Czech communist who invited the Red Army to crush his country’s political reforms in 1968
A die-hard communist of unswerving orthodoxy, Vasil Bilak helped to unleash a savage Soviet repression on his fellow Czechs. A man described as “more Stalinist than Stalin”, he was one of the handful of hardliners who invited the Warsaw Pact tanks to invade his country in August 1968.
Once the Soviet Union had re-established its grip on Czechs, Bilak luxuriated in the rewards for his loyalty to Moscow, seemingly indifferent to the despair of Czechs and Slovaks. The crushing of their political reforms, and the humiliation of the reformers’ figurehead, Alexander Dubcek, were defining episodes in the Cold War.
Bilak, who had been close to the Soviet leadership in Moscow, was one of the main signatories to a so-called “letter of invitation” to the Brezhnev -regime in Moscow warning that “the very existence of socialism in our country is threatened” and urging Brezhnev to use “all means you have in your disposal to help”.
A copy of this letter emerged from the Soviet archives after the end of communist rule, and was given by the Russian president Boris Yeltsin to the new Czechoslovak president Vaclav Havel.
Bilak always denied having been involved in such an invitation. And later attempts to prosecute him for his role in 1968 failed. What was not in doubt, however, was his continued prominence in the 1970s and 1980s as a man who enjoyed plush villas and hunting trips by helicopter while warning of the need to defeat political dissidents and the bourgeoisie.
He was a leading ideologue in the conservative communist regime that ruled Czechoslovakia for more than two decades after 1968, trying to resist many of the reforms sweeping the Soviet bloc, before its overthrow in the “Velvet Revolution” of 1989.
He then faced the collapse of his political world and personal humiliation, expelled from the Communist Party to which he had devoted his life.
Bilak was born in 1917 in a village in Ruthenia, northeastern Slovakia, one of nine children of a farmer. He trained as a tailor and later proudly displayed his training certificate to show his proletarian origins — until it was revealed that on the reverse the master tailor who had examined him had written: “He is all right on trousers, but don’t let him at the jackets.”
He joined a left-wing trade union as an act of resistance against the Nazi puppet state ruling Slovakia, and then the Czechoslovak Communist Party at the end of the Second World War. He rose swiftly. After the Stalinist intensity of the 1950s there was some relaxation in communist thinking in the economic sphere, and Bilak was thought to have had some sympathy with that.
However, when it came to the relaxation of political controls and censorship under Alexander Dubcek in the mid-1960s, Bilak was always hostile. He claimed to admire Picasso and once said that Tolstoy, Balzac and Hemingway were among his favourite writers. However, he attacked those Czechoslovak intellectuals calling for more freedom. He warned of “ideological chaos” and suggested it was “naive” for the Communist Party to relinquish control of the press.
He was present at tense negotiations between the Soviet leadership and the Dubcek Government in 1968, and was in close contact with allies in Moscow as the crisis worsened, before the Soviets decided to use force in what was cynically termed “fraternal assistance”.
“Every reasonable and upright citizen of our country,” Bilak said later, must “understand that the fraternal internationalist aid, granted to us by the Soviet Union was inevitable . . . they came in time to prevent bloodshed”.
After Dubcek was ousted in 1969 Bilak was rewarded for his loyalty to Moscow with a leading role in the new regime. It was led by Gustav Husak, pursuing “normalisation” in Czechoslovakia, which included the ruthless purging of many members of the Communist Party and also the continuous harassment of dissident groups such as Charter 77.
When the Charter was signed Bilak called it a “piece of infamy” and renewed his attack on Dubcek and the reformers, claiming they had been preparing a “bloodbath” in 1968. He was believed to be asking his Moscow allies for permission to stage show trials of dissidents such as Vaclav Havel.
Bilak, fond of denouncing opponents as “Trotskyites”, “Zionists” or “fascists”, insisted on “no dialogue with anti-state elements”. His private motives may have been betrayed by his warning to colleagues after 1968 that “if they ever get to the top again we will hang!”
Vasil Bilak Getty Images
To his increasing discomfort, however, communist experimentation with reform within the Soviet bloc accelerated. He was called “more Stalinist than Stalin” by one Western newspaper after he variously criticised China’s leadership for allying itself with “imperialists” and western European communist parties who “made a programme of the abandonment of the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism”.
