A few obits...two UK vets, two US vets

[KB]

Obituaries



The Times

July 05, 2006

Francis Cammaerts

June 19, 1916 - July 3, 2006

Outstanding SOE agent who organised French Resistance groups to sabotage German communications




REGISTERED as a conscientious objector before the Second World War, Francis Cammaerts felt he could no longer stand aside after his brother was killed while serving with the RAF. A fluent French speaker with a deep affection for the country, he became one of the most outstanding agents of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in France. Curiously for one who was to prove so successful, he was initially assessed as “lacking in dash” and “not suitable as a leader”.

The SOE was founded on Winston Churchill’s order to “set Europe ablaze” after the fall of France in June 1940. SOE operations in France were not helped by the division of the country into an occupied zone, embracing the North and the Atlantic Coast, and the area under the administration of the Pétain Government at Vichy. Until the US entered the war in December 1941, the defeat of Germany appeared a distant prospect, and French citizens who chose to support SOE did so at great personal risk.


Francis Charles Albert Cammaerts was born in London, son of Professor Emile Cammaerts, a Belgian poet and patriot. He became a pacifist in the 1930s while at Cambridge, where he read English and history at St Catharine’s College and won a hockey Blue. He began a teaching career at Cabin Hill School, Belfast, in 1937, and became an agricultural labourer in 1940 as an alternative to military service.


He left farming to join SOE in October 1942. After training, he was flown into northern France in March 1943 by a single-engined Lysander monoplane piloted by Squadron Leader Hugh Verity of 161 Squadron RAF. The Westland Lysander, designed for army co-operation and reconnaissance, was vulnerable to German fighter attack in daylight but its short take-off and landing capability and robust undercarriage made it ideal for landing two or sometimes three agents with pinpoint accuracy by night; a feat then impossible by parachute.


More than a dozen SOE circuits were active in France at the time of the German occupation of the area previously under Vichy control in November 1942.

Cammaerts was assigned to the “Donkeyman” circuit then operating in the upper Rhône valley, but his SOE reception party drove him first to Paris with a brash disregard for security that alerted him to the risks of such behaviour. Over six feet tall with large feet he felt very conspicuous, so left by the evening train for Annecy to join Donkeyman. But his intuitive zeal for security led him to a safe house in Cannes, where he established a cover as a teacher recuperating from jaundice.


This was the first, and last, time that he spent more than four nights in the same place, as security rather than urgency was the SOE watchword at this stage of the war. He spent his early months in France gradually building his own circuit, “Jockey”, of seven or eight reliable individuals who, thoroughly indoctrinated of the importance of security, set about recruiting potential saboteurs for when the time was ripe. His key to individual safety was to insist that his agents always had a credible reason for what they were doing, if stopped by a German patrol.


In the later months of 1943 he established several small and semi-independent groups, all part of his Jockey circuit, down the left bank of the Rhône between Vienne and Arles and eastwards through the hinterland to the Isère Valley. He travelled by motorcycle to visit each group, but no one knew his real name, nationality or where he lived.


Having established the Jockey circuit as being ready to play its part in sabotaging the German lines of communication and routes north when the Allied invasion came, Cammaerts was recalled to London for briefing in November 1943. While there he raised the problem of the enmity between the agents working in France under the aegis of General de Gaulle’s headquarters and those, many of them French citizens, recruited by SOE’s French section. There was a strongly held view in the Gaullist camps in London and Algiers that it was unconstitutional for French citizens to be recruited by a foreign power. As Britain and the Free French were fighting for the same cause, including the liberation of France, this may seem a very minor quibble. It was never entirely resolved, however, and De Gaulle insisted that all SOE operations in France ceased soon after the liberation of Paris in August 1944.


Cammaerts’s aircraft crashed on landing when he returned to France in February 1944. Fortunately, he was unhurt and hastened to check the readiness of the Jockey circuit. He also visited the 3,000-strong group of maquisards — young Frenchmen who had fled to the Vercors plateau to avoid conscription for forced labour in Germany. In April 1944 he informed SOE’s London headquarters that the “Vercors has a finely organised army, but they need long-distance and anti-tank weapons”.


