Thriller writer who turned a fascination with military matters and gadgetry into a bestselling global brand
With a stream of bestsellers spanning more than 20 years, Tom Clancy was one of the most successful thriller writers ever. Beginning in 1984 with The Hunt for Red October, his books combined the grand theatre of global politics with meticulous technical research and page-turning readability. They sold in their millions, in hardback and in paperback, and inspired a host of franchise ventures. Co-written volumes appeared, in keeping with the global Clancy brand but with much of the actual writing done by other hands. There were successful series of video games and a run of big-budget feature films.
Clancy’s great achievement was to invent a new genre. The “techno-thriller”, as it came to be known, was the natural outcome of a self-confessed nerd’s almost boundless enthusiasm for the machinery of warfare and for gadgets and gizmos of all kinds. The sheer weight of carefully researched technical detail lent verisimilitude to a fictional universe which was a vivid projection of the author’s political and emotional beliefs. The hero of many of his novels, CIA operative Jack Ryan, is an archetypal true-grit all-action hero, albeit one with access to better technology than most. Clancy was an old-fashioned Republican patriot who revered Ronald Reagan. In his novels the role of America as defender of global freedom is never in doubt.
Clancy would not have prospered, however, if he had not so skilfully moved with the changing geopolitical times. Over the years, as Ian Fleming had with James Bond, he explored not just the present but a sort of alternative future. He could imagine a nuclear attack on Denver or full-scale war between China and Russia so plausibly that both casual readers and military experts were convinced and enthralled.
It all made him formidably wealthy. In 2008 he was reckoned to be the fourth highest earning author in the world, having made £18.7 million in the previous 12 months.
Thomas Leo Clancy Jr was born in 1947 in Baltimore, the son of a postman. To the end of his life, he would live in the state of Maryland. After Roman Catholic high school and university, where he studied English literature, he married a student nurse, Wanda Thomas, and took over her family’s insurance business in the small town of Owings.
As a boy he had spent hours studying military journals and books but poor eyesight thwarted his efforts to join the US Army. He finally put all his reading to use when he began to write in the late 1970s. The Hunt for Red October, the tale of the defection of the commander of a prototype Soviet submarine, was his first novel. With the attention to detail that would come to typify Clancy’s writing, the vessel was modelled closely on the Soviet Typhoon class nuclear submarines. The lead character had elements of Clancy’s own life and interests, a mixture of things he had done and things he would have loved to do. So, his CIA man, Ryan, had served in the Marines and worked on Wall Street; he also had a background in accountancy and taught naval history in Annapolis, the nearest big town to Clancy’s home in Owings.
Dense with research, the book was published by the Naval Institute Press, which helped to earn it a cover blurb from the former CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner. Sales took off when a friend in Washington began to pass copies around, one of which landed on the desk of President Reagan. When the President stepped off his helicopter with the book under his arm and a reporter shouted, “What are you reading?”, Reagan showed the world the cover and pronounced it, “the perfect yarn”. After that endorsement, it sold 365,000 in hardback and 4.3 million in paperback.
Clancy was immensely proud of the realism and accuracy of his work. In an interview he recalled a meeting with John Lehman, the Navy Secretary. “The first thing he asked me about the book was, ‘Who the hell cleared it’.”
Although the sales of The Hunt for Red October were huge, it was not Clancy’s commercial peak. In the years that followed, Ryan and (from 1988) his CIA associate John Clark took on most of the US’s enemies, from Russians to Colombian drug barons and Arab terrorists. Clancy’s fifth book, 1989’s Clear and Present Danger, was the bestselling novel of the 1980s, and for two decades his sales were second only to John Grisham’s.
The global-threat scenarios Clancy posited in his books were often inspired by role-playing wargames. His second book, Red Storm Rising (1986), was co-written with the games designer and former naval officer Larry Bond. Clancy’s research drew him into the orbit of the intelligence services. His most famous “prediction”, the use of a commercial airliner to destroy a public building in Debt of Honor (1994), may have been down to chance, but he was never far behind the professionals.
