Inventive naval surgeon who devised an underwater escape system from aircraft and a widely used protective flying helmet
John Rawlins was internationally recognised as one of the pioneers in aviation medicine, diving research and operations.
He was born at Amesbury, Wiltshire, when his father was commandant of the nearby chemical research establishment at Porton Down. From an early age he had no doubts that he would be a surgeon and in 1939 he was accepted as a medical student at University College, Oxford, graduating as a Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery in 1945.
While working at the London Chest Hospital, he became liable for National Service and was assigned to the navy in May 1947. According to Rawlins, it was after a particularly riotous mess dinner that he inadvertently volunteered for a course in aviation medicine, a field new to him and one which, linked to his diving, was to become a life-long enthusiasm.
Appointed to the carrier Triumph in the Mediterranean, he never missed an opportunity to gain first hand experience of carrier-borne flying operations and their considerable hazards.
He took up spear-fishing while in Malta and, adapting the equipment designed by Jimmy Hodges, an ex-midget submarine colleague, he built his own compressed-air diving equipment. This incorporated a hydrostatically controlled “demand valve”, the design of which was copied into the navy’s first swimmers’ air breathing apparatus some five years later.
After his release from National Service Rawlins returned to the London Chest Hospital but a quirk of the newly instituted NHS found him at the end of a queue of 70 applicants for his previous job. After two years as a supernumary, teaching anatomy at Bart’s and the Charing Cross Hospital, the Royal Navy “made him an offer he couldn’t refuse” and appointed him with a permanent commission to the RAF Institute of Aviation Medicine (IAM) in 1951.
Combat by fast jet aircraft during the Korean War produced a need for an automatically inflating “G-Suit” to prevent aircrew blacking out due to a loss of blood supply to the brain during high-G manoeuvres. Rawlins’s first task was to develop a suit to military standards and his final design achieved a pattern that was to be used unmodified by RN, RAF and civilian test pilots for six years.
A naval pilot was nearly scalped by the upper cable of a crash-barrier on a carrier flight-deck off Korea, this accident prompting the development of a crash helmet of sufficient strength and lightness yet having high acoustic insulation as well as provision for radio communications. Rawlins undertook some original research into the mechanics of skull and brain injury, shock absorption and the design of headphones. He learned how to machine rubber on a lathe by first deep-freezing it.
The outcome was the first protective flying helmet to be based on the mechanics of skull injury, both services ordering it in large numbers. He subsequently joined the British Standards Institute and contributed to internationally agreed standards for motor-cycle, racing driver and horse-riding helmets.
The arrival of intensely noisy jet engines prompted Rawlins to conduct the first acoustic survey of carrier flight deck noise and subsequently to design a noise-attenuating flight deck helmet. During this survey, a sailor walked into a whirling propellor despite broadcast warnings; this accident led Rawlins to develop a flight deck magnetic loop communications system.
In 1955 a Scimitar aircraft suffered brake failure and taxied over the side of Ark Royal’s flight deck, an accident made more tragic by the all-too-public press photographs of the pilot trying to escape from under a jammed cockpit canopy. Rawlins worked on the recovered aircraft to determine the cause and conducted a long series of experiments with various British, French and American aircraft to produce an underwater escape system that, using compressed air, would blow off the cockpit canopy and inflate the life-jacket. This particular solution was never used. For his achievements, Rawlins was appointed MBE in 1956 and OBE in 1960.
In 1958 he was attached to the Royal Naval Physiological Laboratory to work on diving research, including preliminary studies into the long term effects of saturation diving using rats and various gas mixtures. He returned to the IAM and worked there until 1964 when he was selected as the navy’s Man of the Year and awarded the Erroll-Eldridge Prize for his notable contributions to flight safety and health.
Promoted to surgeon commander, he was appointed to the carrier Ark Royal for three years as the medical and diving supervisory officer, also captaining the ship’s judo team. This was followed by three years exchange service with the US Navy’s medical research institute at Bethesda, Maryland, where he worked on thermal protection for deep diving with particular attention to the Sealab III programme.
