Captain of a British gun boat during the war who later wrote compelling books about Coastal Forces operations in the Mediterranean
Len Reynolds is recognised as the definitive historian of Coastal Forces wartime operations, particularly in the Mediterranean. His four books complement Peter Scott’s well-known The Battle of the Narrow Seas, which dealt with the Channel and North Sea. After winning the DSC for his service on a gun boat during the war, Reynolds held several posts in public service.
Born in 1923, the son of a police sergeant, he was educated at Wallington County Grammar School. Enlisting in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in 1942, he was sent to a motor gunboat, MGB 658, as a midshipman. He served in her throughout the war, finally, at the age of 21, as her captain.
Based at Malta, MGB 658 supported the invasion of Sicily. Involved in 14 operations in 19 days against German E-Boats and under constant air attack, the crew rapidly became hardened and ready for the intense campaign along the Italian coast, playing a significant part in the invasion of the Tuscan island of Elba by Free French forces under General de Lattre de Tassigny.
After this operation, while on patrol in the Piombino Channel, MGB 658 was attacked by an Italian destroyer, shells ripping up the after deck, killing everyone on the bridge, wounding five others and killing the seaman sharing Reynolds’s gunnery control position. “He took a shell which killed him, and saved my life — but his blood and splinters from the wooden door knocked me over and I was sure I had been wounded.” MGB 658 made it slowly back to Bastia.
Now captaining MGB 658, Reynolds was deployed to the Adriatic under the control of Commander (later RearAdmiral Sir) Morgan Morgan-Giles (obituary, May 14) and based at Vis, the only Dalmatian island not held by the Germans, where destroyers and MGBs aided Tito’s partisans by harassing coastal supply convoys. Mines were a great danger and Reynolds lost several friends. During his time, the four officers and 30 ratings in MGB 658 were awarded five DSCs, eight mentions in dispatches and five DSMs, having sunk or severely damaged 26 enemy craft.
After leaving the RNVR, Reynolds started researching Coastal Forces history. He published Dog Boats at War, Home Waters MTBs and MGBs at War, and MTBs at War (with H. F. Cooper and a foreword by Morgan-Giles), and his own memoirs in 1955.
Meanwhile, he took up teaching at his old school, also attending Birkbeck College, London, where in 1956 he took a first in geography. He later became headmaster at Kendal Grammar School in 1960 and Maidenhead Grammar School in 1965, retiring in 1981.
A Scout from the age of 8, he became a member of the Chief Scout’s Advance Party, helping to modernise the movement. In 1980 he was awarded the Silver Wolf, in 1981 appointed OBE, and in 2012 received the Chief Scout’s 70 Years Service award.
He also served as the “headmaster” of the Admiralty Interview Board for 30 years. He was one of the statutory worthies on the body that selects young people for officer training in the Royal Navy and Royal Marines.
He is survived by his wife of 67 years, Winifred, and their son and daughter.
Leonard Reynolds, OBE, DSC, Coastal Forces captain and historian, was born on June 26, 1923. He died on April 18, 2013, aged 89
Commander-in-Chief of the forces of the Warsaw Pact who presided over a comprehensive increase in the strength of the Soviet military
Viktor Kulikov was a highly decorated Red Army veteran who became the tough-talking head of the Soviet Armed Forces in one of the most dangerous periods of the Cold War.
As a junior officer he had commanded armoured units on the Eastern Front in 1941-45, and he was appointed Chief of General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces in 1971. It was a critical time — Nato forces on the Central Front in Germany were beset by a sense of weakness as the Vietnam War was taking its toll of US military confidence. Kulikov presided over re-equipping and reconfiguring the Soviet armed forces which left them arguably more powerful in relation to the West’s armies than at any time since the end of the Second World War.