Bilak typified the communist gerontocrats who feared that history was moving against them. He seemed incapable of finding a new language, praising five-year plans and complaining that “remnants of the defeated bourgeoisie continue to exist”. When Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformist new Soviet leader, visited Prague in 1987 it became clear he had little time for Bilak’s views, which included rejection of radical measures to try and improve the weak performance of the Czechoslovak economy. In an extraordinary reversal of his previously intense loyalty, Bilak began to argue that Czechoslovakia no longer needed to copy the Soviet Union in everything.
In 1987 he helped to engineer the replacement of Husak as communist leader by Milos Jakes. However, Bilak was becoming increasingly sidelined, losing senior posts. He urged the government to clamp down harder as the Velvet Revolution ignited in autumn 1989, but in the end the regime collapsed swiftly. Bilak was expelled from a Communist Party desperately trying to salvage credibility.
He returned to live in his villa in Bratislava, from where he had enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, including hunting trips by helicopter. He would sometimes shoot deer from his limousine.
He was detained briefly on charges of financial irregularities but attempts to prosecute him for treason for his role in 1968 never succeeded; the case was dropped for “lack of evidence”.
Bilak occasionally gave unrepentant interviews about the past, maintaining the stony façade of the resolute ideologue to the end.
His wife predeceased him and he is survived by a son, Dmitrij, a financial adviser in Prague, and a daughter, Nadezda, a retired teacher of Russian at a university in Bratislava.
Vasil Bilak, Czechoslovakian communist, was born on August 11, 1917. He died on February 6, 2014, aged 96
British GOC in Berlin at the height of the Cold War who was known for his integrity, quiet diplomacy and elegant German
Patrick Brooking’s proficiency in German would stand him in good stead for his military career. As General Officer Commanding (GOC) of the British Sector of Berlin, he oversaw the years immediately before the Berlin Wall was torn down and Germany was reunited. Even in retirement he continued working tirelessly to improve Anglo-German understanding, for which he was honoured by both countries.
His appointment as the British GOC in Berlin in 1985 called for immensediplomacy. His charm and facility for listening to others, together with theelegance and fluency of his German (he had loved the language since childhood in spite of living through the war years), made him well suited to the position.
When Rudolf Hess died in Spandau Prison in 1987, Brooking was determined that the official statement issued should give a truthful account of his suicide: he spent four days liaising with his French, Russian and American counterparts over the statement to ensure its accuracy.
He did not give the impression of being a natural soldier, either by demeanour or interests. His love of choral music brought him into a different milieu wherever he was stationed. He gladly accepted his offer of a place in the Berlin Philharmonic Choir, subsequently meeting Yehudi Menuhin and becoming affectionately known to his friends as “The Singing General”.
Brooking was among those who stood on the podium with President Reagan as the latter made his famous exhortation in 1987 to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this Wall”. Although the Wall’s collapse in 1990 came shortly after he had left as the British GOC, he returned to the city to sing Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem with the Berlin Philharmonic Choir. The dress rehearsal was opened to East Berliners, who came in their thousands for an emotionally charged occasion.
In the years that followed he maintained a close acquaintance with the city, and contributed what he could in a civilian capacity. Having gained the support of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, he pooled together the resources to turn the old British Officers Club into a larger, more modern facility.
Patrick Guy Brooking was the son of Captain C. A. H. Brooking, RN, and Geraldine Joan Brooking (née Coleridge). He was educated at Charterhouse and commissioned into the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards in 1956. After service in Germany and with the UN Force in Cyprus, he attended the Staff College and was appointed Military Assistant to the Commander of 1st (British) Corps in Germany. He received an MBE for his role as Brigade Major (chief of staff) of 39 Infantry Brigade, responsible for countering the IRA insurrection in Belfast in 1974-75.
Brooking spent two years as Deputy Chief of Staff at HQ UK Land Forces at Wilton before returning to Germany as GOC Berlin. He was appointed CB in 1988 and his final service assignment was Director-General of Manning and Recruiting in the MoD.
After retiring from service, he was Honorary Colonel of 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards 1991-92 and, following amalgamation with the 4th/7th Dragoon Guards, of the Royal Dragoon Guards 1992-94.
Not long after leaving the Army he was invited to join the German cable distribution company KRONE in Berlin, and was soon made a director.
On his return to England in 1997 he joined the Board of the British-German Association based in London, of which he later became chairman. He was appointed CMG for his work in Anglo-German relations in 1997, and received the German Order of Merit in 2004.