This was not a request London wished to hear, as the ability of the German Army to deal effectively with guerrillas who tried to stand and fight was already well proven in Yugoslavia. Arms drops were made to the Vercors but did not include heavy weapons.


As soon as the Allied invasion was launched on June 6, 1944, the railway line cutting teams of Jockey and other SOE circuits went into action, proving the value of Cammaerts’s training. In his book, SOE in France, the official historian of the SOE campaign, M. R. D. Foot, records that every train leaving Marseilles for Lyons after D-Day was derailed at least once and in the Indre Department more than 800 lines were cut in June.


But disaster awaited on the Vercors plateau. Cammaerts’s warning that the maquisards needed heavy weapons had been disregarded, not through neglect in London but because it was reckoned, on sound historic precedent, that it was not the role of guerrillas to fight pitched battles.

The Vercors plateau was not within the Jockey circuit. However, after the Normandy invasion Cammaerts was appointed head of Allied missions in southeastern France. Consequently he was present when elements of at least two German divisions with tactical air support attacked the Vercors maquisards in mid-July. The plateau cliff tops were fiercely contested, but the result was a foregone conclusion. When the order was given for the maquisards to seek what hiding they could find, Cammaerts left the region in despair.


Subsequently, he was satisfied to see his Jockey and neighbouring SOE teams supporting Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of southern France launched on August 15, 1944. SOE teams held open the route from Cannes, through Digne and Gap to Grenoble, to allow the Allied armies, comprising American and French divisions, to clear the lower Rhône, although many units of the German 19th Army — already further north — escaped into Alsace.


It was at this point, despite his meticulous care for security, that he and two colleagues were arrested by the Gestapo in Digne. They may not have realised Cammaerts’s significance, but it was because of the sheer nerve and resolve of his courier, Christina Skarbek, an alluring and dynamic Polish woman who had avoided arrest, that the three were eventually released.


She confronted a French liaison officer to the Gestapo and a Belgian interpreter with the news that the leading US troops would arrive within hours and she would ensure they were handed over to the town’s avenging mob unless they co-operated. Terrified, they engineered the three officers’ release. This was the final chapter of a total for Cammaerts of 15 months in occupied France. (Christina Skarbek was tragically murdered in London by an unwanted suitor in 1952.)

Cammaerts was awarded the DSO for his leadership and gallantry in France but, as in the case of others who operated in enemy-held territory for prolonged periods, he gave great credit to the ordinary French people who provided him and his companions with safety and comfort. In the BBC TV series Secret Agent, broadcast in 2000, he said: “The most important element was the French housewife who fed us, clothed us and kept us cheerful.”


He was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur and awarded the French Croix de Guerre in 1945, the US Medal of Freedom in 1947 and advanced to Officer of the Légion d’Honneur in 1991.


After demobilisation he worked with the International Agency for Reparations in Brussels. He returned to teaching in 1952 and was headmaster of a school in Stevenage for nine years. He was principal of the City of Leicester College of Education, 1961-66, and Professor of Education in Nairobi, 1966-72. He came out of retirement at 65 to go to Botswana to start up a new college for mixed-ability teacher training in 1981. He finally retired in 1987.


Cammaerts married in 1941 Nancy, daughter of James Finlay, architect to the Leeds education committee. She predeceased him, as did one of his daughters. He is survived by a son and two daughters.


Francis Cammaerts, DSO, leader of the wartime SOE circuits in southeast France, was born on June 19, 1916. He died on July 3, 2006, aged 90


Obituaries

Charles R. Rambo; Decorated Soldier, State Dept. Specialist

Tuesday, June 27, 2006; Page B06


Charles Robert Rambo, 87, a decorated World War II veteran who spent 25 years as an international communications specialist with the State Department, died June 8 at his home in Arlington. He had mesothelioma cancer.


A retired Army colonel, Mr. Rambo joined the State Department in 1965. He oversaw operations in Latin America and the Middle East and headed up State's first counterterrorism operation. During his tenure, Mr. Rambo also promoted government-sponsored sports programs as a conduit for communications between the United States and other countries.


