Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gestures before voting in Caracas on October 07, 2012. Venezuelans voted Sunday with President Hugo Chavez’s 14-year socialist revolution
Charismatic President of Venezuela whose colourful 13-year tenure was overshadowed by his autocratic style and a faltering economy
Hugo Chávez was a parachute regiment officer who led a failed attempt to overthrow the elected government of Venezuela, spent time in prison and was eventually elected president himself, breaking the political mould in the process. His attempts to carry out radical reforms to a society that he regarded as deeply corrupt and unjust split the country down the middle and brought it to the brink of civil conflict. In the process, his virulent, anti-US rhetoric made him an iconic figure for would-be revolutionaries the world over. Time magazine placed him on its list of the world’s 100 most influential people in both 2005 and 2006.
A charismatic personality, Chávez inspired almost religious devotion among his millions of followers, including viewers of his weekly live TV programme, Alo Presidente (Hello President), but his aggressive language and blustering manner provoked equally strong feelings among his enemies.
His 13-year tenure as president was marked by increasingly autocratic rule and economic mismanagement which pushed the fiscal deficit to 8.5 per cent of GDP in 2012. Moreover, his use of the country’s vast oil wealth to fund social programmes did little to mask high levels of corruption, crime and human rights abuses.
Chávez was first elected president in 1998, and he won successive elections thereafter, on the strength of his dominant personality and helped by a demoralised and divided opposition. By mid-2011 the high point of Chávez’s popularity seemed to have passed, the economy was struggling and suddenly there were doubts about his apparently iron constitution. He was taken ill during one of his frequent visits to Cuba, and it subsequently transpired, after an emergency operation on a pelvic abscess, that he had cancer — the exact nature and location of which were never made entirely clear. He promptly dropped the word “death” from his favoured political slogan “socialism or death”, explaining that his illness had caused him to enter a more reflective, more nuanced phase of his life.
Despite his failing health, Chávez insisted on running for another six-year term in elections brought forward to October 2012. He won a convincing victory, with some 55 per cent of the votes, over Henrique Capriles Radonski, the unity candidate of a broad spectrum of opposition parties. But the campaign took so much out of Chávez that he was finally forced to confront his own mortality. He stopped saying that he had been cured of cancer and, in December 2012, a month before his inauguration, he named a successor, urging his followers to vote for the Vice-President, Nicolás Maduro, if he was unable to continue and fresh elections had to be held. After warning his followers that they must “calmly prepare” for the hard times ahead, Chávez returned to Cuba for a fourth operation.
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías was born in 1954 into a lower middle-class family in Sabaneta, in western Barinas state (which he was later to turn into a family fiefdom), the second of six children. His parents were both schoolteachers, but he seems to have inherited some of the characteristics of a rather more dashing ancestor: his great-grandfather, Pedro Pérez Delgado, known as Maisanta, had led a unit of irregular cavalry in the civil wars of the early 20th century. Chávez attended the Venezuelan military academy, passing out in 1975 as a second lieutenant, with a qualification in engineering and a reputation as a baseball fanatic. He had a good academic record, and went on to pursue postgraduate studies in political science at a university in Caracas.
A steady rise through the ranks of the army culminated in 1991 in promotion to lieutenant-colonel and appointment as commander of the parachute regiment in Maracay, one of the country’s most important garrisons. But Chávez had other things on his mind than advancing his military career: in 1982, while still a captain, he had formed a secret association with like-minded young fellow officers, who were dissatisfied with what they perceived as the corruption and cynicism of the civilian politicians who had been running Venezuela since the ousting of the last military dictator, General Marcos Pérez Jiménez, in 1958.
Venezuela, one of the world’s leading oil producers and a founder-member of OPEC, had enjoyed periods of great prosperity, but in recent years the oil revenues had dwindled, leading to public spending cuts, unemployment and growing discontent among a population that was still predominantly poor, despite the country’s vast wealth.