As a member of the Salisbury Musical Society, singing continued to give him great enjoyment. In 2000 he organised a series of joint concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic Choir to mark the millennium and raise money for charity. All three concerts — at St Paul’s Cathedral, Salisbury Cathedral and Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church — were sold out.
He is survived by his wife Pamela (née Walford), whom he met at the Grand Military Cup at Sandown Racecourse. They married in 1964, and had a son, Johnny, and a daughter, Samantha. Johnny followed his father into the military and is a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Dragoon Guards; he has served twice in Iraq and Afghanistan. Samantha works in the hotel industry.
Major-General P. G. Brooking, CB, CMG, MBE, GOC British Sector Berlin, was born on April 4, 1937. He died of lung cancer on January 22, 2014, aged 76
Battle of Britain pilot who was awarded the DFC after shooting down four German aircraft
Edward Smith was one of Churchill’s “Few” who fought throughout the Battle of Britain and narrowly missed shooting down the five German aircraft that would have entitled him to be called a fighter ace.
Smith was one of the prewar auxillary officers who reinforced the regular RAF on the eve of hostilities in August 1939 after learning to fly with 610 Squadron at weekends. Equipped with Hawker Hind biplanes, 610 was ill-equipped to tackle the modern Luftwaffe, but the squadron soon received Hurricanes and then Spitfires. Smith was posted to Scotland as the ill-fated Norwegian campaign opened in April 1940, but was switched to Biggin Hill and then Gravesend on the Kent coast as the Germans swept through France.
Smith scored his first combat victory on May 27 when he shot down a Heinkel III bomber while providing cover for the British Experditionary Force as it retreated to Dunkirk.
As the fighting intensified, he shot down two German Me109 fighters and, on August 11, a Heinkel 59 seaplane off Calais.
Twenty-four hours later, Smith was bounced by a dozen German fighters and shot down over the Channel. He baled out but suffered severe burns to his face and neck. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
He was credited with shooting down four-and-a-half enemy aircraft, but the actual figure may have been higher.
Edward Brian Bretherton Smith was born in 1915 in Formby, Lancashire. He was a pupil at King William’s School, Isle of Man, and worked for Shell Refineries before the war. After recovering from his injuries, Smith was posted as a flying instructor to the Central Flying School, Cranwell. He also served in Algeria and Italy.
His wife, Pamela, whom he married in 1940, died in 2002. A son also predeceased him. He is survived by two sons.
Wing Commander Edward Smith, DFC, AE, was born on January 12, 1915. He died on September 15, 2013, aged 98
Wartime bomb disposal expert who survived a battle of wits with the makers of German explosives
Eric Wakeling was one of the last survivors of the lonely, hazardous and often secret war between Hitler’s scientists and the British Army’s Bomb Disposal teams.
More than 45,000 unexploded bombs (UXBs) fell on Britain between 1939 and 1945. Each was a menace to life and to the war effort until made safe. The burden of doing so was borne largely by specialists from the Royal Engineers, of whom almost 600 were killed or wounded in the course of their work. No national memorial yet commemorates this sacrifice.
Wakeling was unusual in volunteering to join Bomb Disposal and in being only 20 at the time. Most of its initial recruits were middle-aged professionals, often architects and horticulturists, considered by the Army to have some affinity with science and sparing younger men from what were not regarded at first as frontline duties.
For when little was known about German advances in armaments, it had been proposed that UXBs might be swept up, like autumn leaves, by retired policemen equipped with wheelbarrows. The Luftwaffe’s campaign of 1940 soon scotched such notions, as bombs up to 12ft long and weighing almost two tons buried themselves 65ft beneath oil storage tanks and gasometers, hospitals and Spitfire factories.
Some were fitted with delayed action timers, while others failed to explode because of a dud fuse which might be armed by a blow from a shovel or vibrations from a passing lorry. Within days of the Blitz beginning, London was almost paralysed by 1,000 UXBs. Defeating this threat became a priority for the Government, but the knowledge which would allow the Army to do so could only be gained by an often fatal process of trial and error.
Wakeling recalled that when early in 1941 he was posted to 3 Bomb Disposal Company, based in Nottingham, training for officers was still rudimentary. (Their sappers, who did the digging, received none.) “I think somebody said life expectancy was about 16 weeks,” he remembered. “But I was never shot at and I slept in a bed every night, which is more than a lot of people can say. The dangers were there and your life was more or less in your hands.”
