Another Naval one I'm afraid - not so much a warrior but did his bit for Queen and Country.

http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/54028.html

Prof D Gordon MacDonald, RD; born July 5, 1942, died December 7, 2005.

Professor Gordon MacDonald, an international pioneer in the field of forensic dentistry and oral pathology, has died at the age of 63.

Born in Milngavie, the son of a local doctor, Gordon was educated at Kelvinside Academy and the University of Glasgow, graduating Bachelor of Dental Surgery in 1964. He was an outstanding dental student academically and was also president of the Dental Students' Society.

After graduation he embarked on a career in oral pathology, working and training as a university lecturer at the Glasgow Dental Hospital and School, and in the University Department of General Pathology at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. He also spent a year in Chicago as a visiting associate professor at the University of Illinois. At that time, the newly-created Royal College of Pathologists was bringing together pathologists from different medical and scientific backgrounds and, in 1971, Gordon became the first dental graduate to obtain the MRCPath diploma by examination. His main research interest was in oral cancer and he completed his PhD Thesis in 1973.

The 1970s were exciting times for academic and hospital dentistry in Glasgow. The large new Dental Hospital and School extension opened in 1969 and provided extensive facilities for research and teaching, in both laboratory and clinical sciences. Gordon was a prime mover of a group which co-ordinated and integrated the teaching of general and oral disease for dental students. This approach not only benefited dental education, but also research and clinical practice, and it served as a blueprint for national and international developments in dental education.

He also, by this time, had developed an excellent regional oral pathology diagnostic service in the west of Scotland, much valued by medical and dental colleagues. Indeed, it was on the basis of his histopathological studies of the spread of oral cancer to adjacent tissues that his plastic and maxillofacial surgical colleagues were able to adopt more limited surgical operations which reduced facial deformity and improved patient wellbeing.

In parallel, he became an expert in forensic dentistry, developing further the work of Dr Warren Harvey in the use of bite marks in criminal investigation and, in 1976, became honorary forensic odontologist to Strathclyde Police. Thereafter, he was an expert witness in many criminal trials and his national fame in this field, particularly via his development of unique photographic overlay techniques, spread worldwide to involve him in such high-profile events as the Australian Ayers Rock Dingo Case. In addition, he was the Foundation Editor of The Glasgow Dental Journal.

In 1991 he was appointed Professor of Oral Pathology at the University of Glasgow.

Professor MacDonald's other main interest was with the Royal Naval Reserve, which he had joined as a student in 1959, following keen involvement in the school CCF Naval Section. He served as a Seaman and Naval Control of Shipping Officer.

He was appointed Commanding Officer of HMS Graham in 1982 and thereafter accepted appointments as the Senior Officer Naval Control of Shipping Branch and director of personnel. He served as Commodore RNR 1995-1997. During a distinguished career, he was awarded the Reserve Decoration with bars and the Northern Ireland Medal and in 1996, he was appointed an honorary ADC.

In his work, Gordon epitomised efficiency and dedication, and he led by example. He admired the Royal Navy culture of authority, chain of command, decisiveness in decision-making and, on occasions, felt frustrated by the more deliberate, contemplative, consensus-building approach of university administration. As one university colleague said, on taking a different view from Gordon at a meeting, "If I were in the navy, I would be walking the plank by now".

He had a fine, medium-dry sense of humour and enjoyed the good fellowship with his friends at Glasgow Golf Club, where he played an adventurous type of game, and of curling with both the Bearsden Club and Kelvinside Academicals' Curling Club, of which he was president.

Later in his career, he was recognised widely for his achievements in oral pathology – president of the British Society, vice-president, Association of Head and Neck Oncologists of Great Britain, and president of the International Association of Oral Pathologists. His last appointment as dean of the dental faculty and the first vice-president (dental) of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, gave him much pleasure and satisfaction. It enabled him to contribute towards training and standards in postgraduate dentistry and medicine, both nationally and internationally, and he filled this post with great distinction. Hence, much of his life was dedicated to the education and training of younger colleagues in the university, the hospital service and also in the Royal Naval Reserve. He was an outstandingly good teacher and will be remembered by generations of students for his clear, direct and forthright style, not to mention his formidable multiple-choice examinations. He also encouraged and trained many younger colleagues in oral pathology, and indeed in other specialties, and derived much pleasure from their subsequent achievements.

