От	Chestnut
К	Chestnut
Дата	04.11.2011 14:48:56
Рубрики	WWII; Спецслужбы; Армия; ВВС;

[2Chestnut] Военные некрологи из британских газет

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Major John Timothy

Парашютист, награждённый тремя Военными Крестами, последний из которых он получил за штыковую атаку под Арнемом

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/army-obituaries/8863227/Major-John-Timothy.html

Captain Tony Dodd

Офицер-танкист, оборонявший деревню от яростной вражеской контратаки

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/army-obituaries/8860980/Captain-Tony-Dodd.html

Lieutenant-Commander Tony Spender

Капитан военно-морского флота, спасший повреждённую подводную лодку находчивым приказом

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/naval-obituaries/8853813/Lieutenant-Commander-Tony-Spender.html

Wing Commander Tadeusz Sawicz

Польский пилот, участвовавший в Битве за Британию после дерзкого побега из Варшавы

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/air-force-obituaries/8851401/Wing-Commander-Tadeusz-Sawicz.html

Annie Penrose

Её детское прозвище было присвоено одному из лучших истребителей всех времён

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/air-force-obituaries/8849075/Annie-Penrose.html

Sir Arthur Norman

Кавалер двух военных Крестов за Отличную Службу, ранее печатавший банкноты для Чан Кайши

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8846785/Sir-Arthur-Norman.html


'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'

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От	Chestnut
К	Chestnut (04.11.2011 14:48:56)
Дата	08.11.2011 19:23:14

Военные некрологи из британских газет

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Brigadier General Dick Lord

Пилот авиации ВМС, приложивший огромные усилия к созданию школы пилотов-истребителей "Top Gun"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/naval-obituaries/8873213/Brigadier-General-Dick-Lord.html

>Lieutenant-Commander Tony Spender

>Капитан военно-морского флота, спасший повреждённую подводную лодку находчивым приказом

> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/naval-obituaries/8853813/Lieutenant-Commander-Tony-Spender.html

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3219156.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00229/98232050_Spender_229939k.jpg


Wartime submarine captain who survived torpedoing and collisions and was decorated for his service on Far East patrols

One of the very last surviving submarine commanding officers of the Second World War, “Tony” Spender had a distinguished record.

He joined the Navy as a Special Entry cadet in 1937 and served as a midshipman in the Jutland veteran battleship Barham which had an unfortunate start to the war. In December 1939, having returned to home waters from the Mediterranean, she was in collision with one of her escorting destroyers, the Duchess, which sank with only 23 survivors out of 147. Later in the month she was torpedoed by a German submarine and although badly damaged managed to reach Liverpool. She was torpedoed again, in the Mediterranean, in November 1941, blowing up and sinking in four minutes with great loss of life.

After this depressing start, Spender volunteered for submarines. His first boat was the Tribune which in February 1941 was sent with the Second Submarine Squadron to Halifax, Nova Scotia, as part of a desperate tactic to counter German warships attacking merchant convoys. Tribune returned to home waters in May after escorting a convoy which was heavily attacked by U-boats.

Spender was then appointed as second-in-command to the submarine Seraph led by Lieutenant (later Captain) Bill Jewell (obituary, August 25, 2004) who was famous for a number of clandestine operations, the first of which was to land the American General Mark Clark on the North African coast to attempt negotiations with the Vichy French prior to the Allied invasion, Operation Torch. The next was to pick up from the south coast of France the charismatic French General Giraud who had escaped from a German prison camp and take him to North Africa where he might ameliorate Vichy attitudes towards the Allies. It was thought that Giraud would prefer to be transported by an American submarine, so Seraph was ceremonially turned over to Mark Clark’s senior staffer, Captain Jerauld Wright (later Nato Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic) by means of a formal scroll arranged by Spender which contained “historic RN command rules”. Upon inspection, a pin-up from La Vie Parisienne was revealed.

On her next patrol Seraph collided while dived with an Italian submarine and returned home for repairs. Spender was selected for and passed the demanding “perisher” course for CO and was given command of an obsolescent training submarine swiftly followed by the newly built Sirdar. While on sea trials, he suffered an alarming incident, an involuntary dive to 400 feet in the Clyde, sticking so firmly in the mud that it took 12 hours pulling all the tricks available, including having the crew jump up and down in unison aft, until she became unstuck.

