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Maj-Gen Tony Deane-Drummond
Major-General Tony Deane-Drummond, who has died aged 95, won a DSO and two MCs and escaped three times from enemy hands.
Major-General Tony Deane-Drummond Photo: NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
5:41PM GMT 04 Dec 2012
One of his MCs was awarded for his courage during Operation “Market Garden”, launched in 1944 with the aim of seizing a 60-mile corridor spanning eight major water obstacles to secure the Allied advance on to the German plain. The 1st Airborne Division was dropped on September 17 with the main objective of capturing the bridge over the Lower Rhine at Arnhem.
Deane-Drummond was second-in-command of Divisional Signals, but took temporary command of a company of 1st Parachute Battalion after the company commander was killed. The German opposition was far stronger than had been anticipated, and within a short period the company was reduced to 20 men.
Deane-Drummond distributed them between three houses. By nightfall nearly all their ammunition had gone and the main body of the battalion was 400 yards behind them. He and a small group moved to a house near the river.
When a party of Germans broke in and went upstairs to site a machine gun, Deane-Drummond and his team dived into a lavatory on the ground floor. For three days and nights, they took it in turns to rest on the lavatory seat and subsisted on a few apples that they found in the cellar. The Germans often tried the door, but finding it engaged went away again.
On the fourth night the group broke out and swam 400 yards across the Rhine. The opposite bank was manned by Germans, and in the darkness Deane-Drummond fell into a slit trench on top of a German soldier. He and his comrades were taken prisoner and moved to a house on the outskirts of Arnhem, a temporary PoW “cage” holding about 500 all ranks and guarded by an under-strength company. Deane-Drummond found a wall cupboard about four feet wide and 12 inches deep with a flush-fitting concealed door. He unscrewed the lock, turned it back to front, pasted over the outside keyhole and locked himself in. For the next 13 days and nights, he remained there.
The room beyond his door was used by the Germans as an interrogation centre. He had only a one-pound tin of lard, half a small loaf of bread and his water bottle to keep him going. A gap in a corner of the floor surrounded by pipes served as a makeshift urinal.
On the 14th night, the Germans left the room empty and held a party upstairs. Deane-Drummond slipped out of his cupboard, climbed out of a window, dropped into the shrubbery, dodged the guards outside and got away.
A Dutch family concealed him in a shed next to their house. When the Germans searched it, Deane-Drummond, hidden under a pile of sacks, remained undiscovered.
He was passed from one “safe house” to another. On one occasion Baroness Ella van Heemstra, the mother of Audrey Hepburn, arrived with a bottle of champagne.
He was eventually taken in a Red Cross lorry to an area of forest outside Arnhem where he joined up with 30 British soldiers. That night, a party about 120-strong climbed into three old lorries and, guided by the Dutch Resistance, travelled through the German checkpoints masquerading as a rations convoy. They boarded assault boats paddled by sappers from 43rd Infantry Division and got back across the Rhine. Deane-Drummond was awarded a Bar to an earlier MC.
Anthony John Deane-Drummond was born on June 23 1917, grew up in a village in the Cotswolds and was educated at Marlborough before going to the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. He then joined the Royal Signals because two horses, or “chargers”, were the automatic right of every officer in the unit. He was commissioned in 1937.
On a course at Catterick he learnt gliding, which was to become an important part of his life later on. When the Second World War broke out he was commanding an artillery signal section and went to France as part of the BEF.
After the evacuation from Dunkirk, Deane-Drummond joined 2 Commando, which was later to become 11 SAS Battalion and subsequently 1st Parachute Battalion. In February 1941 he took part in Operation Colossus, a mission to blow up the aqueduct at Tragino, southern Italy, which fed the naval ports of Bari, Brindisi and Taranto.
The aqueduct, astride a tributary cascading into the main river flowing from the Apennines to the Adriatic, was in wild, mountainous country. Deane-Drummond was one of 34 officers and men dropped by night; a third of a ton of gun cotton was placed against the piers of the bridge and detonated.