Chávez and fellow members of what came to be known as the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement (MBR-200) after their hero, Venezuela’s 19th-century liberator, Simón Bolívar, began to develop plans for removing the despised politicians and radically overhauling the political and economic system. The urgent need for such action became apparent in early 1989, when the newly elected President, Carlos Andrés Pérez, attempted to deal with a severe economic crisis by decreeing a combination of spending cuts and price increases. Days of rioting and looting followed in Caracas. When Pérez called out the army to restore order, hundreds of people were killed. But the military conspirators bided their time for another three years, until February 1992, when Chávez led an uprising in Maracay and moved his troops the short distance to the capital, where they almost succeeded in capturing the President. But the movement proved to be short-lived: units loyal to Pérez rallied and quickly routed the rebels.
It was not all bad news for Chávez, however. He became a public figure after he appeared on television in combat uniform to acknowledge that his coup d’état had failed “for now” and to urge his comrades to lay down their arms. He was imprisoned but pardoned in 1994 by the new civilian President, Rafael Caldera.
Chávez quickly made it clear that he had no intention of slipping back into obscurity. After contacting his former comrades-in-arms, who had taken part in another failed coup while he was in prison, he formed his own political party, the Fifth Republic Movement (MVR), a civilian version of MBR-200. He began to travel around the country, always wearing military fatigues and his red paratrooper’s beret, delivering incendiary speeches of a vaguely left-wing nature, promising dire retribution for the corrupt politicians who had reduced such a rich country to abject poverty. For several years Chávez appeared to be little more than a minor irritant on the wilder fringes of Venezuelan politics, but he was steadily building a following among the disillusioned and disinherited. Further years of economic decline and political ineptitude combined to present Chávez with another opportunity to seize the initiative, and this time he made no mistake.
For the 1998 presidential elections, he formed a broad electoral coalition, known as the Polo Patriótico, which included the Communist Party and several other small left-wing groups, but with the MVR as its backbone. His charisma attracted the attention of experienced left-wing politicians, notably José Vicente Rangel, who had stood twice for president, and Luis Miquilena, a veteran communist who saw in Chávez the leader that the fragmented opposition to Venezuela’s two established parties, Acción Democrática (AD) and the Christian Democrat COPEI party, had long been seeking. Both were to be leading figures in Chávez’s first government.
He won a stunning victory in December 1998, with more than 56 per cent of the votes, humiliating the traditional parties, and setting the scene for the launch of his “Bolivarian revolution”, which was founded on the controversial premise that Simón Bolívar had held egalitarian and anti-imperialist views. Within a few months a constituent assembly had been elected, with inexperienced but enthusiastic chavistas in the overwhelming majority, and the new constitution they drafted — approved at the end of 1999 with 72 per cent of voters in favour — laid thegroundwork for the radical changes Chávez had in mind. Their main features were greatly increased powers for the executive and a much bigger economic role for the state. The new constitution also changed the official name of the country to “Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela”. Chávez’s next step was to call fresh elections under the new constitution, to make sure there was no doubt about his legitimacy. He was returned in July 2000 with an even bigger majority. His power and prestige were at their height, and few disagreed that changes were long overdue.
Chávez saw himself not only as the architect of a new domestic order, but also as a Third World leader of international stature. He travelled constantly, to such places as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Iran of the ayatollahs and Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, denouncing “neo-liberal” globalisation at every opportunity, antagonising the Americans by refusing to cooperate with their “war on drugs,” attacking their intervention in Afghanistan and heaping praise on Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba — which warmly returned the compliment. Chávez blamed the Arab Spring uprisings in Libya and Syria in 2011 on the machinations of US imperialism, and he remained a staunch supporter of Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad until the very end.
He called for Latin American integration as a counter-balance to US influence in the region, distributed cheap oil to the small, cash-strapped countries of Central America and the Caribbean and urged fellow OPEC members to use the organisation’s bargaining power to extract a better deal from the developed countries. He created his own organisation of anti-American countries, known as ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas), which included Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, and later was one of the driving forces behind the formation of Unasur (Union of South American Nations), set up as an alternative to the long-established Organisation of American States, which Chávez and like-minded leaders saw as a plaything of Washington.
