Battle of Britain pilot with the famous 249 Squadron which he later commanded in the defence of Malta
In a remarkably long wartime career as a combat pilot which involved him in the air defence of Britain in 1940 and Malta in 1941, service in North Africa in 1943 and command of a fighter station in the Far East theatre in 1944, John Beazley served during the Battle of Britain with 249 Squadron, the RAF’s top scoring fighter unit of the war.
It was also 249’s proud claim that it won Fighter Command’s only wartime Victoria Cross, that of Flight Lieutenant James Nicholson, who remained with his blazing aircraft until he had shot down a Messerschmitt 110 with which he was in combat, only baling out when he saw it go down in flames.
Beazley was himself shot down during the Battle of Britain, and was later badly wounded during an air battle over Essex. But he returned to the front line on both occasions, and later commanded 249 Squadron in Malta.
Hugh John Sherard Beazley was born the son of a judge in 1916, and educated at Cheltenham and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he read history. He joined the University air squadron in 1936 and learnt to fly with the RAF Volunteer Reserve.
When war came he was commissioned in the RAF and after training at Cranwell was posted to 249 Squadron which had been re-formed as a fighter squadron on May 16, 1940, less than a week after Germany’s Blitzkrieg had opened on the Western Front.
Flying in August from Boscombe Down, Wiltshire, where Nicholson won his VC, and in September based at North Weald in Essex, 249’s Hurricanes were in the thick of the action, often flying four sorties a day. On September 2 Beazley’s aircraft was hit by cannon fire while he was tackling enemy fighters over Rochester, and he was compelled to “hit the silk”, but parachuted safely to earth.
He was back in action within 48 hours, but on September 27 he was badly wounded in the foot when his aircraft was hit while he was attacking a Messerschmitt 110. He managed to nurse his Hurricane back to North Weald, but had to spend five months in hospital while his injuries healed. He was to suffer problems with his injury for the rest of his life.
He re-joined his squadron in March 1941, not long afterwards to embark with it in the carrier Ark Royal en route to Malta. On May 21 the squadron’s Hurricanes flew off the carrier for the three-hour flight to the beleaguered island. They all touched down safely, but their destination, Ta Qali airfield, was assailed by the Luftwaffe soon after they had landed, and 249 lost several aircraft on the ground to a strafing attack. At this stage the squadron was still flying its now obsolete Hurricane Is but in June it received some Mk IIs and was able to regain some advantage over the Axis attackers for most of the rest of the year, claiming the 1,000th aircraft to fall to Malta’s defences.
However, towards the end of the year, 249’s losses began to rise steeply and Beazley saw many of his comrades and friends killed or wounded. A fine leader, he was promoted to acting squadron leaderand given command of 249 in December 1941. He led it until February 1942 when he was rested from operations after ten months in action and 215 operational sorties, including combat victories over Ju88, Me109 and Me110, bringing his total claims to seven, with others shared.
After a period on Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder’s staff he was restless to get back to flying, and in December 1942 he converted to the twin-engined Beaufighter in the night fighter role. He was posted to 89 Squadron the Middle East where its Beaufighters were highly effective in night air defence and intruder sorties ranging as far as Malta and Sicily.
With German night fighters retreating northwards in October 1943 the squadron was sent to Ceylon to take part in night air operations in South East Asia, and in March 1944 Beazley was promoted to wing commander and appointed station commander of RAF Minneriya. He had by that time been awarded the DFC.
Towards the end of the war higher rank and further staff jobs beckoned, but Beazley wanted to keep flying, and opted for Transport Command where he flew Dakotas in Europe and in the Middle and Far East until his demobilisation in 1946.
After a period with the family shipping company he joined the Colonial Office and served for ten years in Nigeria where he became a Senior Resident. After Nigeria’s independence he qualified as a chartered accountant in 1960 and worked as finance director for the British Electric Traction Company until his retirement in 1981. Active in the Conservative Party in Hertfordshire, he served as a councillor and then chairman of Hoddesdon District Council and was chairman of the Broxbourne Conservative Association.
