The company landed on September 17 1944 and was responsible for securing and protecting drop zones (DZs) in preparation for the arrival of the 1st Parachute Brigade. On the next evening Eastwood, a platoon commander, was detailed to put out navigational aids for a supply drop. Finding Germans in occupation of the zone in some strength, he attacked, killing some and capturing the rest.
On September 19 he returned to the DZ to assist in the landing of the first wave of Polish gliders. As soon as these appeared, the Germans attacked. Eastwood and his men drove them off until all the gliders had been unloaded.
Cut off, however, he led his platoon through enemy positions under cover of darkness and reached Ommershof on the north-western outskirts of Arnhem.
Air Commodore John Sowrey
RAF ace who was twice shot down in the war but survived to test Britain’s jet fighters of the 1950s
Flying Hurricanes with No 73 Squadron, Sowrey had his first success on June 15 1941. Supporting the 7th Armoured Division near Halfaya, his section encountered two Messerschmitt Bf 109s. Sowrey engaged them and shot one down. He was back in action that afternoon, when he shot down another.
A few days later Sowrey was distraught to learn that his younger brother, Jimmy, who was based at a nearby landing ground, had been shot down in his Hurricane and killed, just two weeks after joining his squadron.
Sowrey joined No 213 Squadron and flew during the campaign in Syria against Vichy French forces before returning to the desert a year later as a flight commander with No 80 Squadron. On May 21 1942 he and his wingman shared in the destruction of a Junkers 88 bomber, which crash-landed in the desert; two days later they accounted for another, which came down in the sea.
Unlike the contemporary image of the lean, raw-boned French general in combat uniform, Jean Compagnon projected a benign individuality such as one might expect from a worldly professor of philosophy. Indeed, had he not been born into a family with a military tradition, he might have become an academic. Certainly he was known in France for his newspaper articles, television commentaries and lectures on politico-military issues rather than for being a general. Yet he was no armchair soldier, having seen active service in North Africa, Europe and the Far East.
Jean Georges André Compagnon was born at Saint Germaine-en-Laye, Seine-et-Oise (now Yvelines) in 1916, the son of Colonel Marcel Compagnon, then fighting on the Somme, and his Belgian wife Lucie. He was educated at the Lycée de Vesoul in the Haute-Saône and the St Cyr military academy from where he graduated in 1936, the same year as King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, although there are no indications that they were well acquainted.
Commissioned into the horsed 4th Regiment of Hussars, he fought in Lorraine during the May-June 1940 Battle of France, was wounded and evacuated to Paris. Under the military reductions imposed on the Vichy Government by the Franco-German armistice, his regiment was disbanded and he was posted to the Foreign Legion’s 1st Cavalry Regiment in Morocco, then still under Vichy administration. The Allied invasion of French North Africa in November 1942 — once the French generals had decided to co-operate — gave him experience of armoured warfare as his regiment formed part of the French “Force I” under General Leclerc in the Allied drive on Tunis.
On conclusion of the North African campaign, he was promoted to captain and sent to join the staff of the French 2nd Armoured Division in England. After landing in Normandy in July 1944, the division distinguished itself in the capture of Le Mans and Alençon. On August 22 General Omar Bradley, commanding the 3rd (US) Army — which including the French division, ordered it to enter Paris from the west as the 4th (US) Infantry Division approached from the south. By 8am on the 24th, the Americans had reached Notre Dame and the French were rolling down the Champs-Elysées with Compagnon close behind the divisional commander, General Leclerc.
For the final phase of the liberation of France in 1944, Compagnon commanded a squadron of tanks of 12th Regiment of Cuirassiers in the fighting for Strasbourg, was wounded but returned to duty in time to be present at the capture of Hitler’s “Eagle’s Nest” at Berchtesgaden. At the end of the war in Europe, he volunteered for service in Indo-China — at the time occupied by the Japanese — where he commanded an independent all-arms tactical group.
His postwar career included a year at the American airborne centre at Fort Benning, a course at the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre from 1953 to 1955, during which he also undertook periods of study at the School of Political Sciences in Paris. From 1958 to 1960 he commanded a parachute regiment in Algeria, leaving before the abortive coup led by General Maurice Challe in 1961 to return to the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre as an instructor and promotion to colonel.