Gordon had great pride in his family, his wife Linda, sons Lindsay and Alastair, daughter Katharine, who died so tragically when a medical student in 1989, and grandson Matthew. The family provided him with the loving, happy secure home base from which he achieved so much, and which comforted him especially during the last few years of serious illness.

from The Times 3 Feb 2006


February 03, 2006


Oswin Craster
June 28, 1916 - January 29, 2006

Leader of SOE teams that harried German and Japanese troops in France and Burma in 1944 and 1945


OS CRASTER, as he was more usually known, had what he liked to describe as “a varied war”. It certainly went from low to high points of activity, the latter a distinct contrast with his work for the Ancient Monuments Inspectorate, which he had begun on leaving university.
He learnt his French in Lausanne before the war, and spoke it with a style that made him a natural recruit for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which he joined in January 1944.



Oswin Edmund Craster was educated at Stowe and New College, Oxford, where he was a member of the horsed cavalry section of the Officers’ Training Corps. When war threatened in 1938 he enlisted in the 5th (Territorial Army) Battalion of The Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and was called up on the outbreak of war.

Commissioned in 1940, he served with the same battalion during the invasion scare after Dunkirk, but in 1943, with no active service in prospect, he put his name forward in response to a letter circulated to units stationed in England calling for French speakers willing to undertake “tasks of particular danger”.

The demand was for about 100 volunteers to form the British element of three-man teams to be dropped by parachute into occupied France on, or soon after, the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944.

Their principal purpose was to establish contact with the local French Resistance groups, where necessary arrange for weapons to be dropped to them and, above all, to ensure that acts of sabotage that the Resistance undertook helped rather than hindered the Allied operational plans following the breakout from the Normandy beachhead.

The three-man teams usually comprised one British and one American or French officer and an experienced sergeant radio operator. The teams were called “Jedburghs”, which according to some accounts was the next code-name to be taken from the pad.

Captain Craster dropped into the Haute-Marne département on September 1, 1944, in charge of the Jedburgh team “Stanley”. The other two members were Lieutenant Robert Cantais, of France, and Sergeant Jack Grinham, a former Coventry Police constable, of the Royal Armoured Corps.

The parachute descent on to the Plâteau de Langres was made from above the usual height, but all members of the team landed safely. Contact was quickly established with the local Forces Français de l’Intérieur, the element of the Resistance aligning themselves with General de Gaulle, but the FFI commander suggested Craster should take his team 15 miles north to the area of Bussières, where a group of the maquis was believed to be in need of weapons and operational guidance.

Craster found about 400 men, some from the “Premier Régiment de France”, which had been kept in being after the 1940 armistice, a group of gendarmes from Langres and 45 enthusiastic railway workers. He radioed to SOE headquarters requesting a weapons drop on a drop zone (DZ) of his selection, only to be told one would be made at another location which was close to a German garrison.

Thanks to a clever diversionary tactic of lighting fires near the first DZ, the maquis were able to collect the arms and other supplies from the designated alternative and begin a campaign of harassment of German troops already in the area and others passing through.

Before being recalled to England via Paris, which had been liberated by the Allies on August 25, Craster and his team organised a spectacularly successful air strike by four US Air Force fighters on a German battalion stubbornly resisting the maquis group in the villages of Belmont, Grenant and Saulles. Troops from the French 7th Army advancing from the south arrived soon afterwards, so he left the maquis to mop up the German survivors in the three villages. He was mentioned in dispatches for his services and awarded the French Croix de Guerre.

On return to England, he was posted to the 2nd (glider-borne) Battalion of his regiment, which had acquitted itself so well in the D-Day landings.

But he volunteered for further service with SOE, this time in the Far East, and sailed for India in February 1945. Little time was allowed for acclimatisation and he was dropped into Burma on All Fools’ Day.