Sirdar was first employed screening convoys to Russia from December 1943. By May 1944 she was based at Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, when on her first patrol Spender made an unsuccessful attack against a German U-boat in the Strait of Malacca followed by a gun action that drove a merchantman ashore. In September, with her squadron, Sirdar was transferred to Fremantle, Australia, to work with the American Navy. Her first patrol in the Sunda Strait was uneventful, her second in the Macassar Strait and Java Sea saw the destruction of Japanese supply shipping, surviving an attack by a bombing aircraft. At this stage in the war, targets were in short supply; on her final patrol Sirdar had another gun action against a supply ship and was again attacked by aircraft. She passed through the vortex of a cyclone on the way back to Fremantle, making most of the passage on one engine. Spender is credited with the longest patrol in an S-class submarine — 49 days. He was awarded the DSC for service on Far East war patrols.

After the war he commanded the A-class submarine Affray, completed in 1946 and deployed to Singapore where the flag-showing strategy of the times generated a remarkable tour taking in Borneo, the Solomons, Hong Kong, Japan and two months based in Sydney working with the Australian Navy.

Spender subsequently served in the training cruiser Devonshire and commanded the Landing Ship (Tank) Messina during the Anglo-French invasion of the Suez Canal in 1956. He spent three years in Hong Kong on the intelligence staff — “a fascinating job, briefing the Governor while dealing with shady Chinese characters in back streets” — followed by six years in London working with the Foreign Office on intelligence matters.

His first job, with IBM, on leaving the Navy was not congenial. In 1975 he returned to the sea as a first mate in Everard Line coasters in the Black Sea. From there he found his niche training cadets for the Kuwait shipping company on voyages in the Persian Gulf, America and Japan. He retired in 1982.

He married Veronica Cookson in 1950 and is survived by her and their daughter and four sons.

Lieutenant-Commander Anthony Spender, DSC, Royal Navy, wartime submarine captain, was born on May 8, 1920. He died on October 10, 2011, aged 91


Major-General E. J. Hellier

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3214294.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00228/97998681_hellier_228129c.jpg


Военный администратор, отвечавший за снабжение британской армии вооружением

Administrator who performed remarkable feats of equipment supply for the British and overseas armies

Jimmie Hellier was well known in the British Army in Germany and at home during the 1970s and 1980s as a competent administrator and communications expert. Although he declined to acknowledge it, his phenomenal energy and dedication to getting things done earned him the nickname “Zebedee” from the jack-in-the-box character in the BBC children’s programme The Magic Roundabout. On leaving the Army in 1982 he was head-hunted by the government-owned International Military Services to oversee its responsibilities for delivery of a multimillion-pound British industry defence contract to the Kingdom of Jordan.

Eric James Hellier was born in 1927, the son of Harry Hellier, a farm worker of Wedmore, Somerset, and educated at the local grammar school and at Cardiff University. He joined the RNVR in the closing year of the Second World War and was commissioned in May 1946. He served at sea in frigates and minesweepers, helping to clear the thousands of mines remaining from the war, a period that provided him with naval anecdotes to last a lifetime. When his RN commission expired in 1948 he took a regular army commission with the Royal Corps of Signals.

Posted directly to a signal regiment in the Suez Canal Zone, he was quick to make his mark as a man who learnt fast and got things done. He soon became a signal troop commander and was sent to Mauritius to command a 200-strong detachment of British and Mauritian soldiers.

After service with Royal Signals units in England, Germany and Hong Kong, in 1960 he attended the Staff College, Camberley, emerging as a General Staff Officer in the War Office Signals Directorate. There he became responsible for the planning of the deployment of the “Larkspur” range of radio equipment to all regular army units and the phased withdrawal of the in-service range.

Selection to command the 7th Armoured Brigade Signal Squadron in the Army of the Rhine in 1964 confirmed his worth as a communicator with a flair for innovation, yet it was as an administrator that he went to Northern Ireland — before the onset of the 30-year Troubles — as the personnel and logistics officer of 39th Infantry Brigade based in Belfast. He had scarcely found his feet there before he was informed he was to go to Catterick to command 24 Signal Regiment.

The regiment was due to move from good accommodation with training facilities to a disused, hutted camp. Visiting the troops’ huts at reveille in January, he found them unheated, with no hot water in the washrooms. Despite the hour, he roused the civilian head of the Works Department from his bed to inquire if he was warm, explaining that it was he who was responsible for a large number of soldiers who were not. The heating promptly came on.

Returning to the General Staff in what had meanwhile become the Ministry of Defence, he was again involved in the introduction of hardware. This was the experimental fitting of the 30mm Rarden cannon to the FV432 range of lightly armoured infantry carriers. This was sensibly abandoned after deployment to one brigade, in favour of the development of the Warrior armoured vehicle incorporating the cannon from the design stage.

