Wartime submarine captain who survived torpedoing and collisions and was decorated for his service on Far East patrols
One of the very last surviving submarine commanding officers of the Second World War, “Tony” Spender had a distinguished record.
He joined the Navy as a Special Entry cadet in 1937 and served as a midshipman in the Jutland veteran battleship Barham which had an unfortunate start to the war. In December 1939, having returned to home waters from the Mediterranean, she was in collision with one of her escorting destroyers, the Duchess, which sank with only 23 survivors out of 147. Later in the month she was torpedoed by a German submarine and although badly damaged managed to reach Liverpool. She was torpedoed again, in the Mediterranean, in November 1941, blowing up and sinking in four minutes with great loss of life.
After this depressing start, Spender volunteered for submarines. His first boat was the Tribune which in February 1941 was sent with the Second Submarine Squadron to Halifax, Nova Scotia, as part of a desperate tactic to counter German warships attacking merchant convoys. Tribune returned to home waters in May after escorting a convoy which was heavily attacked by U-boats.
Spender was then appointed as second-in-command to the submarine Seraph led by Lieutenant (later Captain) Bill Jewell (obituary, August 25, 2004) who was famous for a number of clandestine operations, the first of which was to land the American General Mark Clark on the North African coast to attempt negotiations with the Vichy French prior to the Allied invasion, Operation Torch. The next was to pick up from the south coast of France the charismatic French General Giraud who had escaped from a German prison camp and take him to North Africa where he might ameliorate Vichy attitudes towards the Allies. It was thought that Giraud would prefer to be transported by an American submarine, so Seraph was ceremonially turned over to Mark Clark’s senior staffer, Captain Jerauld Wright (later Nato Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic) by means of a formal scroll arranged by Spender which contained “historic RN command rules”. Upon inspection, a pin-up from La Vie Parisienne was revealed.
On her next patrol Seraph collided while dived with an Italian submarine and returned home for repairs. Spender was selected for and passed the demanding “perisher” course for CO and was given command of an obsolescent training submarine swiftly followed by the newly built Sirdar. While on sea trials, he suffered an alarming incident, an involuntary dive to 400 feet in the Clyde, sticking so firmly in the mud that it took 12 hours pulling all the tricks available, including having the crew jump up and down in unison aft, until she became unstuck.
Sirdar was first employed screening convoys to Russia from December 1943. By May 1944 she was based at Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, when on her first patrol Spender made an unsuccessful attack against a German U-boat in the Strait of Malacca followed by a gun action that drove a merchantman ashore. In September, with her squadron, Sirdar was transferred to Fremantle, Australia, to work with the American Navy. Her first patrol in the Sunda Strait was uneventful, her second in the Macassar Strait and Java Sea saw the destruction of Japanese supply shipping, surviving an attack by a bombing aircraft. At this stage in the war, targets were in short supply; on her final patrol Sirdar had another gun action against a supply ship and was again attacked by aircraft. She passed through the vortex of a cyclone on the way back to Fremantle, making most of the passage on one engine. Spender is credited with the longest patrol in an S-class submarine — 49 days. He was awarded the DSC for service on Far East war patrols.
After the war he commanded the A-class submarine Affray, completed in 1946 and deployed to Singapore where the flag-showing strategy of the times generated a remarkable tour taking in Borneo, the Solomons, Hong Kong, Japan and two months based in Sydney working with the Australian Navy.
Spender subsequently served in the training cruiser Devonshire and commanded the Landing Ship (Tank) Messina during the Anglo-French invasion of the Suez Canal in 1956. He spent three years in Hong Kong on the intelligence staff — “a fascinating job, briefing the Governor while dealing with shady Chinese characters in back streets” — followed by six years in London working with the Foreign Office on intelligence matters.
His first job, with IBM, on leaving the Navy was not congenial. In 1975 he returned to the sea as a first mate in Everard Line coasters in the Black Sea. From there he found his niche training cadets for the Kuwait shipping company on voyages in the Persian Gulf, America and Japan. He retired in 1982.
He married Veronica Cookson in 1950 and is survived by her and their daughter and four sons.
Lieutenant-Commander Anthony Spender, DSC, Royal Navy, wartime submarine captain, was born on May 8, 1920. He died on October 10, 2011, aged 91
Военный администратор, отвечавший за снабжение британской армии вооружением
Administrator who performed remarkable feats of equipment supply for the British and overseas armies
Jimmie Hellier was well known in the British Army in Germany and at home during the 1970s and 1980s as a competent administrator and communications expert. Although he declined to acknowledge it, his phenomenal energy and dedication to getting things done earned him the nickname “Zebedee” from the jack-in-the-box character in the BBC children’s programme The Magic Roundabout. On leaving the Army in 1982 he was head-hunted by the government-owned International Military Services to oversee its responsibilities for delivery of a multimillion-pound British industry defence contract to the Kingdom of Jordan.