The SOE had been operating against the Japanese occupation forces in the Far East since 1942, from March 1944 under the title of Force 136. Former Jedburghs redeployed from northwest Europe played a significant part in Force 136’s “Operation Nation”. Their instructions were to harass the Japanese, wherever found, working with the local anti- fascist organisation (AFO) Burmese guerrillas and the Burmese National Army, under General Aung San (father of the leader of the human rights and democratic movement in Burma and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi). This had originally been formed under Japanese auspices but had switched to the Allied cause in early 1945.

Craster’s group, code-named “Zebra”, dropped into central Burma, but found working with the head of the local AFO, Than Tun, extremely difficult. The group therefore made a 95-mile march westwards across the Pegu Yomas to Tharrawaddy, itself a considerable feat of endurance and determination.

Operations against Japanese forces in the area, who were waiting their chance to fight their way eastwards across the Sittang river in an attempt to escape into Thailand, began at the end of April. Together with another Force 136 team, “Jackal”, the group Craster was with had accounted for 800 of the enemy by the end of May. He was mentioned in dispatches for a second time.

After what he regarded as a relatively slow start to his wartime experiences, Craster could reasonably claim that he had finished on a high note, although he would be the last person to do so. On demobilisation he returned to his work with the Ancient Monuments Inspectorate and was Principal Inspector for England on his retirement in 1976.

In 1944 he married Mary, née Molony, whom he met in Dover when she was serving with the WRNS. She survives him, with one son and two daughters.



Oswin Craster, officer of the wartime Special Operations Executive and Principal Inspector of Ancient Monuments for England, was born on June 28, 1916. He died on January 29, 2006, aged 89.

U Boat ace Erich Topp died on Boxing Day 2005. Strange that the Torygraph, normally on the ball with military obits seems to have missed that one. Otto Kretchmeyer died late 90s, car crash of all things was honoured with an obituary.

Topp like Kretchmeyer rejoined the German Navy when it was re-established in the 50s and made Flag Rank before retirement. Topp was posted to a NATO job in the US, quite something for an ace who torpedoed a Yank ship, the first of the war (actually a little before the US was officially in on it).

This obituary comes from SS (that's Steam Ship) Nerissa's website, run by relatives of the survivors. Nerissa was a Topp victim but no bitterness is evident.

Rear Admiral Erich Topp

Michael J Lee.

Died quite suddenly earlier this year age 62.

I list this bloke for 2 reasons.

First, if you were ever stationed in Colchester between 1965 and 1995 there is a chance that you
went to his shop in town and had him cut your hair.

(Headgate/Bull crossroads, go right, down passed the ABC cinema/ bingo hall and Mike had his shop on the left in a 1960 building called Centurian House.)

Second, when younger,he was one of us.

Mike was 6' 3'', skinny and always wore glasses and yet once when I visited his house I
saw an old B/W 10x8 picture.
Usual squad/course photo, 10ish blokes plus DS, and there was a very young Mike.
Tall,skinny,with glasses plus wings and a para lid.
No idea what unit.

RIP Mike.

Richard

Gen Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley
(Filed: 14/03/2006)

General Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley, who died on Saturday aged 81, provided inspiring leadership in Korea at the battle of the Imjin river.

In June 1950 North Korean forces crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded South Korea; by October Chinese "volunteers" had joined them. The UN Security Council resolved to go to South Korea's assistance and American ground forces were ordered in, followed by a force from Hong Kong and, two months later, the British 29th Infantry Brigade. Britain's main Commonwealth partners also pledged their forces and these formed the 1st Commonwealth Division.

Farrar-Hockley went to Korea in 1950 as adjutant of the 1st Battalion Gloucestershire Regiment. In April the following year 29 Brigade was holding the line along the Imjin with the Glosters defending the main river crossing, an ancient invasion route to Seoul.

The battle began on April 22 and, during its final phase, the 1st Battalion was concentrated on Hill 235 with "A" Company holding a long spur towards the west. On April 24, at about midnight, the Chinese attacked "A" Company in great strength, pressing home the offensive for more than 10 hours.