The party now had to get back to the west coast, 60 miles distant, as quickly and secretly as possible to rendezvous with a submarine. After pushing their way through almost impenetrable ravines and fields knee-deep in mud, they were challenged by a man with a shotgun. A crowd of women, children and unarmed peasants quickly gathered, and the commandos were forced to surrender to avoid causing civilian casualties.
Deane-Drummond was in a PoW camp at Sulmona, south-west of Pescara, for 10 months before escaping in December 1941. He and a comrade climbed a ladder at night in full view of the sentries on the pretext of changing a light bulb. When they dropped over the 10ft-high barbed wire perimeter fence, the guards opened fire.
A bullet flicked past Deane-Drummond’s cheek, drawing blood, but he got away. His companion was badly injured and recaptured. Dressed in a mackintosh, with a Swastika badge in the buttonhole and a fake German passport in his pocket, Deane-Drummond walked to Pescara and then took a train to Milan. He had only bad Italian and schoolboy German, and a hotel receptionist accused him of being an Englishman. He bluffed his way out of the place and spent the night at the railway station.
At Como the next day, he was challenged again and apprehended. After being interrogated he was taken to a PoW camp at Montalbo, looking over the Po plain, and placed in solitary confinement for 30 days before being returned to Sulmona. In May 1942, on learning that he was about to be transferred to an escape-proof prison, he feigned deafness and was sent to the Military Hospital in Florence.
One night, after putting hair oil on the shutter hinges to prevent any squeaking alerting the guards, he got out of the window of his room 70ft above the ground, lowered himself on to a crumbling piece of decorative moulding and worked his way around the face of the building in pitch darkness, fighting off attacks of vertigo as he went.
He then climbed through a lavatory window, crept past the Carabinieri and dropped down into a courtyard which led to the main road.
Deane-Drummond took a train to Varese, via Milan, and then — as he approached the frontier town of Chiasso — scrambled up the mountainside and crawled under a wire fence hung with alarm bells, midway between two sentry boxes.
From Switzerland he made his way to Marseille, where he was concealed by Madame Renée Nouveau – whose flat was part of the “Pat” escape line – before he was taken off by a Gibraltar-bound Royal Navy vessel disguised as a fishing trawler, flying the Portuguese flag and equipped with a 3.7in gun. He was awarded his first MC.
After returning to England, Deane-Drummond, now a captain, served as signal officer to the commander of the newly-formed 2nd Parachute Brigade. In April 1943 he accompanied the brigade to Sousse, Tunisia, and in September he disembarked at Taranto, southern Italy, with 1st Airborne Division.
During the next few months, based at Termoli, he worked with “round-up” teams bringing escaped Allied prisoners back to the British lines, usually by landing craft. He returned to England at the end of the year and took part in Operation “Market Garden” in September 1944.
At the end of that year, on his return from Holland, Deane-Drummond went to Staff College and was then posted to HQ 6 Airborne Division as GSO2 (Operations), serving in Palestine during a period of increasing civil disturbances. He often had dinner at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and was fortunate not to be there when the hotel was blown up.
In 1948, after a year at the War Office and an advanced signals course with the US Army, he went to RMA Sandhurst as an instructor and then returned to Staff College as a member of the directing staff.
Deane-Drummond went to Cyprus on antiterrorist operations as company commander of 1st Parachute Battalion. Driving through Kyrenia, he was hit on the head by a stone thrown through his windscreen. He was badly concussed and medically downgraded.
In 1956, while recovering, he spent much of his time gliding, and the following year became the British National Gliding Champion. He was selected to fly in the British team in 1958, 1960, 1963 and 1965.
In 1957 Deane-Drummond commanded 22 SAS Regiment in counter-terrorist operations in Malaya. In the last months of 1958 the regiment’s task was largely accomplished, and it faced being returned to England and possible disbandment.