Starting from his appointment as French military attaché in Washington in 1962, subsequently in France and during service in Germany he delivered lectures on politico-military topics and the process of decolonisation, which he had observed in both Indo-China and Algeria. Fluent in English and German, he spoke to mixed civilian and military audiences in order — as he put it — to broaden cultural understanding. These talks widened the currency of his name in both civil and military circles.
On promotion to brigadier-general he was first Chief of Staff to the C-in-C of French Forces in Germany and then commander of the 2nd Armoured Brigade. As a major-general he commanded the 11th Parachute Division and on promotion to lieutenantgeneral in 1976 the 3rd Military Region in north-western France. He was appointed to the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour on his retirement from active duty in 1976.
Compagnon quickly extended his literary accomplishments, writing articles for the journals Ouest-France, Le Soir and Spectacle du Monde, as well as extending his field as a university lecturer. He received the Maréchal Foch prize from the French Academy for his contribution to the better understanding of politico-military affairs, while his Leclerc, Maréchal de France (1989) provided the definitive biography of the leader he so admired in North Africa and during the liberation of France.
His autobiography, Ce en quoi je crois (2006), expressed his strongly held beliefs: the constant search for what is good, service to one’s country and love of family.
His first wife, Jacqueline, née Terlinden, died in 1963. His second wife, Sylvie Palewska, survives him with six children from his first marriage, including the literary historian Antoine Compagnon, and a daughter from his second marriage.
General J. G. A. Compagnon, soldier and academic, was born on October 26, 1916. He died on November 4, 2010, aged 94
Born into a Czech Jewish family in Germany in 1920, Jan Wiener witnessed the rise of Nazism, flew in RAF bombers during the war and was a political prisoner in postwar Czechoslovakia before escaping to the US. He survived many extraordinary challenges in his long life, and the moment on which his life, and survival, hinged as a young man, was one of acute tragedy.
He had managed to escape Nazi occupied Prague, leaving his mother behind, to join his father and stepmother in exile in Yugoslavia. They had made numerous attempts to obtain papers to emigrate to safer places, as they listened anxiously to news of German military advances. In the end a permit to enter Britain arrived, but too late as German forces invaded Yugoslavia in spring 1941, accompanied by the Gestapo hunting down Jews.
Wiener’s father, who “seemed to have lost all hope”, fearful of humiliating capture and death, interrupted a game of chess they were playing, to say: “Tonight I will take the only way out — I will commit suicide. It would be a great relief to me if you would join me, but the decision is yours.”
Wiener urged him to reconsider. “At 20 years of age”, he recalled, it was “not natural to accept any situation as hopeless”. And he thought of his mother back in Prague, still hoping for his, and her own, survival.
But his father was adamant. In the end Wiener agreed to wait, holding hands with him as he lay next to his wife on a bed, both dressed in their Sunday best, until an overdose of pills had taken effect.
“Dazed with grief, fear and confusion”, Wiener headed across cornfields to a railway line where he stowed away on a freight train, and began a long and hazardous escape via Fascist Italy.
He tried to reach unoccupied France by concealing himself underneath a train next to the outflow of the lavatories but was discovered in Genoa by a railway employee checking axles. He was taken to a police station, where the officer warned he would probably be deported to the Nazi-occupied Czech lands. “If you do that,” Wiener told him, “ it would be kinder and cheaper to shoot me right here!”
In the end the officer relented, and Wiener was sent instead to a series of Italian prisons and prisoner-of-war camps. There followed several escape attempts and banishment to tougher prisons such as Ustica, a rocky prison island 30 miles north of Palermo. During this time he heard that his mother had died at the concentration camp at Terezin (Theresienstadt).
As the Allies advanced into Italy, Wiener feared being sent north into Germany and he and a fellow prisoner escaped once more and managed to make their way across mountains to surrender to British Forces. “After they had determined we were not Germans they took us to a military hospital where they shaved us, sprayed us, hosed us and then fed us.”
Wiener then underwent training and joined 311 Czechoslovak bomber squadron in Britain, flying more than 20 operations as a navigator over Germany, France and the Netherlands before the end of the war. His linguistic skills were also much used by the intelligence service of the Czechoslovak Army in exile.
