John Eisenhower, Military Historian and Son of the President

A Peninsula Library patron, with who I have developed a friendship, in part based on a shared interest in history, told me about JSE's passing (I'd already seen the item). Then he mentioned that John graduated from West Point on 4 June 1944 — D-Day, the day his father sent Allied troops to invade Europe, to land in Normandy in the beginning of the campaign to dislodge the Nazis.

Leslie Priest/Associated Press — John Eisenhower and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower visiting Culzean Castle in Scotland in 1946.

 Mr. Eisenhower was an Army officer in World War II and the Korean War and a national security adviser during his father’s presidency, but at that point he was still viewed primarily as the son of Ike, the American hero. 

National security adviser; fascinating.

John Sheldon Doud Eisenhower was born in Denver while his father was stationed at an Army post in Panama. As a child, he toured World War I battle sites with his father, who was writing an Army guidebook to them. He attended high school in the Philippines during his father’s tour there and followed his path by entering West Point in July 1941.

But, as he recalled in his memoir, “I was not only his son; I was a young lieutenant who needed on occasion to be straightened out.” At one point, he wrote, “I asked him in all earnestness: ‘If we should meet an officer who ranks above me but below you, how do we handle this? Should I salute first and when they return my salute, do you return theirs?’ “Dad’s annoyed reaction was short. ‘John, there isn’t an officer in this theater who doesn’t rank above you and below me.’ ” 

Rosie the Riveter

Belated Medal of Honor recipient

Vernon Baker, who was the only living black veteran awarded the Medal of Honor for valor in World War II, receiving it 52 years after he wiped out four German machine-gun nests on a hilltop in northern Italy, died Tuesday at his home near St. Maries, Idaho. He was 90. The cause was complications of brain cancer, said Ron Hodge, owner of the Hodge Funeral Home in St. Maries.

“I was a soldier and I had a job to do,” Mr. Baker said after receiving the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for bravery, from President Bill Clinton in a White House ceremony on Jan. 13, 1997.

Rick Wilking/Reuters - Mr. Baker received the Medal of Honor from President Bill Clinton at age 77.

But in the segregated armed forces of World War II, black soldiers were usually confined to jobs in manual labor or supply units. Even when the Army allowed blacks to go into combat, it rarely accorded them the recognition they deserved. Of the 433 Medals of Honor awarded by all branches of the military during the war, not a single one went to any of the 1.2 million blacks in the service.

In the early 1990s, responding to requests from black veterans and a white former captain who had commanded black troops in combat, the Army asked Shaw University, a historically black college in Raleigh, N.C., to investigate why no blacks had received the Medal of Honor during World War II. The inquiry found no documents proving that blacks had been discriminated against in decisions to award the medal, but concluded that a climate of racism had prevented recognition of heroic deeds.

Military historians gave the Army the names of 10 black servicemen who they believed should have been considered for the Medal of Honor. Then an Army board, looking at their files with all references to race deleted, decided that seven of these men deserved to be cited for bravery “above and beyond the call of duty.”

Four of the men — Lt. John R. Fox of Cincinnati; Pfc. Willy F. James Jr. of Kansas City, Mo.; Staff Sgt. Ruben Rivers of Oklahoma City; and Pvt. George Watson of Birmingham, Ala. — had been killed in action. Two others — Staff Sgt. Edward A. Carter Jr. of Los Angeles and Lt. Charles L. Thomas of Detroit, who retired as a major — had died in the decades after the war. Those six received the medal posthumously at the White House ceremony in 1997.

Mr. Baker, the lone survivor among the seven, was greeted with a standing ovation as he entered the East Room to the strains of “God Bless America” played by the Marine Corps Band. As Mr. Clinton placed the Medal of Honor around his neck, Mr. Baker stared into space, a tear rolling down his left cheek. “I was thinking about what was going on up on the hill that day,” he said later.

That day was April 5, 1945. Lieutenant Baker, a small man — 5 feet 5 inches and 140 pounds — was leading 25 black infantrymen through a maze of German bunkers and machine gun nests near Viareggio, Italy, a coastal town north of Pisa. About 5 a.m., they reached the south side of a ravine, 250 yards from Castle Aghinolfi, a German stronghold they hoped to capture.

Lieutenant Baker observed a telescope pointing out of a slit. Crawling under the opening, he emptied the clip of his M-1 rifle, killing two German soldiers inside the position. Then he came upon a well-camouflaged machine-gun nest whose two-man crew was eating breakfast. He shot and killed both soldiers.

After Capt. John F. Runyon, his company commander, who was white, joined the group, a German soldier hurled a grenade that hit Captain Runyon in his helmet but failed to explode. Lieutenant Baker shot the German twice as he tried to flee. He then blasted open the concealed entrance of another dugout with a hand grenade, shot one German soldier who emerged, tossed another grenade into the dugout and entered it, firing his machine gun and killing two more Germans.

Enemy machine-gun and mortar fire began to inflict heavy casualties among the platoon. Lieutenant Baker’s company commander had gone back for reinforcements, but they never arrived, so the remnants of the platoon had to withdraw. Lieutenant Baker, supported by covering fire from one of his soldiers, destroyed two machine-gun positions to allow the evacuation. Seventeen of the men in the platoon had been killed by time the firefight ended. The next night, Lieutenant Baker voluntarily led a battalion advance through enemy minefields and heavy fire.

Lieutenant Baker received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest award for bravery. Asked a half-century later whether he had ever given up hope of being awarded the Medal of Honor, he seemed surprised. “I never thought about getting it,” he said.

Tom Davenport - Vernon Baker, a World War II veteran, received the nation's highest military award in 1997.

Freddie Stowers, a black veteran of World War I nominated for the medal in 1918, finally received it posthumously from President George Bush in 1991.

Vernon Joseph Baker was born on Dec. 17, 1919, in Cheyenne, Wyo., the son of a carpenter. After his parents died in an automobile accident when he was 4, he and two older sisters moved in with their grandparents, who also lived in Cheyenne.

The youngster developed a penchant for trouble, so he was sent to Boys Town in Omaha at age 10. He stayed there for three years, then earned a high school diploma while living with an aunt in Iowa.

He joined the Army in June 1941 and was sent to Camp Wolters, Tex., for basic training — his first trip to the Deep South. When he boarded a bus to the camp after stepping off the train, the driver shouted a racial epithet and told him to “get to the back of the bus where you belong,” he recalled years later in an interview with The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash.

When he began to show leadership potential, he was sent to Officer Candidate School, graduating as a second lieutenant in 1942. He went to Italy in 1944 with the 92nd Infantry Division’s 370th Regiment, which was composed of black enlisted men and black junior officers but had white officers in senior positions.


In October 1944, Lieutenant Baker was shot in the arm by a German soldier, and when he awoke from surgery he noticed that he was in a segregated hospital ward.

After the war, he remained in Italy for three years, then returned to the United States and re-enlisted. He stayed in the Army until 1968, then worked for the Red Cross at Fort Ord, Calif., counseling needy military families. After his first wife, Fern, died in 1986, he retired and moved to a rural section of Idaho to pursue his love of hunting.

Mr. Baker’s survivors include his second wife, Heidy; three children from his first marriage; a stepdaughter; and a stepgrandson.

