От Chestnut
К Chestnut
Дата 10.10.2012 16:23:11
Рубрики WWII; Спецслужбы; Армия; ВВС;

Военные и топичные некрологи из британских газет

Eric Lomax

Бывший пленный у японцев, встретивший в мирной жизни своего мучителя, но выбравший примирение вместо возмездия

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/army-obituaries/9596599/Eric-Lomax.html

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3563020.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00344/2586200_Lomax1_344187c.jpg



Lomax with Takashi Nagase, his former Japanese torturer, on the bridge over the River Kwai. Nearly 50 years after the war the two men met and were reconciled

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00344/2321900_Lomax2_344190c.jpg



Eric Lomax and other Allied prisoners of war worked on the Burma – Siam “Death Railway”.

Wartime prisoner of the Japanese who recounted his appalling experiences in a sensational memoir in 1995

Captured by the Japanese while in charge of a signal section in the Royal Artillery as Singapore fell to the Japanese in February 1942, Eric Lomax was sent to work as a PoW on the notorious Burma-Thailand Railway. There, with other captives, he suffered severe privations, including torture and beatings, until his release in the summer of 1945.

The story of his sufferings, ghost-written by Neil Belton, caused a sensation when it was published as The Railway Man in 1995. That year it was made into a television drama entitled Prisoners in Time, starring John Hurt as Lomax, and the book went on to win the 1996 NCR Book Award and the J. R. Ackerley Prize for autobiography, though several authorities on the experiences of Far East Prisoners of War (FEPoWs) were to query the accuracy of some of its details.

In the meantime Lomax had tracked down and met one of his former torturers, a Japanese interpreter named Takashi Nagase, and had had a reconciliation with him on the banks of the River Kwai where he had been imprisoned. The reconciliation and the Japanese apology had been filmed as the documentary, Enemy, My Friend, in 1995, directed by Mike Finlason. Lomax was subsequently to describe how this meeting and Nagase’s apology had purged him of a long-nursed anger at his treatment, and restored him to wholeness and peace.

Eric Sutherland Lomax was born in Edinburgh in 1919, and when war came he was called up and commissioned into the Royal Signals in 1940. He was serving as a Royal Signals officer attached to the 5th Field Regiment Royal Artillery in Singapore early in 1942 as the Japanese closed in on the city.

After periods in various camps he was among the thousands of prisoners selected to work on the Burma-Thailand Railway, constructed using forced labour by the Japanese to support their forces in the Burma campaign. Of these, around 90,000 Asian labourers and 16,000 Allied PoWs died through malnutrition, disease and maltreatment, as well as being shot out of hand or beaten to death.

In his own account, Lomax and his fellow prisoners came to the attention of their guards in August 1943 when a radio they had assembled from silver paper, wire, aluminium and wax, so that they could monitor the All India Radio broadcasts from New Delhi, and follow the course of the war, was discovered by the authorities at their camp at Kanburi on the River Kwai. Lomax had, too, made a map of the area which was also found. From that moment, as Lomax described it both in The Railway Man, and in a short account Beyond the River Kwai, published in a collection, Soldier Stories, in the US in 2006, their lives became a living hell.

The five men suspected of being involved in the construction of the radio, who included Lomax, were beaten with pick-axe handles until two of them died. Both Lomax’s arms were broken, and he was subsequently subjected to a form of “waterboarding” when a brutal NCO forced the torrent from a high-pressure water hose into his nose and mouth. In this torment the perpetrators of these evils came to be symbolised by the constant voice of the interpreter at his ear, urging him to confess and reveal information about anti-Japanese activities within the camp of which he actually had no knowledge. Periods in the camp hospital, so that they might become “well enough” to endure further torment, were followed by a renewal of the physical violence against the men.

Eventually news that the war was going against the Japanese began to filter through to the camps. Finally, in the summer of 1945 came the information that an astonishing new bomb had brought the Japanese Empire to its knees, and one day an American B29 flew over the camp dropping food packages. After gaining his liberty Lomax was mentioned in dispatches for his resolute conduct in the camps.