Successive US administrations were not alone in deploring the way things were going in Venezuela. At home, Chávez went out of his way to attack and threaten those he regarded as the entrenched political and economic power groups — business leaders, bankers, newspaper owners, trade union bosses linked to the two traditional parties, even the Catholic Church hierarchy — whom he saw as responsible for Venezuela’s failure to realise its full potential. He lumped them all together in his fiery rhetoric as the “squalid oligarchy”, to the delight of the poverty-stricken millions in the shantytowns of Caracas, who saw in Chávez, a dark-skinned mulatto, a leader after their own hearts.
To begin with, he had no clear blueprint for reforming the economy, other than a vague commitment to redistributing wealth and channelling more of the oil revenues into much-expanded social welfare programmes. Over the years he brought in and then discarded a succession of left-wing thinkers from home and abroad — including Miquilena, the Trotskyist Alan Woods and the German sociologist Heinz Dieterich — to give shape and consistency to his ideas, with mixed results. While he floundered, the demoralised, discredited and divided opposition gradually began to regroup and recruit new adherents.
Chávez’s fascination with the sound of his own voice — his broadcasts, carried by law on all radio and TV channels, were frequent and interminable — drove his critics to distraction, and his authoritarian tendencies alienated many of his erstwhile allies, particularly among the military officers who had accompanied him in the 1992 uprising. They were alarmed by Chávez’s determination to involve the armed forces in politics, particularly in social action programmes, and some turned into his most implacable enemies. They were in the forefront of an attempt to overthrow him in April 2002.
As the economy declined, Chávez’s swelling number of opponents had taken to organising mass protest marches on the streets of Caracas, and one of these, against Chávez’s efforts to bring the respected state oil company, PDVSA, under tight political control, ended in a number of deaths when unidentified gunmen opened fire on the demonstrators. Within hours a group of military and civilian conspirators, with discreet support from Washington, had captured Chávez, forced him to step down and set up a provisional government. It lasted less than 48 hours. The interim president, Pedro Carmona, an elderly businessman, made the crass mistake of closing Congress and dissolving the political parties — thereby completing the destruction of political freedoms and democratic institutions that his enemies had been blaming on Chávez. The overthrown president’s supporters in the barrios took to the streets, Carmona’s supporters melted away, and loyal military units brought him back in triumph from his prison on a Venezuelan island in the Caribbean.
For a while Chávez made a show of seeking reconciliation with the opposition, to halt the slide towards civil war, but talks on resolving their differences made little progress. Within a few months the marches and protests began again, culminating in a nine-week general strike, from December 2002 to February 2003, supported by employers, trade unions and opposition parties. Their idea was to bring the country to a halt, particularly by paralysing the oil industry, which accounted for more than a quarter of Venezuela’s GDP, until Chávez was forced to resign or call early elections. But the opposition had miscalculated, and once again Chávez showed himself to be a consummate political survivor. He ruthlessly broke the strike at the state oil company, where more than 12,000 workers and executives were sacked, and within a few weeks the situation was more or less back to normal. Chávez was able to claim a complete victory, despite the damage done to the economy by the prolonged stoppage. This triumph made him even less inclined to negotiate with his enemies, or to moderate his criticisms of the US and the multilateral agencies, such as the IMF, which he blamed for conspiring with local “counter-revolutionaries” to overthrow him.
Things thereafter went from bad to worse for the beleaguered opposition. In 2004 they tried unsuccessfully to unseat Chávez in a recall referendum. In the following year they boycotted legislative elections, which they claimed were rigged, and then lost the 2006 presidential election by a record margin. Chávez thereupon used his complete domination of the legislature to push through a series of measures to further what he had come to call “socialism of the 21st century” by increasing the State’s grip on the economy, and particularly by using the national oil company, PDVSA, as the main agent of income redistribution, through food and other subsidies. He also created a number of “missions” to funnel lavish public spending into areas such as the notoriously deficient health, education and public housing sectors.