During the night the only two platoon commanders became casualties, and by dawn the forward platoons had been driven back. The company was then concentrated on a knoll about 50 yards from battalion headquarters; had it been captured the battalion's situation would have become untenable.

It rapidly became clear that the one officer remaining with the company would require assistance to maintain the defence of this vital point. Farrar-Hockley volunteered for this dangerous task, and his impact on the desperate position of the company was immediate. Trenches in which the defenders had become casualties were re-manned and fire superiority was regained.

The enemy working around the left flank were caught by grenades and small arms fire and fell back with heavy losses. Establishing themselves about 40 yards away, they attacked again and again but each time they were beaten off.

Farrar-Hockley was in one of the forward trenches, encouraging his men and taking a leading part in the fierce, close-quarter fighting. His order to the drum-major, at the height of the battle, to counter the nerve-wracking blare of the Chinese assault trumpets with snatches of British Army bugle calls passed into regimental legend.

When orders were received to abandon the position, Farrar-Hockley covered the withdrawal with fire and a smokescreen and he was one of the last to fall back; but, when the battalion's position was eventually overrun by the Chinese, he was taken prisoner.

The citation for the DSO awarded to him for his part in the battle stated: "Throughout this desperate engagement on which the ability of the Battalion to hold its position entirely depended, Captain Farrar-Hockley was an inspiration to the defenders. His outstanding gallantry, fighting spirit and great powers of leadership heartened his men and welded them into an indomitable team. His conduct could not have been surpassed."

During the two years that Farrar-Hockley spent in PoW camps, he frustrated efforts to brainwash him by vigorously debating with his gaolers. He made six attempts to escape. On one occasion he reached the Korean coast before he was recaptured; on another he crawled and swam for seven hours along a river bed, feigning death when spotted by enemy soldiers and surviving the intense cold by wrapping himself in a blanket taken from a dead mule.

Following recapture, he was often tortured or brutally interrogated. Farrar-Hockley was released after the Armistice was signed in July 1953 and was mentioned in dispatches for his conduct as a prisoner of war.

A journalist's son, Anthony Heritage Farrar-Hockley was born at Coventry on April 8 1924 and educated at Exeter School. On the outbreak of the Second World War, at the age of 15, he ran away from school and enlisted in the Gloucestershire Regiment, but he was found out and discharged. He re-enlisted in 1941 and was posted to the 70th Young Soldiers' Battalion.

In 1942, after volunteering for parachute training, he was granted an emergency commission in the Parachute Regiment. At the age of 20 he was in command of a rifle company of the 6th Battalion and he won an MC during the Communist rebellion in Athens. He said afterwards that getting food through to the starving people of Thebes was one of the best things he ever did.

After serving in Palestine, Farrar-Hockley returned to the Glosters and went with them to Korea. Following his release from prisoner-of-war camp, he attended Staff College before rejoining the Airborne Forces, serving as deputy assistant adjutant and quartermaster-general, then as brigade major of the 16th Parachute Brigade. He saw active service during this period in the EOKA campaign in Cyprus, the landings at Port Said in 1956 and the British intervention in Jordan in 1958.

The following year he became chief instructor at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, before taking command of the 3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment in the Persian Gulf in 1962. The greatest feat of arms of his career was, perhaps, his battalion's capture, in 1964, of the Arab Nationalist stronghold at Wadi Dhubsan deep in the Radfan mountains north of Aden.

The battalion was called upon to undertake a difficult 10-mile advance into mountainous enemy territory and then attack a highly inaccessible and strongly-defended rebel base. Helicopters were not available in sufficient numbers to permit an assault from the air, so his men roped themselves down the sheer sides of the flanking ridges and achieved complete surprise over the rebels in the gorge below.

During a hard-fought battle, Farrar-Hockley's Scout helicopter was shot down beyond his own lines. With some difficulty, he rejoined his battalion and, finding it pinned down, he launched a well-executed attack which drove the enemy from their position. This action led to the submission of the dissident Radfani tribes and to the award of a Bar to Farrar-Hockley's DSO.