He attended the Sapporo and Munich Olympic Games in the 1970s and the 1980 Lake Placid Games as a member of the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Before retiring from the State Department in 1979, he was director of communications for the Western Hemisphere. He continued to work as a consultant until 1991.


Mr. Rambo was born June 26, 1918, in Phoenixville, Pa. He was a direct descendant of Peter Gunnar Rambo, who came to Philadelphia from Sweden in 1640 and was an interpreter between Peter Stuyvesant and the Indians in Philadelphia and New York.


He attended Drexel University as an electrical engineering student before entering the Army in 1941 and volunteering for the first parachute unit. After completing jump school, he was shipped overseas as communications chief and later regimental platoon leader to the 503rd Parachute Battalion, which became the 503rd Parachute Regiment, the first parachute regiment in the Army.


Throughout World War II, he served in active combat with the 503rd in the Pacific theater under the command of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, including during the New Guinea and Philippines campaigns and the liberation of Corregidor Island. During combat, he participated in the lowest altitude jump, 150 feet, made in the Pacific theater.


His military decorations include the Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts and the Master Parachutist badge. He also was honored by Portugal's government for his work related to sports programs. He retired from the Army in 1965.


Mr. Rambo was active in many organizations. He was a former member and on the board of directors of the U.S. Olympic Committee and was a past president of the United States People to People Sports Committee, the 503rd Parachute RCT Association and the Returned & Services League of Australia.


He also belonged to the American Rocket Society, the Hawaii State Society, the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Association and the White House Communications Association.


An accomplished self-taught classical Hawaiian steel guitarist, Mr. Rambo performed professionally until three years ago.


He began playing the instrument at 13 after meeting guitarist Les Paul at a concert in Philadelphia. After the concert, Paul took the teenager to a music store, where he first played. There, Mr. Rambo bought a steel guitar with earnings from his newspaper route.


Survivors include his wife, Lorraine Rambo of Arlington; two children, Barbara Rambo of San Francisco and Bruce Rambo of Turkey; a sister; and two grandsons.


Decorated Veteran Edward Hamilton

By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 4, 2006; Page B06


Edward Smith Hamilton, 89, a highly decorated combat veteran of World War II who later embarked on clandestine buccaneering adventures along the coast of China during the Korean War, died of pneumonia June 30 at his home in Annandale.


Mr. Hamilton, a 1939 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, was commander of an Army infantry battalion that went ashore at Normandy Beach on June 8, 1944, two days after D-Day. His unit of the 90th Infantry Division saw considerable action throughout the summer on its march through France.


For his coordination of the defense of a key bridge in France on Aug. 5, 1944, Mr. Hamilton was awarded the Silver Star. A month later, on Sept. 8, he led a surprise raid on German positions at Avril, France, that disabled four tanks and led to the capture of 17 enemy soldiers. For his daring assault and his heroism under fire during the battle, Mr. Hamilton received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army's second-highest commendation for valor.


Two days later, he was wounded in battle and lost his left eye. He was given a battlefield promotion to lieutenant colonel and received, among other decorations, the Bronze Star and three awards of the Purple Heart.


After recuperating, Mr. Hamilton returned to his hometown of Dallas, Ore., in 1946 to open an insurance agency.


In 1950, as the Korean War was heating up, he was lured back into action as a CIA agent in Taiwan, working with the Chinese nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek. Nicknamed the "One-Eyed Dragon," Mr. Hamilton led combined American and Chinese guerrilla units in clandestine attacks against communist forces on the Chinese mainland. His role in the covert actions conducted along the southeastern coastline of China is detailed in the book "Raiders of the China Coast" by Frank Holober.


Mr. Hamilton was in Taiwan from 1950 to 1954 before he was transferred to Washington. In 1956, he was sent to Germany as an undercover agent working in counterintelligence in East Germany and Turkey. He left the CIA in 1959 and took a position as operations officer with the old Civil Defense Administration. He retired in 1973.


He was a member of St. Alban's Episcopal Church in Annandale.


In his later years, Mr. Hamilton made many visits to France, where he was welcomed as a returning hero of the nation's liberation from Nazi control. Last year, he was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government.


His wife of 63 years, Grace Cutler Hamilton, died in 2003. A son, Edward E. Hamilton, died in 1948. A daughter, Mary Suzanne Hamilton, died in 1997.


