Murray Wrobel stands to the left of General Ritter von Thoma during the German’s secret visit to the pyramids after his capture at El Alamein
A talented linguist who put his fluent German to use interrogating prisoners during the war in Europe
As a 21-year-old lieutenant, Murray Wrobel had the unusual distinction of conducting a captured German general on a secret tour of the Pyramids.
In November 1942, late in the battle of El Alamein, the tank of Lieutenant-General Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, who commanded the Afrika Korps, had its tracks shot off. He was captured and taken to Montgomery, who asked him to dinner. At home, this chivalrous behaviour did not go down well. “The incident, trifling in itself, roused an altogether disproportionate amount of disapproval,” noted Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s Information Minister.
When Von Thoma expressed regret at leaving Egypt without seeing the Pyramids, it was decided to oblige him. Lieutenant Wrobel, a German speaker who had spent his boyhood in Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland), was assigned as his escort. One cool November morning they were driven the eight miles to the Pyramids at Giza. The general’s uniform was concealed by a British trench coat. Although they posed together for a photograph, no word of the outing ever got out.
Murray Wrobel was born in 1921 in Liverpool. His mother was from a Manchester family of Russian Jews, his father was of a Polish Jewish immigrant family from Danzig. After the First World War Wrobel’s father returned to Danzig to export timber to Liverpool. His son soon acquired the fluent German that became the basis of his wartime career in the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC). Later his younger sister Pauline, an ATS officer, also worked for CSDIC, as did an uncle.
In the 1930s the Wrobels relocated to London. Wrobel attended Dulwich College as a day boy before finishing his formal education in Switzerland, where he polished his German. He also spent six months in Rouen for his French.
Early in 1940 Wrobel enlisted in the Royal Army Service Corps where he responded to a call for German speakers from the CSDIC. During the Battle of Britain he was involved in interrogating captured Luftwaffe aircrew and U-Boat sailors. In the spring of 1941 he was transferred to CSDIC’s Cairo HQ. On one occasion in the fighting against Rommel he was inserted into a prisoner-of-war cage in German uniform to try to glean nuggets of intelligence.
In May 1943 the Panzerarmee surrendered in North Africa and Wrobel was seconded to the Special Operations Executive to help to prepare some German anti-Nazis, codenamed Bonzos, for a raid in Yugoslavia wearing Wehrmacht uniforms. He enjoyed this work though the operation was abandoned.
He returned to his frontline interrogation duties, landing at the Salerno beachhead to spend much of the next 14 months following British forces up Italy. Late in 1944 he returned to London for another SOE attachment after he had proposed infiltrating the Nazis’ redoubt in the Bavarian Alps. It was, by his own admission, a harebrained scheme and nothing came of it. He spent much of the rest of the war on arduous night exercises with some Bonzos who were to be inserted behind enemy lines. He was also trained in the use of plastic explosive which damaged his hearing and, some years later, earned him a disability pension.
After the war he worked with the War Crimes Investigation Unit — according to an interview he gave to the Imperial War Museum in 2007 he was mostly employed questioning prisoners suspected of the murder of the 50 RAF aircrew shot after the 1944 Great Escape from Stalag Luft III.
Leaving the Army in 1946, Wrobel set up an office supplies company with customers all over Europe. After retirement he had homes in Canada, France and Cyprus before settling in Wimbledon. In his late seventies he compiled dictionaries on subjects ranging from plants to reptiles. Entries were in Latin, Italian, French, English and German.
He was married three times, twice divorced, and had four children. His third wife, Myra Panayedes, an Anglo-Cypriot, predeceased him.
Murray Wrobel, wartime intelligence linguist and interrogator, was born on January 12, 1921. He died on March 16, 2013, aged 92
Vice-Admiral Sir Norman King
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Naval officer whose diplomatic skills were of great benefit in a senior Nato role in southern Europe
In his long career in the Royal Navy, Norman King was known throughout for his excellent judgment in personnel and professional matters, allied to a friendly, cheerful and persuasive personality.
Norman Ross Dutton King was born in Barcelona in 1933 — his father, Sir Norman King, KCMG, was in the diplomatic service. He went to Dartmouth Royal Naval College in 1946, aged 13. His early seagoing career was at home and abroad: in the aircraft carrier Indefatigable, the frigates Tintagel Castle and Wild Goose, the cruiser Ceylon in the Far East, the minesweeper Hickleton and the destroyer Corunna in the Mediterranean.
In 1960 he qualified as a torpedo and anti-submarine specialist after the year-long course at HMS Vernon at Portsmouth, followed by appointment as an instructor at Dartmouth.
In 1963 he took command of the minesweeper Fiskerton, based in Singapore, and participated in the extensive military operations mounted by the British, Malaysian, Australian and New Zealand armed forces to prevent President Sukarno of Indonesia from disrupting the states of Sabah and Sarawak on the island of Borneo as they joined the newly formed Federation of Malaysia.