After relinquishing command of his battalion in 1965, Farrar-Hockley went to the Far East to be Chief of Staff to the Director of Operations in Borneo, where he helped to organise secret operations inside Indonesian territory which brought about the end of President Sukarno's "Confrontation" with Malaysia.

Farrar-Hockley took command of the 16th Parachute Brigade in 1966 and, in 1968, went to Exeter College, Oxford, on a Defence Fellowship. He carried out research into the effects of national service on British society; after conducting a poll of 2,000, Farrar-Hockley reported that 84 per cent said that they would welcome a return to conscription. He admitted, however, that there was a strong political bias against a compulsory call-up and that the Services did not want conscription.

After a four-month tour as Director of Army Public Relations, Farrar-Hockley was promoted to major-general and posted to Belfast as Commander Land Forces. Urban rioting and terrorism were rising, and Farrar-Hockley was the first senior officer to acknowledge publicly that the IRA was behind the violence.

Although he left Ulster well before "Bloody Sunday", his unremitting campaign against the IRA and his close association with the Parachute Regiment made him a prime target. In 1971 he took command of the 4th Armoured Division in BAOR before moving to the Ministry of Defence in 1974; his innovative thinking and operational experience were given full scope as Director of Combat Development (Army).

He was promoted to lieutenant-general in 1977 on his appointment as GOC South East District, and was knighted in the Birthday Honours of that year. In 1979 he moved to Oslo to take up his final military appointment as Nato's C-in-C Allied Forces Northern Europe.

After retiring from the Army in 1982 Farrar-Hockley acted as a defence consultant and spent much of his time writing. His publications included The Edge of the Sword (1954), an account of his experiences in the Korean War; The Somme (1964); and Goughie (1975), a well-reviewed biography of General Sir Hubert Gough, the commander of the ill-fated Fifth Army in 1918. He joined the Cabinet Office's historical section to write the official history of the Korean War in two volumes, A Distant Obligation (1990) and An Honourable Discharge (1995). He wrote many articles in newspapers, periodicals and journals.

Even in his retirement to a village in Oxfordshire, the IRA remained a threat. In 1990 a bomb was attached to the reel of his garden hose, but was spotted by his gardener and defused. "I keep my eyes open," said Farrar-Hockley, "and I don't much care for people who place explosive devices in my garden."

Farrar-Hockley was a man of boundless energy with an infectious enthusiasm for soldiering. A lucid, forceful speaker, his pugnacious face appeared regularly on television commenting on military events or terrorist incidents affecting the Army.

In response to new evidence that emerged in successive enquiries into "Bloody Sunday", when 13 Catholics were shot dead during a civil rights' march in Londonderry in 1972, Farrar-Hockley robustly defended the role of the Parachute Regiment: "It is all part of a long-running public relations exercise," he told the BBC, "to persuade people that soldiers were all murderers and nothing wrong was done by the people on the other side." He voiced strong concerns following the ruling by the judges sitting on the Saville Tribunal that the former Paras could not rely on being granted anonymity.

He was also an outspoken opponent of the European Court of Human Rights ruling that the British Armed Forces were obliged to permit avowed homosexuals to enlist. He maintained that the military was a unique institution which should be allowed to run its own affairs, and that the concession would damage morale and discipline.

Farrar-Hockley was ADC General to the Queen from 1981 to 1983, Colonel Commandant of the Prince of Wales Division (1974-1980) and of the Parachute Regiment (1977-1983), and Colonel of the Gloucestershire Regiment from 1978 to 1984. He was appointed GBE in 1981.

Tony Farrar-Hockley married first, in 1945, Margaret Bernadette Wells; she died in 1981. He married, secondly, in 1983, Linda Wood, who survives him with two sons (one son predeceased him) of his first marriage; the eldest, Major-General Dair Farrar-Hockley, followed his father into the Parachute Regiment and was awarded the MC in the Falklands War.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../ixportal.html

From The Telegraph, Brigadier Stanley 'Speedy' Hill. It was he who said "Gentlemen, in spite of your excellent training and orders, do not be daunted if chaos reigns. It undoubtedly will."

