Farewell to Old Soldiers - 2022

Lawrence N. Brooks, oldest US veteran of WWII and perhaps the oldest man in the country, dies at 112 (ABC7)

Lawrence N. Brooks, the oldest World War II veteran in the U.S. - and believed to be the oldest man in the country - died on Wednesday at the age of 112...

Sidney Poitier obituary (Guardian)

During World War II, in November 1943, he lied about his age and enlisted in the Army. He was assigned to a Veteran's Administration hospital in Northport, New York, and was trained to work with psychiatric patients (Wikipedia)

When I saw that Hardy Kruger had died this week aged 93, I immediately remembered him from his film roles in "A Bridge Too Far" and "The Wild Geese". Not really an "old soldier". Unbeknownst to me, having grown up in Nazi Germany, of his own admission he "was raised to love Hitler" and had been drafted into the SS in 1944 age 16. Later in life he "frequently spoke publicly against extremism and for democracy, citing his own experiences." (see Wikipedia).

Also passing away this week aged 102, Brigadier Charles McGee, Legion of Merit (2), Distinguished Flying Cross (3), Bronze Star, Air Medal (26).

One of the "Tuskegee Airmen" in the Second World War, he stayed in the US Air Force postwar and later served in combat in both the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_McGee_(Tuskegee_Airman)

Sydney Baillieu Myer, (1926-2022) who served as a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Australian Navy aboard the corvette HMAS Pirie towards the end of the Second World War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baillieu_Myer

(His older brother Ken (1921-1992) also served in the RAN aboard the destroyer HMAS Arunta in WW2 and was awarded a DSC and was also mentioned in dispatches).

... and yet another old sailor passes... Noel Allanson, 1925-2022 who served as an Able Seaman in the Royal Australian Navy aboard the corvette HMAS Ipswich, which was present at the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay in 1945.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Allanson
https://www.navy.gov.au/hmas-ipswich-i

For those of you who ever find yourselves at a loose end with an hour or so to spare in Melbourne, Australia, the WW2 corvette HMAS Castlemaine is preserved at Williamstown and is well worth a visit:

https://hmascastlemaine.org.au/

Bamber Gascoigne, former University Challenge quizmaster, dies at 87 (Guardian)

National Service in the Grenadier Guards (Wikipedia).

Pa Sorie: The Sierra Leonean proud to have fought in World War Two (BBC)

Samuel Sorie Sesay, one of a dwindling group of West Africans who fought in the British army in World War Two, died last month in Sierra Leone at the age of 101... fighting the Japanese in Burma...

Werner Grossmann obituary (Guardian)

“I am completely at peace with myself” – so announced Werner Grossmann, who served as the last head of East Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the HVA, for four years from 1986. When challenged after German reunification in 1990, Grossmann, who has died aged 92, claimed his life had been dedicated to helping prevent the outbreak of another world war...

As the second world war drew to a close, the 16-year-old Grossman, with others of his age, as well as elderly men, were called up by the Nazis for the Volkssturm, a kind of home guard, to defend the rapidly disintegrating German front. “When the Red Army came, I took my bike and rode home”...

USAF Col. Gail S. Halvorsen “Uncle Wiggly Wings” died February 16 at the age of 101. He wrote The Berlin Candy Bomber. Yes, he was THAT candy bomber.

Bolivian soldier who killed Che Guevara dies at age 80 (Guardian)

Mario Terán “simply complied with his duty as a sergeant of the army,” said retired general Gary Prado, who led the group that captured Guevara in 1967 after a months-long pursuit... Terán was chosen to kill {Che} after orders to execute the already wounded Guevara, then 39, arrived from the capital. “It was the worst moment of my life,” he told reporters later. “I saw Che large, very large. His eyes shone intensely. I felt him coming over me and when he fixed his gaze on me, it made me dizzy... ‘Calm yourself,’ he told me, ‘and aim well! You are going to kill a man!’ Then I took a step back toward the door, close my eyes and fired”...

Russian attack on Kharkiv kills Holocaust survivor, 96 (Guardian)

A 96-year-old man who survived a string of Nazi concentration camps including Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen has been killed by an explosion during the Russian assault on the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv... “We are shocked to confirm the violent death of Boris Romanchenko, whose niece informed us on Monday morning that he died last Friday after a bomb or rocket hit the multistorey building where he lived in Kharkiv and his apartment was burned out”... Born in 1926 to a farming family in the village of Bondari outside the city of Sumy in north-eastern Ukraine, Romanchenko was taken as a prisoner of war after the German Nazi regime launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union in 1941... In 1942, he was deported to Dortmund, in Germany’s industrial Ruhr valley, to work as forced labourer in a mine. After attempting to escape, he was seized just as he was about to board an east-bound train and was then deported to Buchenwald concentration camp in January 1943. Romanchenko was later moved to Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea island of Usedom, where he was made to work on the V2 rocket programme, as well as Mittelbau-Dora and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. Romanchenko said he was liberated from Bergen-Belsen by British and American allied forces on 14 April 1945 just before he and other survivors were due to be killed by being fed poisoned food. He was enlisted to the Soviet army for five years after the end of the war...