After recovering he was able to return to work, and for some years lectured in personnel management at Strathclyde University. But mental flashbacks, particularly the low whispered voice of the interpreter repeatedly assuring him “Lomax, you will tell” continued to dog him. To find this man became something of an obsession.

As he recounted, Lomax eventually had a stroke of luck when a British Army chaplain who had been in contact with former Japanese soldiers told him he had located the interpreter and found out that he lived in the city of Kurashiki. His former tormentor had apparently become active in charitable causes and had built a Buddhist temple of peace close to the river and railway at Kanburi, as an act of atonement. Lomax’s sufferings ran too deep for him to be convinced at that stage, but eventually, in 1991, he was persuaded to read a book written by Nagase, in which the former interpreter mentioned him and expressed deep remorse for his sufferings.

Eventually Lomax felt he could face meeting Nagase and he and his wife, a nurse, flew to Thailand, to take a train to Kanburi, where the two men at last met and were reconciled. Nagase, it transpired, had devoted his life since the war to campaigning against militarism and working for reconciliation. As he recalled in Beyond the River Kwai, Lomax was able to assure him of his total forgiveness.

In the year following its publication The Railway Man was criticised for the inaccuracy of some aspects of its account of what had happened at Kanburi and other camps, by relatives of other survivors of the experience and professional historians.

The book is currently being made into a film directed by Jonathan Teplitzky and starring Colin Firth and Jeremy Irvine as, respectively, the older and younger Eric Lomax, and with Nicole Kidman playing Patti, who befriended and married Lomax as his second wife.

Lomax is survived by his wife, Patti, by a daughter from his first marriage and by four stepchildren.


Eric Lomax, prisoner of war and survivor of the Burma-Thailand Railway, was born on May 30, 1919. He died on October 8, 2012, aged 93


'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
От Chestnut
К Chestnut (10.10.2012 16:23:11)
Дата 15.10.2012 18:13:28

весьма топичный некролог

Norodom Sihanouk

Король, принц и премьер, эмигрант и снова король Камбоджи (дважды отрёкшийся от престола в итоге)

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3568706.ece

Energetic Cambodian monarch who after abdicating the throne became an important figure in his country’s turbulent political life

Norodom Sihanouk was a gifted and mercurial participant in Cambodian politics for more than 70 years. He reigned for many years as Cambodia’s king and abdicated in 1955 in order to take up a political career. In the so-called Sihanouk period (1955-70), when he served first as prime minister and later as chief of state, he displayed a formidable array of political skills while ruling his “children”, as he called them in a theatrical, benevolent and despotic fashion.

After he was removed from office in 1970 in a bloodless coup, Sihanouk formed an alliance with the Cambodian Communists, or Khmer Rouge, hoping to return as chief of state. Instead, the Khmer Rouge, after they came to power in 1975, held him prisoner for three years before they were driven from power.

Sihanouk spent the 1980s in exile, mostly in Beijing. He returned home briefly in 1991 and was crowned king for the second time in 1993. Given nothing significant to do, he abdicated again in 2004. From then on he lived primarily in Beijing and never spent more than a few weeks a year in his native country.

Norodom Sihanouk was born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in 1922, when the southeast Asian kingdom formed a part of French Indo-China. He was the only child of Prince Norodom Suramarit and Princess Sisowath Kossamak, whose father, Sisowath Monivong, reigned as king during much of Sihanouk’s boyhood.

When Monivong died in 1941 the French plucked Sihanouk from high school in Saigon and named him king — it was a position he had never expected to occupy. At the time Japanese troops were stationed throughout Indo-China with the permission of the French, who remained in administrative control.

The French assumed that Sihanouk would be a pliable ruler of Cambodia in perilous times. In March 1945, however, the Japanese imprisoned French officials throughout Indo-China and encouraged Sihanouk to declare Cambodia’s independence, which he did with little enthusiasm. The newly named Kingdom of Kampuchea lasted until the French returned to Cambodia in force in October 1945, as Sihanouk knew they would. The young King welcomed them warmly and soon regained their backing.