Promotion to colonel in 1971 returned him to Germany as chief personnel and logistics officer of the 4th Armoured Division commanded by Major-General (later General Sir) Anthony Farrar-Hockley (obituary March 14, 2006). From this he was promoted to command the Royal Signals Brigade and garrison at Catterrick. While there, a polyp on his larynx reduced his voice to an uncharacteristic whisper. One of the signal technicians designed a throat microphone and chest speaker that gave much amusement to those under his jurisdiction, once they realised where his voice was coming from.

The 1975 course at the Royal College of Defence Studies was followed by a return to Germany as chief personnel and logistics officer of the 1st (British) Corps. For his services in planning and organising the arrangements to mark the Queen’s Silver Jubilee parade at Sennelager, Germany, he was advanced to CBE from the OBE he had received for his regimental command and the MBE for service in Northern Ireland. Promotion to major-general in charge of administration and logistics for the UK-based land forces, with its headquarters at Wilton, Wiltshire, from 1979 to 1981, completed a military career of great intensity and irrepressible humour.

Before leaving the service, he had been invited to join International Military Services Limited (IMS) to oversee the responsibilities taken on by the company to ensure proper delivery of 272 Khalid main battle tanks and their associated support and training facilities to Jordan. Earlier versions of the Khalid, the Shir, had been ordered by Iran in the late 1970s but the contract was arbitrarily cancelled short of the start of delivery following the fall of the Shah, leaving defence manufacturers high and dry. Following protracted negotiations, Jordan took up the contract for more tanks than Iran had ordered but of improved specification.

The challenges Hellier faced to fulfil the re-orientated contracts were formidable enough, as they involved a wide range of manufacturers, and after delivery got under way a serious fault was discovered in the Khalid’s gearbox. Introducing a programme called Bold Resolve, Hellier set up teams of technicians in Jordan to extract the gearboxes for shipping home for modification and return. His efforts finally succeeded in bringing the whole contract in on time while he was also handling other IMS equipment supplies to Oman and Sri Lanka.

In addition to his duties with IMS that extended until 1992, he was Representative Colonel Commandant Royal Signals in 1983 and Chairman of the Royal Signals Institute from 1984 to 1989. In 1992 he chaired the fundraising committee that produced £1.25 million for a major extension to the Museum of Army Communications at Blandford, Dorset.

His wife Margaret “Margo”, née Leadeham, whom he married in 1952 survives him with a son and daughter. Another son died in boyhood.

Major-General E. J. Hellier, CBE, administrator and communicator, was born on July 23, 1927. He died on October 31, 2011, aged 84

Flight Lieutenant Wallace Cunningham

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3219159.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00229/98232057_Cunningham_229941c.jpg


Пилот-истребитель, участник Битвы за Британию, и узник Шталаг Люфт

Wallace Cunningham joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve in 1938 and was called up on the outbreak of war. After training he was posted to 19 Squadron in June 1940 at the outset of the Battle of Britain. By the end of the battle he had become a fighter “ace” (five combat victories) and had also served with the Duxford-based “Big Wing” commanded by the legless ace Douglas Bader.

In the following year while on a bomber escort, he was shot down over the Netherlands and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of war. Active in escape attempts in several camps, he was eventually sent to Stalag Luft III in Silesia, from which he joined the Long March westwards in the bitter winter weather of early 1945, when the camp was evacuated by the Germans to prevent its inmates from falling into the hands of the approaching Russians.

Wallace Cunningham, known throughout his RAF service as Jock, was born in Glasgow in 1916 and studied engineering at the Royal Technical College, Glasgow. Having joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve he learnt to fly at Prestwick. When war broke out in September the following year he was mobilised and commissioned, and sent for flying training at 11 Flying Training School at Shawbury in Shropshire.

After converting to Spitfires at 5 Operational Training Unit at Aston Down, Gloucestershire, he was posted in June 1940 to 19 Squadron based at Duxford, Cambridgeshire, in 12 Group which was commanded by Air Vice-Marshal Trafford Leigh Mallory. He had his first combat victory on August 16, when he shot down a Messerschmitt 110 twin-engined, long-range fighter off Clacton.

From the following month the squadron operated as part of the three-squadron Big Wing (soon to be increased to five squadrons) commanded by Bader who, encouraged by Duxford’s station commander and Leigh-Mallory, was anxious to develop attacks on enemy formations by massed squadrons, in direct contradiction to the highly successful piecemeal attacks which formed the fighting philosophy of Keith Park, AOC 11 Group, responsible for the defence of London and the South East.

The first Big Wing operation was on September 7, and resulted in Cunningham’s second combat victory, over a Heinkel He 110 near Ramsgate. During the same sortie he also damaged a second He 111. In general however the results of the day suggested that such large formations were unwieldy in combat, a conclusion Park had already come to in his experiments with them over Dunkirk. The Germans themselves derided such large formations as Idiotenreihe. Although nothing in subsequent mass deployments was to change the picture, the Big Wing’s proponents continued vociferous in their advocacy of their tactics at the highest levels, undermining the standing of both Park and Fighter Command’s boss, Hugh Dowding, who backed his 11 Group commander to the hilt.