After the war Wiener returned to Prague to begin life there again — a new start in the Czech capital just as he had made as a teenager when his family had moved there in 1933.
He had been born in Hamburg, where his father had established a trading company. After the Nazis came to power in Germany his Czech Jewish parents returned to their homeland, and Wiener “went to school in Prague, learnt the Czech language and learnt to love the country”.
When Czechoslovakia’s fate became so uncertain in 1938 under pressure from Hitler, Wiener volunteered as a schoolboy for the army, confident that any attack by Germany would prompt British and French assistance for Czechoslovak forces. Instead he and his fellow soldiers had to watch in impotent despair as the Munich Agreement handed the Sudetenland, with its German-speaking majority, to Germany.
“This dismemberment”, Wiener recalled, “shattered our national morale”, making “defence impossible as it took from us our fortified border mountains”.
He was still at school when he witnessed the final stage in the crushing of Czech independence as the Nazis invaded the Czech lands in March 1939 and entered Prague: “When the motorised infantry came, some people thrust their hands into their pockets and only glared, some made threatening gestures with their fists. Many women were crying .”
When he returned to his classroom he found that it was divided into benches for Jews and non-Jews, and it was made clear that Jews would not be admitted to university.
And so he decided to join his father in Yugoslavia. He managed to leave through a combination of bribery and humiliating encounters with the newly installed Nazi bureaucracy in Prague.
And he was reminded of all this on his return to Prague in 1945. Wearing his RAF uniform he returned to the office where he had had to go in 1939 to seek permission to take possessions out of the country. Sitting in the office was the same Czech collaborator with the Nazis who had been there in 1939, who had barked at him in German to “stand back”, and had allowed him to take very little with him, including only one pair of shoes because “Jew, you won’t have time to wear out one.”
Now, in 1945, Wiener confronted the man, and hit him — he did not kill him as he had originally thought of doing. He did not, he said, want to descend to the level of the Nazis.
“A huge weight was lifted from me. I would not have to live the rest of my life with such a foul deed on my conscience,” he recalled in an interview with the Prague Post newspaper.
However, such collaborators and their ways had not disappeared in Czechoslovak society. After the Communist takeover of power in 1948 Wiener, who had resolutely refused to join the Communist Party, was sacked from his position as an English teacher for alleged involvement in “anti-state activities”. Like so many who had fought for the free Czechoslovak forces during the war, he was accused, in an atmosphere of Stalinist paranoia, of pro-Western views and sent to work in a steel mill near Prague and then, in the 1950s, as a forestry worker in Bohemia.
In the mid-1960s he and his third wife, Zuzana, were given permission to emigrate to the US. He obtained a position teaching history in Massachusetts. In 1969 he published an account of the assassination by Czechoslovak agents in 1942 of Reinhard Heydrich, Nazi ruler of the Czech lands. The narrative was interspersed with Wiener’s account of his own wartime experiences.
He also taught in Washington and after the revolution against Czechoslovak communism in 1989 returned to Prague once more where, into his eighties, he remained a popular lecturer. He also made a striking documentary, Fighters, in which he and a fellow Czech Jew, Arnost Lustig, revisited their wartime and postwar experiences and debated vigorously the dilemmas life in such turbulent and tragic times had presented — dilemmas which Wiener, recalling episodes such as his father’s suicide, had experienced more intensely than anyone.
He is survived by his wife Zuzana and a son and a daughter.
Jan Wiener, Czech historian, was born on May 26, 1920. He died November 24, 2010, aged 90
Beginning his working life in the advertising department of a Sydney paint business in 1931, Vic Hodgkinson joined the Royal Australian Air Force as a storeman in 1937 and was accepted for pilot training two years later. Coming to the UK in 1940 he flew Sunderland flying boats on anti-submarine and convoy escort patrols during the Battle of the Atlantic before returning to Australia, where he converted to Catalina flying boats. He flew these and Sunderland transport aircraft for the remainder of the war during which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and mentioned in dispatches.
After the war he returned to the UK and for the next 25 years had a career as a civil pilot with BOAC, retiring just as the airline was merged with BEA to form British Airways.