Asked at the awards ceremony how he had felt about serving in a segregated unit, Mr. Baker replied: “I was an angry young man. We were all angry. But we had a job to do, and we did it. My personal thoughts were that I knew things would get better, and I’m glad to say that I’m here to see it.”

Vernon Baker, Belated Medal of Honor Recipient, Dies at 90
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Published: July 14, 2010 - NY Times

iconic Times Square kissing photo

Edith Shain dies at 91; WWII nurse in iconic Times Square kissing photo

She was a married, part-time nurse when she joined the jubilant crowd celebrating V-J Day and was kissed by a young sailor. The photo by Life magazine's Alfred Eisenstaedt was seen by millions.

By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times. June 24, 2010

It's one of the most iconic images to emerge from World War II.

Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt's photograph of an anonymous young sailor in a dark-blue uniform dipping a white-uniformed nurse backward while giving her a long kiss in the middle of Times Square on Aug. 14, 1945, symbolized the euphoria surrounding the news that the Japanese had surrendered and the war was finally over.

Edith Shain, a retired Los Angeles elementary school teacher who claimed to be the mystery nurse in the photo seen by millions around the world, died of cancer Sunday at her home in Los Angeles, said her son, Michael. She was 91.

Shain was a married, 27-year-old part-time nurse at Doctors Hospital in Manhattan when she joined the jubilant crowd in Times Square celebrating V-J Day.

"You can imagine how people felt. They were just elated," Shain said in a  2005 interview with The Times. "Someone grabbed me and kissed me, and I let him because he fought for his country. I closed my eyes when I kissed him. I never saw him."

When Eisenstaedt's photo ran in Life magazine the following week — he had neglected to get the names of his subjects, whose faces are obscured in the picture — Shain recognized herself but was too embarrassed to tell anyone it was her.

"But I knew it was me," she said. "I was wearing the same kind of shoes, and I had the same kind of seams in my stockings. And a little bit of my slip was showing."

Immediately after the sailor kissed her, Shain said, she encountered a soldier who also wanted a kiss. But that was enough for her, and she and the friend she was with left Times Square.

Shain later moved to Los Angeles, where she worked as a nurse before becoming a longtime kindergarten and first-grade teacher at Hancock Park Elementary School. She was married and divorced three times and had three sons.

In 1980, no longer embarrassed by her Times Square encounter with the anonymous sailor and wanting a copy of the famous photo, Shain wrote to Life magazine and identified herself as the nurse.

Eisenstaedt himself flew out to meet her.

"He looked at my legs and said I was the one," Shain recalled.

Eisenstaedt gave Shain a copy of the photo and, according to The Times article, Life flew her to New York for a luncheon.

In one of his books that he later inscribed for her, Eisenstaedt wrote that she was "the one and only nurse" whom he had photographed in Times Square.

But Bobbi Baker Burrows, a Life editor familiar with the subject, told the Associated Press in 2008 that Eisenstaedt, who died in 1995, was never sure that Shain was the nurse in the photo.

Burrows recalled that when interest in the photo was renewed, Life ran an article saying, "If you are the sailor or the nurse in the picture, please step forward."

"We received claims from a few nurses and dozens of sailors, but we could never prove that any of them were the actual people, and Eisenstaedt himself just said he didn't know," she said.

Carl Muscarello, a former New York City police detective, was one of the men who have claimed to be the sailor in the photo.

"Everything points to him," Shain told the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel in 1995. "He was tall enough that he could execute that form."

During the 60th anniversary of V-J Day in 2005, Shain and Muscarello appeared together in Times Square, where they exchanged a kiss for photographers and a large crowd.

Shain, however, was still not convinced that Muscarello was the sailor who had bussed her.

"I can't say he isn't," she said. "I just can't say he is. There is no way to tell."

Born July 29, 1918, in Tarrytown, N.Y., Shain graduated from a nursing school in New York and earned a bachelor's degree in education at New York University. She retired from teaching in 1985.

"The famed kissing nurse," as the New York Daily News once called her, often served as honorary grand marshal of Veterans Day and Memorial Day parades and spoke to World War II veterans' groups.

She was scheduled to appear in Times Square in August for a V-J Day celebration.

She also had been serving as national spokesperson for a grassroots initiative to establish a permanent national day of remembrance on the second Sunday of every August to honor the men and women of the World War II generation.

"She used to call herself an accidental celebrity, and she felt she should use that celebrity for the common men and women of the World War II generation," said Warren Hegg, national supervisor of the Keep the Spirit of '45 Alive initiative.

In addition to her son Michael, Shain is survived by her sons Justin and Robert; six grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.

Great Escape

Jack Harrison: wartime bomber pilot and Stalag Luft III PoW [London Times obituary]

An RAF bomber pilot who was shot down in 1942 on his first raid over enemy-occupied Europe, Jack Harrison became part of the team that planned and executed the “Great Escape” from Stalag Luft III in 1944.

The breakout, from the camp in Silesia in March 1944, was the culmination of more than two months of feverish tunnelling, which involved the digging of three tunnels, christened “Tom”, “Dick” and “Harry”, the longest of which, Harry, was eventually selected for the attempt.

On the night of March 24, in the bitter Silesian winter, Harrison was 98th on the list of 200 PoWs who were lined up to crawl through Harry, surface from the tunnel outside the perimeter wire and get to the cover of the dense pine forests that surrounded Stalag Luft III. In the event 76 prisoners had made it through the tunnel when, as bad luck would have it, one of the guards outside the perimeter wire momentarily left the path he was supposed to be patrolling on sentry duty in order to attend to the wants of nature. He stumbled into the open exit hole and fired a warning shot into the air.

As pre-arranged, those who were still in the tunnel got out and returned to their huts, destroying all the documents that had been forged to give them cover for their attempt to get to coasts and frontiers. Only three of those who escaped from the camp made it back to the UK. Two Norwegians managed to get to the Baltic coast and thence by boat to neutral Sweden, while a Dutchman escaped through France and Spain. The remaining 73 were recaptured.

The Great Escape was to have a tragic sequel. Enraged by the audacity and scale of the attempt from one of the Reich’s most inaccessible PoW camps Hitler ordered, in defiance of the laws of war, that an example should be made of the Stalag Luft III escapers. Of those recaptured 50 were shot by the Gestapo on his orders, a crime depicted in the film The Great Escape (1963), directed by John Sturges and starring Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson and Donald Pleasance.

[Ed: one of the all-time great films. A favourite. But, Bronson gets mentioned and James Garner doesn't?]


Jack Harrison was born in 1912 and was teaching Latin at Dornoch Academy in Sutherland when the Second World War broke out in 1939. Called up into the RAF he was posted to Bomber Command after basic pilot training and commissioned as a flying officer. His aircraft was hit by flak on his first operation, an attack on the Dutch port of Den Helder in November 1942.

Harrison was forced to ditch in the sea off the Dutch coast and was captured by the Germans. After being held in a number of camps he was sent to Stalag Luft III at Sagan, one of Germany’s largest PoW facilities, holding almost 10,000 air force officers from the RAF, US Army Air Forces and other Allied air forces. During the preparation for the Great Escape Harrison, one of the camp’s gardeners, was among assistants to the plan’s mastermind, Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, helping to dispose of dirt from the tunnels.

[That is a great scene in the film, when they bring the dirt out to the garden.]