At this time, in central Oman, the ringleaders and hard-core followers of an earlier rebellion against the Sultan Said bin Taimur were holding out on the Jebel Akhdar, an elevated plateau intersected by deep wadis and with sheer cliffs of rock and shale rising to some 7,000ft above sea level. The rebels, equipped with rifles, machine guns and mortars, held all the known tracks to the summit, and many high-ranking Army officers believed that it would take a brigade to oust them, a course that was ruled out on political grounds.
Deane-Drummond pressed the case for the SAS to become involved. Two SAS squadrons were brought in from the jungles and swamps of Malaya and underwent intensive training in the radically different conditions.
In a night attack in January 1959 — with support from the Sultan’s Armed Forces, British Army detachments and an assault troop of Life Guards — the two SAS squadrons scaled the mountain. RAF aircraft were called in and the remaining insurgents were captured or dispersed. The success of the operation put the future of the SAS beyond doubt. Deane-Drummond was awarded a DSO.
In 1961 he commanded 44 Independent Parachute Brigade Group (TA) before returning to RMA Sandhurst as Assistant Commandant. He was promoted major-general in 1966 on taking command of 3rd Infantry Division and then became Assistant Chief of Defence Staff.
He was appointed CB in 1970 and was Colonel Commandant of the Royal Corps of Signals from 1966 to 1971, the year he retired from the Army.
Later that same year, Deane-Drummond became a director of the Paper and Paper Products Industry Training Board. During the next eight years he visited some 500 companies in an effort to improve the quality of management. After moving to Somerset, he established a business selling wood-burning stoves; he later settled in a South Warwickshire village.
Deane-Drummond was a proficient carpenter and enjoyed restoring antique furniture. He published Return Ticket (1951), Riot Control (1975) and an autobiography, Arrows of Fortune (1991).
Tony Deane-Drummond married, in 1944, Evie Boyd. She died in 2002, and he is survived by their four daughters.
Maj-Gen Tony Deane-Drummond, born June 23 1917, died December 4 2012
Major-General Tony Deane-Drummond, who has died aged 95, won a DSO and two MCs and escaped three times from enemy hands.
Major-General Tony Deane-Drummond Photo: NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
5:41PM GMT 04 Dec 2012
One of his MCs was awarded for his courage during Operation “Market Garden”, launched in 1944 with the aim of seizing a 60-mile corridor spanning eight major water obstacles to secure the Allied advance on to the German plain. The 1st Airborne Division was dropped on September 17 with the main objective of capturing the bridge over the Lower Rhine at Arnhem.
Deane-Drummond was second-in-command of Divisional Signals, but took temporary command of a company of 1st Parachute Battalion after the company commander was killed. The German opposition was far stronger than had been anticipated, and within a short period the company was reduced to 20 men.
Deane-Drummond distributed them between three houses. By nightfall nearly all their ammunition had gone and the main body of the battalion was 400 yards behind them. He and a small group moved to a house near the river.
When a party of Germans broke in and went upstairs to site a machine gun, Deane-Drummond and his team dived into a lavatory on the ground floor. For three days and nights, they took it in turns to rest on the lavatory seat and subsisted on a few apples that they found in the cellar. The Germans often tried the door, but finding it engaged went away again.
On the fourth night the group broke out and swam 400 yards across the Rhine. The opposite bank was manned by Germans, and in the darkness Deane-Drummond fell into a slit trench on top of a German soldier. He and his comrades were taken prisoner and moved to a house on the outskirts of Arnhem, a temporary PoW “cage” holding about 500 all ranks and guarded by an under-strength company. Deane-Drummond found a wall cupboard about four feet wide and 12 inches deep with a flush-fitting concealed door. He unscrewed the lock, turned it back to front, pasted over the outside keyhole and locked himself in. For the next 13 days and nights, he remained there.
The room beyond his door was used by the Germans as an interrogation centre. He had only a one-pound tin of lard, half a small loaf of bread and his water bottle to keep him going. A gap in a corner of the floor surrounded by pipes served as a makeshift urinal.
