General Magnus Malan
General Magnus Malan, who died on Monday aged 81, led the armed forces of apartheid South Africa and later became the first former minister to be put on trial on charges of committing atrocities during the period of white minority rule.
Abrasive South African Defence Minister who acted ruthlessly against the enemies and critics of apartheid
After a career in the South African Army General Magnus Malan went into politics at the top — on retirement from the South Africa Defence Force (SADF) in 1980 he was appointed Minister of Defence by President P. W. Botha. He became National Party MP for Modderfontein in 1981.
In December 1986 he became a deputy chairman of the party in the Transvaal. He is remembered for his conviction of the need for a total national strategy and “total onslaught” to deal with the forces of “communism” (in which he included most legitimate protest against apartheid).
Malan remained at Defence, despite two heart bypass operations until President F. W. de Klerk removed him in August 1991, by which time his reactionary views were becoming incompatible with the changing temper of the times. He moved to Water Affairs and Forestry, where he remained until he retired from active politics at the end of January 1993.
Magnus André de Merindol Malan was born at Kimberley in 1930 and attended the Afrikaans Boys’ High School and Danie Craven Physical Education Brigade, Kimberley. Joining the army as a cadet officer, he took a BSc in military science at the University of Pretoria.
His first senior appointment was as officer commanding South-West Africa Command 1966-68; there followed spells in command of the South African Military Academy, 1968-72, and of the Western Province, 1972-73, before he became chief of the South African Army in 1973 and of the South African Defence Force from 1976.
With his abrasive style, Malan was not at home in politics, or happy with public participation in public affairs, He believed South Africa was at war and that the end justified the means. He was convinced that for South Africa “one man, one vote, in a unitary state” would be a disaster.
He misunderstood the politics of protest and said of African unrest: “The revolution was basically about getting a roof over your head, having food to eat, education for your children, having a job and medical services. That was the crux of the whole thing.” After the 1986 State of Emergency had been declared he said democracy was not a relevant factor for blacks, among whom, he said, there was only limited interest in political participation.
Malan and P. W. Botha collaborated on the burgeoning security apparatus that fortified the State in the 1980s, part of which was a military assassination squad, chillingly known as the Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB), which was used to quell unrest in the black townships. He later claimed to have known nothing of the bureau and its covert operations until November 1989.
In February 1990 there was a snap debate on the CCB. Malan acknowledged its existence but said he had not ordered any killings of opponents of the Government. There was pressure from the ANC for Malan to resign, and in October 1990 Archbishop Desmond Tutu called from the pulpit for his dismissal: “The new South Africa cannot afford yesterday’s men with dubious morals and yesterday’s attitudes.”
Internationally Malan never had any scruples about defending South Africa against “total onslaught”, as he saw it, fearing that the Soviet Union would establish itself in Angola, and use it as a base for forays into the whole continent. He admitted that South Africa was supporting Jonas Savimbi and his Unita movement (as other Western powers had done) which South Africa and the West in general saw as a potent anti-communist force. In Namibia he saw Swapo as communist-inspired.
In 1988 Malan and “Pik” Botha (the South African Foreign Minister) had a narrow escape. They were due to fly to New York, in connection with pre-independence talks for Namibia, and changed flights only hours before they would have caught PanAm Flight 103 (which was brought down over Lockerbie).
Though the military was not represented in the long negotiations with the ANC, Malan interfered in them, for example by saying that there could be no question of a merger between the SADF and Umkhonto we Sizwe (the ANC’s military wing). Though useful to the Government as a safety valve, he could not really get used to the idea of negotiating with the recent enemy, and when in August troops were moved into the townships he attacked left-wing radicals for their onslaught on the SADF.
After Malan’s retirement from active politics in November 1995 he was arrested, with ten other senior police and military officers, charged with having been responsible for the murder by an Inkatha hit squad (set up by order of the State Security Council and known as Caprivi 200) of 13 people at kwaMakhuta, south of Durban, on January 21, 1987, and of conspiring to kill anti-apartheid activists. After a six-month trial he and the other defendants were aquitted on all counts The acquittal led to much criticism of South Africa’s judicial system, and Tutu, as chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Council (TRC), stated that it offered a better way of uncovering the truth about the past. Malan had already said that he would not appear before the TRC, but in April 1997 his position changed and he offered to testify, though he insisted that he had never given orders for unlawful activities. Subpoenaed by the TRC in December 1997 regarding cross-border incursions into Mozambique in support of the Renamo right-wing rebels, in October 1998 he was found accountable, as a member of the State Security Council, for the State’s violations of human rights.