The French were in no hurry to leave Indo-China, but to reduce nationalist pressure they allowed political parties to form in Cambodia in 1946. Elections in 1947 and 1951, the first in Cambodian history, were won by the mildly proindependence Democrat Party. As he gained self-confidence Sihanouk feuded with the Democrats but he waited until 1952, when France’s war against rebels in Indo-China was going badly, to confront the French himself. He shut down the Democrat-controlled National Assembly and embarked on what he called a “royal crusade for independence”, threatening to abdicate and to arm the Cambodian people if France kept control of the kingdom.

Taken aback, the French caved in and granted Cambodia its independence in November 1953. A royal decree, signed by the King, named him the Father of Independence.

In mid-1955 Sihanouk abdicated, had his father named king in his place, and set out as a Prince on a political career. Political parties ceased to exist, and Sihanouk’s personally sanctioned political movement, the Sangkum Reastr Niyum (People’s Socialist Community), came to dominate political life, winning four elections against derisory opposition between 1955 and 1966. When King Suramarit died in 1960 Sihanouk allowed the monarchy to lapse as an institution.

Throughout the Sihanouk period the Prince was immensely popular among the Cambodian peasantry, towards whom he displayed sustained and genuine affection. Domestically, he supported improvements in Cambodia’s education but was intolerant of dissent and easily bored by economic issues. In the international arena he energetically pursued a policy of neutralism, which alienated him from the US, Thailand and South Vietnam, but pleased de Gaulle’s regime in France, non-aligned nations and the Sino-Soviet Bloc.

Walking a tightrope of his own design, the Prince attracted substantial assistance from a range of donors and kept Cambodia out of the Second Indo-China War then being waged less than 70 miles from Phnom Penh. Unsurprisingly, many elderly Cambodians still see his years in power as a kind of golden age.

By the late 1960s, however, governing the country singlehandedly became difficult for the Prince and his behaviour became erratic. He spent much of his time writing, directing and starring in popular films that dramatised Cambodia’s joie de vivre and his own importance.

As economic conditions worsened and as the war in Vietnam intensified, many of the urban elite withdrew their support from him. As the Cultural Revolution flourished in China, Sihanouk also lost the backing of young Cambodians like Hun Sen, Cambodia’s prime minister since 1985, who were attracted to radical ideas. A civil war against communist-led guerrillas — the so-called Khmer Rouge — broke out in 1968.

In March 1970 the National Assembly voted Sihanouk out of office while he was travelling abroad. The new regime, led by General Lon Nol, plunged Cambodia into the Vietnam war via an alliance with the US.

Sihanouk was deeply affronted by the coup. He took refuge in Beijing and with Chinese encouragement became the head of a government in exile, allied with the Communist Vietnamese, the Peoples’ Republic of China and the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) led by Saloth Sar, alias Pol Pot. His allies promised to return him to power. Lon Nol, meanwhile, decided to attack the Communist forces dominated by North Vietnam inside Cambodia. These forces cut his poorly trained army to ribbons, and after 1971 he was unable to mount any offensive action despite massive infusions of American aid. The CPK forces gained experience, confidence and thousands of recruits, especially after Vietnamese troops withdrew in 1972.

In the five-year war, perhaps as many as half a million Cambodians perished. Many of the casualties were inflicted by a massive US aerial bombardment in 1973 that postponed a CPK victory for a couple of years.

In April 1975 CPK forces overwhelmed the Lon Nol regime. Pol Pot and his colleagues immediately set in motion a series of harsh economic and political measures, including the evacuation of cities, the execution of political enemies, the abolition of money and the collectivisation of agriculture.

The regime called itself Democratic Kampuchea (DK) and its dogmatic, inexperienced and terrifying leaders presided over the deaths of over 1.5 million Khmer, or roughly a quarter of the country’s population. The dead included six of Sihanouk’s 14 children.