On return to England he received a series of senior appointments including Director of Health and Research in the rank of commodore and in 1975 Dean of Naval Medicine and officer-in-charge of the Institute of Naval Medicine as a surgeon rear-admiral, receiving the Chadwick Gold Medal and Prize for services to naval health as well as the Gilbert Blane Medal of the Royal College of Surgeons and the Telford Award of the Institution of Civil Engineers. In 1973 the Aerospace Medical Association recognised his contributions with the Arnold D Tuttle Award.
In 1977 he was appointed Medical Director General of the Navy, retiring in 1980 in the rank of surgeon vice-admiral. He was appointed KBE in 1978.
After his naval career, Rawlins worked mainly in the field of underwater technology. Besides his numerous fellowships, he was a director and chairman of a number of companies, including Deep Ocean Technology Inc, Trident Underwater Engineering (Systems) and Medical Express. His diving expertise was recognised by the award in 1995 of the Reg Vallintine Award of the Historical Diving Society of which he was President and the Colin McLeod award of the British Sub-Aqua Club with its honorary life membership. He was much in demand as a lecturer and presented technical papers to various groups in the UK, France, Sweden, Japan and the USA.
His wife Diana, whom he married in 1944, died in 1992. He is survived by their son and three daughters.
Surgeon Vice-Admiral Sir John Rawlins, KBE, Medical Director-General of the Navy, 1977-80, was born on May 12, 1922. He died on July 27, 2011, aged 89
>Ctirad Masin
> Czech anti-communist 'resistant’ who shot his way out of a vast Soviet dragnet to freedom
Anti-communist Czech who completed a daring escape to West Berlin by clinging to the bottom of a train
It was one of the great dramas of the early Cold War. In 1953 Ctirad Masin, a young Czech and fierce opponent of his country’s new communist rulers, was attempting with his brother Josef and three other associates to reach the American-occupied zone of Berlin. From there they hoped to gain military training in the West “and come back either as part of a liberating army ... or as its advance guard”.
But they were spotted during their journey across East Germany, and then pursued for days by thousands of police and security officials. They moved at night and narrowly escaped discovery, hidden under piles of wood. At a railway station, apparently surrounded, they shot their way out of trouble. While two of their number were captured, Ctirad, his brother and one other reached West Berlin, Ctirad making the final journey clinging to the underside of a train.
He was finally able to realise his dream and enlist in United States forces, but the hope for a US-led invasion of Czechoslovakia was left unfulfilled. Instead Masin had to settle for US citizenship and life as a businessman, cursing the effects of communism to the end of his life. Even after the end of communist rule in Czechoslovakia in 1989 he refused to return to his birthplace, claiming that communists still had too much influence in his native land, and that legal continuities with the communist era might leave him open to prosecution.
For Masin knew too that while some Czechs, including prominent politicians, regarded him and his group as heroic freedom fighters, others remained much more critical, because of the six individuals the group had killed during the preparation and implementation of their escape plan. Masin justified his actions by arguing that “the situation was unbearable” in the late 1940s and early 1950s, that the communist government had killed hundreds, and that all his groups’s victims in both Czechoslovakia and East Germany had been servants of communist regimes and therefore legitimate targets.
However, around half of those consulted in a Czech television opinion poll a few years ago considered the Masin group to have been “criminals”. Their extraordinary story exposed deep divisions in Czech opinion about what kind of resistance to communism was justified, and how far it could be seen as a nationally imperative “third resistance” following Czech resistance, by some at least, against Habsburg and then Nazi rule.
Ctirad Masin would certainly have seen exactly that kind of continuity, growing up in a family with a proud military and resistance tradition. He was born in the town of Podebrady, about 30 miles from Prague, in 1930 and was strongly influenced by his father, who had fought with the Czech legions in Russia during and after the First World War and was an officer in an artillery regiment of the Czechoslovak Army.
Although that army was not able to resist Nazi invasion of the Czech lands in 1939, Masin’s father became a leading figure in the underground Czech resistance until his capture and torture by the Gestapo. He was executed in 1942 as part of Nazi reprisals for the assassination of the Nazi Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich.