In 1977 Kulikov was promoted to Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the Warsaw Pact — a post which he held until 1989 and the dying days of the Soviet Union when he was relieved by Mikhail Gorbachev. Long before then, cracks had begun to appear in the fabric of the Warsaw Pact military and political arrangements, notably in respect of Poland in the Solidarnosc (Solidarity) era from 1980 (although as early as 1968 Romania had declined to join in a Soviet-led occupation of Czechoslovakia to suppress the reformist, democratic tendencies of the “Prague Spring”).
As head of Warsaw Pact forces Kulikov was in a key position during what has become one of the most controversial episodes in Polish-Soviet relations of the period: the declaration of martial law in Poland by the country’s leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, in December 1981.
Jaruzelski always maintained that in the crisis of 1981, with the independent trade union Solidarnosc and its political allies threatening by their demands for liberty the country’s sovereignty and its allegiance as a member of the Warsaw Pact, his imposition of martial law had been decisive in forestalling a Soviet invasion.
It was a version of events calculated to portray the Polish communist leader not as a Soviet puppet but as a patriot who had saved Poland from the horrors of a Soviet invasion and the complete subjugation of national identity that would have followed it.
This comforting scenario was accepted in many quarters in the West, leading to a lenient view of Jaruzelski. Indeed, during the period of tension Kulikov had paid frequent visits to Soviet units in the border area where powerful forces were assembled.
But in 2009 the Polish Institute of National Remembrance published a correspondence between Jaruzelski and Kulikov which put a very different slant on matters. It suggested that far from having taken such an initiative, Jaruzelski had appealed to the Soviet high command to send troops into Poland if his martial law ploy failed, to prop up his government, hoping at the same time to “look good” as the hapless but well-meaning victim of events who had only his country’s wellbeing at heart.
Kulikov always maintained that the Soviet Union, even under the paranoid leadership of Leonid Brezhnev, had never intended to invade Poland at that time. On the evidence, Polish prosecutors were inclined to side with the Soviet marshal, and in 2006 they prepared charges against Jaruzelski over the martial law issue, the indictment describing the Polish leader and his cabinet as an “armed criminal group”. Thousands of Polish dissidents were arrested and more than 100 people were killed over the 18-month period of the martial law crackdown. Poor health has since prevented Jaruzelski’s being brought to trial.
Viktor Georgievich Kulikov was born in 1921 into a peasant family in the village of Verkhnyaya Lyubovsha in the Orel region of Russia. He joined the Red Army, training at the Grozny military school as a career officer in 1939. When war came with the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany in 1941 he was assigned to tanks and served throughout on the Eastern Front, winning the Order of the Red Banner in 1943 and 1944 and the Order of the Patriotic War in 1943 and 1945.
In the postwar period he rose rapidly through the Soviet military hierarchy, gaining his first major appointment as commander of the Kiev military district in 1967, from which he was moved to the important post of commander of the Group of Soviet forces in Germany two years later. In 1971 as Soviet Deputy Defence Minister he was appointed Chief of the General Staff.
He was regarded at that stage of his career as one of the new generation of officers who recognised that the Soviet military machine needed younger officers, particularly those with a technical background, to give sophistication and flexibility to the Red Army’s methods.
In his years in the post he greatly increased the effectiveness of Soviet forces and their supporting tactical air power, modernising both equipment and communications.
An influential figure and an extreme hardliner, Kulikov was allowed to make what amounted virtually to diplomatic threats to the “enemy”, the US, through such channels as the columns of the Army newspaper, Red Star. Once he had become C-in-C of all the Warsaw Pact forces he made it clear that any Western use of cruise or Pershing missiles would be to risk all-out nuclear war.
In the different climate of glasnost and perestroika ushered in by Mikhail Gorbachev from the mid-1980s, such bellicosity was deemed inappropriate. The erstwhile “Young Turk” was now sounding like a dinosaur and Gorbachev retired him in January 1989.
Among his many decorations and honours Kulikov was the recipient of four Orders of Lenin between 1971 and 1988, was made a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1981, and in the post-Soviet era was admitted to the Order of Honour for his “services to strengthen national defence” and his work on the “patriotic education of young people”. He served as a member of the Russian parliament (Duma) from 1989 to 2003.