Malan married in 1962 Margrietha van der Walt. She survives him with a daughter and two sons.
General Magnus Malan, soldier and politician, was born on January 30, 1930. He died on July 18, 2011, aged 81
Seaman who was decorated for his heroism in rescuing a fellow sailor from burning oil after his ship was sunk in the siege of Malta
The failure of two convoys to get essential relief supplies through to Malta in June 1942 threw the precarious situation on the island into sharp relief. Only two merchantmen got through. Although besieged, Malta’s harbour and airfields provided bases for ships and submarines of the Royal Navy and RAF aircraft that threatened the sea supply lines of Rommel’s Afrika Korps and the Italian forces in the Western Desert. If Malta fell, the Allies could do little to prevent unrestricted reinforcement and supply of their enemies in North Africa.
Aviation fuel and anti-aircraft ammunition stocks on the island were numbered in days — at action rates — and general supplies down to less than five weeks when Convoy WS21S of 14 freighters with an escort equivalent to a battlefleet, including three aircraft carriers and the battleships HMS Nelson and Rodney, began to converge on Gibraltar in early August. The aim of Operation Pedestal was to fight the convoy through to Malta. On board HMS Ledbury, one of the Hunt class destroyers assigned as close escort to the merchantmen, was Petty Officer C. H. Walker.
WS21S and her escort entered the Mediterranean on August 9 but it was impossible to keep such a concourse of ships secret for long. At 1315 hours on August 11 the carrier HMS Eagle was struck simultaneously by four torpedoes fired by the German U73 and sank in six minutes. From 1420 hours that day, the merchantmen and escorts came under relentless attack from German and Italian bombers, torpedo bombers, E-boats and submarines. The convoy’s position 30 miles SSE of the island of Pantelleria was identified by German reconnaissance aircraft soon after dawn on August 13. A formation of 12 Ju88 bombers appeared at 0800 hours and immediately began to circle in readiness for attack. The merchant ships were steaming in line ahead for Malta — still 150 miles distant — and expecting an escort of RAF Beaufighters to arrive at any moment. But lack of fighter-control ships in the group precluded direct communication with the aircraft, which were still scouring the sea for the convoy. After failing to hit the tanker Ohio, two Ju88s singled out the cargo ship SS Waimarama for attention. The first aircraft released a stick of five bombs, of which a cluster of four struck the merchantman close to the bridge. The vessel had a deck cargo of petrol, which ignited in one sheet of flame; a violent explosion amidships threw up a huge column of smoke and debris as the ship first listed to starboard and then sank in a widening circle of burning oil.
To the crews of the accompanying escorts it seemed certain that all aboard the Waimarama must be lost. But, hearing shouts through the smoke, Lieutenant Roger Hill, RN, brought HMS Ledbury close in to the scene, lowered boats to pick up survivors and, rigging out scrambling nets as he went, plunged his ship into the flaming area of sea to rescue men trapped in pockets of clear water.
Petty Officer Walker, mustered on deck with others to give any assistance needed, saw one of the injured survivors of the Waimarama in difficulties in the water. Well knowing that the Ledbury might have to turn away at any moment to avoid the flames, he dived over the side and held the casualty up in the water, with burning oil all around them, until they could both be hauled aboard the destroyer.
Thirty-three of the Waimarama’s crew of 120 were rescued by the Ledbury. Scarcely was this accomplished than she came upon some of the crew of the Melbourne Star who had leapt overboard believing their own ship to be on fire as she became enveloped in the pall of smoke where the Waimarama had gone down.
Three of the 14 merchant ships of the convoy reached Malta on the evening of August 13; a fourth — the cargo vessel Brisbane Star — limped in on the 14th. Finally, the heavily damaged but vital oil tanker Ohio, with two destroyers lashed alongside to give her forward way and the indefatigable Ledbury acting as her rudder astern, crept into Valetta harbour with her decks awash at 0800 hours on the 15th. Nine merchant ships of the convoy were lost but 55,000 tons of critically important cargo reached besieged Malta.
Charles Henry Walker — who always preferred to be known as “Charles Henry” — received the Albert Medal from King George VI on August 13, 1943 — one year to the day after the act of heroism that had earned him the award. The Albert Medal, named after Queen Victoria’s Prince Consort, was instituted in 1867 specifically for saving life at sea and was regarded as equal — in terms of the degree of gallantry it honoured — to the Victoria Cross.