Pol Pot and his colleagues summoned Sihanouk home in 1975 as chief of state but gave him no duties. In the following year, they forced him to resign and placed him under house arrest on the grounds of the former royal palace. Although he lived in relative comfort, Sihanouk in this period expected to be killed from one day to the next.

In 1978 DK went to war with Vietnam and by the end of December, facing a Vietnamese invasion, it was on the brink of collapse. Three days before the fall of Phnom Penh, Sihanouk was flown to the US to plead DK’s case. Soon afterwards he sought asylum in Beijing. By 1980, with Chinese encouragement, he began presenting himself as a valid alternative to the Peoples’ Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), the pro-Vietnamese regime that had taken power in Phnom Penh.

Sihanouk’s ongoing marriage of convenience with the Khmer Rouge, whose forces formed the backbone of anti-PRK resistance along the Thai-Cambodian border in the 1980s, diminished his credibility. However, as the Cold War ended and as foreign powers sought to extricate themselves from their commitments to Indochina, Sihanouk came to be seen by some, as he had always seen himself, as an indispensable, unifying element in a Cambodian government that would be acceptable to foreign powers and to Cambodia’s hostile political factions.

Under the Paris peace agreements in 1991, Sihanouk returned to Cambodia after 12 years in exile, and was greeted by enthusiastic crowds. In 1993, guided by the UN, Cambodia held national elections, which were won by a royalist party, led by Sihanouk’s eldest son, Norodom Rannaridh, whom Sihanouk disliked. The winners were quickly forced to share power with the Cambodian Peoples’ Party (CPP), which had monopolised Cambodian politics under various names since 1979.

In October 1993 Sihanouk was crowned king for the second time. At his request, the pre-1970 Cambodian flag was reinstated along with pre-1970 street names in Phnom Penh, the abandoned royal palace and pre-1970 military uniforms. Sihanouk also bestowed royal titles on many CPP officials, but their loyalty to him was almost nonexistant.

Although Sihanouk in the 1990s was almost as energetic as ever, Hun Sen saw to it that he had limited authority, no media outlets, and no sustained contacts with the population. Chafing under these restrictions and pleading ill-heath, Sihanouk spent much of the period in Beijing and North Korea. In 2004 he abdicated for the second time. His youngest son, Norodom Sihamoni, a childless bachelor, took his place, and it seemed clear to many that the demise of Cambodian royalty as an institution was only a matter of time. It had probably been fatally wounded in 1960, when Sihanouk refused to have a king named in his father’s place.

Norodom Sihanouk is inseparable from the history of 20th-century Cambodia, and a balanced view of his 70-year career is difficult to assemble. He was a hard-working patriot whose unpredictable actions often had deleterious effects. An ardent Francophile, he also befriended the Chinese Prime Minister Zhou enlai, and after 1970 he never challenged Chinese policy. This alliance led him to support the Khmer Rouge for much longer than most Cambodians would have liked. His opponents also criticised his autocratic, ego-driven style, his fondness of flattery and his intolerance of dissent.

His supporters, while admitting his flaws, pointed to his unswerving devotion to Cambodian independence and praised his affection for Cambodia’s rural poor. Moreover, unlike many southeast Asian rulers, Sihanouk made no effort to enrich himself during his years in power. A talented musician, an eloquent orator and a fluent writer, Sihanouk vigorously defended his place in history in several volumes of self-serving memoirs, written in elegant French.

Sihanouk fathered 12 children before he married Monique Izzi in 1955. She bore him two children, including the reigning monarch and was crowned Queen Monineak in 1992. She survives him, as do six of his children.

Norodom Sihanouk, ruler of Cambodia, was born on October 31, 1922. He died on October 14, 2012, aged 89




'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
От Chestnut
К Chestnut (15.10.2012 18:13:28)
Дата 16.10.2012 12:06:21

Re: весьма топичный...