He is survived by his wife, Maria, and by two daughters.
Marshal Viktor Kulikov, Commander-in-Chief of the forces of the Warsaw Pact, 1977-89, was born on July 5, 1921. He died on May 28, 2013, aged 91
>Admiral Sir John Bush
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Naval officer who was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross three times and was involved in key battles in the Mediterranean
Known by his subordinates as “The Burning Bush” , Admiral Sir John Bush illustrated the rule that such nicknames only endure when they are earned, as his most definitely was. As Vice-Chief of the Naval Staff and Commander-in-Chief, Western Fleet during the late 1960s he was renowned for driving energy, forcefully expressed impatience with obstacles to progress and intolerance of failures to perform to his own high standards. A true “salt horse”, he had served the entire war in destroyers and had been decorated three times with the Distinguished Service Cross while he was still a lieutenant.
Born in 1914, John Fitzroy Duyland Bush entered the Navy in 1933 from Clifton College. At the outbreak of the Second World War he was second-in-command of the Tribal class destroyer Nubian in which he was involved in a number of the important actions of the Mediterranean campaign. He was awarded his first DSC in August l94l for skill and enterprise during a high-speed night action off the Libyan coast in which a force of four British destroyers annihilated an Italian convoy of five freighters and three destroyers for the loss of one of their number, Mohawk. His gallantry and fortitude during the unsuccessful battle to defend Crete earned him a second DSC. Nubian was among those ships damaged by German air attacks beyond local repair and withdrawn from the theatre.
Still a lieutenant, Bush was next given command of the Hunt class destroyer Belvoir and was awarded a third DSC for his part in the Aegean campaign which followed the armistice with Italy in September 1943. Churchill (in American eyes repeating his 1915 Dardanelles obsession) perceived an opportunity to open up the Aegean and the Black Sea to convoys for Russia, thus easing the difficulties of supply round the North Cape, by a seizure of those Greek islands previously held by Italian garrisons. But there was a crucial failure to take the regional lynchpin, Rhodes, and the subsequent capture of the islands of Cos, Leros and Samos and the support of the Allied garrisons thereon proved costly and ineffective. Overwhelming German air superiority was the deciding factor in a struggle in which the islands and the campaign were lost.
Under Bush’s command Belvoir acquitted herself with distinction, conducting shore bombardments and attacking Axis coastal shipping, mainly at night and under constant threat of air attack. On one occasion she was hit by a bomb from a Stuka which fortunately failed to explode; this was lifted overboard by the strongest man in the ship’s company who earned himself a medal thereby.
As a lieutenant-commander, Bush subsequently commanded the destroyers Zephyr and Chevron and was mentioned in dispatches for his part in escorting Mediterranean convoys.
Among his postwar sea appointments was command of the destroyer Cadiz and in 1955-56 Captain 6th Frigate Squadron. From 1959 to 1961 he was Director of the Naval Plans Division in the Admiralty.
As a rear-admiral he oversaw the operational efficiency of the Mediterranean escort flotillas until January 1963 when he became commander of the British naval staff and naval attaché in Washington. He returned to the Ministry of Defence to become Vice-Chief of Naval Staff, participating in the bruising arguments which finally led to the extended two-volume Defence White Paper which was published on February 22, 1966, and which signaled the demise of the large fixed-wing aircraft carrier from the Royal Navy.
In 1967 Bush was appointed to the new post of Commander in Chief Western Fleet, a title reflecting the run-down of the Mediterranean station and the establishment of control of all western naval forces from a headquarters at Northwood, Middlesex.
Retiring in 1970, he was for three years a director of a Washington-based company dealing in international security matters.
His wife Ruth, whom he married in 1938 (they were married for 74 years), died earlier this year. He is survived by three sons and two daughters.
Admiral Sir John Bush, GCB, CB, DSC and two Bars, wartime destroyer captain and Commander in Chief, Western Fleet, 1967-70, was born on November 1, 1914. He died on May 10, 2013, aged 98