The George Cross had been introduced by King George VI in 1940, after the onset of German air attacks on British cities, to recognise “acts of the most conspicuous courage in circumstances of extreme danger” by civilians or members of the Armed Forces when not in the immediate presence of the enemy. In a move to rationalise awards for gallantry in such circumstances, a royal warrant of 1971 authorised all surviving holders of the Albert Medal to exchange their awards for the George Cross. Walker received his from the Queen on March 12, 1973.
Charles Henry Walker was born in Portsmouth in 1914 and joined the Royal Navy as a seaman in the early 1930s. He served with the Royal Navy off Palestine during the Arab rebellion of 1938 and shortly after this became a galley cook specialist, attaining the rank of petty officer cook shortly after the outbreak of war. He served with Atlantic convoys, in the Mediterranean and with HMS Ledbury during the Italian campaign.
On leaving the Royal Navy in 1954 he became a postman in Portsmouth, eventually retiring to Cleveland. After receiving the George Cross he donated his Albert Medal to the museum of HMS Victory at Portsmouth.
He is survived by his wife, Brenda, their son and two daughters.
Petty Officer Charles Henry Walker, GC, naval veteran, was born on March 9, 1914. He died on July 17, 2011, aged 97
'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
First Sea Lord who used his vast experience of naval strategy to argue that Britain should retain Trident as its nuclear deterrent
During his final six years in the Navy, between 1987 and 1993, two issues of particular importance occupied Julian Oswald while he held the influential posts of Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet and First Sea Lord.
He realised from his previous experience at the MoD that Britain could never afford the RAF’s proposals for a tactical air-to-surface nuclear missile as well as the Trident submarine-borne nuclear ballistic missile system without serious financial harm to the conventional capabilities of the Armed Forces.
In the arcane theology of nuclear deterrence, Trident was designed to be the strategic system of last resort; always on patrol at sea, invulnerable and, during the Cold War, aimed at defeating the anti-missile defences of the “Moscow criterion” and thereby deterring the Soviet leadership from threatening Britain or Europe.
However, such an all-or-nothing posture lacked a certain amount of credibility. Nato’s deterrent philosophy had envisaged a series of flexible escalatory responses to the threat of aggression that would hopefully contain any conflict to a level below the strategic, with its fearful possibility of “nuclear winter”. This continuing principle called for the possession of a number of less powerful weapons that could be more flexibly targeted, but, if land-based, would raise all sorts of problems concerned with “counter-force” retaliation and internal security.
During the last years of the Cold War and thereafter Oswald campaigned for the adaptation of the Trident system in terms of its technology and targeting flexibility so that it would be acceptable in a “sub-strategic” or even a non-nuclear role. In this he was successful. Trident remains Britain’s only nuclear weapon system.
It was also clear that in the post-Cold War political environment the objectives of national navies had changed. Long outdated was a strategy that required the defeat of the enemy fleet in order to establish sea control. In its place came the concepts of “expeditionary warfare” and “littoral operations”, recently illustrated by world events from Sierra Leone to the Gulf.
The role of the Royal Navy would be even more the gun that fires the projectile — the Army — ashore than it had been historically. An emphasis on amphibious operations, or “brown water” as opposed to “blue water”, had been part of naval staff thinking for some time, and Oswald succeeded in establishing the case for the large helicopter-carrying ship, HMS Ocean, which by its presence in the fleet also brought forward in its wake the logic for further specialist amphibious shipping and other capability upgrades.
During his time as First Sea Lord, Oswald was also responsible for the introduction of women in seagoing ships, a controversial issue for which he was criticised by a small clique but which became accepted as thoroughly normal and an initiative that defused any thought that the Navy’s practices had not kept up with the times.
John Julian Robertson Oswald was born in 1933, passed out from Dartmouth Naval College in 1951 and served as a midshipman in Britain’s last battleship, Vanguard, being present for her final and noisy main armament firings. After sub-lieutenant courses, he was appointed in charge of the 50-plus midshipmen in the “gunroom” of the training carrier Theseus. “It contained all the funnies — air cadets, Canadians, Venezuelans, reservist national servicemen,” he said.
As the “action stations” officer of the watch in the cruiser HMS Newfoundland, Oswald witnessed the destruction of the Egyptian frigate Domiat in the Gulf of Suez during the ill-fated 1956 Anglo-French-Israeli campaign against the ambitions of President Nasser. Domiat was sailing south with lights on when she was challenged and illuminated by the darkened Newfoundland’s searchlight and ordered to halt. Domiat responded with three shots from her 4in gun before Newfoundland’s 8in salvos knocked out her gun and wrecked her machinery, stopping her attempt to ram. Newfoundland suffered six casualties. Only about half Domiat’s crew — 68 — were rescued. Oswald recorded that the action “made a pretty horrifying impression on me at close range”.
