Thread: MILITARY (& RELATED) OBITUARIES

Captain Mike Henry

Captain Mike Henry, who has died aged 80, had the rare experience for a second-in-command of being imprisoned in his own ship, and was then promoted to become captain of Resolution, Britain’s first nuclear missile submarine.

When the notoriously short-tempered Captain Joe Bartosik sacked his second-in-command in the newly-commissioned guided-missile destroyer London in late 1965, Henry was the strong character sent as a replacement.

Henry proceeded to improve the other officers’ morale, but when London arrived in Singapore for maintenance work Bartosik, for unspecified reasons, had him placed under arrest in his cabin .

He loyally endured this treatment, but the Fleet chaplain had to intervene with the Captain of the Fleet to obtain his release. Later Bartosik is alleged to have written to Rear-Admiral Horace Law, a successful Flag Officer Submarines, saying that he considered Henry unsuitable for an important submarine appointment “understood to be impending�. Law’s reply is said to have been one of the few occasions when Bartosik’s legendary malevolence was checked.

When Henry was given command of Resolution, he led the port crew when it fired Britain’s first Polaris missile 1,000 miles downrange on the Atlantic missile range off Cape Canaveral, within a minute of the time that had been agreed by President Kennedy and Harold Macmillan five years earlier. Under his command Resolution completed two deterrent patrols, one the first ever British deployment and the second during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Henry was then promoted captain , and for two years commanded the Tenth Submarine Squadron, consisting of all four British Polaris boats.

Michael Charles Henry was born on June 4 1928 in London and brought up in Co Kildare, London and Monte Carlo, where his father was British consul. He entered the Navy in January 1942. After the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth was bombed he was engaged in sweeping up the broken glass before being evacuated, first to Buller’s Orphanage, near Bristol, and then to the seat of the Duke of Westminster, Eaton Hall near Chester.

After the war he served in the diesel-engined submarines Tactician, Seneschal, Alcide, Trespasser, Seascout, Talent, Trenchant and Tiptoe before passing his “perisher� in 1955. He commanded Seraph and then Trump before becoming an exchange officer at the US submarine base at New London, Connecticut. This led to his playing a leading part in the creation of the Seraph Monument at Charleston, South Carolina, dedicated to Anglo-American co-operation during the Second World War. This is possibly the only site in the United States where the White Ensign is flown, alongside the Stars and Stripes, commemorating Seraph, which was placed under the command of an American officer for the rescue of General Henri Giraud from Vichy France in 1942.

Henry made his mark as Staff Officer (Submarines) on the British naval staff in Washington, and had his appointment in the highly structured US-UK Polaris programme approved by Admiral Hyman Rickover.

The US Navy was impressed with the professionalism of Henry’s people during the month-long DASO (demonstrating and shaking down), which was identical with the process undergone by all American ballistic missile submarines.

From 1974 to 1975 he proved a dashing and highly capable ship handler of the guided missile destroyer Hampshire before holding several senior staff appointments, including his last job as Director of Naval Operations and Trade.

Henry was greatly respected in the trade as a gentleman and a submariner, though he admitted that his competitive spirit to garner “firsts� caused resentment amongst friends, especially those in the starboard crew of Resolution.

In retirement he worked for British Oil, a quango set up by the Labour government in the early days of North Sea oil exploration . He then became Naval Regional Officer for Scotland & Northern Ireland; he got on well with the locals throughout his region, and briefly served as acting rear-admiral during bi-annual Nato exercises.

Henry bought an International Six-Metre Class yacht, Nancy, which he kept at Gareloch, and worked vigorously to revive the classic class in British waters. Later he joined the Mudhook Yacht Club, whose membership is restricted to 41; he served the club as secretary and rear-admiral .

Mike Henry, who died on November 6, married Elma Nicol, who survives him with their two sons and three daughters. One son became a lieutenant-commander.

Rear-Admiral Teddy Gueritz

Rear-Admiral Teddy Gueritz, who has died aged 89, took over as a beachmaster on Sword Beach at 0800 on June 6 1944, wearing a blue-painted helmet and red scarf while armed with only a large blackthorn walking stick.

He was charged with making order out of the chaos as men poured ashore and flail tanks attempted to explode mines and clear wire while the beach exits were jammed by vehicles stuck in soft sand. His sharpest memory was of the sight of his wounded superior, Commander Rowley Nichols, and of his army opposite number, Lieutenant-Colonel DVH Board, who had been killed outright. In addition, a fresh brigade, which landed at about 0930, found that the wind had driven the tide higher than expected, thereby narrowing the beach and covering many of the explosive obstacles.

Gueritz worked unremittingly, calling in landing craft, unloading troops and organising routes leading off the beach by clearing wreckage and casualties and maintaining ship-to-shore communications. By evening some 30,000 troops, several hundred vehicles and tons of ammunition had been landed.