Vic Hodgkinson was born in 1916 and educated at Sydney Tech High School which he left to work first at a Sydney paint works, as a signwriter, and then as a storekeeper at an aircraft stores company. All this time he had been repeatedly applying to join the RAAF, and was eventually accepted as a storekeeper. After a couple of years of routine tedium (during which he had been constantly applying for flying training), with war impending he was suddenly accepted on a cadet training course.
After basic training at Point Cook, Victoria, he was posted in October 1939 to the UK for flying boat training at Calshot, Hampshire, and thence to 10 Squadron, RAAF, which was then being formed with Sunderlands in the UK. This RAAF squadron had been “lent” to the RAF by the Australian Government which continued to fund it throughout the war, during which it saw continuous active service.
The squadron was involved in a number of ticklish operations during the period of the French retreat in June 1940 when the British Government was trying to persuade the French Government in Bordeaux to continue the fight against the Germans from North Africa.
One of its aircraft flew the Colonial Secretary, Lord Lloyd, to Bordeaux to try to persuade Admiral Darlan not to let French warships fall into German hands. Another transported the Minister of Information, Duff Cooper, to Rabat in Morocco to try to contact and persuade French ministers. Neither of these missions received a particularly warm welcome, and both returned to England in 10 Squadron Sunderlands.
Hodgkinson flew anti-submarine patrols over the Mediterranean from Malta and Alexandria during the early days of the desert campaign, and then returned to the UK where, based in Oban, the squadron patrolled the Western Approaches. During the Blitz the squadron moved south, operating out of RAF Mount Batten, near Plymouth, and Pembroke Dock for patrols over the Bay of Biscay to track the exit of U-boats from Brest.
Returning from one of these patrols in April 1941, he was forced to come down in the Irish Sea when his Sunderland grew perilously low on fuel as at tried to make its landing in Angle Bay with the sea flare path completely hidden in dense fog. The aircraft struck an unseen object on the water and broke up, but Hodginkinson and those of his crew who had survived the impact were able to get into their dinghy. After several hours they were picked up by a small rustbucket of a coaster plying its trade in cut flowers between the Isles of Scilly and Liverpool.
On another occasion Hodgkinson’s aircraft was attacked by a Focke-Wulf 200 Condor, whose 20mm cannon armament far outranged and was much superior to the Sunderland’s .303 machineguns. As the enemy’s cannon punched holes in his starboard wing, Hodgkinson dropped to a height of 50 feet, putting the Condor above him, at the same time making a slow turn to put it within range of his four-gun rear turret.
Finding the Condor suddenly above them and on the starboard beam, this and the starboard midships gun opened up spiritedly, and the Condor was seen heading back to France trailing dense smoke as it disappeared over the horizon. Later in this tour Hodgkinson severely damaged an Axis supply tanker and a U-boat.
He was posted back to Australia for which he sailed from Liverpool in April 1942. On arrival he converted to the American-built Catalina, whose immense range (and crew comfort) made it one of the most effective maritime reconnaissance aircraft of the war. Many of his Catalina sorties flown from Cairns, Queensland, in 1942 lasted well over 20 hours. The following year he was engaged in reconnaissance and attack operations over New Guinea and the Solomons. After a total of 3,000 flying hours he was rested from operations, promoted to wing commander and given command of an operational training unit. In March 1944 he was posted to form 40 Squadron RAAF, which flew Sunderlands from Port Moresby. He commanded the squadron until the end of the war.
Joining BOAC on his return to civilian life, Hodgkinson flew many of its four engine aircraft types over the next 25 years, from the piston-engined flying boats which were in service immediately postwar to the jet Comet, the world’s first jet airliner, the Boeing 707.
In retirement from 1971 he lived in Hampshire, where he was involved in the restoration of a Short Sandringham flying boat, which became the central exhibit at the Southampton Hall of Aviation of which he was a trustee.
He is survived by his wife, Terry, whom he married in 1941, and by three sons.
Wing Commander Vic Hodgkinson, DFC, wartime Coastal Command pilot, was born on October 17, 1916. He died on November 20, 2010, aged 94