Beazley was also a trustee and treasurer of the Battle of Britain Memorial Trust. As such he played an active role in helping to establish the Battle of Britain Memorial on the White Cliffs at Capel-le-Ferne, near Folkestone.
He married, in 1947, Mary, daughter of Admiral Sir Bernard Rawlings. He is survived by her and by three children.
Wing Commander John Beazley, DFC, wartime fighter pilot, was born on July 18, 1916. He died on June 13, 2011, aged 94
RAF navigator who helped to plan the bombing of German supply lines to prepare the way for D-Day
In the spring of 1944 Bomber Command under its redoubtable but stubborn leader, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, was ordered to divert a proportion of its energies from the strategic bombing of Germany, of which Harris was the architect, to attacking targets in northern France and Belgium — railways, bridges, tunnels, marshalling yards — whose destruction would materially expedite the forthcoming Allied invasion of German-occupied Europe.
Although Harris dug his heels in against what he was convinced was a misuse of his strategic bomber force, a trial raid against a railway centre at Trappes, south west of Paris, in early March resulted in such spectacular destruction and dislocation of rail traffic that it became evident that a sustained assault by Bomber Command would be capable of virtually paralysing the German capacity to move troops against whatever beach heads the Allies might establish before, and not after, the projected invasion. This was a vital discovery. In spite of Harris’s protests his best bomber squadrons were from then until June 6, 1944, and afterwards, employed on this momentous interdiction work.
Don Nelson, a Pathfinder Force navigator newly arrived at No 7 (Lancaster) Squadron, was involved in the precision navigation and marking of targets that was so vital to the success of this bombing policy. Over the next four months, flying with one of No 7’s flight commanders who also frequently acted as master bomber, he played an important role as the French railway system was methodically degraded as D-Day approached, causing trains to have to make lengthy diversions to reach their destinations. In addition Nelson and No 7 attacked stores and weapons depots causing chaos in the supply train to the German armies in France.
Remarkably, and again counter to Harris’s predictions, the losses were light. Of the 8,795 aircraft employed on these operations between March 6 and June 3 only 203 were lost. Such an attrition rate, 2.3 per cent, was less than half that sustained by squadrons who regularly undertook the area bombing of German cities.
After D-Day, Nelson and 7 Squadron were involved in attacking V1 sites in the Pas de Calais, and the E-boat bases at Le Havre, which might have constituted a serious threat to Allied supply lines. During these operations he was mentioned in dispatches and in September was awarded his first DFC.
In August, No 7 had resumed its place in Harris’s attacks on German cities. Nelson navigated for raids on the German naval base at Kiel, the inland ports of Bremen and Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland), and Saarbrücken, his final trip, in October. He received a Bar to his DFC, having completed 70 operations.
Donald Kenneth Nelson had begun his war flying in the Western Desert. Born in London in 1920, he had joined the RAF in 1939, and was trained as a navigator in South Africa, before joining 37 Squadron, equipped with Wellingtons, in March 1942.
At this period, with the Royal Navy having suffered grievous losses to its aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean, the Fleet Air Arm’s Albacore biplane torpedo bombers were being used as land-based aircraft to mark targets for the Desert Air Force’s Wellingtons at night. In one of the most successful of these co-operations, 37 Squadron located and bombed a huge Axis ammunition dump destroying ordnance vital to Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Nelson subsequently guided attacks on Axis shipping in the harbours of Tobruk and Benghazi. After completing 37 sorties with 37 Squadron he was posted back to the UK as an instructor.
When he was rested from operations with 7 Squadron in October 1944 it was not the end of his service flying career. In the last months of the war he was a navigator with Transport Command on the transpacific route to Australia and New Zealand.
He was demobbed in 1946 and worked as a technical consultant to such building trade companies as Pilkington and Goodlass Nerolac Paints. In retirement he was active in the Pathfinder Association and served as its president. He married in 1943 Edna Mather. She died in 1986 and he is survived by a son and daughter. A second son predeceased him.
