantly Protestant, and used in small groups to man vehicle checkpoints and similar security duties to relieve the burden on the regular army. Aggrieved by what they perceived as their secondary, largely defensive role in the conduct of counter-insurgency operations, the morale of these battalions was often not high.
As an Ulsterman steeped in the history of the Province and recognising the slight felt by many of his volunteers, McCord worked hard to get them accepted into larger-scale operations and appropriately appreciated by the regular units with which they were working. His advance to CBE in the Northern Ireland operational awards list in 1978 indicated his success.
He was subsequently Deputy Commander Eastern District in England from 1978 and an honorary ADC to the Queen from 1981 to 1984. He was Colonel of the Royal Irish Rangers from 1985 to 1990 and devoted much of his restless energy to the completion of a regimental chapel in St Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast. He retired to Sussex from where he concerned himself with civilian care homes in England and was director of Sussex Housing and Care Committee from 1994 to 2001.
He married Annette Thomson in 1953, who survives him with two sons. Another son predeceased him.
Brigadier Mervyn McCord, CBE, MC, Korean War veteran, was born on December 25, 1929. He died on February 8, 2013, aged 83
McNeice, right, insisted that “the Filthy Thirteen” sport mohawks to deter lice during lengthy periods behind enemy lines
Leader of an airborne demolition unit that is thought to have inspired the 1967 war film The Dirty Dozen
Although he participated in four parachute drops, including Operation Market Garden, which involved the ill-fated attempt to seize the Rhine bridge at Arnhem in September 1944, Jake McNiece has his niche in the annals — and mythology — of US combat operations in the Second World War for his leadership of an airborne demolition unit in the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, part of the 101st Airborne Division, on D-Day.
Known as “the Filthy Thirteen” — though in fact 19 members of the unit jumped on June 6 — McNiece and his paratroopers were dropped inland just after midnight, their orders being to destroy bridges, supply lines and any other objects to impede German reinforcements from reaching the beachhead.
Their exploits are thought to have inspired, at least in part, the 1967 film The Dirty Dozen (based on a novel of that name by E. M. Nathanson), which featured such Hollywood hard men as Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan and Charles Bronson — though unlike the fictional unit, the Thirteen were not convicted felons and their objectives were not specifically to assassinate German officers. The Thirteen had awarded themselves their title, though whether it was a comment on their known aversion to soap and water, or a generally robust esprit de corps that had no time for the niceties of army discipline, has not been definitively established.
McNiece was certainly behind the order to the Filthy Thirteen to shave their heads into mohawks, reasoning that in an anticipated lengthy period behind enemy lines the style was less likely to pick up head lice. His own mother was part Choctaw, and he also instituted face paint, as giving camouflage, especially in night fighting. He and those of the unit who survived spent more than 30 days behind enemy lines after D-Day, in that time destroying two bridges and securing a third to assist the advance of US forces. He was awarded the Bronze Star four times and the Purple Heart twice, and in 2012 was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur by France.
James Elbert McNiece was born in 1919 in Maysville, Oklahoma, the ninth of ten children. Although he dropped out of high school at Ponca City where the family moved, he was encouraged to return by the school’s football coach and eventually found work as a firefighter. There he learnt about setting the explosives which the city fire department used to level buildings damaged by fire, and this stood him in good stead when he enlisted in the US Army in September 1942.
After the Filthy Thirteen’s postD-Day exploits he took part in Operation Market Garden and also in the struggle for Bastogne in the Ardennes, during the Battle of the Bulge, when the town was memorably defended against German forces by 101st Airborne commanded by the redoubtable General Anthony McAuliffe. Demobbed at the end of the war, McNiece worked for the US Postal Service in Ponca City.
In 2003, with the military historian Richard Killblane, McNiece wrote an account of his war: The Filthy Thirteen: From the Dustbowl to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest — The True Story of the 101st Airborne’s Most Legendary Squad of Combat Paratroopers. In it he candidly acknowledged his propensity to change rank rather rapidly, because he was often busted down to private for acts of insubordination. But when an operation was in the offing he would soon find himself restored to sergeant, and the leadership of his demolition squad. He was always to glory in the unit’s insubordinate reputation within the US Army. “Every time a guy came into the outfit that another sergeant could not handle, they would put him over in my group and isolate him,” he recalled.
His first wife, Rosita, died in 1952. He is survived by his second wife, Martha, and by two children and two stepchildren.