>Norodom Sihanouk

>Король, принц и премьер, эмигрант и снова король Камбоджи (дважды отрёкшийся от престола в итоге)

> http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3568706.ece

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/politics-obituaries/9610196/Norodom-Sihanouk.html

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02369/sihanouk_2369186b.jpg



Король Сианук в Ппариже в 1946 году в компании французских генералов

'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
От Chestnut
К Chestnut (10.10.2012 16:23:11)
Дата 11.10.2012 19:04:23

Re: Военные и...

Sir Geofroy Tory

Дипломат, занимавшийся вопросом перенесения тела казнённого в 1916 году за государственную измену Роджера Кэйсмента в Ирландию для торжественного перезахоронения

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/politics-obituaries/9600062/Sir-Geofroy-Tory.html

Lt-Cdr Allan Waller

Морской офицер, воевавший на пяти кораблях, четыре из которых были потоплены

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/naval-obituaries/9600060/Allan-Waller.html

'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
От Chestnut
К Chestnut (11.10.2012 19:04:23)
Дата 12.10.2012 14:56:58

Re: Военные и...

>Harold Shukman


>Британский историк России и СССР (Оксфорд, Сэнт-Энтониз), переводивший >с русского в том числе книги Волкогонова, и сын участника РЯВ

> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/9566293/Harold-Shukman.html

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3561765.ece

Historian of modern Russia, biographer of Stalin and Rasputin and translator of novels and studies of the leaders of the Revolution

Harold Shukman was a historian of 19th and 20th-century Russia, a prolific translator of Russian literary and political writings and an author on subjects as diverse as literature and the world of espionage. For more than 50 years he was associated with the University of Oxford as a lecturer in modern Russian history and with St Antony’s College where he was a Fellow and, at one time, director of its renowned Russian and East European Centre.

From the 1960s and until his retirement in 1998 he was deeply involved in developing and enriching Russian studies at Oxford as an academic discipline in an era when the Cold War cast its ominous shadow over scholarly research in this field. He also helped to organise a popular weekly seminar at St Antony’s at which both prominent scholars and historical figures appeared — among them, like a ghost from the past, Alexander Kerensky, the dominant if short-reigning Prime Minister in the Russian Provisional Government established in the wake of February 1917 and the fall of the Tsarist monarchy.

Shukman’s scholarly work was characterised by a sense of both the futility and the tragedy of the Russian and Soviet history that began with Kerensky and culminated with Mikhail Gorbachev, whom Shukman admired but whose attempts at reform eventually led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Some of Shukman’s work was devoted to the 19th-century seeds of this grim story.

Harold Shukman was born in London in 1931, the son of Jewish immigrants who in 1913 had fled anti-Semitic persecution in Russia. His father, David Shukman, a tailor, was soon subjected to an excruciating dilemma which Harold later wrote about in the book War or Revolution: Russian Jews and Conscription in Britain, 1917 (2006). The British Government, despite the growing demands of the First World War, at first did not impose conscription on some 30,000 Russian Jewish immigrant men of military age like Harold’s father. But when the Romanov monarchy collapsed in February 1917, Britain gave these immigrants a choice: join the British Army or be repatriated for service in Russia. Harold’s father was among some 3,500 who chose the latter. He survived the hardships that ensued following the October Revolution and eventually succeeded in making his way back to London. Shukman’s book is a detailed study of this heretofore little-known story, where both the personal and the collective are poignantly interwoven.

It may well be that this personal family history had already foreordained Shukman’s future interests. But his road to an academic career in Russian history had a more practical beginning. After an unremarkable early education, he was offered the prospect, during his National Service, of Russian language training at the Joint Services School for Linguists (JSSL) in Cambridge and Bodmin. No doubt the purpose of this course was to produce linguists for the various intelligence tasks made necessary by the emerging Cold War. Many years later, Shukman would co-write with Geoffrey Elliott the book Secret Classrooms: An Untold Story of the Cold War (2002) in which the JSSL intelligence training programme is meticulously described. In the event, however, instead of taking that “espionage” route to a career, Shukman turned to academic studies.