The first 30 of those chosen to make the escape attempt were selected for their fluent German, which would give them the best chance of avoiding detection while attempting a “home run”. The next 70 had all worked on one or other of the tunnels and were acquainted with the conditions, and the last 100 were chosen out of a hat from 500 volunteers.

Harrison had acquired a working knowledge of German, though he was by no means fluent, and was to adopt the guise of a Hungarian electrician working for the German engineering company Siemens. He was in Block 104 waiting for the call to the tunnel when the remainder of the escape had to be aborted. He quickly burnt his forged identity papers and got out of the disguise he was to have escaped in. He remained at Stalag Luft II until the camp was evacuated as the Red Army drew near the eastern frontiers of the Reich.

When the war ended he returned to his wife, whom he had married in 1943, and resumed his teaching career, moving in 1958 to Rothsay where he was appointed director of education for the Isle of Bute. He retired in 1975.

His wife, Jean, predeceased him and he is survived by a son and a daughter.

Jack Harrison, wartime bomber pilot and Stalag Luft III PoW, was born on December 18, 1912. He died on June 4, 2010, aged 97

Decorated heroine of the French Resistance

Andrée Peel, who died on March 5 aged 105, was a much-decorated heroine of the French Resistance; known as Agent Rose, she helped dozens of British and American pilots escape from occupied Europe and only escaped death at the hands of the Nazis by the skin of her teeth.

When the Germans invaded France, Andrée Virot, as she then was, was in her mid 30s and running her own beauty salon in the Breton port of Brest. Her first act of defiance took place as German troops entered the town, when she gave shelter to a group of fleeing French soldiers and begged her neighbours for civilian clothes for them so they would not be captured. She was subsequently amazed – and disconcerted – to find that German soldiers of all ranks had been taught fluent French and that some even spoke Breton.


When General de Gaulle declared in his famous broadcast of June 18 1940 that "France has lost a battle, but she has not lost the war," Andrée and some friends got together to type out the message and slip copies through people's letterboxes. She soon became involved in the Resistance, circulating the organisation's clandestine newspaper. Within weeks she was made head of an under-section of the organisation, responsible for sending information to the Allies.


Brest was an important naval base, and information about shipping movements was vital to the Allied war effort. By establishing contacts in the dockyard, Andrée was able to pass on information about naval installations, as well as about troop movements and the results of Allied aerial attacks. These were mainly directed at the harbour area, but many bombs missed their target and fell on the town. No one blamed the Allies. She recalled one man whose house had been destroyed leaping with joy when he found that his precious radio, on which he listened to the BBC, had survived intact. On another occasion she came across a group of teenage boys singing "What joy, Tommy, now that we are united at last" to a well known tune, as British bombs rained all around.

Joy at bombs falling; a better alternative to Nazism.


During her three years with the Resistance – during which she was known first as Agent X and then as Agent Rose – Andrée helped save the lives of more than 100 Allied pilots. Her team used torches to guide Allied planes to improvised landing strips and smuggled fugitive airmen aboard submarines and gunboats on remote parts of the coast, often feeling their way in the dark past German coastal shelters. The work was extremely dangerous. Any family found harbouring an Allied airman risked being shot and in 1943 Andrée herself was forced to leave Brest after a comrade (who had been forced to watch his family being tortured by the Gestapo) informed on her.

She fled to Paris and assumed another identity, but a week after D-Day she was again betrayed by a comrade, who confessed under torture. She was arrested and taken to Gestapo headquarters where she was stripped naked, interrogated and subjected to a series of tortures, including simulated drowning and being savagely beaten around the throat. As a result her gullet was displaced and her tonsils crushed. She continued to suffer pain for the rest of her life.

Simulated drowning = waterboarding.

Eventually she and other prisoners were transported to the women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück where, on arrival, they were forced to strip and frogmarched into what she later realised was a gas chamber. She never discovered why they were released since many others lost their lives. She noticed later that the camp did a brisk trade with local farmers who bought the ash from the camp crematorium to spread on their fields.

Human ash as fertilizer.


Andrée narrowly escaped death on several more occasions. She fell ill with what a doctor told her was meningitis, but recovered. Then, during the daily roll call, she was selected for the gas chamber but was saved by a Polish fellow inmate who crept up to a table and snatched up the piece of paper with Andrée's number on it without being seen by the SS. Eventually she was transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp where life seemed easier, initially at least, and she was able to send messages to her family in Brest via French prisoners-of-war working in the fields outside.


But, as the Allies closed in towards the end of April 1945, it became obvious that the Nazis were determined to obliterate evidence of their crimes. By the time she and a group of fellow prisoners were lined up against a wall, they had heard that some prisoners had been shot and others killed with flame throwers, so they had little doubt what was in store. As a firing squad drew near, she wrote later, the terrified prisoners heard a telephone ringing in the camp commandant's office. It was a message from the Americans to the effect that the firing squad had been seen entering the camp and that if they wanted to live, they would spare the lives of the prisoners. The soldiers fled.


Andrée Peel was awarded the Croix de Guerre (with palm), the Croix de Guerre (silver star), the Cross of the Voluntary Fighter, the Medal of the Resistance, the Liberation Cross – all French awards – as well as the American Medal of Freedom, awarded by President Eisenhower, and the King's Commendation for Brave Conduct, given by George VI. After the war she received a personal letter from Winston Churchill congratulating her on her work. Much later, at age of 99, she was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, France's highest honour, receiving the award from her own brother, General Maurice Virot, a retired four-star general.


After her release from Buchenwald, Andrée returned to Paris where she was welcomed by crowds singing the Marseillaise, and fulfilled a promise made in 1944 to make a pilgrimage to the Sacré Coeur church in Montmartre to thank God for her deliverance.


Andrée Marthe Virot was born on February 3 1905 into a religious and deeply patriotic French family. Her father was a civil engineer who specialised in building bridges. When she returned to a devastated Brest after the war, she learned that he had been killed after walking too close to a German soldier who was fishing using hand grenades. A brother had also lost his life in Germany while fighting in the ranks of the Free French. She returned to Paris where she became the manager of La Caravelle, a restaurant near the Luxembourg Gardens specialising in "first class cuisine at acceptable prices". News that she was a former Resistance worker attracted many clients including leading politicians and former Allied servicemen.


One day a young English student called John Peel came into the restaurant. He was supposed to be learning French, but his accent was so comical that Andrée offered to give him lessons. Though he was 20 years her junior, a relationship developed, and they ended up getting married. Her husband made his career as a neuropsychologist at Barrow Gurney mental hospital in Bristol and they settled in a village nearby. Andrée always felt she had been born with a special gift: "Very often I could feel a kind of electric current at my fingertips, sometimes extremely hot, and this current passed out of my hands into the air. When I wanted to concentrate it and intensify it, my wish was granted". In Bristol she laid her "electric" hands on a woman who had been injured after stumbling on the stairs and discovered she had the gift of healing. "My future path had opened in front of me as if I had been guided thereto by some divine order," she recalled. She established herself as a healer and dietitian, building up a faithful list of clients.


Though Andrée Peel always kept the striped blue-and-grey tunic she had been forced to wear in the concentration camps, she never intended to write a book about her experiences until it was suggested that by doing so she would be telling the stories of those who had not survived. Her autobiography, Miracles do Happen, appeared in 1999. When she celebrated her centenary, Andrée Peel said: "I still feel like a woman of 50. I think that time has forgotten me." The secret to a happy life, she observed, was a good companion – and eating the main meal of the day at lunchtime. Her husband predeceased her.