Sergeant Jake McNiece, wartime paratrooper, was born on May 24, 1919. He died on January 21, 2013, aged 93
Commander Tony Shaw
Ïèëîò, ñáèòûé íàä îêêóïèðîâàííîé Ôðàíöèåé, ê êîòîðîìó â åãî ïóòè íàçàä ïðèñîåäèíèëèñü åãî îõðàííèêè
Naval aviator who was shot down over the South of France in 1944 but escaped and returned to action
Born at Balfour, a small town bordering Lake Kootenay in British Columbia, Anthony Shaw began his career as a naval aviator at Portsmouth Barracks as a Naval Airman Second Class in 1942. After learning to fly in America, he qualified as a Fleet Air Arm fighter pilot, with carrier deck landings in the Clyde.
His first major front-line operation was in support of the Allied landings at Salerno in Italy in September 1943 where British air cover was provided by five small and two large aircraft carriers. Shaw flew Seafires, the naval version of the Spitfire, from the small carrier Attacker, providing ground attack support and air defence for the Army. After escorting a Russian convoy he was back in the Mediterranean for a secondment to the South African Air Force, dive bombing German positions in Italy in a Spitfire.
Rejoining the Attacker for the invasion of southern France in August 1944, Shaw was shot down by flak while strafing a motorised column near Avignon. As flames enveloped his cockpit, he was able to invert his aircraft, struggle out and open his parachute.
Captured by soldiers, he was treated firmly but not roughly, given that many of the local roads featured burnt-out German tanks and vehicles destroyed from the air. His interrogators believed he was flying from Corsica, having not understood about aircraft carriers.
En route to a PoW camp, Shaw surreptitiously unbuckled leather straps holding the canvas cover of his lorry and in the dark dropped over the side into a ditch. The following day he was captured a second time, but his schoolboy German and French helped to establish a relationship with his two escorts, whom he surprised by being able to play Lili Marlene on a looted violin.
He was about to be turned over to a local PoW organisation when it became clear that his suggestion that the three of them should “disappear” and wait for the Americans to arrive had started to bear fruit. “How would we be treated?” he was asked, Shaw replying that they would be taken to America and put to work on a farm. Thanks to Shaw’s initiative, they contacted the wife of a leading Resistance member who hid them in a cellar until the American Army arrived. Shaw’s two captors were indeed shipped to a farm in America and later sent him postcards, one of which revealed that they had been told by the SS to shoot this troublesome airman.
Back with 879 Squadron aboard the Attacker, he flew numerous sorties during the Aegean campaign. In late 1944 he returned to the UK having been appointed MBE for his “gallantry and devotion to duty”. He was next sent to Scotland to learn how to be a deck landing control officer, or “batsman”. After working up with 899 Squadron (Seafires), he sailed with it in the escort carrier Chaser for the Far East where it ferried replacement aircraft to the large carriers of the British Pacific Fleet.
After demobilisation from the RNVR in 1946, he spent a period as a King’s Messenger, delivering classified diplomatic mail in the Far East and then Europe. An opportunity then arose to re-join the Royal Navy as a regular. He re-qualified in Spitfires and spent two years in 813 Squadron flying the Blackburn Firebrand strike aircraft off Home Fleet carriers. In 1951 he qualified as a test pilot at the Empire Test Pilots School at Farnborough. His autobiography The Upside of Trouble (2005) recounts numerous life-threatening incidents during testing.
He was commended by the US Navy for his work flying as a member of an American squadron based at Atlantic City, going supersonic for the first time and assisting the integration of the British inventions of the angled deck and mirror landing sight into American aircraft carriers.
Later service included Lieutenant-Commander (Air) at Abbotsinch air station; conversion to helicopters; and Lieutenant-Commander (Flying) in the carrier Hermes where he was court-martialled for insolence towards his boss, the Commander (Air), during a professional argument. The Admiralty quashed his conviction, having established the truth of the matter.
Later appointments were Defence Adviser to the British High Commission in Sierra Leone, and work with Sea Cadets in London, after which he retired in 1974, taking up a career as a land agent in Scotland.
His first marriage was dissolved. He is survived by his second wife, Elisabeth Shimmons, whom he married in 1992 and the two sons of the first marriage.
Commander Anthony Shaw, MBE, naval aviator, was born on September 5, 1923. He died on November 21, 2012, aged 89