Flight Lieutenant Don Nelson, DFC and Bar, wartime RAF navigator, was born on February 13, 1920. He died on March 20, 2011, aged 91
Vice-Admiral Sir John Martin
Naval officer who survived an eventful war to hold a series of senior and influential peacetime posts
As a midshipman in the battleship Queen Elizabeth and the destroyer Glowworm, John Martin witnessed the rescue of thousands of distressed refugees during the Spanish Civil War and the naval contribution to the quelling by the Army of both Arab and Jewish insurgency in the Palestine Mandate.
At the outbreak of war he was in the destroyer Pelican, based at Harwich and employed escorting East Coast convoys carrying coal to London. After his first night watch on the bridge he went below and changed into pyjamas and was awoken by a loud explosion from a ship in the convoy. Thereafter for the entire war he slept in his clothes with seaboots at the ready.
Pelican was bombed by German aircraft during the Norwegian campaign. A “hideous explosion” blew off her stern and inflicted many casualties, particularly among the 80 army communications personnel “who, being inexperienced, had come on deck to watch” and among Pelican’s after guns’ crews.
Martin was hit in the neck and leg. Ordered aft to find out what was happening, he and a sub-lieutenant RNVR, had to throw human body parts overboard, an experience which stayed with him all his life. Pelican stayed afloat and was towed to Shetland.
Back at Chatham, Martin was told to join the Sun Tug company’s Tug No 15 at Tilbury. With another officer, he collected nine lifeboats from adjacent merchantmen and towed them to Dunkirk. He had no real idea where to go but followed the track of destroyers passing at high speed.
Dunkirk was a mess of smoke and dive bombers. By dawn only two motorised lifeboats had returned to the tug, and these were towed back to Ramsgate. During a second trip the tug was overloaded with soldiers and barely stable. A third trip to try to tow off a grounded steamer was a failure. During it Martin, on board the steamer, was machinegunned from the air. Having embarked a RN commander, Sun Tug 15 set off on a fourth trip, only to meet a host of shipping and hear that the evacuation was complete. But, pressing on, the tug was able to help the last destroyer, packed with soldiers, to leave Dunkirk pier in a hurry.
Sun Tug 15 has a good claim to be the last vessel to leave Dunkirk, with a company of the Coldstream Guards whose perfect drill and discipline under such conditions were a credit to the brigade.
Martin slept for three days and rejoined Pelican, which, after one convoy, was incapacitated by an acoustic ground mine off Sheerness. The shock gave Martin an impacted ankle joint.
Repaired in the Middlesex Hospital, London, he was appointed second-in-command of the destroyer Antelope. An ancient ship in need of a refit, she was sent out with the battleship Prince of Wales and battlecruiser Hood to find and sink the Bismarck.
While Antelope was refuelling at Reykjavik, Bismarck was reported “not far off”. Antelope with two other vessels was ordered to intercept; perhaps luckily the violent weather prevented this, the destroyers searching instead for Hood’s survivors, of whom there were only three.
Having taken the six-month specialist navigator’s course, Martin was next appointed as the navigational expert to the 13th Minesweeping Flotilla. This, after work-up in the Channel, sailed as escorts to the large convoys supplying the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942.
After several supporting tasks as Allied forces moved east toward Tunis, the flotilla cleared a large minefield off Cape Bon, Tunisia. This took six weeks and, as usual with minesweeping, required meticulous navigation. In the subsequent assaults on Pantelleria, Sicily and Salerno the minesweepers generally went in ahead of other forces, often a perilous position. Martin was proud that while he was navigating the flotilla they never lost a ship; four were sunk subsequently. He was awarded the DSC.