On the 14th night, the Germans left the room empty and held a party upstairs. Deane-Drummond slipped out of his cupboard, climbed out of a window, dropped into the shrubbery, dodged the guards outside and got away.
A Dutch family concealed him in a shed next to their house. When the Germans searched it, Deane-Drummond, hidden under a pile of sacks, remained undiscovered.
He was passed from one “safe house” to another. On one occasion Baroness Ella van Heemstra, the mother of Audrey Hepburn, arrived with a bottle of champagne.
He was eventually taken in a Red Cross lorry to an area of forest outside Arnhem where he joined up with 30 British soldiers. That night, a party about 120-strong climbed into three old lorries and, guided by the Dutch Resistance, travelled through the German checkpoints masquerading as a rations convoy. They boarded assault boats paddled by sappers from 43rd Infantry Division and got back across the Rhine. Deane-Drummond was awarded a Bar to an earlier MC.
Anthony John Deane-Drummond was born on June 23 1917, grew up in a village in the Cotswolds and was educated at Marlborough before going to the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. He then joined the Royal Signals because two horses, or “chargers”, were the automatic right of every officer in the unit. He was commissioned in 1937.
On a course at Catterick he learnt gliding, which was to become an important part of his life later on. When the Second World War broke out he was commanding an artillery signal section and went to France as part of the BEF.
After the evacuation from Dunkirk, Deane-Drummond joined 2 Commando, which was later to become 11 SAS Battalion and subsequently 1st Parachute Battalion. In February 1941 he took part in Operation Colossus, a mission to blow up the aqueduct at Tragino, southern Italy, which fed the naval ports of Bari, Brindisi and Taranto.
The aqueduct, astride a tributary cascading into the main river flowing from the Apennines to the Adriatic, was in wild, mountainous country. Deane-Drummond was one of 34 officers and men dropped by night; a third of a ton of gun cotton was placed against the piers of the bridge and detonated.
The party now had to get back to the west coast, 60 miles distant, as quickly and secretly as possible to rendezvous with a submarine. After pushing their way through almost impenetrable ravines and fields knee-deep in mud, they were challenged by a man with a shotgun. A crowd of women, children and unarmed peasants quickly gathered, and the commandos were forced to surrender to avoid causing civilian casualties.
Deane-Drummond was in a PoW camp at Sulmona, south-west of Pescara, for 10 months before escaping in December 1941. He and a comrade climbed a ladder at night in full view of the sentries on the pretext of changing a light bulb. When they dropped over the 10ft-high barbed wire perimeter fence, the guards opened fire.
A bullet flicked past Deane-Drummond’s cheek, drawing blood, but he got away. His companion was badly injured and recaptured. Dressed in a mackintosh, with a Swastika badge in the buttonhole and a fake German passport in his pocket, Deane-Drummond walked to Pescara and then took a train to Milan. He had only bad Italian and schoolboy German, and a hotel receptionist accused him of being an Englishman. He bluffed his way out of the place and spent the night at the railway station.
At Como the next day, he was challenged again and apprehended. After being interrogated he was taken to a PoW camp at Montalbo, looking over the Po plain, and placed in solitary confinement for 30 days before being returned to Sulmona. In May 1942, on learning that he was about to be transferred to an escape-proof prison, he feigned deafness and was sent to the Military Hospital in Florence.
One night, after putting hair oil on the shutter hinges to prevent any squeaking alerting the guards, he got out of the window of his room 70ft above the ground, lowered himself on to a crumbling piece of decorative moulding and worked his way around the face of the building in pitch darkness, fighting off attacks of vertigo as he went.
He then climbed through a lavatory window, crept past the Carabinieri and dropped down into a courtyard which led to the main road.
Deane-Drummond took a train to Varese, via Milan, and then — as he approached the frontier town of Chiasso — scrambled up the mountainside and crawled under a wire fence hung with alarm bells, midway between two sentry boxes.