Cunningham’s personal performance, however, continued to be exemplary. By the end of the battle he had a tally of four kills and three shared destroyed, giving him as total of 5½ combat victories. In October he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for “great personal gallantry and splendid skill in action” and was appointed a flight commander in No 19.

Cunningham remained with No 19 in the following year when Fighter Command went on the offensive with fighter sweeps over France, and in July 1941 he damaged a Messerschmitt 109 during a sortie over northern France. But in August, as his squadron was escorting a force of Blenheim bombers on a raid on shipping near Rotterdam, both he and his CO were hit by flak and forced to bale out.

Taken prisoner, he was sent first to Oflag XC at Lübeck before being moved south to Oflag VIB at Warburg. There he was soon involved with a tunnelling team which made good progress and was on the verge of a breakout when it was discovered. Nothing daunted, the Warburg PoWs began another tunnel and Cunningham was among the 35 men selected to make the escape attempt. In fact the team’s calculations were awry and the tunnel surfaced on April 18, 1942, well short of a safe distance from the perimeter wire. Five prisoners got out through it but it was discovered next day.

Towards the end of the year Cunningham was dispatched to Stalag Luft III in Silesia where he spent the remainder of the war. Although he was still interested in escape attempts he also took advantage of instruction courses that were being offered and kept up his engineering studies. When, in January 1945, the camp was evacuated by the Germans in the face of the Red Army’s advance, he was among those who made the march westwards in atrocious conditions during which many prisoners perished. In late April he and his group were liberated by British troops and he was repatriated.

After his release from the RAF in 1946 he returned to working as in engineering becoming technical sales director for the heavy plant firm Winget, for which he travelled widely. He subsequently worked as chief engineer at Dalglish of Glasgow and, when it was taken over by the American company Proctor and Schwartz, was made a vice-president. In retirement he became popular speaker at RAF bases and universities.

His wife, Mary, whom he married in 1945, died in 1998. He is survived by their daughter.

Flight Lieutenant Wallace Cunningham, DFC, fighter ace and engineer, was born on December 4, 1916. He died on October 4, 2011, aged 94





'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'

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От	Chestnut
К	Chestnut (04.11.2011 14:48:56)
Дата	04.11.2011 14:58:32

Re: [2Chestnut] Военные...

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Colonel Peter Storie-Pugh

После ранения в 1940 г провёл войну в лагере Колдитц, а после стал известным хирургом-ветеринаром

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3207041.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00225/5813967_colditz_225754c.jpg
Colditz Castle
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00225/97691805_pugh_225763c.jpg
Peter Storie-Pugh

Soldier who spent his war in Colditz after being wounded in 1940 and later became an influential figure in the world of veterinary surgery

Before qualifying as a veterinary surgeon, Peter Storie-Pugh spent more than four years of the Second World War confined in Oflag IVC — Colditz Castle in Saxony. Incarcerated there because he was classified as a prisoner who would persistently try to escape, he worked to help others break out of the castle but was never able to get away himself.

While studying medicine at Queens’ College, Cambridge, he had joined the University Cavalry Squadron. On the outbreak of war he was commissioned into the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment and sailed for France with the 6th (Territorial Army) Battalion to join the British Expeditionary Force in early 1940.

During the German offensive into Belgium and northern France in May 1940 his company was ordered to hold the junction of the Albert and Arras roads on the eastern outskirts of Doullens, north of Amiens. The determined defence sustained by his weary soldiers forced a German armoured column to halt, then take to the countryside to bypass the junction. He was later awarded the Military Cross for his resolute leadership.

Storie-Pugh was reported killed in this action but, actually only wounded, he was later taken prisoner and evacuated to the French military hospital under German control at Bapaume. On recovery from his wounds and recognising that transfer to a prison camp was imminent, he escaped from the relatively lightly guarded hospital, only to be recaptured and sent to Oflag IX at Spangenberg Castle on the east bank of the River Weser.

Together with two fellow prisoners, he got away from the lower camp at Spangenberg below the castle by cutting through the wire and swimming along a river close to the perimeter. It was an opportunistic venture for which the three were ill prepared and they were caught by a group of German railway workers as they made for cover in the Harz mountains.

The railwaymen were friendly and good humoured, inviting their captives to join them in toasts of schnapps, but the Feldgendarmerie who came to collect them behaved brutally. Thrown into the back of the truck to return to Spangenberg, Storie-Pugh was slashed in the face by a bayonet and all three men suffered blows with rifle butts. On arrival at Spangenberg, they were hauled into a dance hall, paraded before those present and beaten.