Hard-won experience gradually improved the odds of survival for the squads, especially as technology was developed to allow remote defusing of bombs. Nonetheless, there was a continual battle to stay one step ahead of the enemy’s refinements. In 1943, Wakeling narrowly survived an encounter with the new Y fuse, fitted with mercury tilt switches sensitive even to the tap of a pencil and specifically designed to kill an officer trying to remove it from a bomb. Not knowing with what he was dealing, Wakeling only escaped because of a fault in its manufacture.
On Whit Monday that year, June 13, the port of Grimsby fell victim to a weapon little used against Britain before. The German SD2 was an early kind of cluster bomb, an anti-personnel device with rudimentary wings which rotated in flight like a sycamore seed. Known from these as “butterfly bombs”, they became caught up on branches, gutters and telephone lines, waiting to be triggered by contact.
More than 60 people were killed, and another two dozen injured, in the hours after the raid as the unfamiliar objects were picked up or brushed against in the dark. Normal life was soon suspended, and Wakeling’s company was sent into Grimsby to clear an estimated 1,350 SD2s.
He found them hanging from fences and washing lines, as well as embedded in attics and damp lawns. Some had fallen in pea fields, where entwined tendrils presented particular dangers. It was important to pinpoint all 23 bombs in a cluster, as there was a risk that detonating one would sympathetically explode another nearby which had not been spotted.
Elaborate combinations of pulleys and twine were rigged up to tug butterflies in to traps made of straw bales, but things did not always go without a hitch. “I put a bit of string around one and pulled it,” recalled Wakeling. “It didn’t go off, so I pulled it again — and still it didn’t go off.
“I was in a ditch with my driver, and he said ‘If you pull it much more, it will be in here with us.’ So I went and looked at it. It was still ticking. That was the stupidest mistake I’ve made. It only had a few ounces of explosive, but it would still kill you.”
It took three months to clear Grimsby. For fear of the Germans learning how effective the attack had been, the Government kept details of it quiet. The RAF, however, subsequently incorporated anti-personnel devices into the bombs dropped on Hamburg in July, so disabling much of the city’s fire-fighting capacity.
Eric Edgar Wakeling was born in Deal, Kent, in 1920 and educated at Sir Roger Manwood’s School in Sandwich. His father managed a food processing plant. At 16, he went to the Army Apprentices College and in 1940 was commissioned in the Royal Engineers.
After Grimsby, Wakeling was involved in defusing a 1,000-kg bomb — nicknamed “Hermanns” by the Germans themselves because of their resemblance to Goering — which had fallen on the Market Place at Hull. Towards the end of the war, he took charge of clearing the mines which had been laid on the coasts of Yorkshire and Suffolk to repel invasion. Many had rusted and were oozing explosive. Pebbles, wind, sand and tide made for a treacherous environment in which to locate and neutralise such lethal devices.
He was demobbed in 1947 while a staff captain at the War Office. He returned to civilian life to work for Heinz and then Johnson & Johnson, but in 1952 became the first adjutant of 142 Regiment in the new Army Emergency Reserve. He was appointed its commanding officer in 1965 and later received the Emergency Reserve Decoration.
Eric Wakeling was the founding secretary of the Royal Engineers Bomb Disposal Officers Club, and published several histories of bomb disposal, including The Lonely War (1994). He was an adviser to the 1970s television series Danger UXB.
He married, in 1945, Nicky Hopper. She died in 2012, and he is survived by their two daughters; Carol, who ran an Age Concern day care centre in Kent for many years, and Pauline, who runs a magazine publishing business.
Lieutenant-Colonel Eric Wakeling, wartime bomb disposal expert, was born on August 1, 1920. He died on November 11, 2013, aged 93
Wartime bomber pilot who was decorated for rescuing his navigator from their sinking aircraft
Jim Flint won the George Medal when on a cold night in 1941 he swam back into a sinking Handley Page Hampden bomber off the Norfolk coast to save his badly wounded navigator.
Sergeant Pilot Flint from 49 Squadron, was flying at 5,000ft with the British coast in sight when two German night fighters caught his aircraft P-Peter unawares over the North Sea. The bomber was raked from nose to tail with 20mm cannon, wounding the navigator and air gunner, causing flares to explode inside the aircraft and knocking out the intercom.