From Switzerland he made his way to Marseille, where he was concealed by Madame Renée Nouveau – whose flat was part of the “Pat” escape line – before he was taken off by a Gibraltar-bound Royal Navy vessel disguised as a fishing trawler, flying the Portuguese flag and equipped with a 3.7in gun. He was awarded his first MC.
After returning to England, Deane-Drummond, now a captain, served as signal officer to the commander of the newly-formed 2nd Parachute Brigade. In April 1943 he accompanied the brigade to Sousse, Tunisia, and in September he disembarked at Taranto, southern Italy, with 1st Airborne Division.
During the next few months, based at Termoli, he worked with “round-up” teams bringing escaped Allied prisoners back to the British lines, usually by landing craft. He returned to England at the end of the year and took part in Operation “Market Garden” in September 1944.
At the end of that year, on his return from Holland, Deane-Drummond went to Staff College and was then posted to HQ 6 Airborne Division as GSO2 (Operations), serving in Palestine during a period of increasing civil disturbances. He often had dinner at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and was fortunate not to be there when the hotel was blown up.
In 1948, after a year at the War Office and an advanced signals course with the US Army, he went to RMA Sandhurst as an instructor and then returned to Staff College as a member of the directing staff.
Deane-Drummond went to Cyprus on antiterrorist operations as company commander of 1st Parachute Battalion. Driving through Kyrenia, he was hit on the head by a stone thrown through his windscreen. He was badly concussed and medically downgraded.
In 1956, while recovering, he spent much of his time gliding, and the following year became the British National Gliding Champion. He was selected to fly in the British team in 1958, 1960, 1963 and 1965.
In 1957 Deane-Drummond commanded 22 SAS Regiment in counter-terrorist operations in Malaya. In the last months of 1958 the regiment’s task was largely accomplished, and it faced being returned to England and possible disbandment.
At this time, in central Oman, the ringleaders and hard-core followers of an earlier rebellion against the Sultan Said bin Taimur were holding out on the Jebel Akhdar, an elevated plateau intersected by deep wadis and with sheer cliffs of rock and shale rising to some 7,000ft above sea level. The rebels, equipped with rifles, machine guns and mortars, held all the known tracks to the summit, and many high-ranking Army officers believed that it would take a brigade to oust them, a course that was ruled out on political grounds.
Deane-Drummond pressed the case for the SAS to become involved. Two SAS squadrons were brought in from the jungles and swamps of Malaya and underwent intensive training in the radically different conditions.
In a night attack in January 1959 — with support from the Sultan’s Armed Forces, British Army detachments and an assault troop of Life Guards — the two SAS squadrons scaled the mountain. RAF aircraft were called in and the remaining insurgents were captured or dispersed. The success of the operation put the future of the SAS beyond doubt. Deane-Drummond was awarded a DSO.
In 1961 he commanded 44 Independent Parachute Brigade Group (TA) before returning to RMA Sandhurst as Assistant Commandant. He was promoted major-general in 1966 on taking command of 3rd Infantry Division and then became Assistant Chief of Defence Staff.
He was appointed CB in 1970 and was Colonel Commandant of the Royal Corps of Signals from 1966 to 1971, the year he retired from the Army.
Later that same year, Deane-Drummond became a director of the Paper and Paper Products Industry Training Board. During the next eight years he visited some 500 companies in an effort to improve the quality of management. After moving to Somerset, he established a business selling wood-burning stoves; he later settled in a South Warwickshire village.
Deane-Drummond was a proficient carpenter and enjoyed restoring antique furniture. He published Return Ticket (1951), Riot Control (1975) and an autobiography, Arrows of Fortune (1991).
Tony Deane-Drummond married, in 1944, Evie Boyd. She died in 2002, and he is survived by their four daughters.
Maj-Gen Tony Deane-Drummond, born June 23 1917, died December 4 2012
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