But the father had left a testament urging his sons to recall with courage that all politically and nationally engaged Czechs should defend the freedom of their country and people. “You too have to act accordingly,” he had added. The sons had already shown their commitment as teenagers during the war, helping Russians to escape Nazi imprisonment and earning a decoration from the new postwar President of Czechoslovakia Eduard Benes. When Benes was displaced after a communist coup in 1948 the Masin brothers became diehard opponents of the new regime and its Soviet backers. In Ctirad’s case opposition was reinforced when he was imprisoned by the authorities for nearly two years as a forced labourer at the notorious uranium mines around Jachymov.
The Masin brothers and a few close friends formed an anti-communist resistance group, beginning with minor acts of sabotage such as burning fields and defacing statues of Stalin, before moving on to bigger plans. “We wanted to overthrow the communist regime,” Ctirad recalled. “Obviously we could not make it with our limited resources, but we ... wanted to cause the biggest losses possible in the expectation of an intervention from the West.”
The group began to acquire weapons and steal cash over many months, during which they killed two policemen and a security guard, Ctirad Masin cutting the throat of one policeman after knocking him out with chloroform.
Then in 1953 they felt ready to attempt their audacious escape to West Berlin. Three East German policemen were killed as the Masins and a dwindling number of colleagues resisted arrest. The communist authorities raged, with East German officials summoning the Western press to claim that the Czechs had intended to carry out the “mass murder of the people’s police”. The Czechoslovak Government, meanwhile, took harsh action against the associates and families of those who had escaped. The Masins were prosecuted in their absence for sabotage, murder, embezzlement, defection, espionage and treason.
After serving in the US forces for some years, Ctirad settled as an American citizen in Cleveland, Ohio and ran businesses including one supplying heating equipment. But although the Masins were living well beyond the reach of Czechoslovak law, the prosecutions, especially the allegations of murder, continued to hang over them. After 1989 and the revolution against Czechoslovak communist rule one of the Masin group living in the US, Milan Paumer, returned to live in what became the Czech Republic. He was fêted by some, and the Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas attended his funeral last year, praising his resistance as “heroic”. The Masin brothers had also been honoured by an earlier Czech Prime Minister, Mirek Topolanek.
However, the Czech Presidents Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Klaus were wary of granting the Masin group full rehabilitation and honours from the Czech state. On the Czech political Left, especially among the unreformed Communist Party, there was vocal opposition towards any honouring of the Masins, and even demands that they be extradited and prosecuted for murder. For their part, the Masins said they would not return to the Czech Republic because communist influence there remained strong, including in the legal system partly inherited from communist rule. “If democratic laws were in place,” Ctirad argued in 1995, “there would be no discussion of this kind. It would be the communists standing trial for murdering people.”
While the moral justification of what the Masins did in the 1950s is still disputed, the drama of intrepid individuals against the massed forces of totalitarian states is undeniable. Ctirad Masin’s anti-communist resistance will remain controversial after his death, as it was during his life, at the centre of a profound Czech debate about the rights and wrongs of resistance.
Ctirad Masin, Czech anti-Communist, was born on August 11, 1930. He died on August 13, 2011, aged 81
>Nancy Wake
>Highly decorated SOE agent who ran escape lines to Spain and a large Maquis force before D-Day
SOE courier who was awarded the George Medal for gallantry while serving with the French Resistance
Nancy Fiocca, to use her married name at the time, was parachuted into German-occupied France with another Special Operations Executive agent, Major John Farmer, on the night of April 29-30, 1944. Her companion landed in the right place but Nancy, code-named Hélène, landed 300 yards away. She was found by a Maquisard search party, automatic in hand ready to fire. Her sense of purpose, not to say aggression, had been frequently noted during her intensive SOE training.
The pair’s task was to contact the leaders of a large group of the French Resistance in the Allier and Haute-Loire regions, arm them and try to give them operational direction in anticipation of the Allied invasion of Normandy five weeks later. The SOE did not encourage the formation of large groups of partisans, as they were vulnerable to German attack, but in this instance it was considered that the group could be useful in sabotaging German reinforcement routes from southern France to the Normandy bridgehead.
Taken to a safe house in Cosne d’Allier, Farmer established contact with Resistance organisers the next day, but their radio operator and his equipment, due to be flown in separately by a Lysander, failed to arrive, making it impossible for them to call SOE headquarters in Algiers to begin the delivery of arms. This and suspicions between Maquisard factions led to them being passed from one to another until May 15 when they were finally joined by their radio operator. They chose Chaudes-Aigues, the centre for a group of some 4,000 Maquis, as a base and large-scale deliveries of weapons soon began.