These initiatives helped to shore up Chávez’s popularity among the poor — he went into the 2006 presidential election with a popularity rating of about 70 per cent — but they also had the effect of distracting PDVSA, already subject to political interference and deprived of its most experienced engineers and administrators in the aftermath of the 2002-03 strike, from its main purpose, which was oil production. Output decreased steadily even as world market prices increased and, when the global economic downturn arrived in 2008, Venezuela went into recession and stayed there long after other Latin American countries had returned to robust growth.
The deal Chávez struck in 2007 with Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, for Venezuela to provide cheap fuel for London’s buses, was a typical piece of showmanship and was little more than a distraction. Although the poor majority undoubtedly benefited greatly from Chávez’s spending programmes, the way the money was dispensed lacked transparency and the economy was racked by waste, inefficiency and corruption. Venezuela’s inflation rate was the highest in the region, fuelled by ever-expanding expenditure financed by oil revenues and, increasingly, by loans from China. On the streets violent crime was out of control, and bloody mutinies in the overcrowded prisons were a common occurrence.
As a result, Chávez’s popularity began to wane. In 2007 he suffered his first serious electoral setback, when proposed amendments to the constitution were defeated in a referendum. His United Socialist Party (PSUV) — successor to the MVR — subsequently suffered unprecedented setbacks in local elections in 2008, which saw the rejuvenated opposition win control of Caracas, and in the 2010 parliamentary elections, when opposition candidates took more than 47 per cent of the votes.
Chávez nevertheless managed to win a plebiscite on a constitutional amendment to enable him to stand for re-election an indefinite number of times, and he announced that he would be a candidate again in 2012. He was undeterred by the cancer diagnosed in mid-2011, which forced him to delegate some of his extensive powers to his largely faceless subordinates while he underwent treatment. Despite his health problems, and his declining popularity, he remained an utterly dominant figure in Venezuelan politics, determined to hang on to power and to ensure that his “revolution” could not be reversed.
But Chávez’s growing incapacity, and his decision to designate Nicolás Maduro his successor, focused attention on the weaknesses inherent in a political model that depended so heavily on the personality of a single individual. Chávez’s government had all the trappings and institutions of a democratic administration — elections, courts, cabinet, a relatively free press, etc — but it was nothing without Chávez. The institutions had no independent existence, and the separation of powers between executive, legislature and judiciary was a fiction. Even some of Chávez’s fervent admirers wondered whether he had made the right decision by singling out Maduro, a largely unknown quantity despite his six years as Venezuela’s foreign minister. They wondered whether he was up to the job of continuing the revolution, and whether he would be able to assert his authority over rivals in the PSUV leadership, such as the president of the National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, and Maduro’s predecessor as Vice-President, Elías Jaua.
The first signs were, however, positive: in regional elections in December 2012, PSUV candidates won 20 of the 23 state governorships. Jaua was one of the few to suffer defeat, at the hands of Capriles in Miranda state, which includes most of the Caracas region. Chávez was to have been sworn in on January 10, 2013, but the National Assembly of Venezuela agreed to postpone the inauguration to allow him time to recuperate and return from a third medical treatment trip to Cuba.
Chávez married Nancy Colmenares, with whom he had two daughters and a son, and then Marisabel Rodríguez, who had one daughter. They became estranged after Chávez was elected president and were divorced in 2004.
Hugo Chávez, President of Venezuela 1999-2013, was born on July 28, 1954. He died on March 5, 2013, aged 58
Guards officer who protected the Royal Family during the early years of the war and was privy to a secret plan to spirit them away
For two years in the early part of the Second World War Jeffrey Darell served with the small force responsible for the close protection of the Royal Family. Contingency plans in the event of an expected German invasion of Britain were kept a close secret by the officers but were never required. On release from this exceptional duty, Darell joined the 1st (Armoured) Battalion Coldstream Guards and distinguished himself in the 1945 battle of the Rhineland.
Need for the Royal Family protection unit became apparent in June 1940 after Germany’s occupation of Norway and the blitzkrieg offensive that overran France and the Low Countries. The Royal Families of Norway and Holland managed to evade capture and took refuge in England, but the immediate prospect of a cross-Channel invasion emphasised the danger to the British Royal Family and the consequent establishment of the “Coats Mission”.