In 1956 he completed a first-class degree in Russian language and literature at Nottingham University and then moved to St Antony’s College where in 1960 he received the DPhil for a thesis on the Bund, an important socialist and cultural movement among Russian Jews in prerevolutionary Russia. After a year spent as an Astor Fellow at Harvard and Stanford universities in the United States, he returned to St Antony’s in 1961 as a research fellow and, in 1969, became a Governing Body Fellow. He remained at the college for the rest of his life.

During the two and a half decades or so from the early 1960s, the college became a leading centre of Russian and Soviet studies and a home to some of the most distinguished scholars of the time, among them David Footman, Max Hayward, George Katkov, Harry Willetts, Ronald Hingley, Sergei Utechin, Richard Kindersley, Michael Kaser and Archie Brown. All aspects of Russia and Russian culture were considered to be within the purview of its lectures and seminars and, in fact, the founding Warden of St Antony’s, Sir William Deakin, a distinguished historian of Europe in his own right, was also an expert on Russian and East European subjects.

In this atmosphere of intellectual discussion and research, Shukman flourished and published a number of important works, including, in 1975, together with Deakin and Willetts, A History of World Communism. He wrote short biographies of Rasputin and Stalin, a study of Lenin and the Russian Revolution (1967) and, towards the end of his life, together with Felix Patrikeeff, Railways and the Russo-Japanese War: Transporting War (2007). He was also the editor of a large number of works, among them The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Russian Revolution (1988); Stalin’s Generals (1993); and Agents for Change: Intelligence Services in the 21st Century (2000).

If this provides an idea of his range and scope of interests, his work as a translator from the Russian was no less prodigious. Among his translations are plays by Isaac Babel, two novels by Anatoly Rybakov, Heavy Sand (1981) and Children of the Arbat (1988), as well as the Memoirs of Andrei Gromyko (1989) and the three ruthlessly critical biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky by the Russian general and historian Dmitri Volkogonov, which appeared in the 1990s and had a powerful impact on the subsequent re-evaluation of Soviet history. In all these capacities, as author, editor and translator, Shukman has left a deep imprint upon the study both of Russia and of the Soviet Union.

Shukman had great personal charm and graciousness and enjoyed endearing relationships with friends and colleagues. He possessed a sharp wit and an irrepressible sense of humour and was a celebrated raconteur and conversationalist within the sometimes overbearing corridors of academia.

He is survived by his wife, Barbara, an artist who turned him into an enthusiast of modern art and its techniques, two sons and a daughter from a previous marriage and two stepdaughters and a stepson.

Harold Shukman, historian, was born on March 23, 1931. He died on July 11, 2012, aged 81

Prince Roy of Sealand

Бывший военный, создавший себе независимое государство на заброшенной нефтяной платформе в Северном Море

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/royalty-obituaries/9602837/Prince-Roy-of-Sealand.html


'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
От Chestnut
К Chestnut (12.10.2012 14:56:58)
Дата 15.10.2012 18:15:18

Re: Военные и...

Group Captain Sir Richard Kingsland


Австралийский военный пилот, в 1940 г предотвративший арест фельдмаршала Горта вишистами и доставивший его в Гибралтар (за что получил DFC)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9607727/Group-Captain-Sir-Richard-Kingsland.html

'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
От Chestnut
К Chestnut (15.10.2012 18:15:18)
Дата 16.10.2012 12:03:54

Re: Военные и...

Colonel Clive Fairweather

Офицер SAS, командовавший первым этапом операции по освобобждению иранского посольства в Лондоне от террористов

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/special-forces-obituaries/9610176/Colonel-Clive-Fairweather.html

'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
От JGL
К Chestnut (12.10.2012 14:56:58)
Дата 12.10.2012 15:37:42

Re: Военные и...

Здравствуйте,

>Prince Roy of Sealand

>Бывший военный, создавший себе независимое государство на заброшенной нефтяной платформе в Северном Море

> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/royalty-obituaries/9602837/Prince-Roy-of-Sealand.html
Не на нефтяной, а как раз на очень топичной бывшей ПВОшной ;)

С уважением, Юрий.