Brigadier 'Speedy' Hill.

Brigadier 'Speedy' Hill
(Filed: 18/03/2006)

Brigadier "Speedy" Hill, who died on Thursday aged 95, won an MC and three DSOs as a commander of airborne forces during the Second World War.

In 1942 Hill took command of the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment, which was dropped at Souk El Arba, deep behind enemy lines in Tunisia. His orders were to secure the plain so that it could be used as a landing strip and then to take Beja, the road and rail centre 40 miles to the north east, in order to persuade the French garrison to fight on the Allied side.

To impress the French commander with the size of his unit, Hill marched the battalion through the town twice, first wearing helmets and then changing to berets. The Germans, hearing reports that a considerable British force had occupied Beja, responded by bombing the town.

On learning that a mixed force of Germans and Italians, equipped with a few tanks, was located at a feature called Gue, Hill put in a night attack. But a grenade in a sapper's sandbag exploded, setting off others, and there were heavy casualties when the element of surprise was lost.

Two companies carried out an immediate assault while Hill, with a small group, approached three light tanks. He put the barrel of his revolver through the observation port of the first tank and fired a single round. The Italian crew surrendered at once. He banged his thumbstick on the turret of the second tank, with the same result.

But when he used the method on the third tank, the German crew emerged, firing their weapons and throwing grenades. They were dealt with in short order, though Hill took three bullets in the chest. He was rushed to Beja, where Captain Robb of the 16th Parachute Field Ambulance operated on him and saved his life.

The citation for Hill's first DSO paid tribute to the brilliant handling of his force and his complete disregard of personal danger. The French recognised his gallantry with the award of the Légion d'Honneur.

Stanley James Ledger Hill, the son of Major-General Walter Hill, was born at Bath on March 14 1911. Young James went to Marlborough, where he was head of the OTC, and then won the Sword of Honour and became captain of athletics at Sandhurst.

Nicknamed "Speedy" because of the long strides he took as a tall man, he was commissioned into the Royal Fusiliers, with whom he served with the 2nd Battalion, and ran the regimental athletic and boxing teams.

In 1936 he left the Army to get married, and for the next three years worked in the family ferry company. On the outbreak of war Hill rejoined his regiment, and left for France in command of 2RF's advance party. He led a platoon on the Maginot Line for two months before being posted to AHQ as a staff captain.

In May 1940, Hill was a member of Field Marshal Viscount Gort's command post, playing a leading part in the civilian evacuation of Brussels and La Panne beach during the final phase of the withdrawal. He returned to Dover in the last destroyer to leave Dunkirk, and was awarded an MC.

Following promotion to major and a posting to Northern Ireland as DAAG, Hill was dispatched to Dublin to plan the evacuation of British nationals in the event of enemy landings. He booked into the Gresham Hotel, where several Germans were staying at the time.

Hill was one of the first to join the Parachute Regiment and after being wounded in Tunisia in 1942, he was evacuated to England. Although forbidden to take exercise in hospital, he used to climb out of his window at night to stroll around the gardens. Seven weeks later, he declared himself fit and, in December, he converted the 10th Battalion, Essex Regiment, to the 9th Parachute Battalion.

In April the following year, Hill took command of 3rd Parachute Brigade, consisting of the 8th and 9th Parachute Battalions and the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, which he commanded on D-Day as part of the 6th Airborne Division.

Given the task of destroying the battery at Merville and blowing bridges over the River Dives to prevent the enemy bringing in reinforcements from the east, he completed the briefing of his officers with the warning: "Gentlemen, in spite of your excellent training and orders, do not be daunted if chaos reigns. It undoubtedly will."

Things began to go wrong straight away. Many of the beacons for marking the dropping zones were lost, and several of the aircraft were hit or experienced technical problems. Hill landed in the River Dives near Cabourg, some three miles from the dropping zone, and it took him several hours to reach dry land.

The terrain was criss-crossed with deep irrigation ditches in which some of his men, weighed down by equipment, drowned.