Clancy’s attention to detail in these matters was driven by a boyish love of facts and, he said, by a “moral obligation to my readers to get it right”. This went beyond the exciting business of gun calibres and defence systems. Clancy knew the precise tree on The Mall in London that Ryan hid his wife and child behind in Patriot Games.
Success allowed Clancy to pursue his interests to the full. In 1993 he bought a stake in a baseball team, the Baltimore Orioles. He produced nonfiction books on military matters, including a series about hardware and military formations and another co-written with retired generals who had been involved in recent US campaigns. He relished the access his work gave him: the off-the-record briefings, the chance to meet fighter pilots, service personnel and intelligence agents and to observe their work at first hand. He enjoyed a second career as an expert guest commentator on news programmes and talk shows.
He was a great cheerleader for the Armed Forces. “Reporters treat the military like drunken Nazis,” he once said, “[but] they’re the most loyal friends you can have. They’re my kind of people. We share the same value structure.” He met his second wife, Alexandra, through General Colin Powell.
Clancy’s books were natural candidates for screen adaptation. Four films were made between 1990 and 2002. All were commercially successful but they failed to develop into series, largely because Ryan was portrayed by four actors. After Alec Baldwin took the role in The Hunt for Red October (1990), Harrison Ford took over for Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994), but was himself replaced for The Sum of All Fears (2002) by the much younger Ben Affleck. Clancy, it was reported, disowned Patriot Games after the film-makers changed the ending. It was, however, an enormous hit.
In 1995, Clancy co-founded a video-games company, Red Storm Entertainment, producing “shoot-em-ups” that either tied in with his novels or themselves inspired book franchises. From 1996, the Tom Clancy name was also licensed to franchised book series.
He eventually extended the co-writing process to include the Jack Ryan series, using other writers to flesh out storylines that he had approved. The final book to be credited solely to Clancy himself was 2003’s The Teeth of the Tiger, in which he introduced Jack Ryan Jr, the son of his original hero. His most recent book Threat Vector, again employing a co-writer, was published at the end of 2012. It reached No.1 in the New York Times bestseller charts. His next book, Command Authority, will be published in early December and there will be a new film, Jack Ryan: Shadow One, directed by Sir Kenneth Branagh, at the end of the year.
Clancy was married twice, first to Wanda Thomas in 1969, with whom he had four children, and then to Alexandra Llewellyn in 1999.
Tom Clancy, writer, was born on April 12, 1947. He died on October 1, 2013, aged 66
Vietnamese military leader who masterminded the rout of the French at Dien Bien Phu and then overcame the US-backed might of South Vietnam
General Vo Nguyen Giap was the guerrilla mastermind who overcame enormous odds against superior forces to drive first the French and then the Americans out of Vietnam. Only his mentor, President Ho Chi Minh, held a higher place in the pantheon of the communist heroes who led Vietnam to independence.
A self-taught military strategist, Giap commanded the forces of the nationalist Viet Minh during the First Indo-China War which began in 1946. That bitter struggle ended in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu with his comprehensive rout of the French.
The defeat of a well-equipped modern army by what had recently been a guerrilla force was a remarkable achievement. Giap would forever be known as “The Victor of Dien Bien Phu”. The blow to French pride, prestige and authority was severe, not least in France’s other overseas colonies; the Algerian war would begin six months after Dien Bien Phu.
With the end of French colonial rule, Vietnam was divided by international agreement into North and South Vietnam. That did not satisfy Giap, who declared that the war of Vietnam’s independence was not finished.
He continued to lead the armed struggle against the US-backed government of the South, and this escalated into full-scale war from 1965, with a huge commitment of US forces. In this Second Indo-China War (more generally known as the Vietnam War) Giap had to endure some severe military reverses, notably in 1968 and 1972. He nonetheless continued to symbolise resistance to American might .
Giap was replaced in command of North Vietnam’s forces in 1974 for the final push on Saigon after the Americans had left, but by then he had a secure reputation as a master of the art of “people’s war”. After the reunification of the country in 1976, he remained Defence Minister of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam until 1980.
Vo Nguyen Giap was born in the village of An Xa, in the central province of Quang-Tri in 1909. After joining the New Vietnam Revolutionary Party as a schoolboy at the French-run lycée in Hue in the late 1920s, he was imprisoned by the French from 1928 to 1931 for his political activities.