It was commanded by Major James Coats of the Coldstream Guards, who had served with the all-volunteer ski battalion formed to go to the aid of Finland in its war with the Soviet Union but disbanded when Helsinki and Moscow reached agreement on peace terms. The force comprised a 124-strong company of the Coldstream Guards, to which was attached a troop of Rolls-Royce armoured cars from the 12th Royal Lancers stationed in the Royal Mews. The plan in the event of invasion was to escort King George VI, Queen Elizabeth and the two young princesses to one of three safe houses: Newby Hall in Yorkshire, Pitchford Hall in Shropshire or Madresfield Court in Worcestershire.
Such was the sensitivity attached to the role and composition of the mission that every Guardsman was interviewed personally by Coats. The company second-in-command, Captain W. G. Tatham, had won the Military Cross in the First World War; Darell was to achieve the same in 1945 and another subaltern, Lieutenant I. O. Liddell, won the Victoria Cross in Germany in 1945. The force was tested by frequent emergency exercises and accompanied the Royal Family to Sandringham, Norfolk, where it was billeted in York Cottage and manned a daytime observation post on the estate water tower.
As the invasion threat receded, so the need for the Coats Mission diminished. It was stood down in May, 1942, just two years after the onset of the German onslaught into Belgium and France that had caused it to be raised. By then, Darell had been appointed ADC to the GOC-in-C Southern Command, a post he held until joining 1st Coldstream Guards later in 1942.
The conversion of Foot Guards battalions into tank regiments was questioned by many — “Why put tall Guardsmen into cramped armoured vehicles?” — but the measure proved successful with Guards armour and infantry working together in the North-West Europe campaign from Normandy to the Baltic.
Having landed in Normandy with 5th Guards Brigade of the Guards Armoured Division in June 1944 as a captain, Darell was promoted major to command a tank squadron in September. During the battle of the Rhineland in February-March 1945, his squadron of Sherman tanks was supporting 5th Coldstream Guards, of 32nd Guards Brigade, in an operation to clear the Xanten-Rheinberg road. The prospects were not promising.
The infantry start line was dominated by high ground held by the enemy, as was the left flank of the advance, with self-propelled and 88mm anti-tank guns in both areas. The situation called for resourceful leadership. Masking the enemy positions with artillery-fired smoke and handling his tank troops with consummate tactical skill, Darell cleared the Xanten-Rheinberg road and took 120 prisoners, an action for which he received the MC.
Jeffrey Lionel Darell was the son of Lieutenant-Colonel G. M. Darell, 3rd son of the 5th baronet. He was educated at Eton and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, from where he was commissioned into the Coldstream Guards in July 1939. After the end of the war in Europe, he was successively Brigade Major of the Household Brigade, commanding officer of 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards in Germany and commander of Old College RMA Sandhurst. From 1964 to 1967 he commanded 56th Brigade of the Territorial Army and completed his service as Commandant of the Mons Officer Cadet School, Aldershot, from 1970 to 1974. He was an ADC to the Queen from 1973 to 1974.
On leaving the Army he was a trustee and member of the London Law Trust from 1981 to 1999 and High Sheriff of Norfolk in 1985.
He succeeded his cousin in 1959 to become the 8th holder of the baronetcy created in 1795. In 1953 he married Bridget, daughter of Major-General Sir Allan Adair, former commander of the Guards Armoured Division. She survives him with a son, Guy, who succeeds to the baronetcy, and two daughters.
Brigadier Sir Jeffrey Darell, Bt, MC, Guards officer, was born on October 2, 1919. He died on February 27, 2013, aged 93
General Sir Richard Worsley
Çàíèìàë âûñîêèå ïîñòû â øòàáå ÂÑ â ïåðèîä óõîäà Áðèòàíèè èç èìïåðèè
Officer who held crucial senior staff appointments in the Army in a trying period of withdrawal from Empire
Dick Worsley was an able military administrator with a diplomatic touch. Perhaps more at home as a chief of staff than as an operational commander, he was nevertheless one of the outstanding soldiers of his generation, who served the country well throughout the long and militarily trying withdrawal from Empire and the confrontation with the Warsaw Pact in Europe.