After appointment to the minelayer Manxman, a fast passage to the British Pacific Fleet was followed by transfer to the cruiser Bermuda, a cruiser and carrier force flagship, which arrived at Leyte in the Philippines as the atom bomb concluded the war. Martin recalled how awful the British prisoners looked upon release in Formosa (now Taiwan), emaciated and yellow from forced labour in copper mines.
His postwar seafaring activities included navigating the battleship Nelson and the carrier Victorious and, from 1950, two rewarding years training cadets in the cruiser Devonshire.
After a tour on the staff college directing staff he was sent to Singapore on the joint services planning staff where the chief task of his small team was to write the papers that set up the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation (Seato).
Having been second-in-command of the cruiser Superb in the Middle East, Martin was promoted to captain. His subsequent tours included the Admiralty Manpower Division and three years in the Caribbean, first as senior naval officer and after the amalgamation of all three services, commander of all British Forces in the Caribbean area. This role included the continuing military protection of Belize, episodes of disaster relief and providing security for President Kennedy and the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, at the Nassau meeting that determined the future of Britain’s nuclear deterrent.
On his return to the UK in 1963 Martin was given the plum job of captain of Dartmouth naval college, usually a stepping stone to flag rank. Having no private income, he initially demurred, complaining that he and his wife could not afford to take up the post. He was told that it was now time to modernise the social environment and to prune the costs of hospitality.
While Flag Officer Middle East and Commander, British Forces Persian Gulf, from 1966 to 1968 he was mentioned in dispatches for his part in managing the withdrawal from Aden in November 1967 and the consequent reorganisation of the British presence in the Middle East.
Martin always regarded his work as director-general of naval personal services and training in the MoD as perhaps his most valuable achievement. It anchored the principle of the “military salary” , particularly the naval “X factor” connoting family separation, into Whitehall thinking which thereafter recognised that in any calculations of equivalence with civilians, service people earned their pay under somewhat different circumstances.
Promoted vice-admiral in 1970, Martin was appointed to Norfolk, Virginia, as deputy to the Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic (Saclant), one of three major Nato commanders and always held by the US Atlantic fleet commander, the deputy’s post always being British. While much of his duties involved educating Americans about the idiosyncrasies of European Nato across the water, Martin found the lack of operational responsibility irritating.
He was appointed KCB on retirement in 1972. He took up the post of Lieutenant-Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Guernsey for six years from 1974.
Although suffering from tachycardia, Martin played hockey and ran the mile for the Navy in his youth. A keen beagler, he was master of the Dartmouth pack. When, on a later courtesy visit, Martin was greeted by much barking, a polite cadet remarked: “Gosh, they recognise you, sir.”
He is survived by his wife, Rosemary, whom he married in 1942 and their two sons and two daughters.
Vice-Admiral Sir John Martin, KCB, DSC, Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic, 1970-72, was born on May 10, 1918. He died on May 31, 2011, aged 93
RAF flying doctor who piloted a jet bomber through the mushroom cloud during Britain’s atom bomb tests in Australia in 1953
One of the few RAF doctors to wear pilot’s wings, Geoffrey Dhenin had a distinguished war during which he won the George Medal for helping to rescue a member of the crew of a crashed Lancaster bomber. He subsequently took part in the monitoring of radiation from Britain’s nuclear and thermonuclear bomb tests in 1953 and 1957 respectively, on the first occasion flying a Canberra jet bomber through the mushroom cloud of an A-bomb detonated in the Woomera Desert in Australia. After a series of senior appointments in the 1960s and 1970s he was appointed Director-General of RAF Medical Services in 1974.
Geoffrey Howard Dhenin was born in 1918 in Bridgend, Glamorgan, and educated at Hereford Cathedral School and St John’s College, Cambridge, where he read the natural sciences tripos (for medicine), completing his clinical training at Guy’s Hospital, London.