On his release, he threw in his lot with the Indo-Chinese Communist Party and taught in a private school run by Dang Thai Mai, whose daughter he later married.
During the late 1930s, when the Communist Party and its Democratic Front were operating legally, Giap was a propagandist in Hanoi together with Pham Van Dong (a close associate of Ho Chi Minh) who was later to serve as Prime Minister of both North Vietnam and the reunified Vietnam.
In May 1940, along with Pham Van Dong, he joined Ho Chi Minh in southern China, where he became a leading figure in the Communist-sponsored independence League — the Viet Minh.
Although then not a military leader, on Ho’s instructions he established an “armed propaganda” unit in 1944, which later merged with other groups to form the People’s Army.
When the Viet Minh seized power in Hanoi in August 1945, following the surrender of occupying Japanese forces, Giap emerged as interior minister (and virtually second in command) in the Provisional Government of Ho Chi Minh. On the day when Ho proclaimed Vietnam’s independence, it was Giap who read the main policy speech of the new regime.
Although he had always been deeply anti-French, he had to take a conciliatory line when it was necessary to play the French off against the Chinese nationalist forces who occupied northern Vietnam between September 1945 and the summer of 1946. At that time he is also believed to have played an active part, as security chief, in eliminating non-communist nationalists who rivalled the Viet Minh for leadership of the revolution during 1946.
When Ho Chi Minh and Pham Van Dong went to France for negotiations in the summer of 1946, Giap remained in charge of the government in Hanoi. Almost certainly, he led the preparations for the general uprising of December 19, 1946, that followed breakdown of the modus vivendi with the French. When this failed, the Viet Minh fled from Hanoi and the other main towns for safe havens in the hills, while the French reasserted their hold over Indo-China.
By late 1947 the Viet Minh had retreated once more to the VietnamChina border area, where Giap — having become defence minister in November 1946 — began to lay the foundations for a protracted guerrilla war. His forces made limited progress in 1948-49 but became a serious threat to the French after they began to receive Chinese communist assistance in 1950.
There followed a long and bitter war in which the Viet Minh suffered costly reverses as well as successes. A notable success was the defeat of French forces on the Cao-Bang Ridge in October 1950, and by 1953 the French were urgently seeking a new strategy.
In November 1953 an operation was launched to draw the Viet Minh into a set piece battle intended to bring about their destruction. A divisional-sized position defended by a series of strongpoints was established at Dien Bien Phu in Viet Minh controlled territory, 220 miles west of Hanoi.
Although this air-supplied base threatened Viet Minh supply lines into neighbouring Laos, bad weather reduced the volume of supplies by air, and, contrary to French intelligence assessments, Giap was able to concentrate his Viet Minh force of 75,000 men and 200 artillery pieces, including anti-aircraft guns and rockets that cut the French air supplies to a fraction of that required.
Under Giap’s skilful direction, the Viet Minh bombarded and then attacked and seized the strong points in turn; they finally captured the airstrip on March 27, 1954. When the French were forced to surrender on May 7, with more than 2,000 dead and 5,000 wounded out of a total of 14,000 defenders, Giap had won a great victory. The defence of Dien Bien Phu had seized the world’s imagination and its fall was seen to symbolise the failure of European military superiority over Asian guerrilla forces motivated by a fight for national independence.
As his reward for victory, Giap was able to lead his People’s Army back into Hanoi in October 1954 to stay. The Geneva Agreements of July 1954 had given only the northern half of the country to the Viet Minh, however, and had obliged them to withdraw from South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Giap was among the most forthright in insisting that the war was not yet over, announcing that it should continue until the communist-led revolution had also taken control of the South, where Ngo Dinh Diem was establishing a pro-US regime.
In late 1956 Giap appears to have won the argument, when it was decided that revolutionary struggle would continue in the South, even though it could only be “peaceful” for the time being. Gradually, under his direction, the struggle expanded in scope and became more military in character. Finally the (Viet Cong) People’s Liberation Armed Forces were established in the South in February 1961.