His strength lay in organisation, administration and higher level politico-military policy-making in the days before the collapse of the Berlin Wall. He was particularly well cast in his last military appointment as Quartermaster-General of the Army before going into British industry in 1982.
Richard Edward Worsley was the son of H. H. K. Worsley of Grey Abbey, Co Down. He was educated at Radley College and commissioned into the Rifle Brigade in 1942. He joined the 8th Battalion in England, but was transferred to the 2nd Battalion in Tunisia towards the end of the North African campaign. He soon made his mark and, by the time the battalion reached Italy in May 1944 as part of 6th Armoured Division, he had been appointed its adjutant, a post that he was to hold through the hard-fought advance from Cassino via Rome to the Northern Apennines, and in the decisive battles south of the Po, culminating in the advance into Austria.
Adjutant of 2nd Rifle Brigade was no sinecure. The battalion had been overseas since 1939 and was highly experienced, having fought with outstanding success throughout the long series of Western Desert campaigns as a motor battalion. Fighting in Italy did not come easily to riflemen “with sand in their shoes”, who found it hard to come to terms with the harsh realities of the mountains of Italy. Worsley’s organising ability stood the battalion in good stead throughout the battles of the long hot summer of 1944.
When winter came the battalion suffered such losses during its abortive attacks on the mountain town of Tossignano that it had to be amalgamated with the 10th Battalion. Although the 10th provided most of the officers and men for the amalgamated battalion, Worsley was the obvious choice as adjutant.
His tact, firmness and dry sense of humour helped to rebuild it into the new 2nd Rifle Brigade. Much of the credit for its subsequent successes in the final battles south of the Po and in the Venetian plain in April-May 1945 must go to Worsley, who so ably complemented its outstanding commander, Dick Fyffe.
He stayed on as a company commander in 2RB during the turbulence of the early days of the occupation of Germany before being posted in 1948 to represent the Rifle Brigade as an instructor at Sandhurst, following its re-opening as the Royal Military Academy. He was highly successful in this esoteric environment, before joining the 1st Battalion in the British Army of the Rhine in 1952.
The Staff College, which he attended in 1954, gave full rein to his talents, leading to his appointments as GSO2 to 11th Armoured Division in 1955 and GSO2 to General Sir Hugh Stockwell’s ill-fated Suez Force in 1956. He then returned to the Staff College as an instructor in 1959, and in 1962 was appointed GSO1 to Major-General (later Field Marshal Lord) Michael Carver, GOC of the 3rd Division, then part of the UK-based Strategic Reserve.
Instead of commanding a Rifle Brigade battalion he was transferred to the 1st Royal Dragoons to take command of the regiment at Tidworth in 1963. The Royals had just returned from operations in Aden and Malaya and were invited to exercise their right to march through the City of London.Worsley had the distinction of riding his horse at the head of the regiment as it marched past the Lord Mayor at Mansion House.
One of his first tasks was to convert the regiment from armoured cars to tanks before it was sent to Germany. The speed with which the Royals became a competent armoured regiment was largely a result of his organisational skill and enthusiasm.
It came as no surprise when he was promoted to command 7th Armoured Brigade in 1965. This began his subsequent close association with policy-making in the Nato environment. He commanded 7th Armoured Brigade for two years, and was subsequently the Commander of 1st (British) Corps from 1976 to 1979.
Between these two appointment he was Chief of Staff Far East Land Forces, 1969-71; Commander 3rd Division in the United Kingdom, 1972-74; and Vice Quartermaster-General in the Ministry of Defence, 1974-76. After command of 1st (British) Corps, he became Quartermaster-General in 1979 and Freeman of the City of London in the same year.