In 1943 he joined the RAF, and was serving as a medical officer with 116 (Bomber) Squadron at Kirmington, Lincolnshire, when in October that year one of its Lancasters, which had had to return from a raid with engine failure, crashed near the base as it attempted to land. The aircraft caught fire trapping the rear gunner in his crushed turret. After getting to the wreckage Dhenin administered medical aid to the injured man, and with an airman worked for 30 minutes to try to release him. At length a crane arrived to raise the wreckage and Dhenin was able to release the gunner who, thanks to his emergency medical aid, was one of only two members of the Lancaster’s crew to survive the crash. Dhenin’s George Medal was gazetted later that year.
Soon after D-Day Dhenin was posted to a mobile field unit in Normandy, and spent most of the remainder of the war involved in the evacuation of casualties from the North West Europe campaign. He was mentioned in dispatches in 1945.
Towards the end of the war he was briefly liaison officer to a French Air Force Spitfire Operational Training Unit at Ouston, Northumberland, where he met his future wife, Claude Andrée Evelyn Rabut, who held a French Air Force commission. They were married in 1946.
After the war he learnt to fly and went as a flying medical officer to the RAF Institute of Aviation Medicine at Farnborough, later joining the Central Bomber Establishment in a similar capacity. After passing through the RAF Staff College, Manby, on whose staff he then served, he was sent to the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell to prepare for the part he was to play in the forthcoming British atom bomb tests at Woomera. In October 1953 he volunteered to fly through the atomic cloud at Woomera to collect radioactive particles from it. With an RAF radiologist and a navigation expert, he piloted a Canberra jet bomber into the radioactive cloud six and a half minutes after the device had been detonated, and samples were collected in pods on the aircraft’s wings, which were subsequently dropped in a safe area. This was the first time that an aircraft had done this, and Dhenin was awarded the Air Force Cross for his accomplishment.
Having joined the nuclear club (Britain’s first A-bomb had been detonated in the frigate HMS Plym in the Montebello Islands in October 1952), the hydrogen bomb became an imperative. In 1957 Dhenin went out to Christmas Island, the base for the thermonuclear tests, Operation Grapple, in which the first three bombs, which did not actually achieve the desired megaton yield, were dropped from a Vickers Valiant bomber and detonated over Malden Island, 200 miles to the south of Christmas Island. Dhenin was awarded a Bar to his AFC in 1957 for his sampling work in association with the tests. Later H-bombs in the series were dropped over the southern tip of Christmas Island, when the megaton threshold was achieved.
After passing through the Staff College, Bracknell in 1959 Dhenin commanded Princess Mary’s RAF Hospital in Akrotiri, Cyprus, 1960-63; the RAF Hospital, Ely, 1963-66; and was Principal Medical Officer, Air Support Command, 1966-68.
From 1968 to 1970 he was Director of Health and Research, RAF, and then, from 1970 to 1971, Deputy Director-General of Medical Services before going to Strike Command as Principal Medical Officer for two years, before being appointed to the RAF’s top medical job in 1974. He was appointed KBE in 1975. He had been made a Fellow of the International Academy of Aerospace Medicine in 1972. In retirement from the RAF after 1978, he was for a year adviser to the Saudi Arabian National Guard. He was editor of the Textbook of Aviation Medicine in 1978.
In retirement he continued to pursue his favourite sports: golf (captain of Wentworth Golf Club 1981); skiing (well into his eighties) and scuba diving (formerly president of the RAF’s Sub-Aqua Association).
His wife Evelyn died in 1996. In 2002 he married Syvia Howard. She and a son and two daughters of his first marriage survive him. A second son of his first marriage predeceased him.
Air Marshal Sir Geoffrey Dhenin, KBE, AFC and Bar, GM, Director-General Medical Services RAF, 1974-78, was born on April 2, 1918. He died on May 6, 2011, aged 93
Soldier and champion rifle shot who was awarded a Military Cross for leading daring raids against guerrillas in Sarawak in the 1960s
Dedicated to his profession, a champion rifle shot, boxer, cricketer and squash player, Peter Welsh was habitually free with his opinion, not least when addressing his military superiors. He avoided censure through his reputation for being proved right and the certainty that he spoke in the general interest — not his own. He was essentially a regimental officer and his soldiers respected his judgment and personal example on operations.