Published: 7:11PM GMT 09 Mar 2010

Modesto Cartagena

United States Department of Defense - Modesto Cartagena in 2000

Fighting in an Army regiment made up almost entirely of Puerto Rican soldiers, Mr. Cartagena helped win victories over discrimination as well as Communist troops.

March 4, 2010
Modesto Cartagena, Hero of Korea, Is Dead at 87
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN

Modesto Cartagena, who was cited for heroism in the Korean War while fighting in an Army regiment composed almost entirely of soldiers from Puerto Rico and acclaimed for its bravery, died Tuesday at his home in Guayama, P.R. He was 87. The cause was a heart attack, said his son Modesto Jr.

In September 1950, the 65th Infantry Regiment arrived at the South Korean port of Pusan. Over the next three years the regiment fought in nine major battles, including a blocking maneuver that helped Marines complete a fighting retreat from the Chinese Communist onslaught at the Chosin Reservoir in December 1950.

The Puerto Rican soldiers surmounted not only the Communist enemy but also prejudicial attitudes. Brig. Gen. William Harris, the regiment’s commander during the early stages of the Korean War, was quoted by The Denver Post as having written after the war that he was reluctant to take the post because the Puerto Rican troops were disparaged in the military as a “rum and Coca-Cola outfit.” But, he continued, he came to view them as “the best damn soldiers in that war.” More than 3,800 members of the regiment were killed or wounded in Korea.

Sergeant Cartagena, a member of the regiment’s First Battalion, received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s highest award for valor after the Medal of Honor, for “extraordinary heroism” in a single-handed assault that enabled his company to seize a hill near Yonchon, South Korea, on April 19, 1951. Sergeant Cartagena had charged ahead of his men, who were pinned down by a “well-entrenched and fanatically determined hostile force,” as his citation put it. His rifle was shot away from him and he was wounded by enemy grenades, but he dispatched five Communist emplacements by tossing grenades at them.

That is really the stuff of movies.

A native of Cayey, P.R., Mr. Cartagena was born on July 22, 1922. He fought in Europe during World War II, and besides the Distinguished Service Cross was awarded Silver and Bronze Stars in both World War II and Korea. In addition to Modesto Cartagena Jr., he is survived by his sons Luis, Fernando and Vitin; his daughters, Sara and Wilma; his sisters, Maria and Virginia; and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. His wife, Sara, died in 1995.

The 65th Infantry Regiment became known as the Borinqueneers, the term derived from an Indian word for Puerto Rico denoting “land of the brave lord.” Its history was related in the 2007 television documentary “The Borinqueneers,” produced, directed and written by Noemi Figueroa Soulet.

On the 50th anniversary of the regiment’s arrival in Korea, Louis Caldera, the secretary of the Army, unveiled a plaque in its honor at Arlington National Cemetery. Mr. Cartagena attended in his old dress uniform, with its stripes denoting a sergeant first class. “I’m just sorry that I’m too old to go to Afghanistan to fight,” he told The El Paso Times in 2002. “I’d do it all over again if I could.”

Daring American stuntman

Another US person whose obituary I found in a London paper, and not in a paper in the US.

Robert Hoy as Joe Butler in the TV series The High Chaparral.


Daring American stuntman who often doubled for Tony Curtis and starred in the TV series The High Chaparral - guardian.co.uk, Sunday 28 February 2010 17.55 GMT

Among the many unsung heroes of film history are those individuals who make actors seem more athletic and daring than they could possibly be. Although the raison d'etre of his profession is invisibility, the stuntman and stunts co-ordinator Robert Hoy, who has died of cancer aged 82, was one of the few whose name and face have emerged from anonymity.


As well as enjoying a long career as a stuntman – he continued into his 60s – Hoy, an expert horseman, appeared in more than 150 films and television series in small parts. One of his largest roles was the ranch-hand Joe Butler in 62 episodes of The High Chaparral from 1967 to 1971. With his thick black moustache, dark hair and sideboards, and invariably wearing a blue shirt, Hoy made Butler into a hard-riding, hard-fighting, hard-drinking masculine figure, willing to risk his life again and again to defend the Chaparral ranch from enemies.

Sideboards?

Risking one's life goes with the job of performing stunts, although extreme precautions are always taken to ensure safety. However, this has not entirely prevented accidents. On the set of Spartacus (1960), Kirk Douglas accidentally cracked one of Hoy's ribs when he rammed a fake sword into the stuntman's side. While hanging upside down for the 1980s TV series Magnum PI, Hoy broke his leg and ankle. "I recovered and got back to work," he recalled. "I didn't think twice about it. That's just part of the business." Hoy, a veteran of the second world war, had been rejected from active service in the Korean war because of a bad injury to his right leg: "That hurt more than the actual injury."



Hoy considered that one of the most dangerous stunts he ever did was for the Stanley Kramer film The Defiant Ones (1958), in which he doubled for Tony Curtis, while Ivan Dixon did the same for Sidney Poitier. On the run as escaped convicts, and chained together, they find themselves in the rapids of California's Kern river. "The current was moving along at about six knots," Hoy remembered. "There were many outcroppings and rocks, some of them below the water. There also were old fence posts, downed trees and whirlpools. There was no element of control. All we could do was try to stay alive, but it all looked great on film."

I remember the scene in the film, and I remember Ivan Dixon separately.

Hoy specialised in horse work and explained that "all stunts have an element of danger, but horses have minds of their own, and in the two or three seconds of doing a stunt, things can go wrong". Although he was born in New York City, he got to know horses as a child when he worked part-time on a dude ranch in the Catskill mountains. He continued to handle horses there until he joined the marines near the end of the second world war. (Hoy always wore two pins: one honouring the marines, the other the fraternity of stuntmen.)

On leaving the service, he took a job as a cowboy on a Nevada ranch, before going to Hollywood in 1950. His first film was Ambush, where he doubled for Robert Taylor on a horse, jumping fences and falling off. Hoy was lucky to have the stuntman Dave Sharpe as his mentor, who taught him how not to get killed. Hoy continued to do stunts and act. Besides being a favourite of Curtis, he was stunt double for Clint Eastwood in four movies: The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), The Enforcer (1976), The Gauntlet (1977) and Bronco Billy (1980).

Hoy doubled for Audie Murphy in To Hell and Back (1955), in which Murphy, the most decorated combat soldier of the second world war, played himself. He also did some of the more tricky bits of action for Murphy in Destry (1954) and Walk the Proud Land (1956).


Hoy was a lifetime member of the Stuntmen's Association of Motion Pictures, which he co-founded in 1961. A few days before he died, he received the Golden Boot, an award given by the Motion Picture & Television Fund to those who have made significant contributions to the western genre.


He is survived by Kiva, his wife of 22 years, and a son, Christopher.


• Robert Francis Hoy, stuntman and actor; born 3 April 1927; died 8 February 2010

Colourful and successful career in the wartime RAF

Jack Brotherton-Ratcliffe, who has died aged 90, co-founded the Croudace group of companies, one of the biggest and most successful privately-owned construction companies in Britain.

The thumbnail picture is accompanied by this summary: Innovative building tycoon who prospered in the 1980s property boom but insisted on an ethical approach. Implied is that ethics is not necessary for prospering, and that ethics do not preclude prospering.