Because of his previous form, Storie-Pugh was dispatched to the Sonderlager — high-security camp — at Colditz. One of only the second group of prisoners sent there, he arrived on December 2, 1940, and was confined until liberated by the United States Army in April 1945.

Remembered by another inveterate escaper, the mining engineer Jim Rogers (obituary August 18, 2000), as one of the most cheerful prisoners in Colditz, he soon became an eager participant in a series of escape plans. One particularly ingenious idea involved a manhole in the canteen floor through which prisoners could enter the drainage system to dig a vertical exit, thereby solving the problem of hiding the entrance and having space to distribute the earth from digging. This plan would almost certainly have got beyond the wall but for betrayal by a German sentry who had been bribed to look away from the exit point.

In September 1942 Storie-Pugh became the first British prisoner to be sentenced to solitary confinement in the newly constructed cells after being caught on a reconnaissance of an escape route through the castle lofts with Lieutenant Fritz Kruimink of the Royal Netherlands Navy.

His medical training allowed him to work as a paramedical assistant in the castle sick bay and, in the later years of their confinement, he estimated that because of the high morale among the prisoners, fewer than 15 per cent were beginning to show the psychological effects of imprisonment.

Appointed MBE for services during incarceration in Colditz, Storie-Pugh returned to his veterinary studies and the Territorial Army after his release. He commanded a parachute Light Battery of the Cambridgeshire Regiment, Royal Artillery, TA, until the unit was restored to the infantry role and, on promotion to colonel, became the Deputy Commander 161 Infantry Brigade TA, 1962-65. He was Commandant of the Cambridgeshire Army Cadet Force, 1965-70.

Peter David Storie-Pugh was the son of Professor Leslie Pugh, CBE, FRCVS and Paula Storie. His grandfather had also been a veterinary surgeon and his academic promise at Malvern and as a Foundation Scholar at Queens’ College, Cambridge, led him into the profession. He qualified MRCVS from the Royal Veterinary College in 1948 and took up a research fellowship in the Cambridge department of animal pathology in 1949. His PhD in 1953 was followed by his appointment as lecturer in the department of clinical veterinary medicine at Cambridge, a post he held for 30 years. He became a Fellow of Wolfson College in 1967.

A member of a wide variety of bodies concerned with farming, he served as chairman of the National Sheepbreeders Association. Elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in 1975, he became the president in 1977 and was twice elected president of the British Veterinary Association, in 1968 and in 1970.

The entry of the UK into the European Economic Community in 1973 provided a new focus for his interests. He was instrumental in the establishment of the Federation of Veterinarians of the EEC and became its first president in 1975. He held that post for four years during which time he worked closely with the European Commission in developing the EEC Professional directive for Veterinarians. For this work he was advanced to CBE for his work in this field in 1981.

His fluent French and adequate German greatly helped in his dealings with continental colleagues. He was the first non-German to be awarded the Robert von Ostertag Medal by the German Veterinary Association in 1972. In retirement he lived in France but a serious car accident in 1998 left him incapacitated.

His marriage in 1946 to Alison, daughter of the late Sir Oliver Lyle, was dissolved in 1971. He married Leslie Striegel in the same year. He is survived by her, and by a son and two daughters of his first marriage and three sons and a daughter of his second.

Colonel P. D. Storie-Pugh, CBE, MC, veteran of Colditz and former President of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, was born on November 1, 1919. He died on October 20, 2011, aged 91

Barbara Ridler

Заведующая кардами Женского Королевского Армейского Корпуса, впоследствии работавшая в исследовательском центре Консервативной партии

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3214315.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00228/97998263_ridler_228125c.jpg


WRAC head of personnel who later became the mainstay of the Conservative Research Department

Barbara Ridler was a femme formidable whose strong, steely character was softened by abundant charm. She was regarded with deep affection and respect in the two very dissimilar organisations in which she spent her career, the Women’s Royal Army Corps and the Conservative Research Department, an extraordinary outfit quite unlike any other in modern politics.

She was born in 1915 into the staunchly Roman Catholic Dodd family which had long been well established in the life of Liverpool. It is an indication of the esteem in which the family was held that at the age of 21 she was given the honour of launching a passenger steamship of which the city was particularly proud. She had earlier been welcomed into their circles as a member of the Royal Mersey Yacht Club, having acquired a marked interest in sailing.