The growing effectiveness of their guerrilla campaign led the United States to embark on a programme of “counter-insurgency”, and then in 1965 to intervene in strength, sending whole combat divisions to South Vietnam and launching an air war against the North. By that stage, too, regular units of the People’s Army of Vietnam were moving from North Vietnam into the northern provinces of South Vietnam.
During the ten years of war that followed, key decisions on the Communist side were taken collectively by the Politburo, but Giap is believed to have masterminded the Tet Offensive of early 1968, later recognised as the turning-point of the war in favour of the Viet Cong.
Initially, however, there were military disasters for the communists. Their attacks on Saigon and other cities brought the Viet Cong only massive casualties. Intended as a second Dien Bien Phu, the offensive failed to bring the war to an early end. Rather, it demonstrated at last that the South Vietnamese government forces had the will and ability to resist if only they had sufficient firepower. The offensive made a devastating impact on US opinion, however, and from that point onwards the United States abandoned any hope of winning a military victory.
A further big North Vietnamese offensive directed by Giap in the spring of 1972, in the teeth of US air power at its most effective, also failed to break the stalemate that the war had then reached and was repulsed with heavy losses. Later that year Hanoi was obliged to reach a compromise settlement with the Americans. Even then, a final deadlock was broken only after further massive aerial bombardment of the North, during which Giap himself defiantly led the air defence campaign. At one point he was rumoured to have been killed in a bombing raid.
In the end the Paris agreement was signed and American forces withdrew from the South early in 1973, leaving behind — officially at least — only 50 advisors to the armed forces of the South. The final phase of the war, between northern and southern Vietnamese armies, ended in the conventional campaigns of 1974-75, by which time Giap had been replaced as commander-in-chief by General Van Tien Dung.
Giap’s reputation remained high, however, even though his influence probably declined in the late 1970s. He was replaced as defence minister in February 1980 and two years later lost his place in the Vietnamese Communist Party politburo. However, in May 1984 he had the satisfaction of revisiting the Dien Bien Phu battlefield and of being interviewed by Western journalists, on the anniversary of his most spectacular victory.
His wife, Nguyen Thi Quang Thi, whom he had married in 1939, had been executed, along with other members of his family, while he was an exile in China during the Second World War.
General Vo Nguyen Giap, Vietnamese military leader, was born on August 25, 1911. He died on October 4, 2013, aged 102
Military scientist who played a crucial role in Britain’s nuclear weapons programme during the early years of the Cold War
Eric Younson was at the heart of Britain’s attempt to develop “home grown” strategic and battlefield nuclear weapons from the 1950s onwards after the Americans had restricted foreign access to US nuclear technology at the end of the war.
The US ban — which in Britain’s case had been part prompted by espionage scandals involving leaks of nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union — ultimately led to the detonation of the UK’s first atom bomb in 1952, and in the early 1960s the entry into RAF service of the Avro Blue Steel “stand off” nuclear missile, designed to be launched 150 miles from its target from any of the RAF’s three V-bombers.
President Truman’s determination to retain US control over atomic weapons, enshrined in the McMahon Act of 1946, had decisively ended the close wartime co-operation between the two countries (and Canada) that had led to the development of the first atomic bombs and their detonation with such devastating effect over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Attlee Government therefore authorised work to begin on an independent British atomic bomb. Succeeding Conservative administrations threw their weight behind the development of the Blue Steel strategic nuclear weapon for the RAF and the Blue Water battlefield nuclear missile for the Army, as part of the UK nuclear weapons contribution to Nato’s Cold War stance against the Soviet threat.
When work began in the mid-1950s Younson was working as deputy assistant director of scientific research. At that time artillery units in the British Army of the Rhine were relying on the first-generation MGM5 Corporal and MGR1 Honest John battlefield guided missiles. These were supplied by the US and would be Britain’s input to the tactical nuclear punch on the battlefield in the event of an invasion of West Germany by the Soviet Union which could not be halted by conventional defences.
Given the relatively short range of these weapons, it was a solution to Nato defence on the Central Front which most military men on the ground did not care to think about too closely.