Since he did not trust radio, he kept in touch by driving around on a motorcycle, periodically being found directing traffic at crossroads by his advancing men. Near Sallenelles, Hill and a group of men of the 9th Parachute Battalion were accidentally bombed by Allied aircraft; 17 men were killed.

Hill was injured but, after giving morphia to the wounded, he reported to his divisional commander, who confirmed that the battery at Merville had been captured after a ferocious fight, and that Hill's brigade had achieved all its objectives.

Hill underwent surgery that afternoon, but refused to be evacuated and set up his headquarters at La Mesnil. Under his leadership, three weak parachute battalions held the key strategic ridge from Chateau St Côme to the outskirts of Troarn against repeated attacks from the German 346th Division.

On June 10 the 5th Battalion, Black Watch, was put under Hill's command. Two days later, when the 9th Parachute Battalion called for urgent reinforcements, Hill led a company of Canadian parachutists in a daring counter-attack.

The 12th Parachute Battalion, took Bréville, the pivotal position from which 346th Division launched their attacks on the ridge, albeit at great cost. Hill said afterwards that the enemy had sustained considerable losses of men and equipment and a great defensive victory had been won. He was awarded a Bar to his DSO.

The 3rd Parachute Brigade returned to England in September but three months later it was back on the front line, covering the crossings of the River Meuse. In the difficult conditions of the Ardennes and in organising offensive patrolling across the River Maas, Hill's enthusiasm was a constant inspiration to his men.

In March 1945 Hill commanded the brigade in Operation Varsity, the battle of the Rhine Crossing, before pushing on to Wismar on the Baltic, arriving on May 2, hours before the Russians.

He was wounded in action three times. He was awarded a second Bar to his DSO, and the American Silver Star.

Hill was appointed military governor of Copenhagen in May and was awarded the King Haakon VII Liberty Cross for his services. He commanded and demobilised the 1st Parachute Brigade before retiring from the Army in July in the rank of brigadier.

He was closely involved in the formation of the Parachute Regiment Association and, in 1947, he raised and commanded the 4th Parachute Brigade (TA).

The next year, Hill joined the board of Associated Coal & Wharf Companies and was president of the Powell Duffryn Group of companies in Canada from 1952 to 1958. He was managing director and chairman of Cory Brothers from 1958 to 1970.

In 1961, Hill became a director of Powell Duffryn and was vice-chairman of the company from 1970 to 1976. Among a number of other directorships, he was a director of Lloyds Bank from 1972 to 1979.

He was for many years a trustee of the Airborne Forces Security Fund and a member of the regimental council of the Parachute Regiment. In June 2004, he attended the 60th Anniversary of the Normandy landings.

A life-size bronze statue of him with his thumbstick, sited at Le Mesnil crossroads, the central point of the 3rd Parachute Brigade's defensive position on D-Day, was unveiled by the Prince of Wales, Colonel-in-Chief of the Parachute Regiment.

James Hill married first, in 1937, Denys Gunter-Jones, with whom he had a daughter and, in 1986, Joan Haywood.

At Chichester in his final years he enjoyed pursuing his lifelong hobby of birdwatching.

The Telegraph today

Major 'Cuth' Adami
(Filed: 25/03/2006)

Major "Cuth" Adami, who has died aged 72, was an unconventional Army officer responsible for inadvertently encouraging the career of the young Idi Amin; later he became one of the first British restaurateurs in hippie-era Ibiza.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...5/ixportal.htm

This old soldier seems to have had a full and varied life!

Telegraph Obituary 3 Apr 06: Lt Col Monty Orsby MBE MC & Bar

Lieutenant-Colonel Monty Ormsby, who has died aged 89, was a fighting commander of a very high order and won a Military Cross at the first Battle of Cassino and a Bar in Malaya.

Robin Niellands - RM and military historian.

Telegraph Obit

Countess Nina von Stauffenberg, wife of Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg. Foreground of history or what?

From the Daily Telegraph.