He joined Pilkington Brothers in 1982 and became chairman and chief executive of its Electro-Optical Division, and chairman of Barr and Stroud. He was forced to retire, much to his companies’ regret, after undergoing heart bypass surgery in 1986.
A kind and considerate man, he devoted himself to his final retirement by helping the associations of both the Rifle Brigade and the Blues and Royals, taking endless trouble to look after their veterans and regimental interests.
In 1959 he married Sarah Anne Mitchell, daughter of Brigadier Alister Mitchell. They had a son, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Worsley, currently a serving officer in The Rifles and a past Commanding Officer of the 2nd Royal Green Jackets, and a daughter. The marriage was dissolved and in 1980 he married Caroline, Duchess of Fife, née the Hon Caroline Cecily Dewar, elder daughter of the 3rd Baron Forteviot.
General Sir Richard Worsley, GCB, OBE, Quartermaster-General of the Army, 1979-82, was born on May 29, 1923. He died on February 23, 2013, aged 89
Norman Colley
Ìîðñêîé ïåõîòèíåö, ïðèíèìàâøèé ó÷àñòèå â ïîäãîòîâêå Cockleshell raid
Norman Colley is 5th from the right standing, taken in 1943 just before No 2 Section RMBPD went to the eastern Mediterranean
Royal Marine who played a part in the preparations for the daring but doomed Cockleshell Heroes raid
Norman Colley served in the Royal Marines during the Second World War and played a modest role in one of the war’s most daring undercover episodes.
Born in Pontefract in 1920, Norman Colley started his working life in a grocer’s shop. He was called up in 1942 for National Service and enlisted in the Royal Marines in Plymouth. His first unit was Labour Corps 813 at Scapa Flow, Orkney. Chafing at the drudgery of the work he soon volunteered for “hazardous duty”. He was interviewed by Major “Blondie” Hasler, later a famous yachtsman, who told him that if he joined his new unit — cover name, Royal Marines Boom Patrol Detachment — his “expectations of achieving a long life would be severely limited”.
His training began in June 1942 and consisted of canoeing, demolitions, diving, swimming, signals, map marches across Dartmoor and night work. In September 1942 Hasler was instructed to plan Operation Frankton, the extraordinarily gallant attack by canoe and limpet mine in December 1942 on German shipping in the Gironde near Bordeaux. Its participants came to be known as the Cockleshell Heroes.
Colley joined Hasler and 11 other Marines who were loaded with their six collapsible canoes known as “folbots” into the submarine Tuna, captained by Lieutenant R. P. Raikes, DSO. Having suffered an ankle accident just weeks beforehand, Colley went along as spare man in case someone dropped out.
On the evening of December 7 Tuna surfaced two miles off the Gironde and, while evading German patrols, launched the canoes. Colley was in charge of the launch party bringing the canoes up via the torpedo loading hatch, loading them and launching to the leeward side. In rehearsals in Scotland they managed to launch all six canoes in 45 minutes. Colley said, “The skipper of the Tuna told us that if E-Boats approached, the sub would dive, possibly leaving Marines to swim for it.” One canoe was damaged during unloading so its crew stayed behind.
Of the ten men who paddled off into the darkness, two died of hypothermia, six were captured and, although combatants in uniform, shot under Hitler’s infamous Commando Order and two, Hasler himself and Marine Bill Sparks (obituary December 3, 2002), made it through enemy-occupied France, over the Pyrenees, through Spain and back to Britain. Only two canoes reached the targets 70 miles up the Gironde, damaging six ships, five of which were repaired shortly afterwards.
After Operation Frankton, Colley continued in the hazard business by joining the Royal Marines Special Boat Section and, with Corporal Bill Sparks, took part in Combined Operations Pilotage Party operations that surveyed potential landing beaches behind enemy lines in the Aegean.
Colley married his wife Alma in 1945. After the war he worked for an engineering firm for seven years, then became a baker/confectioner for 23 years in South Emsall and finally the town’s sub-postmaster, before retiring to Pontefract.
Norman Colley, Royal Marines, Operation Frankton supporter, was born on November 22, 1920. He died on February 17, 2013, aged 92