Flint put the Hampden into a steep dive, turning sharp right as he did so and, plunging almost to sea level, shook the fighters off. But the damage had been done. Ominous wisps of smoke began to trail from his port engine, and although the coast was not far away, Flint realised that they were not going to make it back to base.
With the beaches heavily mined and bristling with antitank obstacles, he was obliged to attempt to ditch a few hundred metres from the foreshore off Cromer, luckily extinguishing the engine fire as the aircraft hit the water.
As he and his crew crawled from the aircraft they found their dinghy had been riddled by enemy fire and they would have to swim for the shore.
But as they set off Flint realised that Sergeant Fitch, his navigator, was not with them. Assuming that he must be unable to extricate himself, Flint went back into the Hampden. In the cramped interior of the bomber he eventually located the man in the dark.
The citation for his medal recorded that despite the inrushing water he hauled the badly wounded and unconscious airman through an escape hatch and, as the aircraft tail tipped skywards and disappeared, he swam for shore dragging his crewman behind him. He was, he said decades later, exhausted by the effort and had to be carried up the beach.
In the event both navigator and rear gunner died from their wounds, but for his fearlessness in re-entering his foundering aircraft to get the navigator out, Flint was awarded the GM. He was also awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal for his skilful handling of the aircraft during the mission as a whole and for evading the attack by the German night fighters, leading to the highly unusual bestowal of two medals for the same action.
Jim Flint was born in Nottingham on Empire Day in 1913 and after leaving school aged 14, trained as an accountant with the firm of R. A. Page in the city.
He was a talented amateur sportsman in both football and cricket. He played at Trent Bridge in a north versus south Nottingham game before the war and took all 10 wickets on two occasions. “They said I got a lot of pace off the wicket,” he recalled this year.
As war clouds gathered he decided in 1938 to volunteer for the RAF Volunteer Reserve and was accepted for pilot training. Having received his wings he was posted as a sergeant pilot to 49 (Hampden) Squadron, based at Scampton in Lincolnshire, in January 1941.
These were the desperate early days when Bomber Command attempted to take the fight to the enemy with its inadequate equipment. The Hampden with its short fuselage — the rear part was a mere boom — provided extremely cramped accommodation for its four-man crew. Nevertheless, Flint and No 49 carried out raids, at the extreme edge of the Hampden’s range, to Berlin and the Baltic port of Stettin (today Szczecin in Poland). They also undertook daylight attacks on enemy shipping in Brest harbour, where the commerce-raiding battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were anchored. This was a dangerous assignment for the lumbering Hampden as this target was bristling with flak of all sorts.
Flint later recalled that his first raid over Germany was the result of a gentlemanly offer to fill in for a navigator who was taken ill. He learnt only on the way to the aircraft that they were going to bomb Berlin by which time it was, he suggested wryly, too late to reconsider. He successfully found and bombed the target. For his work during the early years of the war he was also awarded the Air Efficiency Medal.
At the end of his tour in September 1941 he was rested from operations and served on the ground as an airfield controller. He liked to say that after a particularly chilling experience one night, waiting in the open to count in the last stragglers from a raid, it was pointed out to him by a fellow NCO that if he had been an officer he would have had a warmer billet from which to do the job. Whether this was true or not, on the offer of a commission in 1942, the second time such an offer had been made, he accepted. After converting to Lancasters in 1944 he was posted to 50 Squadron as its commanding officer. Among the most spectacular operations in which the squadron participated in this period was the attack on Wesel, ahead of the Allied crossing of the Rhine in March 1945. On that occasion the bombers so pulverised the defences that commandos were able to take the town with only about 30 casualties. Flint commanded 50 Squadron until the end of the war, and was awarded the DFC.
Demobbed in 1945 as a wing commander he accepted an offer to become a partner in a sports business. This was not successful and he soon afterwards became a representative and director of a hairdressing equipment company for which he travelled around Britain until his retirement in 1978. In retirement he and his wife, Joyce, travelled widely.
Flint kept up activities with veterans’ organisations and maintained close links to Scampton, from where he had flown with 49 Squadron. His portrait today hangs in the mess at Scampton.
As interest in the wartime role of Bomber Command revived in recent years he was much courted by the media. Always immaculately turned out in a pinstripe suit and bowler hat, he proved an eloquent and invariably modest spokesman for a generation of lost airmen.