In fact a certain amount of UK-US consultation on weapon development had continued despite the McMahon restrictions. Nevertheless it was something of a surprise to the Americans to learn that Britain was developing its own tactical and strategic nuclear weapons and the systems to deliver them to the target. It was apparently Younson himself who, during a meeting in Washington, casually informed the Americans what was afoot, and that the UK was determined to become “nuclear self-sufficient”.
It took the Americans some time to thoroughly assess this new intelligence, and ultimately it led to a recognition in Washington and London that separate development of such specialist and expensive weapons by close allies was wasteful and absurd. It also became apparent that the US, ready — and able — to apply far greater human and financial resources, would always be at least one cycle of development ahead of the UK.
In the meantime, the British Blue Steel had entered service with the RAF in 1963. Although its effectiveness when delivered by the subsonic Vulcan, Valiant and Victor bombers was increasingly called into question — the planes would have had to approach within 150 miles of Moscow or Leningrad to deliver it — it nevertheless remained in service until 1970. By the end of that time the delivery of the deterrent strategic nuclear deterrent had passed decisively to the US and Royal navies, and to the submarine-launched ballistic missile.
Despite its good performance in trials the Blue Water battlefield missile, which was developed by English Electric, never made it into service. After successful flight evaluation at Woomera rocket range in Australia it was cancelled, a victim of defence economies, in 1962.
Eric John Younson was born in 1919 and educated at Jarrow Grammar School and Durham University, where he read chemistry. On the outbreak of war he enlisted in the Royal Artillery. Commissioned in November 1940, he was assigned as a troop commander in a searchlight unit in the Biggin Hill air-defence sector.
This was actually not such a misuse of talent as it may sound, as it led to his calibrating radars used in enemy night fighter interception. His scientific expertise was recognised and he was sent to the Ministry of Supply for crash courses on searchlight radar. He was soon to gain a reputation for advanced scientific thinking.
As the 1944 Normandy invasion loomed, a demand came from Montgomery’s 21st Army Group HQ for a means of countering the devastating effect of German mortar fire on infantry in the open. Younson was transferred to the technical weapons staff and for the months up to June 1944 was engaged in modifying anti-aircraft radars to track the trajectory of mortar bombs back to their source, thereby allowing accurate counter-fire. For his work as scientific research adviser throughout the campaign in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany until the end of the war he was mentioned in dispatches.
There was no question of a man with his technical genius returning to routine soldiering, and in future there were few occasions when he was not closely involved in the development of nuclear weapon and delivery systems. He attended the first nuclear science and technology course at the Royal College of Military Science, Shrivenham, in 1957, and was engaged in the investigation of the electromagnetic pulses emitted by nuclear weapons.
In the Operation Grapple nuclear tests over Christmas Island in 1957 and 1958, the hitherto unproven British H-bomb achieved megaton-plus yields. This success opened the door to much closer co-operation with the Americans. Younson was asked by the chief scientific adviser to the Secretary of State for Defence, Solly (Lord) Zuckerman to represent himself and the head of MI6 on a joint working party in Washington which included the British Atomic Energy Authority, the US Department of Defense and the CIA. He was to remain on Zuckerman’s staff for six years.
After life in such a rarefied atmosphere it was back to earth with a bump and a move to the Army Equipment Policy Department and such matters as determining the design of the new army spade. But he remained on call to Lord Zuckerman for important discussions such as multilateral force negotiations. His last appointment was as president of the three-Service Ordnance Board responsible for supervising the safe introduction of new weapon systems.
In retirement from 1973 he was for a year senior assistant director of the Central Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges at the Department of Education and Science, and was director of the Scientific Instrument Makers Association in the mid-1970s.
He married Jean Beaumont Carter in 1946. She survives him with three daughters.
Major-General Eric Younson, OBE, soldier and scientist, was born on March 1, 1919. He died on August 14, 2013 aged 94
>John Nunneley
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Veteran of the Burma campaign who later worked tirelessly for reconciliation with the Japanese
John Nunneley had a reputation for persistence. Hearing that the widow of a decorated wartime comrade was being denied her pension by the Ministry of Defence, he got out his medals and his 14th Army bush hat and posed with her for photographs in Whitehall, beneath the statue of Field Marshal Lord Slim; the widow was draped in a Union Flag. When the stunt succeeded in attracting media attention but failed to reverse the decision, Nunneley gate-crashed a reception at No 10 Downing Street and personally confronted the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
This time he had more luck. The Government discovered on further investigation that the widow was indeed entitled to a war disability pension, even though her late husband had been a South African serving in a colonial regiment when he won a Military Cross for leading his platoon in an attack on a Japanese position in Burma in 1944. Mrs Gillian Norbury duly received a modest back payment and a pension adequate for her to live in England.
