Michael Parsons
Surgeon who carried out life-saving operations in occupied Albania
In September 1944, David Lloyd Owen, the commanding officer of the LRDG, was parachuted with a team of men into the Albanian mountains. Their task was to link up with partisans and help these resistance groups step up their attacks on the Germans.
But Lloyd Owen fell 30ft into a ravine and was badly injured. As a result, Parsons – who had only recently been appointed the LRDG's medical officer in the rank of captain – was summoned to Bari, south Italy, from where he was ordered to fly to Lloyd Owen's assistance.
He greatly disliked parachuting, but boarded a Halifax and was flown across the Adriatic at night and in stormy weather. He jumped out at 3,500ft and dropped close to where Lloyd Owen was laid up. Among the items in his kit was a bottle of whisky, strapped to his leg, for his CO's approaching birthday.
After diagnosing a broken spine, he encased Lloyd Owen's back in plaster and treated his facial injuries. The CO was in no state to be moved for several days, so Parsons went with guides to give aid to wounded partisans in the surrounding areas.
Georges Charpak
Jewish member of the Resistance who survived Dachau to go on and win the Nobel Prize for Physics
When the Germans occupied this zone as well in 1943, he joined a Communist Resistance group and was briefly involved in helping young Frenchmen who had been drafted to work as forced labourers in Germany to escape so that they could join the partisans.
After being arrested by the French police, Charpak spent a year in prison in France before being transported to Dachau. Had he been recognised as a Jew, he would have been summarily executed; but with his blue eyes, blond hair and the name Charpentier, he was able to pass as a non-Jewish Frenchman. He was assigned to work as a ditch digger (an experience which gave him a lifelong distaste for gardening) and had a close call when, rudely shaken awake by a guard after he had fallen asleep on his shovel, he remonstrated in Yiddish. It took some explaining to convince the man that he was not Jewish.
Lieutenant-Commander Donald Macqueen
Britain's most experienced decklanding officer, who guided thousands of aircraft onto heaving carrier decks
Macqueen flew Swordfish with 823 and 810 Naval Air Squadrons from the carriers Glorious, Illustrious, Ocean, Vengeance and Theseus, and took part in the lead-up to Operation Ironclad – the capture in 1942 of Diego Suarez, when he bombed ships and shore targets, dropped dummy parachutists, and flew air support missions for the attacking forces.
Paddy Davies
Naval brains behind a wartime 'taxi' service for secret agents and PoWs
Lieutenant “Paddy” Davies was a wartime commando in the Arctic and intelligence officer in the Mediterranean.
Christened Denis but universally known as “Paddy”, Davies was born in Brazil and educated at Stowe, Buckinghamshire. While in Rio de Janeiro awaiting his place at Cambridge, the outbreak of war with Germany caused him to volunteer for the Navy. But although dressed in the uniform of a sub-lieutenant RNVR and working for the British naval attaché, his knowledge of the sea was nil. Becoming dissatisfied after a year, he renounced his rank, wangled a passage home on a tramp steamer and was by mid-1942 an ordinary seaman on board the destroyer Ashanti, escorting convoys to Russia.
Ashanti’s captain was the renowned “Dickie” Onslow, the only destroyer captain to be awarded three Bars to his DSO for gallantry in action. Davies had the duty of “captain of the heads”, naval jargon for he who keeps the lavatories clean. During an inspection, Onslow recognised that Davies was officer material and advised that he should volunteer for “special” — ie, dangerous — service to speed the selection process.
Davies did so, and found himself appointed to No 14 (Arctic) Commando which had been formed in late 1942 to attack shipping and German bases in Norway, being transported there with their canoes in motor torpedo boats. Training conditions in the Scottish Highlands were harsh; Davies’s team was destined to try to sabotage the battleship Tirpitz near Trondheim but he was fortunate that this suicidal operation never came off. Among 14 Commando’s operations was the sinking of several ships at Haugesund with limpet mines, but the seven men were captured, turned over to the SS and eventually, as a consequence of Hitler’s directive concerning commandos, shot at Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin.
When 14 Commando was disbanded, Davies was sent to the Mediterranean to be the intelligence officer for a little-known organisation based principally at Bastia in Corsica, which landed and recovered agents over the Italian and French coasts. The Italians had recently surrendered and were ostensibly on the side of the Allies. Davies had to deal with the needs of the British Secret Intelligence Service and Special Operations Executive, the American Office of Strategic Services, the French Bataillons de Choc and Deuxième Bureau and the Italian OTTO organisation.
Of the variety of vessels used, perhaps the most suitable were the fast and low-profile Italian MAS craft, but it was sometimes uncertain whether the crews had fully changed sides; two British officers were murdered by a crew that reverted. Clandestine approaches in darkness to coastlines where “reception committees” were sometimes unreliable demanded accurate intelligence of German movements.