At the inauguration in 2012 of the Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park, London, he insisted on standing to attention as the memorial was opened by the Queen in memory of the 55,500 bomber crewmen who never came home. “You just had to get on with it,” he said of those distant days. “Some made it, others didn’t. I was one of the lucky ones.”
His wife Joyce, whom he married in 1945, died in 2003. They had no children.
Wing Commander James Flint, DFC, GM, DFM, AE, wartime bomber pilot, was born on May 24, 1913. He died on December 16, 2013, aged 100
Distinguished D-Day veteran who was the moving force behind the creation of the UK-Dutch Amphibious Force in the 1970s
At 8.45am on D-Day, June 6, 1944, Patrick Kay waded ashore under intense enemy fire on Sword Beach as brigade liaison officer with 41 Royal Marine Commando. He was carrying a bicycle.
While this may have looked like a piece of mere English eccentricity to the German defenders, the bike was to prove vitally useful later in the day as 41 Commando suffered serious losses and the Germans threatened Allied communications. Realising the seriousness of their position on Sword Beach, Kay leapt into his saddle and rode at full speed to neighbouring 8 Brigade HQ, where he was able to call in artillery support, which eventually relieved the pressure on 41 Commando.
Even so, the British continued to encounter tough opposition in the battle to capture the village of Lion-sur-Mer on the right flank of Sword Beach. By the following day, 41 Commando had lost a third of its strength.
During the advance to the Seine, Kay was sent forward as liaison officer to 46 Commando, which had lost five officers killed by a mortar bomb which had fallen on its CO’s briefing for an impending night attack. . When a fresh young officer like Kay arrived the CO’s eyes lit up. “Are you armed?” he asked him. Kay answered in the affirmative and was told without further ado: “You will lead Z troop this evening.”
Kay’s incisive leadership contributed to the success of the attack; the Allied advance continued.
In November 1944, Kay played an important role in organising supplies as 4 Special Service Brigade’s staff captain during the battle for the strategically vital island of Walcheren in the mouth of the Scheldt estuary. The port of Antwerp had been in Allied hands since September but could not be used while the Germans still commanded the entrance to the Scheldt. Atrocious weather meant that the Navy could not deliver its supplies to the Brigade, which had to subsist on what it already had. Kay’s careful distribution enabled it to carry on fighting with unimpaired efficiency, until German resistance on Walcheren ended.
Kay’s effort was doubly meritorious. He had been suffering from severe gastroenteritis throughout the campaign, which was fought in wet and bitterly cold conditions. Nevertheless he struggled on, courageously, continuing to direct operations. He was subsequently severely injured when his amphibious tracked landing vehicle hit a mine.
The citation for the military MBE he received praised his fortitude: “In spite of this handicap, he never relaxed his efforts and insisted on taking part in the assault landing, carrying on without relief, until wounded and forcibly evacuated.”
He was to live with the effects of this for the rest of his life, but he did not let it hamper a vigorous postwar career. Operational postings included a spell in Cyprus during the Eoka emergency, and he took part in the Suez landings in 1956. While in command of 43 Commando he took part in an arduous Nato autumn exercise in Norway during which his men carried out a bold, outflanking movement involving marching non-stop for two days and a night, led by the CO “at a cracking pace”. Kay was an officer who led from the front.
The exercise’s senior umpire brought this performance and its demonstration of the suitability of the Royal Marines for operations on Nato’s northern flank to the notice of the high command. As a result, it was agreed that more RM units should be trained for winter warfare in the Arctic as part of Cold War containment.
Pat Kay was also the impetus behind the creation in 1973 of the United Kingdom/Netherlands Amphibious Force, which he forged with his Dutch counterpart Colonel Adriann Lamers of the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps. Although such a notion met resistance in some quarters, it proved to be one of the best examples of military teamwork in European defence.
It was an appropriate conjunction for two corps that had such a long history of association. Over the previous three centuries they had fought both against and alongside each other. They were founded only a year apart, to serve as naval infantry on opposite sides in the Second Anglo-Dutch War of the 17th century.
Born in 1921, Patrick Richard Kay was commissioned in the Royal Marines in January 1940. From 1941 he was at sea in HMS Renown in the Mediterranean and in the Arctic. He was serving in the battlecruiser in November 1943 when she conveyed Churchill to Alexandria.
He retired in 1974, but took over as Director of Naval Security on the sudden death of the incumbent in the same year. In 1982 he became Associate Secretary of the Defence Press and Broadcasting Committee, effectively deputy to the D-Notice Secretary.