Eric James Hellier was born in 1927, the son of Harry Hellier, a farm worker of Wedmore, Somerset, and educated at the local grammar school and at Cardiff University. He joined the RNVR in the closing year of the Second World War and was commissioned in May 1946. He served at sea in frigates and minesweepers, helping to clear the thousands of mines remaining from the war, a period that provided him with naval anecdotes to last a lifetime. When his RN commission expired in 1948 he took a regular army commission with the Royal Corps of Signals.
Posted directly to a signal regiment in the Suez Canal Zone, he was quick to make his mark as a man who learnt fast and got things done. He soon became a signal troop commander and was sent to Mauritius to command a 200-strong detachment of British and Mauritian soldiers.
After service with Royal Signals units in England, Germany and Hong Kong, in 1960 he attended the Staff College, Camberley, emerging as a General Staff Officer in the War Office Signals Directorate. There he became responsible for the planning of the deployment of the “Larkspur” range of radio equipment to all regular army units and the phased withdrawal of the in-service range.
Selection to command the 7th Armoured Brigade Signal Squadron in the Army of the Rhine in 1964 confirmed his worth as a communicator with a flair for innovation, yet it was as an administrator that he went to Northern Ireland — before the onset of the 30-year Troubles — as the personnel and logistics officer of 39th Infantry Brigade based in Belfast. He had scarcely found his feet there before he was informed he was to go to Catterick to command 24 Signal Regiment.
The regiment was due to move from good accommodation with training facilities to a disused, hutted camp. Visiting the troops’ huts at reveille in January, he found them unheated, with no hot water in the washrooms. Despite the hour, he roused the civilian head of the Works Department from his bed to inquire if he was warm, explaining that it was he who was responsible for a large number of soldiers who were not. The heating promptly came on.
Returning to the General Staff in what had meanwhile become the Ministry of Defence, he was again involved in the introduction of hardware. This was the experimental fitting of the 30mm Rarden cannon to the FV432 range of lightly armoured infantry carriers. This was sensibly abandoned after deployment to one brigade, in favour of the development of the Warrior armoured vehicle incorporating the cannon from the design stage.
Promotion to colonel in 1971 returned him to Germany as chief personnel and logistics officer of the 4th Armoured Division commanded by Major-General (later General Sir) Anthony Farrar-Hockley (obituary March 14, 2006). From this he was promoted to command the Royal Signals Brigade and garrison at Catterrick. While there, a polyp on his larynx reduced his voice to an uncharacteristic whisper. One of the signal technicians designed a throat microphone and chest speaker that gave much amusement to those under his jurisdiction, once they realised where his voice was coming from.
The 1975 course at the Royal College of Defence Studies was followed by a return to Germany as chief personnel and logistics officer of the 1st (British) Corps. For his services in planning and organising the arrangements to mark the Queen’s Silver Jubilee parade at Sennelager, Germany, he was advanced to CBE from the OBE he had received for his regimental command and the MBE for service in Northern Ireland. Promotion to major-general in charge of administration and logistics for the UK-based land forces, with its headquarters at Wilton, Wiltshire, from 1979 to 1981, completed a military career of great intensity and irrepressible humour.
Before leaving the service, he had been invited to join International Military Services Limited (IMS) to oversee the responsibilities taken on by the company to ensure proper delivery of 272 Khalid main battle tanks and their associated support and training facilities to Jordan. Earlier versions of the Khalid, the Shir, had been ordered by Iran in the late 1970s but the contract was arbitrarily cancelled short of the start of delivery following the fall of the Shah, leaving defence manufacturers high and dry. Following protracted negotiations, Jordan took up the contract for more tanks than Iran had ordered but of improved specification.
The challenges Hellier faced to fulfil the re-orientated contracts were formidable enough, as they involved a wide range of manufacturers, and after delivery got under way a serious fault was discovered in the Khalid’s gearbox. Introducing a programme called Bold Resolve, Hellier set up teams of technicians in Jordan to extract the gearboxes for shipping home for modification and return. His efforts finally succeeded in bringing the whole contract in on time while he was also handling other IMS equipment supplies to Oman and Sri Lanka.
In addition to his duties with IMS that extended until 1992, he was Representative Colonel Commandant Royal Signals in 1983 and Chairman of the Royal Signals Institute from 1984 to 1989. In 1992 he chaired the fundraising committee that produced £1.25 million for a major extension to the Museum of Army Communications at Blandford, Dorset.
His wife Margaret “Margo”, née Leadeham, whom he married in 1952 survives him with a son and daughter. Another son died in boyhood.