Published: 5:56PM GMT 28 Feb 2010 - London Telegraph

He enjoyed a colourful and successful career in the wartime RAF, piloting Liberators and Halifaxes on more than 90 operations during 1943 and 1944, and ending the war as a squadron-leader. For his exploits he was awarded the DSO.


John Brotherton-Ratcliffe, known as Jack, was born on November 18 1919, the fifth of a family of seven. His early years were spent in Ealing and later Kenley, with a year in Belgium when he was six to ensure he could speak his French mother's language.


At Harrow, Ratcliffe had mixed success, excelling in gymnastics and electro-mechanics. He was in the Officer Training Corps and had a keen interest in flying, building a kit aircraft, the "Flying Flea", which had a very dubious safety record. Fortunately, before he and his brothers could test it, their father confiscated the propeller.


In 1938 he went up to Balliol College, Oxford to read Physics and learned to fly with the University Air Squadron. At the outbreak of war he joined the RAF and completed his training at Cranwell before becoming a flying instructor. In July 1941 he left for South Africa where he trained pilots at an air school in the Transvaal. After two years he moved to the Middle East and converted to the Liberator heavy bomber.


Ratcliffe joined No 148 Squadron at Gambut in Libya in April 1943. The squadron had a special duties role, its main task being to drop arms and agents into the Balkans where partisans were operating. When not engaged on these missions Ratcliffe carried out bombing raids on targets in Italy and southern Europe. On October 21 1943 he unexpectedly found himself detailed to fly a Dakota to a remote landing strip in Greece where he was to pick up 26 people before flying back to Gambut. He had never flown the aircraft type before and, after two brief familiarisation sorties, he completed the operation successfully.


Ratcliffe had completed almost 70 operations when No 148 replaced its Liberators with the Halifax, flying from an airfield in southern Italy. Returning from an abortive supply-dropping operation over Yugoslavia, severe weather and a shortage of fuel forced the crew to bale out and they were rescued from the Gulf of Taranto.

Bale out?

Six weeks later, on January 10 1944, Ratcliffe and his crew were detailed to make two drops to partisans in Albania and Greece. On the outward journey one of the four engines failed but the crew pressed on. After making the first drop, Ratcliffe flew on to the second dropping zone in a valley. Another engine failed and the aircraft was unable to climb away so he ordered his crew to bale out. Ratcliffe remained at the controls until the last man had left, by which time the aircraft was too low for him to parachute to safety and he was forced to make a crash landing in a maize field. The crew managed to join up and make contact with Greek partisans and their British liaison officer who took them back to his base in the mountains. After spending a few weeks in hiding, Ratcliffe and his crew were picked up by the Royal Navy and taken to Italy. He was awarded the DSO for "his skill, courage and devotion to duty".

In July 1944, Ratcliffe left No148 and served with a mobile operations wing in Italy. He was released from the RAF as a squadron leader in December 1945. He trained on Liberators and Halifaxes and in 1943 moved to Libya from where he flew supplies to rebel groups across the Balkans, and also undertook bombing missions.

After the war, not wanting to resume his undergraduate career, Ratcliffe joined his next door neighbour, Oliver Croudace, in his fledgling construction company. At once Ratcliffe saw the opportunities both for renovation and for new council and private housing in the South East, by then scarred by bomb damage and years of neglect, and where a strong political drive for more houses meant that planning restrictions were few.

Ratcliffe bought out his partner and began rapidly to expand Croudace's business, gearing it up for the acquisition of sites for private housing. In 1946 the groundbreaking New Towns Act had heralded the incoming Labour government's political dynamic for town and country development, and the subsequent Conservative governments of the 1950s continued housing policies which among other things facilitated the release of land for building.


During these years Ratcliffe rode the crest of a wave, achieving large-scale success with contracts for developments in Surrey and, especially, in the development of Crawley New Town. An innovator in his style of management, Ratcliffe pioneered the introduction of time and motion studies on building sites, supported by centralised formal control systems. These far-sighted methods enabled him to collect and accurately evaluate data for forecasting project profitability, and so radically to increase Croudace's business during a series of building booms in both the private and local authority sectors. Ratcliffe continued to respond to new commercial challenges, and with his 1974 acquisition of Maybrook, an ailing property investment company, he added a new arm to Croudace's operations, enabling it to continue to prosper through the property sector's golden years in the 1980s.


Despite the inevitable periods of economic recession, which saw so many of his competitors fail, Ratcliffe's firm control and lucid appreciation of his market enabled him to sustain his company's success. In all his business dealings Ratcliffe insisted on an ethical approach, in part a consequence of his admiration for his great-uncle, the last Lord Brotherton, a philanthropist and successful industrialist in his native Yorkshire. A humanist and dedicated family man, Ratcliffe was generous both with his wealth and with his time, while eschewing any desire for public recognition.


Jack Brotherton-Ratcliffe, who died on Christmas Eve, married, in 1945, Rona Greengrass. She predeceased him in 1995. Their two sons and two daughters survive him.

Another obit from a London newspaper, this one from the Times.

From The Times: February 27, 2010
Gladys Skillett : wartime deportee and nurse


Gladys Skillett was the first of the Channel Islands’ wartime deportees to give birth in captivity. It was an event that started an enduring friendship with a young German woman about her own age and in the 1950s paved the way for the start of a special relationship between Guernsey and the Swabian town of Biberach an der Riss where the deportees were held in the nearby Lindele internment camp.

A fact not often noted: the Channel Islands were occupied by the Nazis.

In September 1942 just over 2,000 Channel Islanders were selected for deportation because either they or their spouses or a parent had been born in the UK. Gladys, with her English husband Sidney and their year-old son Colin, was among 834 men, women and children from the Bailewick of Guernsey to go. It should have been 836 but a retired major, one of 11 deportees from Sark, killed himself by slashing his wrists and his wife, who had survived their suicide pact, was taken to hospital.


When she left Guernsey, Skillett, a former nurse, was already five months pregnant with her second child. By the time she was ready to give birth, the four months since her departure from Guernsey had embraced a first British land victory at El Alamein, increased RAF night bombing and, above all, a major defeat looming for the German Army at Stalingrad. In the maternity ward of the small hospital in Biberach where the Guernsey woman arrived in labour most of the other beds were occupied by women who had husbands in uniform. They wanted nothing to do with this lone Englander — with one exception.


Maria Koch had a man in the Wehrmacht. Julius, a forester in civilian life, was then serving in a signals unit in the Netherlands. But Koch was a practising Catholic and when a midwife asked her if she would mind sharing her room with the English patient, confined to a bed in a draughty corridor, she instantly agreed. Shortly afterwards and within about an hour of each other both women had produced healthy boys.


At first their mothers communicated almost entirely by sign language, but they were soon getting on well enough for Koch to persuade a visiting relative to buy her companion a Kinderschöppele, a baby’s milk bottle. Before long the two babies, who would be christened David and Heiner, were each sucking on identical bottles and Koch taught Skillett a new German word: Milchbrüdern — milk brothers.