On June 20, two weeks after Allied troops had landed on the Normandy beaches, the Maquis concentration area was attacked by several German battalions supported by aircraft. The attack started at 7am and continued until after nightfall. When the order “sauve-qui-peut”, calling for panic dispersal, was given, Farmer and Wake became separated from their radio operator but joined a substantial group of Maquis in a deserted village. The pair split up, Wake set off to try to contact a radio operator of another SOE team and Farmer to try to find their own. Each having walked more than 200km they met by arrangement in early July near Aurillac, from where they tried to re-establish radio contact with SOE headquarters.
No reply was received, and the Maquisards having dispersed, the two again decided to move separately with one Maquis companion to try to reestablish contact with Resistance groups in the Allier and Chateauxroux regions respectively. Wake cycled to Chateauxroux then to a prearranged rendezvous with Farmer at Montluçon, covering the 400km journey in less than a week without finding any sign of the Resistance. Asked at the rendezvous, “How are you?” she could neither stand nor sit but simply wept with exhaustion. As Farmer had been equally unsuccessful in the Allier, the pair decided to make their way to Spain when a message was received telling them to collect a new radio operator due to be flown in 250km away.
Narrowly avoiding a pitched battle between Germans and Maquisards on their return journey by car, Farmer decided to tour the region to establish parachute dropzones or aircraft landing grounds for each Resistance group, then co-ordinate weapon supplies from a new base in the forest of Sivret, north of Ygrande. Wake was in charge of this base with two newly arrived US SOE agents when it was attacked by three companies of German infantry on August 7, 1944. Taking command of a Maquisard section whose leader had been killed, Wake seized the initiative, firing her own automatic pistol at the enemy and directing the section’s fire and that of the two US officers, who had each grabbed a bazooka. Gathering the group around her, she directed covering fire for them to withdrew without further casualties.
Nancy Grace Augusta Wake was born in Wellington, New Zealand, daughter of Charles Wake, a lawyer, and Ella Rosier of Sydney. She was educated in Sydney until aged 18 and left for Paris in 1936. There she met a Frenchman, Henri Fiocca, and married him in November 1939. They were living in Marseilles when France fell and, unknown to her husband, Nancy became a courier for an underground organisation conveying Allied pilots to safety.
Although Vichy France was not occupied by Germany until November 1942, life there could be dangerous for anyone suspected of clandestine activity. Wake’s outgoing personality led her to take risks and, while preparing to courier a message across the border into occupied France, she heard that the German authorities already knew her by reputation but not by name. They called her “the White Mouse” for her habit of scurrying about.
Her journey to Paris was successful but, on learning that their organisation’s leader and prominent members had been apprehended, she and a woman colleague fled to Spain. They were arrested and sent to Madrid but by invoking her dual British-French nationality she was able to persuade the Spanish authorities to deport them both to Gibraltar, from where they sailed for England. On arrival she enlisted in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), then recruiting women of French nationality and French-speakers for service in France with SOE.
The operation with Farmer in 1944 was her first. That November, after the incident in the Forest of Sivret and Paris having fallen to the Allies, Farmer sent her to the French capital for temporary duty with an SOE network whose headquarters had moved there.Probably owing to the stress of the preceding summer, she fell ill in Paris and did not report back after sick leave. She subsequently wrote to SOE headquarters in London requesting to be “sworn out” of the organisation in Paris.
She was awarded the George Medal by Britain for her gallantry during the Forest of Sivret incident in August, 1944; and the US Medal of Freedom and French Croix de Guerre with two palms for her SOE services in France. Her services to France were further recognised by her appointment as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour when in her eighties.
Discovering that her husband had been killed by the Nazis, she returned to Australia. In 1957 she married John Forward, an Englishman who had served with the RAF and been a PoW. In December 2001 she left for England amid some publicity, during which she claimed that the Australian Government and veterans organisations were denying her the recognition that she deserved. She was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2004.
Her second husband predeceased her. She had no children.
Nancy Wake, AC, GM, wartime SOE agent in German-occupied France, was born on August 30, 1912. She died on August 7, 2011, aged 98