Thanks to the Convent of the Holy Child in Harrogate where she was educated and to her own wide reading, she was well prepared to make her way in the world. That, as it turned out, was extremely fortunate because her father fell on hard times. Like so many others, he never really recovered from his experiences during the First World War when he fought at Gallipoli. His once flourishing solicitor’s practice in Birkenhead eventually collapsed. Barbara Dodd needed a job; the wartime women’s Armed Forces provided it. She also acquired a husband, Herbert Ridler, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1949.

Joining the bottom rung of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) in 1942, she was promoted steadily, reaching the rank of lieutenant-colonel in the Women’s Royal Army Corps (WRAC) in 1960. She swiftly established herself as a skilful administrator, ensuring the success of a number of signals units during the war. In peacetime her duties were steadily extended, eventually coming to include responsibility for welfare and training throughout the WRAC.

One of her most challenging assignments (1962-64) took her to the Far East as adviser to the British commander-in-chief, a martinet who tried her patience sorely. He piled duties upon her, including oversight of large military building projects designed (vainly, as it turned out) to provide for a permanent British presence in Singapore. She was cheered at this and other times by visits from the WRAC’s commandant, the then Princess Royal, daughter of George V, with whom she established a close rapport.

In combination with other senior officers, they thwarted an attempt to shorten the name of the WRAC to Women’s Corps. The ever cheerful Princess made light of her encounter with a hamster, hidden in the hand of a mischievous child, to whom Ridler had introduced her formally.

Her final military appointment was as head of the personnel department at the War Office. In 1970 she exchanged the ordered routines of army life for the hurly-burly of the Conservative Research Department. It had hardly changed since its creation more than 40 years earlier by Neville Chamberlain who put a senior MI5 officer in charge of it. Little conspiracies and love affairs thrived in its elegant, but badly rundown, premises near Parliament without disrupting its first-rate policy work and briefing services on which the Conservative Party leadership then depended.

As the Department’s establishment officer, Ridler made it her task to ensure that the place did not descend into total squalor. She employed as her shock troops a bevy of well-bred young ladies whom she recruited as secretaries to the policy experts, known as desk officers. It was said, with pardonable exaggeration, that no one who could not be found in Burke’s Landed Gentry (the Peerage was even better) need bother to apply. They loved their rescue work. A roll of banknotes was handed to one so that she could buy a new wardrobe for an unwashed desk officer (later an MP).

Ridler fought a determined rearguard action against the ever-increasing pressure to make politics a 24-hour business. A desk officer once asked her gingerly if his secretary could work beyond tea-time. “Stupid boy”, she barked, “Miranda has got a Duke coming to dinner. Of course she can’t help you.” After this enjoyable little encounter, she quietly arranged for someone else to provide cover.

She entered fully into the spirit of the place. A drunk once fell across the threshold. She peered intently at the prostrate form. “Despite appearances to the contrary,” she pronounced, “I don’t think it is a member of the Shadow Cabinet.” After this rather madcap existence, it seemed somehow appropriate that when, after her retirement in 1980, she went to Buckingham Palace to collect the OBE that she had been appointed, the wrong name was read out to the Queen.

Many years earlier she had teamed up with another WRAC officer, Rachel Green. In retirement “the two colonels”, as they were affectionately known, entertained a stream of visitors at their flat in East Sussex. Among them was Tito Gobbi, a close friend who reinforced their shared love of opera and of Italy, which they visited annually. To the end her Conservative Research Department “girls” would bring their offspring to receive her benedictions.

There were no children of her marriage to Herbert Ridler. She is survived by Rachel Green.

Barbara Ridler, OBE, lieutenant-colonel in the Women’s Royal Army Corps and Conservative Research Department administrator, was born on October 3, 1915. She died on August 10, 2011, aged 95

Karl Wienand

Западногерманский политик, чья храбрость во время войны была позднее запятнана обвинениями во взяточничестве, коррупции и измене

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3215642.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00228/98047324_karl_228572c.jpg


German politician whose courageous wartime exploits were overshadowed by later allegations of bribery, treachery and corruption

Karl Wienand could perhaps have been one of the heroic figures of post-war West Germany’s return to democracy. A man who had survived terrible Second World War wounds, and made his way on crutches back from captivity in the Soviet Union, rose swiftly in the Social Democratic party (SPD) under Willy Brandt. But the time of his greatest influence, the mid-1970s when he was a key organiser, a kind of chief whip for the SPD in Bonn, was also the time when he began to be caught up in corruption, tax evasion and espionage allegations that dogged the rest of his career, and led to his disgrace. He became a kind of symbol of the often murky mixture of political networking, business money and treachery that ran as an undercurrent through that period of West German life.

Wienand was accused of having bribed another party’s MP to abstain in a crucial no-confidence vote in the Bundestag in 1972, which kept Willy Brandt in power. The MP, it appeared, had been in contact with both the East German secret police and the West German security services, and it later turned out to have been the East Germans who paid the bribe. Extensive parliamentary investigation at the time did not find proof of Wienand’s involvement in trying to sway the vote unduly, but nor was his name fully cleared.