They were soon separated, but a fortnight after his son was born Julius Koch was granted home leave. When Maria told him about Heiner’s milchbrüder he arranged through a friendly guard to visit the Skilletts in the Lindele camp, which was just outside the town on a plateau from where on a clear day its inmates coulds see the peaks of the Swiss Alps. Earlier it been a prisoner-of-war camp and the source of the most successful mass British escape of the war when four out of 26 officers who had tunnelled their way out made home runs to the neutral border 40 miles away.


The Kochs could not actually enter the camp any more than the Skilletts could leave it. Instead, the British and German families stood either side of the barbed wire holding their new-born sons aloft and, unable to say very much to each other, smiled a lot. Such spontaneous celebrations of common humanity in the midst of the 20th century’s second Anglo-German war were, to say the least, unusual.


Gladys Eileen Dillingham was born in Guernsey in 1918 some six months before the end of the first one. Her father, Sergeant Ernest Dillingham, a regular soldier from Camden Town, North London, was fighting in France at the time with the garrison artillery.


Ernest had met her patois-speaking mother, whose maiden name was Ingrouille, during a prewar posting to Castle Cornet in St Peter Port, and when, in 1924, he retired from the Army the family settled permanently in Guernsey. The pace was still distinctly rural. One of Skillett’s earliest memories was the thrill of weekly pony and trap rides to market with her maternal grandmother at the reins. Later, looking back on her childhood, her biggest regret was that neither her grandmother nor her mother bothered to teach her the Norman French that they used.

Although British, the Channel Islands are very close to France. Norman French, a curious term.

In the summer of 1940, now a trained nurse, she almost got away before the Germans arrived. On Friday, June 28, her bags were packed and she had a ticket to board the last Weymouth-bound mailboat for the next five years. Then, in late afternoon, came the Luftwaffe’s first and only attack on the island, killing 33 people at the harbour, one of them her mother’s brother, a grower trying to load his tomatoes. Many more were wounded.

Skillett unpacked her uniform and cycled to an emergency hospital together with Sidney, her boyfriend of four months, who without the slightest medical training found himself assisting a couple of hard-pressed surgeons in the operating theatre. All those who had received morphine had their foreheads crossed with Nurse Dillingham’s lipstick so that they would not be overdosed. The young couple worked throughout the night. When they emerged it was daylight and Skillett had missed her boat. Three months later they were married and living for five shillings a week rent in a house that had been evacuated by its owners and left in charge of neighbours. There they might have seen the war out had not Heinrich Himmler needed civilian internees. The SS chief wanted to trade them for German citizens, particularly the 500 or so technicians who in 1941 had been rounded up in Iran when Anglo-Soviet forces deposed its pro-Nazi Shah. (By an odd coincidence one of Skillett’s old beaus, serving in Iran as an officer in the Intelligence Corps, played a large part in tracking them down.) Anyone born in the UK qualified together with spouses and children even if they were native Channel Islanders.

Pro-Nazi Shah?

The London-born Sidney Skillett was an obvious candidate but he was in the building trade and doing essential harbour maintenance work, which convinced the Germans that he should be exempted. There seemed little chance that his father-in-law, the retired soldier, would enjoy the same luck and this greatly troubled Gladys because her mother had recently become very deaf and unwell. So she persuaded her husband that they must convince the Germans to accept them and their son as substitutes which he duly did.

What this selfless daughter had no way of foreseeing was that her parents would soon be much better off had they gone to Germany. As the war progressed, regular Red Cross parcels made living conditions for the internees infinitely superior to those in Guernsey where a tightening Allied blockade starved occupiers and occupied alike. By 1945 the German civilians living around the camp also had much cause to envy them.


Skillett never forgot Maria Koch’s kindness to her and, after Julius’s return to the army, there had been other meetings at the barbed wire and sometimes an exchange of small gifts. On April 23, 1945, St George’s Day, the Lindele camp was liberated by General Leclerc’s French colonial troops and the Guernsey woman sought out her German friend. Before her she pushed a rickety pram containing her latest child, three-month-old Gloria. Beneath the baby was an assortment of Red Cross goodies for Mrs Koch and David’s Milchbrüder, Heiner. Julius was missing, last heard of at a headquarters near Berlin.

A pensive Skillett, holding Heiner, stares out of a photograph taken with the Skilletts and their infant sons as they sit on a grassy bank outside the camp. It was photographed during this interlude between the Skilletts’ liberation and repatriation and Julius’s astonishing homecoming, having evaded Russian and Allied patrols.


But this was by no means the end of their story. Indeed, in many ways, it was still at the beginning with regular meetings in Guernsey and Germany, particulary at birthdays, between the Milchbrüdern Heiner, who became a school teacher, and David, a police inspector. When they became 60, David and Heiner marched, as tradition demands for Biberach’s sexagenarians, in the annual Schützenfest accompanied by her younger sister Gloria, now a deputy in the Guernsey States of Deliberation.


Sidney Skillett died in 1980, having made a fortune by building and running highly successful self-catering holiday chalets. Gladys Skillett is survived by seven children.


Gladys Skillett, the first of Guernsey’s wartime deportees to give birth in captivity, was born on May 2, 1918. She died on February 11, 2010, aged 91

Soviet soldier in historic WW II photo

Found this in the Baltimore Sun, February 17, 2010.

A Red Army soldier who appears in a historic photograph helping hoist a hammer-and-sickle flag over the Reichstag in Berlin in 1945 has died, officials said in Moscow. Abdulkhakim Ismailov, 93, died of unspecified causes Tuesday in his native village of Chagar-Otar, the press office of the president of Russia’s southern province of Dagestan said Wednesday. Ismailov was one of the three Soviet soldiers seen in a photograph taken three days after the fall of Berlin in May 1945. He stands beneath the man holding the flagpole.

The photo became an iconic image of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. It has often been compared with the 1945 Associated Press photograph of U.S. soldiers raising the American flag on Iwo Jima. The Soviet photographer, Yevgeny Khaldei, said years later that the image was staged, and the flag was sewn from three tablecloths. He said the original hammer-and-sickle flag flown from the Reichstag was shot down by German snipers.

Ismailov was identified in the photograph only in 1996 and was awarded a Hero of Russia medal. During WWII, he was part of a motorized infantry battalion and was wounded five times. After the war, he served as a chairman of a collective farm and as a Communist Party official.

-- Associated Press

Photo: In this image from May 2, 1945, Red Army soldiers hoist the Soviet flag over Berlin. Abdulkhakim Ismailov, just below the flag bearer, died Tuesday. Credit: Associated Press / ITAR-TASS, Yevgeny Khaldei

More in: image-makers, World War II

Claiborne Pell

A couple of passages from this obit stick in my mind a year later:  his vast family wealth was derived from an 18th-century royal charter of land from King George III of England; Pell educational grants (and BEOGs; I got one of those); his fame owned the land that is Pelham Manor (in fact, were lords of the manor).


Asked in an interview in 1996 how the programs came to be known as the Pell Grants, he wisecracked: “Because there was no Senator Beog!” In fact, the name was officially changed to Pell Grants in 1980 by his admiring colleagues in Congress.

A good sense of humor.

He also was authored the National Foundation of the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965, which paved the way for the National Endowment for the Arts, which makes federal grants to artists and arts organizations, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which channels federal money in literature, history, language and philosophy, among other fields. The creation of the National Endowment for the Arts did much over the years to foster avant-garde styles and techniques that made American artists renowned worldwide for work that Mr. Pell personally disliked. “I don’t like abstract paintings,” he told an interviewer in 1996, saying he had no use for any artwork “more abstract than Picasso’s Blue Period.”