Survivors include seven children, Diana H. Cowell of Huntington, W.Va., William B. Hamilton of Ocean City, Elizabeth A. Hamilton and Marie C. Hamilton-Perez, both of Santa Cruz, Calif., Richard C. Hamilton of Clifton, Patricia B. Collins of Berkeley Lake, Ga., and Frank S. Hamilton of Panama City, Fla.; 15 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.



Major Bill Close

August 22, 1914 - May 28, 2006
Wartime tank commander held in high esteem at staff college for his exploits in Greece, North Africa and Normandy


GRADUATES of the Staff College, Camberley, will remember Bill Close for his modest yet gripping accounts of action on the battlefields of Normandy.
He had fought in Greece and throughout the Western Desert campaign, rising from sergeant to squadron commander, winning the Military Cross and being mentioned in dispatches. He was in command of A Squadron, 3rd Royal Tank Regiment at the start of the Normandy battles.

William Herbert Close enlisted in the Royal Tank Corps, as it was then, in 1933 and had risen to sergeant by the outbreak of war. In late May 1940 he went to Calais with 3rd RTR and the three battalions of 30th Infantry Brigade in a gallant attempt to keep the port open for supply of the British Expeditionary Force as it fell back in the face of the German blitzkreig. It was a battle against hopeless odds, lasting five days; 3rd RTR lost all its tanks, and Close counted himself fortunate to be among the 250 officers and men taken off by the Royal Navy.

It was in the Western Desert that he was to show his mettle as a tank squadron commander, but before then 3rd RTR was diverted to Greece as a component of the British force sent to stem the Axis invasion. Outnumbered, outfought and with inadequate air support, many British, Australian and New Zealand survivors of the fighting had to be left to get away as best they could. Close was taken by the RN destroyer Hotspur to Crete and — when the island fell — to Alexandria in a local craft he hired, using the squadron’s pay, which he happened to be carrying.

Commissioned in 1942, he took part in the battles of Sidi Rezegh, Bir Hacheim, Alam Halfa, El Alamein, El Agheila and the left hook round the Mareth Line in support of the New Zealand Corps in March 1943. On return to England at the end of the North African campaign he was in command of A Squadron, a position he held until the end of the war.

The regiment joined 11th Armoured Division, commanded by Major-General “Pip” Roberts who had commanded 3rd RTR in the desert. Operation Epsom, to seize crossings over the Odon and Orne, gave Close his first crack at the enemy in Normandy. Crossings were taken over the Odon but the enemy’s hold on the Bourguebus Ridge beyond it had to be left until later.

Operation Goodwood, Montgomery’s July 1944 plan to destroy the bulk of German armour opposing the Normandy beachhead in the east to give the US 1st Army an opportunity to break out in the west, provided Close with a chance to show his skill. 11th Armoured Division led the advance of VII Corps with Close’s A Squadron in front.

Two railway lines lay between Close and the objective. He explained the action on many postwar battlefield tours: “My CO told me to get my squadron over to the far side of the railway embankment as quickly as possible. I did not want to scramble over the top, where we would be silhouetted but there were a few openings for farm tracks underneath. I stood up in my tank, waved my beret above my head, ordered ‘Conform to me’ over the radio and shot through the nearest hole like a rat up a drainpipe.”

All three squadrons of 3rd RTR used the “drainpipe” but came under intense anti-tank fire as they approached Bourguebus Ridge. Close had the back of his tank shot away by an 88 mm shell but took over another to continue in command. 3rd RTR suffered many tank losses that hot summer’s afternoon and capture of the dominating Bourguebus Ridge had to be left again to others.

Close was recommended for an immediate DSO for his part in the battle but received a Bar to his MC instead.

His marriage to Josephine Jones in 1939 was dissolved and in 1963 he married Pamela Deacon, who predeceased him. He is survived by three sons of his first marriage and a daughter of his second.

Major Bill Close, MC and Bar, wartime tank commander, was born on August 22, 1914. He died on May 28, 2006, aged 91.

[socom6]

Jeeez the heroes are dying. May they rest in peace, I thank them for their service.

These guys left big boots.