His wife, Muriel, a member of the WAAF whom he married shortly before D-Day, died earlier this year. He is survived by his daughter, Elizabeth, a GP; and three sons, Richard, a doctor and university teacher; Alec, who is in banking; and Jonathan, who ran a computer business.
Major-General Patrick Kay, CB, MBE, Chief of Staff to Commandant-General Royal Marines, 1970-74, was born on August 1, 1921. He died on September 19, 2013, aged 92
In one of the most spectacular search and rescue operations carried out by a single aircraft during the Second World War, Jack Holmes succeeded in landing a Coastal Command Catalina flying boat on storm-tossed seas to save the crew of an RAF Flying Fortress, which had crashed only three minutes after attacking and sinking a U-boat with cannon fire and depth charges. It was June 1943.
The bomber’s captain had the satisfaction of seeing his adversary sink stern first, and was just reflecting, “Poor blighters, they’ve had it”, as he watched the U-boat’s crew leaping overboard, when his aircraft suddenly lost height. Just before the Flying Fortress ditched, the wireless operator had transmitted an SOS message to spark what was to become a massive air and sea search for the survivors. After swimming to their only serviceable dinghy, the crew found themselves wet and alone on the surface of the sea, a dot on the vast North Atlantic.
For four days the aircraft of Coastal Command scanned tens of thousands of square miles in search of them. A US Navy Catalina took off from Iceland to help. When the Americans spotted the RAF dinghy, the pilot attempted to land in what were now rising winds and an increasingly heavy swell. The casualty list grew.
The aircraft was struck by a huge wave as it came in low and, watched by the British officers in their dinghy, crashed into the sea. The Americans managed to get into two dinghies, but they could not reach the British crew. Neither had paddles and they lost touch as darkness descended.
The rescue attempt continued on the second day. Another Flying Fortress from Coastal Command dropped two containers, but, without paddles, the survivors were unable to reach the supplies. On the third day, an RAF Sunderland flew over, but her captain was unable to attempt a landing.
Finally, on the fourth day, Holmes’s Catalina appeared on the scene, just as the men in the dinghy were getting desperate. In spite of the still huge seas and winds gusting at more than gale force, Holmes made a remarkable landing without damaging his aircraft. He taxied to the dinghy and his crew hauled in the frozen crew.
Take-off presented an even more formidable problem for the overloaded flying boat. “With 13 people now in the Catalina none of us was sure what would happen,” said Holmes afterwards. “We rushed over one swell, down into a trough, and up the other side of another. From that we were thrown into the air — where we stayed.”
The story was told in understated language typical of a modest and skilful pilot. The citation to his second Distinguished Flying Cross praised his “superb airmanship”.
Only one of the crew of the American Catalina survived. He was picked up by a US escort vessel a few days later. The fate of the German submariners is not known.
Jack Holmes had always dreamt of flying. As a boy, watching biplanes zipping over Norwich, the young Holmes seemed unlikely to get a chance. These were the years of the Great Depression.
At the age of 14 he left school to start work with the Norwich Motor Company. The occasions on which he glimpsed an RAF plane high up, glinting in the sunshine, as he worked in the repair shop, kept his ambition alive. Then, at the age of 16, he won an RAF aircraft apprenticeship and passed out top, which gave him the opportunity to train as an officer cadet and pilot at RAF Cranwell.
He served for much of the war with Coastal Command, winning his first DFC in 1941 as a Catalina captain with 240 Squadron on Atlantic patrols. After the war, his appointments included command of RAF Geilenkirchen in 1957 and a period as air attaché in Athens in the 1960s.
Like many of his generation he was reluctant to talk about his wartime service. His three daughters heard about his daring rescue of the downed Flying Fortress crew only shortly before the celebrations to mark his 90th birthday in 2007.
Holmes met his wife, Babette, an art teacher and calligrapher, in South Africa, where she was born. They were married in 1952. She died in 2012. He is survived by his three daughters: Wendy, a doctor; Melanie, a teacher; and Genevieve, a writer. His son, Rory, an electronics engineer, died of a ruptured cerebral aneurysm in 1993, at the age of 35.
Air Commodore Jack Holmes, DFC and Bar, wartime Coastal Command pilot, was born on June 30, 1917. He died on December 31, 2013, aged 96