I agree. And these gems: “I think that many of the grants made to artists by the endowment were mistakes,” he said, adding quickly, “But I’ll never intrude.”  Would that modern politicians had that wisdom; but that would require such intelligence.


campaigning in Providence in 1972 when it began raining hard. He sent an aide to get him a pair of rubbers for his shoes, and when the aide returned, Mr. Pell asked in his formal manner of speech, “To whom am I indebted for these fine rubbers?” “I got them at Thom McAn, Senator,” the aide answered, referring to the shoe store chain. Mr. Pell replied, “Well, do tell Mr. McAn that I am much obliged to him.”

January 2, 2009
Claiborne Pell, Ex-Senator, Dies at 90
By WILLIAM H. HONAN

Claiborne Pell, the quirky, patrician former senator from Rhode Island who created the college grant program that bears his name and wrote the legislation that established the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, died just after midnight Thursday at his Newport, R.I., home. He was 90.

Mr. Pell was stricken with Parkinson’s disease at the end of his Senate career, and his illness forced him to retire in January 1997 after six terms in the Senate. His death was confirmed by Thomas G. Hughes, his former chief of staff.

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Senator Claiborne Pell served six terms in office, until 1997.

Mr. Pell, a Democrat, was widely regarded as the most formidable politician in Rhode Island history; in six statewide victories over Republican opponents, he received an average of 64 percent of the vote.

Mr. Pell was best known for devising legislation that created the program that has dispensed grants to tens of millions of poor and middle-class college students.

He often remarked that he had been motivated to help students meet the high cost of a college education because the G.I. Bill of Rights — the program of federal educational grants to returning service members after World War II — had meant so much to him personally. The fact was that with Mr. Pell’s vast family wealth, derived from an 18th-century royal charter of land from King George III of England, he could have purchased some of the educational institutions they attended, let alone paid their tuition bills.

Mr. Pell, whose ancestors were the original lords of the manor in Pelham Manor, N.Y., lived among the old-money families in Newport. Five of his relatives have been elected to either the House or the Senate, including his father, a one-term representative from Manhattan’s old Silk Stocking District.

After winning his first Senate term in 1960, Mr. Pell, a Princeton graduate, sponsored the preparation of a large two-volume statistical report in 1963 that became the basis of the bill creating the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant, or BEOG, which provided financial aid for the needy to attend college.

Asked in an interview in 1996 how the programs came to be known as the Pell Grants, he wisecracked: “Because there was no Senator Beog!” In fact, the name was officially changed to Pell Grants in 1980 by his admiring colleagues in Congress.

Mr. Pell also was the author of the National Foundation of the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965. That legislation paved the way for the National Endowment for the Arts, which makes federal grants to artists and arts organizations, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which channels federal money in literature, history, language and philosophy, among other fields.

The creation of the National Endowment for the Arts did much over the years to foster avant-garde styles and techniques that made American artists renowned worldwide for work that Mr. Pell personally disliked.

“I don’t like abstract paintings,” he told an interviewer in 1996, saying he had no use for any artwork “more abstract than Picasso’s Blue Period.”

“I think that many of the grants made to artists by the endowment were mistakes,” he said, adding quickly, “But I’ll never intrude.”

A lifelong interest in railroads inspired him to draft a bill that became the High Speed Ground Transportation Act of 1965, intended to improve rail service in the 400-mile Northeast corridor from Washington to Boston. Out of this emerged the Amtrak system and, in 1966, Mr. Pell’s well-received book “Megalopolis Unbound: The Supercity and the Transportation of Tomorrow.”

Mr. Pell vigorously opposed the war in Vietnam and sponsored a treaty banning nuclear weapons on the ocean floor. He became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1987, only to lose the post to Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina after the Republicans captured the Senate in 1994.

Mr. Pell, in his conduct of the Foreign Relations Committee, was sometimes criticized as insufficiently forceful. “If Claiborne has any weaknesses, he is too much of a gentleman,” Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware and now the vice president-elect, once said. To this characterization, Mr. Pell replied, “I am not confrontational by nature.”

But he also stood out for taking unconventional positions and staying with them. In contrast to almost all his Senate colleagues and to several administrations, he advocated an end to the isolation of Communist Cuba by the United States. He called for a policy of small steps toward normalizing relations with Cuba, an approach that later gained broader support.

He challenged President Ronald Reagan’s support of Nicaraguan guerrillas fighting the Marxist Sandinista government. He was also a dedicated supporter of negotiations to reduce nuclear arsenals. In 1988, he led the successful effort in the Senate to obtain ratification of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

In 1964, Senator Pell supported President Lyndon B. Johnson’s request for legislative endorsement of a widened American military role in Indochina, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. But he later said his support had been one of his biggest legislative mistakes, and he soon became an outspoken opponent of the war in Vietnam.

His opposition to American military intervention in foreign conflicts extended in the early 1980s to Lebanon and El Salvador and, in the early 1990s, to American engagement in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Claiborne deBorda Pell was born in Manhattan on Nov. 22, 1918, the only child of Herbert Claiborne Pell and Matilda Bigelow Pell, an immensely wealthy couple from Newport. After Herbert Pell served his term in Congress, he was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to diplomatic posts in Hungary and Portugal.

The Pells traced their New England ancestry to the 1700s and their wealth from vast land holdings in what is now Westchester County, N.Y. In Mr. Pell’s Senate office hung a painting of Vice President George M. Dallas, a great-great-granduncle who served from 1845 to 1849.

After attending private schools, including St. George’s School in Newport, Mr. Pell earned a degree in history at Princeton in 1940. Upon graduation, he went to Europe to help people persecuted by the Nazis and was twice detained. Four months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Coast Guard as a seaman. He served on convoy and did patrol duty in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean. He remained devoted to the Coast Guard, retiring from the Reserve in 1978 as a captain.

Because of an attack of undulant fever, he was sent for recuperation at the Naval Hospital in Newport in 1944. There he met Nuala O’Donnell, whom he married later that year. The couple had four children, Herbert Claiborne III, Christopher Hartford, Nuala Dallas Yates and Julia. In addition to his wife, he is survived by Christopher, known as Toby, of Newport, and Ms. Yates, of New York, along with five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Having attended the conference in San Francisco at which the United Nations was established in 1945, Mr. Pell remained an unstinting supporter of the organization.

He obtained a master’s degree in international relations at Columbia University in 1946 and joined the State Department, which sent him to Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, to open a consulate. Six months later, he was expelled by the Communist government, then worked in Italy and at the State Department in Washington until 1952.

He spent the next eight years in the investment banking business and working for the Democratic Party. In 1956 he also served as vice president of the International Rescue Committee, helping refugees who had made their way to Austria after the Hungarian uprising that year was crushed by the Soviet Union.

After 93-year-old Theodore Green, the grand old man of Rhode Island politics, retired from the Senate, Mr. Pell ran for his seat and was elected in 1960. Although clearly patrician, Mr. Pell had a pro-union record, and that, along with his unassuming manner, kept him in good standing with a predominantly blue-collar electorate that had voted Democratic since 1930.

Mr. Pell’s eccentricities and his ability to laugh at himself endeared him to colleagues and constituents.