Henry Patterson, author of The Eagle Has Landed, dies aged 92 (Guardian)

He used the pseudonym Jack Higgins for his books.

In 1947 he began two years of national service, at first with the East Yorkshire Regiment, and later as a non-commissioned officer of the Royal Horse Guards Regiment of the Household Cavalry doing security work on the East German border (Wikipedia).

>13 John5918: Jack Higgins and Wilbur Smith novels were a staple of my adolescence!

Frank Donovan, 1922-2022. I was saddened to learn of the death of an old family friend, Frank Donovan, just shy of his 100th birthday. Frank served in the Australian Army in the Second World War, apocryphally first losing all his hair as a young man when he was present at the bombing of Darwin. After the war, Frank returned to farming at Kilmore, Victoria, which was where I first met him when I was a young boy back in the '70's, when he threw me on the back of a large chestnut horse that promptly bolted down the Dry Creek Road with me clinging for dear life... but that's another story! Vale Frank, good innings!

UN confirms death of one of last Rwandan genocide fugitives (Guardian)

One of the last five fugitives wanted for his role in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Phénéas Munyarugarama, died in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2002, UN prosecutors have announced... A former lieutenant colonel in the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR), Munyarugarama, who was born in 1948, was charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda with eight counts including genocide and crimes against humanity...

Roger Angell: Baseball's reluctant poet laureate dies at 101 (BBC)

He served in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II (Wikipedia).

Woman warrior: A nation mourns the passing of a Queensland refugee (Brisbane Times)

Aguil Chut Deng joined the Sudan People's Liberation Army in 1984. She died in Australia recently. She is to be buried in South Sudan’s Heroes’ Cemetery at the president’s behest. I knew Aguil. RIP.

Bruce Kent obituary (Guardian)

Bruce Kent, who has died aged 92, was the most controversial Catholic priest of his generation in Britain. To his detractors, his high-profile involvement with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament during its renaissance in the 1980s was unsuitable behaviour for an ordained member of a church that accepted the arguments for nuclear deterrence. For his admirers – and there were very many more of them than detractors – he was a prophetic and charismatic figure who almost single-handedly shook English Catholicism out of its complacency, studied moderation and instinctive avoidance of all things political. To see Monsignor Kent exorcising the Polaris nuclear submarine base at Faslane on the west coast of Scotland, or leading protests at Greenham Common, Berkshire, against the deployment of US cruise missiles, or allowing bailiffs to seize his few worldly possessions rather than pay with his taxes for the proliferation of nuclear weapons was a potent reminder that the Christian gospel is a social and radical one. One of the ironies of the ferocious campaign waged against Kent by self-avowedly God-fearing Conservative MPs, MI5 and the Vatican’s diplomatic representative in Britain... was that the subject of their fury was such a mild-mannered man. Kent was no firebrand and even when confronted and abused by his detractors was emollient. He followed Christ’s example, often quoted but notoriously hard in practice, of turning the other cheek...

He served as an officer in the Royal Tank Regiment from 1947 to 1949.

Sydney Kinsman, aged 100, one of the last surviving Australian "Rats of Tobruk" has died at Alice Springs. A member of 2/48th battalion, he served at Tobruk, was captured at the first Battle of El Alamain, and escaped Italian prison camps to Switzerland before returning to Australia.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-18/sydney-kinsman-wwii-veteran-rat-of-tobruk...

Hells Angels motorcycle club leader Sonny Barger dies at age 83 (Guardian)

According to Wikipedia, he enlisted in the U.S. Army aged sixteen in 1955, but was given an honorable discharge fourteen months later when it was discovered that he had forged his birth certificate in order to be able to join.

Last remaining Medal of Honor recipient from second world war to lie in state at US Capitol (Guardian)

Hershel W “Woody” Williams... who died on Wednesday aged 98, was a legend in his native West Virginia for his heroics under fire over several crucial hours at the Battle of Iwo Jima. As a young US marine corporal, Williams went ahead of his unit in February 1945 and eliminated a series of Japanese machine-gun positions. Facing small-arms fire, Williams fought for four hours, repeatedly returning to prepare demolition charges and obtain flamethrowers...