Countess von Stauffenberg
(Filed: 05/04/2006)

Nina Countess Schenk von Stauffenberg, who died on Sunday aged 92, was the widow of the German officer who attempted to assassinate Hitler with a bomb in July 1944; along with her husband's co-conspirators, she bore the brunt of the Führer's thirst for revenge in the weeks after the attack.

She was born Elisabeth Magdalena, Baroness von Lerchenfeld, in Kaunas, then in Russia but now in Lithuania, on August 27 1913. Her father was a diplomat and courtier, her mother a German-speaking Balt.

She met Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg when she was just 16 and still at boarding school near Heidelberg. Like him, her family was of the Bavarian nobility, although his was Roman Catholic and rather more distinguished, numbering the Prussian Field Marshal August von Gneisenau among its forebears. He was also six years her elder.

They became engaged on his birthday in 1930, and married in 1933. Stauffenberg was noted among his peers for his dashing good looks and unorthodox opinions, but though he was later to be romanticised by admirers of the German resistance movement, as a young man much of his character was decidedly conventional. He had already chosen the army as his career, and went to his wedding in uniform, since he believed that to marry was another of his duties. He also, as one proud to be German, initially welcomed Hitler's rise to power.

By 1940, however, when he and Nina had had three sons and a daughter, his attitudes had changed markedly, influenced in particular by Hitler's oppression of the Church. From the autumn of 1943 onwards, when he was recuperating in Germany after losing seven fingers and an eye in a strafing attack in North Africa, he became determined to kill the Führer, and his dynamism animated a circle of like-minded officers, aristocrats and officials which had hitherto offered only passive opposition to the regime. His elder brother, Berthold, joined the conspiracy, but Nina Stauffenberg knew nothing of their plans.

On July 20 1944 Colonel Count Stauffenberg carried a bomb concealed in a briefcase into the briefing room of the Wolf's Lair, Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia. Another officer moved it, so that it rested next to the massive wooden leg of the conference table and, when it exploded, soon after Stauffenberg had left the room, Hitler was largely shielded from the blast and suffered only ruptured eardrums.

Stauffenberg and the other plotters believed for a time that they had been successful, but by that evening most of them had been rounded up. Stauffenberg was shot almost immediately in the courtyard of army headquarters in Berlin.

Himmler, as security supremo, directed that all of Stauffenberg's relatives, from his infant children to distant cousins, should be arrested and their property confiscated. Berthold Stauffenberg was hanged a few weeks later, while Nina Stauffenberg, who was heavily pregnant, was interrogated and imprisoned in Berlin. While there she comforted the wife of Ernst Thalmann, the Communist leader, who had just learned that her husband had been executed.

The Countess was then sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, as was her mother, who subsequently perished in another camp run by the advancing Russians.

The four Stauffenberg children, of whom the eldest was aged 10, were placed in a state orphanage in Thuringia and given a new surname, Meister. In January 1945 Nina Stauffenberg gave birth in a Nazi maternity home to her husband's posthumous daughter, Konstanze.

The separated family were much helped by the efforts of her sister-in-law, Melitta, the wife of Berthold's twin brother, Alexander, who had also been interned. Although she was a Polish Jew, Melitta had some influence with government officials because of her work on the design of dive-bombers. Towards the end of the war, however, she was fatally wounded when her aircraft was hit as she was returning from a visit to her nephews and niece.

By the war's end, the Countess was being held as a hostage in southern Germany. Although her guards had orders to kill her, she was eventually liberated by Allied troops and reunited with her children. Thereafter, she devoted herself to promoting understanding between Germans and the occupying American forces.

In the last few decades, German knowledge of the homegrown resistance to the Nazis has become much more widespread, with Stauffenberg coming to occupy a central place in that understanding. The Bendlerblock, the HQ where he was executed, now houses the national museum of resistance, and the street on which it stands has been renamed for him.

Like some of those involved in the plot, Nina Stauffenberg was of the view that the heroic failure of the plan resonated more down the years than a successful coup might have done. "On the whole," she once said, "what happened was probably best for the cause."

She is survived by her five children; her eldest son, Berthold, is a former general in the German army.