After he met President Fidel Castro of Cuba in Havana in 1974, Mr. Castro lit up a large cigar and used it to wave farewell. Senator Pell apparently thought the lighted cigar was a parting gift and took it from Mr. Castro’s hand, leaving his host flabbergasted.

John Chafee, who served as a Republican senator from Rhode Island, recounted a story for The Associated Press that became a favorite in descriptions of his colleague.

Mr. Pell was campaigning in Providence in 1972 when it began raining hard. He sent an aide to get him a pair of rubbers for his shoes, and when the aide returned, Mr. Pell asked in his formal manner of speech, “To whom am I indebted for these fine rubbers?”

“I got them at Thom McAn, Senator,” the aide answered, referring to the shoe store chain. Mr. Pell replied, “Well, do tell Mr. McAn that I am much obliged to him.”

Mr. Pell was an avid jogger, but he often wore a tweed sport coat when running, and he pushed for Congressional investigations into ESP and U.F.O.’s.

And when a campaign opponent once sneered at him for his patrician ways, branding him “a cream puff,” Mr. Pell responded by promptly obtaining the endorsement of a bakers’ union.

Mr. Biden said in a statement that Mr. Pell had been a mentor to him and called him “one of our nation’s most important voices in foreign policy for over 30 years.” Because of Mr. Pell, he said: “The doors of college have been opened to millions of Americans — and will continue to be opened to millions more. That is a legacy that will live on for generations to come.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 8, 2009
An obituary on Friday about Claiborne Pell, the former senator from Rhode Island best known as the author of the college grant program that bears his name, misidentified the university from which he received a master’s degree in international relations. It was Columbia, not Princeton

Pigeon Trainer in World War II

In January 1942, barely a month after Pearl Harbor, the United States War Department sounded a call to enlist. It wasn’t men they wanted — not this time. The Army was looking for pigeons. To the thousands of American men and boys who raced homing pigeons, a popular sport in the early 20th century and afterward, the government’s message was clear: Uncle Sam Wants Your Birds.

Richard Topus was one of those boys. He had no birds of his own to give, but he had another, unassailable asset: he was from Brooklyn, where pigeon racing had long held the status of a secular religion. His already vast experience with pigeons — long, ardent hours spent tending and racing them after school and on weekends — qualified him, when he was still a teenager, to train American spies and other military personnel in the swift, silent use of the birds in wartime.

Richard Topus helped American spies and the military in the swift, silent use of birds in wartime.

World War II saw the last wide-scale use of pigeons as agents of combat intelligence. Mr. Topus, just 18 when he enlisted in the Army, was among the last of the several thousand pigeoneers, as military handlers of the birds were known, who served the United States in the war.

A lifelong pigeon enthusiast who became a successful executive in the food industry, Mr. Topus died on Dec. 5 in Scottsdale, Ariz., at the age of 84. The cause was kidney failure, his son Andrew said.

Richard Topus was born in Brooklyn on March 15, 1924, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. Growing up in Flatbush, he fell in love with the pigeons his neighbors kept on their rooftops in spacious coops known as lofts. His parents would not let him have a loft of his own — they feared it would interfere with schoolwork, Andrew Topus said — but he befriended several local men who taught him to handle their birds. Two of them had been pigeoneers in World War I, when the United States Army Pigeon Service was formally established.

Pigeons have been used as wartime messengers at least since antiquity. Before the advent of radio communications, the birds were routinely used as airborne couriers, carrying messages in tiny capsules strapped to their legs. A homing pigeon can find its way back to its loft from nearly a thousand miles away. Over short distances, it can fly a mile a minute. It can go where human couriers often cannot, flying over rough terrain and behind enemy lines.

By the early 20th century, advances in communications technology seemed to herald the end of combat pigeoneering. In 1903, a headline in The New York Times confidently declared, “No Further Need of Army Pigeons: They Have Been Superseded by the Adoption of Wireless Telegraph Systems.”

But technology, the Army discovered, has its drawbacks. Radio transmissions can be intercepted. Triangulated, they can reveal the sender’s location. In World War I, pigeons proved their continued usefulness in times of enforced radio silence. After the United States entered World War II, the Army put out the call for birds to racing clubs nationwide. Tens of thousands were donated.

In all, more than 50,000 pigeons served the United States in the war. Many were shot down. Others were set upon by falcons released by the Nazis to intercept them. (The British countered by releasing their own falcons to pursue German messenger pigeons. But since falcons found Allied and Axis birds equally delicious, their deployment as defensive weapons was soon abandoned by both sides.)

But many American pigeons did reach their destinations safely, relaying vital messages from soldiers in the field to Allied commanders. The information they carried — including reports on troop movements and tiny hand-sketched maps — has been widely credited with saving thousands of lives during the war.

Mr. Topus enlisted in early 1942 and was assigned to the Army Signal Corps, which included the Pigeon Service. He was eventually stationed at Camp Ritchie in Maryland, one of several installations around the country at which Army pigeons were raised and trained. There, he joined a small group of pigeoneers, not much bigger than a dozen men.

Camp Ritchie specialized in intelligence training, and Mr. Topus and his colleagues schooled men and birds in the art of war. They taught the men to feed and care for the birds; to fasten on the tiny capsules containing messages written on lightweight paper; to drop pigeons from airplanes; and to jump out of airplanes themselves, with pigeons tucked against their chests. The Army had the Maidenform Brassiere Company make paratroopers’ vests with special pigeon pockets.

The birds, for their part, were trained to fly back to lofts whose locations were changed constantly. This skill was crucial: once the pigeons were released by troops in Europe, the Pacific or another theater, they would need to fly back to mobile combat lofts in those places rather than light out for the United States. Mr. Topus and his colleagues also bred pigeons, seeking optimal combinations of speed and endurance.

After the war, Mr. Topus earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business from Hofstra University. While he was a student, he earned money selling eggs — chicken eggs — door to door and afterward started a wholesale egg business. In the late 1950s, Mr. Topus became the first salesman at Friendship Food Products, a dairy company then based in Maspeth, Queens; he retired as executive vice president for sales and marketing. (The company, today based in Jericho, N.Y. and a subsidiary of Dean Foods, is now known as Friendship Dairies.)

In the 1960s and early ’70s, Mr. Topus taught marketing at Hofstra; the C. W. Post campus of Long Island University; and the State University of New York, Farmingdale, where he started a management-training program for supermarket professionals. In later years, after retiring to Scottsdale, he taught at Arizona State University and was also a securities arbitrator, hearing disputes between stockbrokers and their clients.

Besides his son Andrew, of Chicago, Mr. Topus is survived by his wife, the former Jacqueline Buehler, whom he married in 1948; two other children, Nina Davis of Newton, Mass.; and David, of Atlanta; and four grandchildren.

Though the Army phased out pigeons in the late 1950s, Mr. Topus raced them avidly till nearly the end of his life. He left a covert, enduring legacy of his hobby at Friendship, for which he oversaw the design of the highly recognizable company logo, a graceful bird in flight, in the early 1960s.

From that day to this, the bird has adorned cartons of the company’s cottage cheese, sour cream, buttermilk and other products. To legions of unsuspecting consumers, Andrew Topus said last week, the bird looks like a dove. But to anyone who really knew his father, it is a pigeon, plain as day.

December 14, 2008
Richard Topus, a Pigeon Trainer in World War II, Dies at 84
By MARGALIT FOX