Wienand, who had been active in fostering the SPD’s links with West German big business, was also accused of helping a businessman in his constituency to avoid paying tax. And damaging allegations of perjury and tax evasion were made concerning Wienand’s personal association with a charter airline, Pan International, which went bust after one of its aircraft crashed, killing 22 passengers. Wienand, who had repeatedly lobbied on the company’s behalf with aviation and other authorities, told a Bundestag investigating committee that he had no financial link with the company. But then evidence emerged of a lucrative consultancy arrangement, on which he had not paid tax. He was later ordered to pay more than DM100,000 (about £20,000) to the tax authorities.

In August 1974 Wienand was suspended from his senior SPD roles, The Times reporting that he had been “the centre of a complicated personal and political controversy almost continuously over the past three years”. His resignation from the Bundestag, for “health reasons”, followed later that year.

Wienand almost always protested his innocence, and he then pursued a career in business. But his troubles and embarrassments were far from over. In 1996 he was found guilty of having informed in the 1970s and 1980s for the East German security services, passing on in many meetings with an agent his knowledge of the internal workings and personalities of West German politics in return for payments believed to have been up to DM1.5 million. Wienand agreed that meetings with East German officials had taken place, but said he had known his contacts were working for the communist security services. He escaped prison as a result of ill health and was later pardoned by Roman Herzog, the President of Germany. But he was financially ruined by the fines imposed, and his disgrace deepened when he was implicated in 2000 in a funding scandal centred on the building of a Cologne waste disposal facility. He resigned from membership of the SPD in 2002, when his expulsion seemed imminent.

It was a pathetic end to a political career that at one time had seemed a great triumph over adversity. Wienand was born in the Rhineland in 1926 into an extremely poor household. His father, a communist building worker, was arrested when the Nazis took power in 1933, and died as war broke out. His mother, a cleaning lady, brought up the family on her own. Wienand joined the Wehrmacht aged 16, had a leg amputated after being wounded, and was also shot in the head and arm, but escaped Soviet captivity.

After studying law and economics at university in Bonn, Wienand joined the SPD in 1947 and became in 1953 the youngest MP in the new West German Bundestag. He rose rapidly in the SPD, winning the trust of leading figures, including Brandt and Helmut Schmidt. He specialised in military policy, and was closely involved too in Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, developing new relationships with the communist east of Germany and Europe. But he was most valued by the party leadership as an effective, behind-the-scenes fixer, sometimes doing the party’s dirty work, making all kinds of useful contacts, seen as discreet and loyal. Those contacts and networks, it later emerged, had gone well beyond the bounds of political necessity and often had much to do with a desire for personal enrichment.

His two wives predeceased him. He was father and stepfather to five children. One of his sons died in a road accident.

Karl Wienand, German politician, was born on December 15, 1926. He died on October 10, 2011, aged 84



'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'

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От	Chestnut
К	Chestnut (04.11.2011 14:48:56)
Дата	04.11.2011 14:50:18

Re: [2Chestnut] Военные...

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>Wing Commander Tadeusz Sawicz

>Польский пилот, участвовавший в Битве за Британию после дерзкого побега из Варшавы

> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/air-force-obituaries/8851401/Wing-Commander-Tadeusz-Sawicz.html

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3205734.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00225/97645585_sawicz_225343c.jpg


Wartime Polish pilot who fought alongside both the RAF and USAAF and later commanded the 1st Polish Fighter Wing at Northolt

The death of Tadeusz Sawicz closes an important chapter in the story of Polish participation in Allied air operations during the Second World War. Sawicz was the last survivor of the 145 Polish pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain in 1940.

Tadeusz Sawicz was born in 1914 in Warsaw, then the principal city of a Poland that was part of the Russian Empire. In 1934 he joined the Air Force College in Deblin, in what was by then an independent Poland, and was commissioned in 1936. When Germany invaded on September 1, 1939, he was with the Pursuit Brigade, flying a PZL P11 fighter, a small high-wing monoplane with a fixed undercarriage and open cockpit — obsolescent but robust and manoeuvrable.

The brigade was tasked with defending Warsaw. It was for long received wisdom that most of the Polish Air Force was destroyed on the ground by the Luftwaffe; in fact many of its aircraft had been dispersed to well camouflaged airfields before war’s outbreak. Outclassed in all but skill and determination by the Luftwaffe, the Polish pilots fought doggedly, and are credited with having shot down 126 German aircraft. Sawicz himself destroyed a Dornier Do17 bomber on September 5 and another the following day.