John Hewlett Nunneley was born in Sydney, Australia. His antipodean upbringing may well have been a factor in the robust approach he later took to any bureaucratic obstacles in his way. Educated at Lawrence Sheriff School, he came to England on the outbreak of war and enlisted in The Buffs (Royal East Kent Regiment) before being commissioned into the Somerset Light Infantry.
Keen to see active service, he volunteered for the Far East. When Japan entered the war, however, his troopship was diverted to Durban. After travelling overland to Mombasa, he was posted on secondment to the 3/6 Battalion King’s African Rifles in Somalia at the end of the campaign to drive the Italians out of the Horn of Africa.
He went on to serve in Burma. There he was wounded during a counterattack in the Kebaw valley in August 1944 and mentioned in despatches. His orderly, Private Tomasi Kitinya, a Luo tribesman from the shores of Lake Victoria, was killed beside him.
Later, after what Nunneley would recall as a fierce battle in the period of the monsoon, one of his men recovered a Union Flag from the body of an enemy soldier. It had been over-painted in Japanese script “Commemorating the Fall of Singapore — February 15, 1942, Sergeant-Major Uchiyama”. The flag had been flying on a government building in Singapore when the island surrendered to the Japanese. It had been torn down by one of the invaders, who had proudly inscribed it to record the moment and then carried it with him in his backpack through the subsequent campaign.
This was the flag in which Mrs Norbury would one day be draped in Whitehall. Its discovery would also in part inspire the campaign to which Nunneley devoted much of his later life. The quest to find out more about the flag, and about Sergeant-Major Uchiyama to whom it had meant so much, led Nunneley eventually back to Burma and thence to Japan. It brought him into contact with Japanese veterans, including at least one close friend of the man from whose backpack the flag had been reclaimed.
As chairman of the Burma Campaign Fellowship Group (BCFG), Nunneley worked hard for the reconciliation of Britain and Japan. His book Tales by Japanese Soldiers (2001), co-authored with Kazuo Tamayama, shows how ordinary Japanese servicemen experienced the war. Its 62 stark, straightforward individual accounts by soldiers, sailors, airmen and medical personnel are the stories of young men (and some women) enduring hardship and fear far from home, much like their Allied counterparts. The insight it offered into a particularly grim conflict was almost unprecedented in English; it was rare enough in Japan, where a tradition of reticence had tended to militate against such personal accounts.
Nunneley was tireless, if not always successful, in his campaign to persuade Burma veterans, of both sides, to find new friendships. It is believed that he and the Duke of Edinburgh were the only holders of the Burma Star to attend the banquet given by the Queen for Emperor Akihito during his State visit to Britain in 1998. The BCFG was awarded the Japanese Foreign Minister’s Commendation for “tireless efforts to mutual understanding between Britain and Japan” largely thanks to Nunneley’s work as chairman, for which he was appointed MBE.
Campaigning was fitted in to a busy working life. On demobilisation Nunneley had worked for Beaverbrook newspapers until 1962, when he joined the board of British Rail.
Always attracted to a challenge, outside work he competed in the Nijmegan Marches on ten occasions, receiving in due course the Royal Netherlands League of Physical Fitness gold medal. He also became an accomplished solo glider pilot.
He was married to Lucia Ceruti from 1945 until her death in April 2011, however they were separated from the mid-70s. He later married Carolyn Oxton. She survives him together with a son and daughter of his first marriage.
Captain John H. Nunneley, MBE, veteran of the Burma campaign and worker for British-Japanese reconciliation, was born on November 26, 1922. He died on July 27, 2013, aged 90
>Air Marshal Sir Reginald Harland
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Guided missile expert and head of the Harrier jump-jet project
After a war spent largely as an engineer in the field in the Allied campaigns in North Africa, Italy and the South of France, Reginald Harland specialised in the postwar period in guided missiles, becoming one of the RAF’s leading experts on their development for air defence.