Italy’s most decorated second world war resistance fighter dies aged 103 (Guardian)

Mario Fiorentini, Italy’s most decorated resistance fighter against fascist and Nazi forces during the second world war, has died in a Rome hospital aged 103... Fiorentini commanded a group of partisans, the name those who fought the regime of the dictator Benito Mussolini and then Italy’s German Nazi occupiers gave to themselves. In one battle, his group emerged victorious against three German battalions. Fiorentini became legendary among partisans for having escaped from Nazi-run jails four times. In December 1943, he lobbed a hand bomb at a Nazi truck near a Rome jail where the inmates inclued two future Italian presidents, Giuseppe Saragat and Sandro Pertini. “The purpose was obviously to attack the Nazis but also to let the two imprisoned anti-fascists feel that the resistance in Rome was still strong and active,” said the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera of that bold exploit. Fiorentini escaped on his bicycle, dodging bullets the Germans fired from the windows of the jail, the newspaper said. He married a fellow resistance fighter, Lucia Ottobrini, in 1945... For his courageous actions, Italy later awarded Fiorentini three silver valour medals and three War Merit Crosses...

Last veteran of Belgian SAS dies aged 97 (Guardian)

The last veteran of the Belgian SAS has died aged 97, marking the loss of another living link with the second world war in Europe. Jaak Daemen, a founder member of the Belgian SAS, which was created in 1944 to carry out sabotage and intelligence gathering behind enemy lines, died earlier this month. He helped liberate the Netherlands and capture Karl Dönitz, the German admiral who created the U-boat fleet and briefly led the Nazi regime after the suicide of Adolf Hitler...

Sterling Lord, agent who championed Jack Kerouac and more, dies at 102 (Guardian)

serving in the Army Air Force during the second world war...

Queen Elizabeth II served in the military during World War II. Princess Elizabeth, as she was then, trained as a lorry driver and mechanic in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, ATS, which was the women's branch of the army.

>27 John5918: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MThEYAKITOk

>28 Bushwhacked:

Thanks, mate. A nice little clip. My mum was in the ATS, as a radar operator with a heavy anti-aircraft battery.

... and in a minor kerfuffle going on down here in the State of Victoria, state government ministers will all need to be re-sworn into office next week by the Governor to pledge allegiance to King Charles III, as Victorian Ministers of the Crown only swear allegiance to the current sovereign, their oaths or affirmations not including the phrase "and heirs and successors" as done in other Australian states and federally.

William Klein, who helped revolutionize photography, dies aged 96 (Guardian)

He joined the US army during the second world war and was stationed in Germany and then France, where he permanently relocated after his service...

NSA analyst jailed for life for selling US secrets to Soviets dies aged 80 (Guardian)

Prior to his employment by the NSA, Ronald Pelton served in the United States Air Force (Wikipedia).

My friend and I were sitting on the curb outside the barbershop at Fort Dix NJ. we enlisted together in Aug 66. Down the street comes marching the elite of the US Army at that time, jump boots blowsed, Khaki uniform all starched and blue infantry ropes looped through his lapel. Hi Buddy, whats up,Buddy was from the neighborhood and us two recruits were very proud of him. The last time we were together was a Super Bowl party (the 1st) at me Fathers house. Where ya going Buddy, over to McGuire Air Force base,elements of the 179th Airborne are going to Nam, see youse guys soon, Buddy was killed 21 days later in an ambush in the Ira Drang Valley, one of the 1st major fire fights of the war....AMDG....

>27 John5918:

Queen Elizabeth II: How wartime helped define her life of service (BBC)

One of the Ritchie Boys, brilliant WWII spy Maximilian Lerner died September 10 at the age of 98. He wrote The expendable Spy.

Great Escape prisoner Vyvyan Howard, dies aged 102 (BBC)

A World War Two pilot, who was a prisoner of war at the camp made famous by the film The Great Escape, has died aged 102. Captain Vyvyan Howard, from Banbury, was captured and held at the German Stalag Luft III camp after his plane was shot down in 1941. During that time, he aided attempts to dig tunnels under the perimeter fences... Mr Howard joined the Royal Navy as a pilot shortly before the start of World War Two and was shot down and captured in the ill-fated Kirkenes raid in the north of Norway... After the war, he continued his career in the Fleet Air Arm and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross (DSC) for gallantry during the Suez Crisis...

Father of modern election science, Sir David Butler, dies at 98 (Guardian)

he was commissioned as a lieutenant to serve in the second world war

Sapper Ernie Walker, 2/8 Field Company, Second World War, served Middle East and New Guinea. Last surviving NSW "Rat of Tobruk", has died aged 106.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-29/rats-of-tobruk-veteran-ernie-walker-dies-...

Poland’s only cosmonaut, Mirosław Hermaszewski, dies aged 81 (Guardian)

He was a pilot in the air force.

... noticed in the paper today an obituary for Hiroshi Miyamura, 1925-2022, as US Army Korean War Veteran who received the Medal of Honour...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshi_H._Miyamura