After the Soviet invasion, air and ground crew were evacuated to Romania. Sawicz, like most of his fellow airmen, evaded internment and made for France via Yugoslavia and Italy.

In France, the Polish Air Force was re-formed to fight alongside the Armée de l’Air. Sawicz was first based at the Lyons-Bron air base. After conversion training on the Bloch MB152, a somewhat underpowered French fighter, he was assigned to a Polish flight with a French Groupe de Chasse squadron at Deauville. With this, he flew several sorties from airfields which rapidly changed hands in the face of the German Blitzkrieg, in May and June 1940. On France’s capitulation he flew his Bloch to Algiers. From there he made his way to Casablanca, reaching Britain, by sea on July 17.

After further conversion training, this time on Hurricanes, he was posted in October to No 303 (Warsaw-Kosciuszko) Squadron for the final stages of the Battle of Britain. The squadron had already distinguished itself and was to become the top scoring squadron of the battle. The contribution to victory in the Battle of Britain by Polish pilots was to be a vital one. Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, Commander-in-Chief Fighter Command, was to acknowledge: “Had it not been for the magnificent material contributed by the Polish squadrons and their unsurpassed gallantry I hesitate to say that the outcome of the battle would have been the same.”

On February 22, 1941, Sawicz was posted to the newly formed 316 (City of Warsaw) Squadron based at Pembrey in Carmarthenshire. On April 9, 1941, while flying an escort sortie over a convoy he destroyed a Heinkel He111 over the sea. Three crew were rescued. Sawicz was refused a request made to British authorities for a Luftwaffe button from the crew, as a war souvenir, but one of the German survivors volunteered a Luftwaffe wing.

With his tour expired Sawicz was rested and posted as an instructor to 58 Operational Training Unit at Grangemouth on the Firth of Forth in June 1942. In September that year he was given command of 315 (City of Deblin) squadron, then based at Northolt with its Spitfires. Sawicz and his squadron were frequently involved in operations over enemy-occupied territory .

Sawicz was involved in a running battle on April 4, 1943, when 315 and 316 Squadrons, acting as escort to USAAF B17 Flying Fortresses, came to grips with a number of Focke-Wulf Fw190s near Rouen. Three of the Polish Spitfires were lost as were three of the German fighters. Sawicz was credited with damaging an Fw190.

In July 1943 he was appointed liaison officer with HQ 12 Group before once more being posted as an instructor. In October that year he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

At the beginning of 1944 Lieutenant-Colonel Francis “Gabby” Gabreski, operations officer of the American 56th Fighter Group, visited Polish friends at RAF Northolt with an offer. Gabreski, who was to become one of the top US aces with 37 kills in the Second World War and later in Korea, had been born in Pennsylvania of Polish parents and was a fluent Polish speaker. In January 1943 he had attached himself to 315 City of Deblin Squadron and took part in some 20 sorties with the Poles. He had been impressed by their aggressive tactics.

He now invited several Poles to fly with 56th Group, and among those who accepted the exchange posting was Sawicz. Another who accepted was Gabreski’s tutor from 315 Squadron days, the future Squadron Leader Tadeusz Andersz (obituary, November 16, 2007). The Polish authorities welcomed this arrangement, thinking of it as a means of cementing ties between their and the American air forces after the war.

Sawicz and the Poles, flying P47D Thunderbolts, completed many sorties with 56 Group’s 61st Fighter Squadron in the run-up to D-Day. He was awarded the American DFC and Air Medal. Sawicz was recalled to service alongside the RAF and in October 1944 was appointed commander of the 1st Polish Fighter Wing (No 131 Wing RAF) comprising the Polish 302, 308 and 317 Squadrons. He led the wing until the end of the war.

Victory over Germany did not bring freedom to Poland, which fell under Soviet rule. The 14 Polish Air Force squadrons and their training establishments, which had served alongside the RAF, were disbanded by the end of January 1947. The same happened to the rest of the 200,000-strong Polish forces which had fought under overall British command. Most chose a life of exile rather than returning to Poland.

Sawicz’s first marriage was dissolved, and in 1957 he emigrated to Canada, and found employment in the aeronautical industry. On retirement he settled near Toronto and attended Polish Air Force reunions in London and in Poland after its return to democracy.

In 2006 the President of Poland promoted him to the honorary rank of brigadier general. He also held the Polish Virtuti Militari, and the Polish Cross of Valour and three Bars.

His second wife predeceased him and he is survived by his third wife, Jadwiga, and by a step-daughter of this marriage.

Wing Commander Tadeusz Sawicz, DFC, wartime fighter pilot, was born on February 13, 1914. He died on October 19, 2011, aged 97



'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'

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