There had been successful beginnings to work on such weapons in the last months of the war. The beam-riding Brakemine, tested by the Army, and the radio-controlled Fairey Stooge, developed for the Navy in reaction to the shipping losses from Japanese kamikaze attacks in the Pacific, had both showed great promise in tests.
The war ended, however, before either could be used in anger, and in the immediate aftermath the Army and Navy lost interest. Protection against air attack reverted to the gun in both Services. It was only as the Cold War evolved that effective missile air defence for armies in the field, airbases and ships again became a priority, prompted by rapid strides in rocketry made by the Soviet Union.
In the early 1950s Harland was project officer for the Thunderbird surface-to-air missile, Britain’s first home grown system for guided missile air defence for the Army, to replace reliance on its traditional AA artillery. Later in the decade he was RAF liaison officer at the USAF’s Missile Division in California.
He went on to be director of the Harrier jump-jet project in the 1960s, en route to becoming the first head of RAF Support Command, the department responsible for all the RAF’s communications, maintenance and logistical support.
Reginald Harland was born in 1920 and educated at Stowe School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He came of a distinguished engineering lineage. His great uncle was the ship-builder Sir Edward Harland who in 1861 had created the business partnership with his personal assistant Gustav Wilhelm Wolff that led to the founding of the shipyard Harland and Wolff in Belfast.
He joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve in 1939 before the outbreak of the Second World War while still at Cambridge. He continued his education there to take his engineering degree, and then took a war course at the School of Aero Engineering, graduating in late 1940.
He spent some time at RAE Farnborough but was soon posted as engineer officer to 241 Squadron in North Africa, responsible for keeping its Hurricane fighter bombers in the air in the searing heat and sandstorms of the Western Desert campaign.
After the Axis surrender in Tunisia in May 1943 he went with the squadron to Italy before transferring in 1944 to a repair and salvage unit first Corsica and then the South of France in the wake of the US and French “Anvil” landings there in August 1944, launched to draw German troops away from the Normandy front.
After the war he was trained as a pilot and later became chief engineering instructor at the RAF College Cranwell. From 1952 the next five years of his career were to be spent on the development of Britain’s first postwar generation of guided surface-to-air missiles.
After a specialist course at the Royal Military College of Science at Shrivenham Harland became project officer at Farnborough, responsible for the English Electric Thunderbird, which was intended to replace the 3.7-inch heavy anti-aircraft gun that had served as the mainstay of the Army’s air defence throughout the war.
The resulting main solid-fuel rocket plus four boosters, guided by a Ferranti Type 83 “Yellow River” pulsed radar that both acquired and illuminated the target, gave considerable range and height advantages over the 3.7, being capable of engaging aircraft out to a range of 45 miles. It entered service with the Army in 1959 and equipped two Royal Artillery Regiments. By that time Harland was serving as ballistic missile liaison officer at the USAF Missile Division in Los Angeles.
Among Harland’s subsequent jobs were director of the P1127 VTOL aircraft from 1967, the year the jump jet began to enter RAF service as the Harrier. His two penultimate posts as AO Engineering of Air Support Command and AOC-in-C Maintenance Command anticipated his becoming the first AOC-in-C RAF Support Command when it was formed in 1973 to combine the functions of his two previous jobs.
He held the post for the unusually long period of four years, consolidating the new arrangements and preparing for the Command’s absorption in 1977 of Training Command, thereby additionally taking over all RAF air and ground training.
In retirement from the RAF from 1977 he was technical director of the engineering design company W. S. Atkins and a consultant to Short Brothers.
He also tried his hand at politics. In the general elections of 1983 and 1987 he stood as SDP/Alliance candidate for Bury St Edmunds, where he lived, on both occasions coming a distant second to the sitting Conservative MP, Eldon Griffiths, though polling better than Labour.
His wife, Doreen, whom he married in 1942, died in 2011. He is survived by two sons and a daughter. A son and a daughter predeceased him.