Gueritz survived 19 days under fire on the beach until receiving a serious head wound. He had just put on his helmet, "but didn't duck quickly enough," he recalled, when a shell splinter punched a hole in it. It was not until he fainted in a field hospital, where he had gone to have a hand injury treated, that it was realised the back of his skull had been crushed.

Evacuated to Southampton General Hospital he owed his life to the skill of the surgeon John Richardson, the future Lord Richardson who became president of the General Medical Council. Gueritz's skill and courage were recognised by a Bar to his earlier DSC.

The son of a colonial officer in Africa, Edward Findlay Gueritz was born on September 8 1919 and educated at Cheltenham College. He joined the Navy as a special entry cadet in 1937 and was a midshipman in the heavy cruiser Cumberland which reinforced Commodore Harwood's squadron off Montevideo when it blockaded the German pocket battleship Graf Spee in December 1939.

He was serving in the destroyer Jersey, which was part of Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten's 5th Destroyer Flotilla, when it engaged three large German destroyers in the Channel on the night of November 29 1940. Mountbatten's ship Javelin was torpedoed and lost bows and stern and had to be towed back to Plymouth with only half of her original length above water. After further operations in South West Approaches, Jersey was deployed to the Mediterranean, taking part in bombardments of Genoa and Livorno and attacking Axis supply shipping to North Africa. When on May 2 1941 she was mined and sunk in the entrance to Grand Harbour, Malta, with the loss of 35 men, Gueritz was rescued by a Maltese dghaisa, a small fishing boat.

Joining Combined Operations Command he served for the next three years in Scotland, the Indian Ocean and India. His first experience of amphibious warfare was as beachmaster of 121 Force during Operation Ironclad, the capture of Madagascar in May 1942 in order to prevent the Vichy French offering bases to the enemy.

He was awarded the DSC for bravery and enterprise. In the winter of 1943-44 Gueritz took part in combined training and work-up of army and navy forces at Invergordon, using swimming tanks and live firing ranges at Tarbatness, from where the inhabitants had been evacuated.

After the war he was second-in-command of the destroyer Saumarez, which took part in the Palestine Patrol and then was mined in the Corfu Channel Incident, when a British squadron was exercising its right of passage in international waters. Saumarez lost her bows and had a fire which killed 36 crew members. According to one survivor, Gueritz proved "a good and efficient organiser, and his insistence on a smart and well-trained crew was a godsend that stood the ship's company in good stead". Nobody doubted that his damage control organisation saved the ship.

In 1948 he attended the Army Staff College, Camberley, and five years later the Joint Services Staff College. During the Suez campaign in 1956 he was naval force logistics officer on the staff of General Sir Hugh Stockwell, for which he was appointed OBE.

Promoted captain in 1959 Gueritz became successively deputy director of the Royal Naval Staff College; deputy director of the Tactical and Weapons Policy Division; Captain of the Fleet, Far East; director of Defence Plans (Navy); and director of the Joint Warfare Staff. He was then Admiral President of the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, and Commandant of the Joint Warfare Establishment, Old Sarum, before leaving the Navy in 1973.

In retirement Gueritz embarked on an academic career. He was a specialist adviser to the House of Commons Select Committee on Defence and director of the Royal United Services Institute. He was president of the Society for Nautical Research, a member of the board of War Studies at London University and vice-chairman of the Council for Christian Approaches to Defence and Disarmament. He edited Brassey's Defence Year Book from 1977 to 1981, and was joint editor of The Third World War (197, Ten Years of Terrorism (1979) and Civil Defence in the Nuclear Age (1982).

During the 1970s Gueritz had the unique experience of wargaming with senior British and German officers when they played Operation Sealion, the German plan for the invasion of Britain in 1940 and 1941. He was satisfied that although the exercise showed the Germans landing, most of their converted Rhine barges were sunk, and eventually some 100,000 troops surrendered.

Teddy Gueritz, who was appointed CB in 1971, died on December 21. He married, in 1947, Pamela Britton who survives him with their son and daughter.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obit...id-Smiley.html

Truly a life lived. RIP, Sir.

RIP, Sir

92 and what a life, that's a full life lived. Funeral should be a celebration of the life he lived and not a mourning that he's gone.

What a career, a true leader of men. RIP Sir.

What a bloke, what a truly marvelous life. RIP.

Wow! That's how to live a life.

Rest In Peace Col Smiley.

Damn, when the last member of the generation of WWII/"Twilight of Empire" vets pops his clogs, Britian will be duller place.

And what will obit writers do for a living?

If I looked up "Work hard, play hard" in the dictionary I would expect this mans face to grin back at me from amongst the pile of girls and vodka bottles.

RIP, Sir.

Top Soldier. RIP

A real "boys own" life.

A life and character to be celebrated.

wow.....that's about all I can say.

stand easy, job done.

S_R

An amazing man. An incredible life. If someone wrote a series of novels that had all of those events it wouldn't be believed!