Some 80 agents were landed or recovered in 52 sorties. Davies himself landed in Sicily three days before the Allied invasion. It was an amusing coincidence that the Sicilian invasion was made easier by the deception known as Operation Mincemeat, “the man who never was”, run by Commander Ewen Montagu, on whose team was Paddy Davies’s future wife Patricia Trehearne. She was always proud that the address of one of the important deceptive letters in the briefcase attached to the body of the supposed Royal Marine officer that drifted ashore at Huelva in southern Spain was in her handwriting.
Davies proposed to Patricia on VE Day and they were married in July 1945. Shortly afterwards Davies met Arthur Hurlestone, a doyen of British perfumery who had founded Lentheric in 1937. When asked what he proposed to do after the war, Davies replied: “I’ll do any job that pays over a thousand a year.” Hurlestone took Davies on and it is a measure of Davies’s acumen that by 1958 he was chairman of Lentheric and subsequently Morny and Germaine Monteil. He retired in 1970.
He is survived by his wife, their son and two daughters.
Lieutenant “Paddy” Davies, wartime commando and intelligence officer, was born on March 14, 1921. He died on September 3, 2010, aged 89
A Canadian who applied to join the RAF at a Vancouver recruiting office when he was 19, Robert Barton came to the UK in 1936 and was granted a short service commission. As a result he had considerable flying experience by the time war broke out, and when 249 Squadron was formed in May 1940 he was appointed a flight commander.
At that time the squadron was based at Leconfield in Yorkshire, but in August it moved south to Boscombe Down and from then on he was in the thick of the Battle of Britain, and had been credited with seven combat victories before the end of the year. Subsequently appointed CO of the squadron, he led it to Malta in May 1941, and over the next six months was involved in the fierce fighting for the defence of the island fortress.
By the time he was rested from operations that December, he had been credited with a dozen combat victories, and at least five more kills shared, and had several other “probables” to his credit. This most unassuming officer (notwithstanding his RAF nickname, “Butch”), whose leadership in Malta was described as being “a tonic to his flight commanders and fellow pilots”, had also won two DFCs and had been mentioned in dispatches, and he was to be appointed OBE (military) before the end of the war.
Robert Alexander Barton was born in Kamloops, in the British Columbian Mountains, in 1916. He grew up at Penticton at the southern end of the Okanagan Lake from where he made the weekly 70-mile boat journey to school at Vernon, at the other end of the lake.
After pilot training in Britain he was posted to 41 Squadron in October 1936, flying Hawker Fury biplane fighters. It was to be one of the first fighter squadrons to receive the Spitfire in 1938. By the time he joined 249 Squadron in 1940 it was operating the Hurricane II, and in one of these he shot down his first Messerschmitt 109 over Middle Wallop on August 15. The following day a pilot of his flight, James Nicolson, was to make history by winning the only Victoria Cross awarded to an RAF fighter pilot during the Second World War: he had remained in his burning fighter and shot down a Messerschmitt 110 after his aircraft had been hit by cannon shells, only baling out — by then badly burnt — when he saw his adversary going down, trailing smoke.
Throughout the rest of August and September Barton was in the thick of the fighting, and by September 27, a day on which his squadron destroyed 20 enemy aircraft in battles over Essex and the Thames Estuary, he had himself become an “ace” (five combat victories). His first DFC, gazetted the following month, praised his outstanding leadership that day.
In December Barton was given command of the squadron and on May 21, 1941 led it to Malta, flying off the carrier Ark Royal from a point east of Gibraltar, and arriving to add to the air defences of that beleaguered island. Another period of intense air fighting ensued with Barton often acting in a night fighter role which sometimes involved him in being on duty over a 24-hour period.
After a Luftwaffe strafing attack soon after its arrival which destroyed a number of its aircraft on the ground, much of the squadron’s dealings were with Italian fighters, principally the Macchi MC200 and 202, of which Barton was credited with four overall, with a number of probables. He also shot down a Fiat BR20 bomber in a night sortie over Malta. On August 1 his engine failed as he was taking off and he crash-landed from 300ft, surviving in spite of suffering second-degree burns. He was back in action by early September, taking further toll of the enemy on September 4 in dogfights with MC200s over Capo Passero in Sicily. On October 7-8 he led a night fighter bomber attack on Comiso airfield. The Bar to his DFC was gazetted in October.
In December he returned to the UK to become wing commander flying at an operational training unit. After a period on the staff of 9 Group he had two station commands, Skeabrae in the Orkneys and North Weald.
In August 1945 he was posted to India and offered a permanent commission. During his two years in India, then on the verge of independence and partition, he helped in the creation of a Pakistan Air Force.
He served in the RAF until 1959, retiring after a staff appointment in the Air Ministry. In 1965 he returned to Canada where he enjoyed fishing in the rivers and lakes of British Columbia.
His wife Gwen, whom he married in 1939, died in 1988. He is survived by their son.
Wing Commander Robert “Butch” Barton, OBE, DFC and Bar, wartime fighter ace, was born on June 7, 1916. He died on September 2, 2010, aged 94