Air Marshal Sir Reginald Harland, KBE, CB, AE, engineer, was born on May 30, 1920. He died on July 30, 2013, aged 93
Naval officer who survived a daring U-boat attack at Scapa Flow and went on to lead a successful mine clearance diving team
In the small hours of Friday October 13, 1939, the 19-year-old Ordinary Seaman Philip White was among more than 1,200 officers and men aboard the veteran battleship Royal Oak when she was struck by first one and, after an interval, three more torpedoes as she lay at anchor in the Royal Navy’s main wartime base at Scapa Flow in Orkney. The daring and skill of the U-boat commander Günther Prien had enabled him to penetrate the defences of Scapa, generally reckoned to be an impregnable anchorage, and make his audacious attack. He and his submarine, U47, were able to escape before the Royal Navy could react.
The loss of the lumbering Great War-vintage battleship did not make an important dent in Britain’s big-ship strength. But the ease of her destruction in an apparently safe harbour, and the tragic loss of life that occurred — 833 of her 1,208 complement including more than 100 boy seamen — was a blow to British naval pride so early in the war.
White was lucky to get out. He at first found himself buried under a press of bodies trapped in his messdeck by an inward opening screen door. He forced his way on to the upper deck and as the battleship capsized, stepped off her bilge keel into the bitterly cold water. In the 12 minutes between the impact of the first and the next three torpedoes, no one aboard Royal Oak had realised that she was being attacked by a submarine. The first detonation under her bow was assumed to be an explosion in her forward inflammable store, and no attempt had been made to abandon ship or to get those asleep up on deck. Inspection parties were still checking the forward compartments when the second, third and fourth torpedoes sliced through her hull and exploded in the stokers’, boys’ and marines’ messes.
White found himself struggling in icy water littered with the dead and dying. He reached a drifting lifeboat but it soon capsized, spilling all its occupants into the sea. After two hours he was on the verge of succumbing to the cold when he heard a welcome “Here’s one more” and he was lifted from the sea and deposited in a rescue boat.
None the worse for his experience, he was next drafted to the cruiser Aurora, seeing action in the Norwegian campaign and in the pursuit of the Bismarck. He subsequently participated in several Arctic convoys.
Philip White was born at Bognor Regis, West Sussex, in 1920. He left school at 14 to help to work the boats of the beach-launched fishing fleet, but his heart was set on the Navy. He liked to recall that his widowed mother had received this news with aplomb, telling him that he might catch the next train to Portsmouth if he stirred his stumps.
In 1947, by now advanced to petty officer, he served in the battleship Vanguard when she took the Royal Family on a tour to South Africa, and was soon afterwards commissioned as a bosun. He then specialised in mine countermeasures, qualifying as a clearance diver, and was soon given command of a mine clearance diving team based at Malta. Over the next three years his team disposed of 2,700 bombs and mines around the shores of the Mediterranean, notably a 1,500lb German acoustic mine, found in the waters of Benghazi harbour. He was appointed MBE (military division) in 1957.
In the meantime he developed a nodding acquaintance with the film world, acting as an extra when Above Us the Waves, about the Royal Navy’s midget submarine attack on the Tirpitz, and later acting as Laurence Harvey’s double in the underwater scenes in the wartime frogman drama The Silent Enemy (1958). He subsequently rose to become head of the Admiralty Experimental Diving Unit, retiring in 1970.
For a couple of years after his retirement he was a consultant to the British diving and diving equipment company Siebe Gorman. In 1973 in Pensacola, Florida, he married a US Navy officer, Lieutenant-Commander Linda Balink. They united their surnames. He then did what he called his “Denis Thatcher” act, travelling with her for the next 20 years of her career, supporting her and delighting in the many “firsts” she achieved as a female USN officer. In the late 1970s when she was posted to a submarine tracking station in the Hawaiian Islands, he appeared in bit parts in 17 episodes of Hawaii Five-0 and in Magnum PI.
When his wife retired with the rank of captain they settled at her home in Pensacola, where they enjoyed sailing together. He is survived by her and by two sons of a previous marriage.
Commander Philip Balink-White, MBE, mine countermeasures
specialist, was born on September 25, 1920. He died on June 5, 2013, aged 92