After two years in the Ministry of Defence from 1965, in the first of four personnel jobs as the junior officers’ appointer and career planner, a post requiring a combination of tact and firmness, he commanded the frigate Leopard. His next tour was in Washington, supporting the commander of the British Naval Staff. Rather unusually, King had three tours in Washington at various levels, in the last of which, having been the chief staff officer, he was himself, as rear-admiral, the commander of the British Naval Staff from 1984 to 1986. In this role he was responsible for the ticklish task of maintaining the Royal Navy’s influence and contributing to the “special relationship” in the face of vastly superior American research and development resources. This post included being the UK’s national representative to Nato’s Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic, based in Norfolk, Virginia.
In the 1970s, besides seagoing tours as second-in-command of the assault landing ship Intrepid and command of the 3rd Destroyer Squadron from HMS Newcastle, he served two years in the warfare department of the Naval Staff. King’s strength as a “people person” saw him progressing from assistant to the Second Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Personnel to being the director of all seaman officers’ careers and finally, in 1987, to Naval Secretary — who inter alia managed for the Admiralty Board the appointments of all senior officers.
Promoted to vice-admiral in 1988, King was chief of staff to an Italian admiral, the Nato commander of naval forces in Europe’s southern region, based in Naples. This was perhaps the most interesting of Nato’s three European regions under the Supreme Allied Commander, SACEUR. Nato’s power at sea was undoubtedly the American Sixth Fleet and local tensions involved its autonomy as an American foreign policy instrument in a region bounded by non-Nato issues in the Middle East and North Africa. With his American expertise and friendships, King negotiated these tensions with skill.
King was appointed KBE in 1989. After leaving the Navy in 1991, he sat on the Lord Chancellor’s Panel of Independent Inspectors dealing with planning issues and between 1993 and 1996 was chairman of the Buckinghamshire Health Authority.
His major achievement, with Peter Ballard, was the fund-raising for and foundation of the prize-winning Milton Keynes Children’s Safety Centre, for which he was chairman and honorary president for many years. This imaginative enterprise was the first centre for teaching children in an interactive and hands-on way about hazards ranging from the home, farmyard, filling station forecourts, fire, water, and dark alleys to internet safety, drug and alcohol abuse. He suffered a stroke in 2007, the effects of which were borne with typical courage and good cheer.
He is survived by his wife, Patricia, whom he married in 1967, and by their two daughters.
Vice-Admiral Sir Norman King, KBE, Chief of Staff to Commander Naval Forces Southern Europe, 1988-91, and founding chairman Milton Keynes Children’s Safety Centre, was born on March 19, 1933. He died on March 6, 2013, aged 79
Tank commander who was decorated after a daring attack on an enemy position in Italy
The attack on the Coriano ridge is not one of the celebrated aspects of the 8th Army’s assault on the German Gothic Line across Italy in September 1944. It remains questionable whether the advance down a forward slope almost devoid of cover was a sensible act of war. The commanding officer of the Queen’s Bays (2nd Royal Dragoons) had pointed out the losses his two leading tank squadrons were bound to sustain, but was overruled. Sergeant Don Burley was the hero of the succeeding action, closely supporting the infantry back onto their objective.
It was known that armour from the 26th Panzer Division, together with 77mm and 88mm guns, were in position to defend the ridge, covering the opposing ridge to the south and the open ground between them. Within minutes of the Bays breasting the southern ridge, anti-tank fire had knocked out all but three of their tanks, inflicting losses of five officers and 17 NCOs and men killed.
One troop of the Bays, of which Burley was the troop sergeant, was sent to the assistance of an infantry battalion driven back from the Coriano feature, leaving its casualties behind. The troop commander’s and the third tank were knocked out during the flanking move, leaving only Burley’s in action. Despite continuous shelling he went forward on foot to seek an alternative route to the enemy-held crest and, having found one offering some cover, arranged with the infantry commander to lead the way forward and give close fire support to a renewed assault. This drove the enemy off part of the ridge, allowing the infantry to consolidate there and evacuate their casualties.
The enemy were quick to launch an improvised counter-attack. Using his tank’s machinegun, Burley inflicted heavy casualties on the advancing enemy infantry but was seriously wounded while reconnoitring a better fire position, again on foot. Ignoring pain and loss of blood, he continued to fight his tank in support of the infantry until the enemy had again been dispersed. Burley was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal, then the equivalent of the DSO, for his operational skill and determination in dealing with a seriously adverse battlefield situation and his personal gallantry in dismounting twice to achieve the best tactical advantage.
On recovering from his injuries, Burley returned to the Bays to command a tank troop during the advance towards and the crossing of the Lamone river on the Adriatic coast in the rain and mud of December 1944. Once the infantry had established a bridgehead over the Lamone, he got his troop across and into fire positions ready to defend the crossing against the inevitable counter-attack. Subsequently, his troop and the infantry were jointly successful in repelling a series of counter-attacks. He was mentioned in dispatches on this occasion.
Donald Burley was born in Aylesbury and joined the Queen’s Bays in 1936. After demobilisation in 1946 he worked for Chartered Consolidated in the City of London, also serving with the City of London Yeomanry (TA).
He is survived by his wife, Margaret, and two sons.
Sergeant Donald Burley, DCM, tank troop leader, was born on January 29, 1919. He died on February 16, 2013, aged 94