His leadership was well demonstrated during Indonesia’s “confrontation” with Malaysia in the 1960s, when he commanded a rifle company of 2nd Green Jackets (King’s Royal Rifle Corps) contesting guerrilla border incursions in Sarawak.
During the period May to September 1965 he led a series of fighting patrols in the frontier region, some requiring the crossing of an 80-yards-wide river with a six-knot current in order to come to grips with an enemy well trained in infiltration tactics and familiar with the terrain.
His aggressive and thoroughly planned operations achieved the surprise necessary to inflict a significant number of casualties on a wily enemy and led to the complete domination of the frontier in his company sector. His professionalism and personal courage were recognised by the award of the Military Cross, the citation stressing that he did not lose a man or a weapon in any of his operations, despite his determination to close with the enemy at every opportunity.
Peter Miles Welsh was the only son of Brigadier W. M .M O’D Welsh. He was educated at Winchester and RMA Sandhurst, from where he was commissioned into the King’s Royal Rifle Corps (60th Rifles) in 1951. He served with 2nd Battalion KRRC in Germany and in England and was an instructor at the Rifle Regiments’ training Depot in Winchester.
As a junior officer he developed a formidable reputation as an individual rifle shot and team leader. At Bisley he twice won the Henry Whitehead Cup, also the Army Hundred Cup and the Silver Jewel twice. He represented the Army six times in the United Services Cup and, while serving at the Rifle Depot, trained the only Depot team to beat the regular and Territorial Army battalions in the KRRC Cup. He represented the Army at squash and boxed heavyweight in the 2nd KRRC team that won the Army of the Rhine Championships in 1954.
From 1958 to 1960 he served as Adjutant of the Kenya Regiment, a Territorial Army unit linked to the 60th Rifles and manned by settlers. He did not allow Kenya attractions to divert his attention from the Staff College entrance examination, which he passed to attend in 1961-62 before becoming Chief of Staff of 129 Brigade of the Territorial Army.
Following a markedly successful tour of duty as a company commander in Borneo, he went to the Joint Services Staff College and in 1968 returned to Camberley as an instructor. This did not strike everyone as his ideal métier, but his active service experience and calm, common-sense approach proved invaluable.
He took over command of 2nd Royal Green Jackets, as the 60th Rifles had by then become, in Ballykelly, Northern Ireland, in 1971. The battalion was well established on an 18-month tour of duty under an experienced CO and familiar with Londonderry’s sectarian susceptibilities. Welsh was consequently surprised when orders given for handling the civil rights march on January 30, 1972 — that became known as “Bloody Sunday” — allocated his battalion a reserve role with only one company on the barricades confining the route of the march.
Giving evidence to the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday in January 2003, Welsh said he had called the commander of the brigade responsible for security in Londonderry — Brigadier Patrick MacLellan — to request a more active role for his battalion as his men knew the city so well and advised against using 1st Battalion The Parachute Regiment “on the day” due to its reputation for toughness. No change was made but Lord Saville’s Report singled out the Royal Green Jackets company on Barrier 14 (on the march route) for praise for the restraint and proportionality it used in dealing with intense rioting.
Welsh was appointed OBE in 1973 for his services in command of his battalion and promoted to command the 5th Air-portable Brigade in Tidworth in 1974. This was followed by the 1976 course at the Royal College of Defence Studies and two staff appointments as a brigadier before promotion to major-general in 1983 to become President of the Regular Commissions Board at Westbury, an appointment to which he was well suited for his shrewd judge of character.
In 1974 he married June McCausland, née Macadam, widow of Captain Marcus McCausland of the Ulster Defence Regiment, who had been murdered by the Official IRA in March 1972. She survives him along with two stepsons and one stepdaughter.
Major-General P. M. Welsh, OBE, MC, was born on December 23, 1930. He died on April 17, 2011, aged 80