Still in Newfoundland, Oswald met in Hong Kong his wife Roni Thompson, the daughter of the colony’s Accountant-General.
His next tour was in the Dartmouth Training Squadron, followed by the year-long course specialising in gunnery at Portsmouth. Oswald never considered himself a properly tribal gunnery officer, being averse to “gas and gaiters”, and because his only two gunnery jobs were concerned with air weapons, the first of these in the large carrier Victorious in the Far East where he was responsible for arming the high-performance jets, then carried with their bombs and missiles, as well as custody of atomic weapons.
His first command was the minesweeper Yarnton which, unusually for this class of patrol vessels, actually had to sweep a Second World War minefield off the Iceland coast as well as contribute to the laborious and unrewarding task of checking that European shipping routes were clear of wartime mines. He did the naval staff course in 1964, followed by tours as an instructor in air weapons and second-in-command of the frigate Naiad in the crack Londonderry Squadron.
His first Ministry of Defence job was in the plans division — “in some distinguished company” — from where he was promoted to commander and captaincy of the frigate Bacchante. This was an amusing duty with nine months as the West Indies’ guardship and a period in Malta “practising for our withdrawal” under the regime of Prime Minister Dom Mintoff.
While serving in the Defence Policy Staff, his promotion to captain earned an extra tour at assistant director level in the division dealing with matters outside the Nato area. After the Royal College of Defence Studies in 1976, Oswald commanded the destroyer Newcastle, then being built at Swan Hunter’s yard on the Tyne and subject to delays. A brief commission included a visit to St Helena where his father “had left him a great aunt in his will”. He was able to fly ashore in the helicopter with her birthday cake on his knees.
He subsequently toured the country in charge of the Royal Navy Presentation Team, delivering lectures to a variety of audiences, recorded as “hard work, but great fun”. In Exeter prison an old lag asked him whether he had “the key” (to the atom bomb). “Of course,” he said. Oswald’s car keys satisfied him.
After two years in command of Dartmouth Oswald was promoted to rear-admiral in 1982 and appointed to the MoD in the assistant chief of defence staff in the policy and nuclear role. This was followed by his final seagoing tour in 1985 to 1987 as Flag Officer Third Flotilla that carried with it the role of Commander Anti-Submarine Warfare Striking Force. This function was important to Nato’s campaign plans for the North Atlantic and Norwegian Sea which envisaged a seaborne reinforcement of Nato’s northern flank on the Norwegian coast. Continued allocation of this role to a Royal Navy officer by Nato planners, particularly the Americans, was a tribute to a British reputation for anti-submarine expertise that had to be maintained by hard training and technological effort.
He was appointed KCB in 1987, and advanced to GCB in 1989. On leaving the Navy in 1993 he undertook a wide range of activities. One was his hobby as a glider pilot which he had taken up when a rear-admiral. He became a qualified instructor and was proud that he introduced more than 800 people to gliding. His height record was 22,500ft over the Cairngorms.
Between 1993 and 2005 Oswald was a non-executive member of the Wessex Regional Health Authority and vice-chairman of the South and West Regional Health Authority; director and chairman of the software company Sema; director of MGM Assurance; director of marine specialists James Fisher and Sons and Corda (Operational Analysis) as well as chairman of Aerosystems International, Informatic and Green Issues (Planning PR).
His charitable and institutional activities included presidency of the Officers’ Association, the Sea Cadet Association, the Shipwrecked Mariners and Fishermens’ Royal Benevolent Society. He was vice-president of Seafarers UK, the World Ship Trust and the RUSI. He was a trustee of the National Maritime Museum, and chairman of the National Historic Ships Committee and the quarterly The Naval Review. He was chairman of the gunners’ St Barbara Association and patron of Deal Maritime Museum and of the Waveney Stardust Trust for the disabled and the Solent MS Therapies Group.
He was a governor of the University of Portsmouth until 2000 and served on the councils of the White Ensign Association and the Forces Pensions Society. He was a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Shipwrights and a Stowaway of the Southampton Master Mariners. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and had an honorary degree from Portsmouth.
Oswald was widely admired for his leadership style; entirely lacking bombast and able to get his way by wellinformed argument, courteously presented and with an irresistible determination. “Watching him chair a meeting was an education,” noted a colleague.
He is survived by his wife, Roni, and their two sons and three daughters.
Admiral of the Fleet Sir Julian Oswald, GCB, First Sea Lord, 1989-93, was born on August 11, 1933. He died on July 19, 2011, aged 77
'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'