Major-General E. J. Hellier, CBE, administrator and communicator, was born on July 23, 1927. He died on October 31, 2011, aged 84
Пилот-истребитель, участник Битвы за Британию, и узник Шталаг Люфт
Wallace Cunningham joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve in 1938 and was called up on the outbreak of war. After training he was posted to 19 Squadron in June 1940 at the outset of the Battle of Britain. By the end of the battle he had become a fighter “ace” (five combat victories) and had also served with the Duxford-based “Big Wing” commanded by the legless ace Douglas Bader.
In the following year while on a bomber escort, he was shot down over the Netherlands and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of war. Active in escape attempts in several camps, he was eventually sent to Stalag Luft III in Silesia, from which he joined the Long March westwards in the bitter winter weather of early 1945, when the camp was evacuated by the Germans to prevent its inmates from falling into the hands of the approaching Russians.
Wallace Cunningham, known throughout his RAF service as Jock, was born in Glasgow in 1916 and studied engineering at the Royal Technical College, Glasgow. Having joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve he learnt to fly at Prestwick. When war broke out in September the following year he was mobilised and commissioned, and sent for flying training at 11 Flying Training School at Shawbury in Shropshire.
After converting to Spitfires at 5 Operational Training Unit at Aston Down, Gloucestershire, he was posted in June 1940 to 19 Squadron based at Duxford, Cambridgeshire, in 12 Group which was commanded by Air Vice-Marshal Trafford Leigh Mallory. He had his first combat victory on August 16, when he shot down a Messerschmitt 110 twin-engined, long-range fighter off Clacton.
From the following month the squadron operated as part of the three-squadron Big Wing (soon to be increased to five squadrons) commanded by Bader who, encouraged by Duxford’s station commander and Leigh-Mallory, was anxious to develop attacks on enemy formations by massed squadrons, in direct contradiction to the highly successful piecemeal attacks which formed the fighting philosophy of Keith Park, AOC 11 Group, responsible for the defence of London and the South East.
The first Big Wing operation was on September 7, and resulted in Cunningham’s second combat victory, over a Heinkel He 110 near Ramsgate. During the same sortie he also damaged a second He 111. In general however the results of the day suggested that such large formations were unwieldy in combat, a conclusion Park had already come to in his experiments with them over Dunkirk. The Germans themselves derided such large formations as Idiotenreihe. Although nothing in subsequent mass deployments was to change the picture, the Big Wing’s proponents continued vociferous in their advocacy of their tactics at the highest levels, undermining the standing of both Park and Fighter Command’s boss, Hugh Dowding, who backed his 11 Group commander to the hilt.
Cunningham’s personal performance, however, continued to be exemplary. By the end of the battle he had a tally of four kills and three shared destroyed, giving him as total of 5½ combat victories. In October he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for “great personal gallantry and splendid skill in action” and was appointed a flight commander in No 19.
Cunningham remained with No 19 in the following year when Fighter Command went on the offensive with fighter sweeps over France, and in July 1941 he damaged a Messerschmitt 109 during a sortie over northern France. But in August, as his squadron was escorting a force of Blenheim bombers on a raid on shipping near Rotterdam, both he and his CO were hit by flak and forced to bale out.
Taken prisoner, he was sent first to Oflag XC at Lübeck before being moved south to Oflag VIB at Warburg. There he was soon involved with a tunnelling team which made good progress and was on the verge of a breakout when it was discovered. Nothing daunted, the Warburg PoWs began another tunnel and Cunningham was among the 35 men selected to make the escape attempt. In fact the team’s calculations were awry and the tunnel surfaced on April 18, 1942, well short of a safe distance from the perimeter wire. Five prisoners got out through it but it was discovered next day.
Towards the end of the year Cunningham was dispatched to Stalag Luft III in Silesia where he spent the remainder of the war. Although he was still interested in escape attempts he also took advantage of instruction courses that were being offered and kept up his engineering studies. When, in January 1945, the camp was evacuated by the Germans in the face of the Red Army’s advance, he was among those who made the march westwards in atrocious conditions during which many prisoners perished. In late April he and his group were liberated by British troops and he was repatriated.
After his release from the RAF in 1946 he returned to working as in engineering becoming technical sales director for the heavy plant firm Winget, for which he travelled widely. He subsequently worked as chief engineer at Dalglish of Glasgow and, when it was taken over by the American company Proctor and Schwartz, was made a vice-president. In retirement he became popular speaker at RAF bases and universities.
His wife, Mary, whom he married in 1945, died in 1998. He is survived by their daughter.
Flight Lieutenant Wallace Cunningham, DFC, fighter ace and engineer, was born on December 4, 1916. He died on October 4, 2011, aged 94
'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
