Obituaries (1 Viewer)

TO

Farewell, R.I.P.

R.I.P. sir.

Legendary Polish soldier is dead...

Stanisław Frączasty, who was one of the best known Polish soldiers and couriers died on Saturday in his house in Chochołów. He was famous for trespassing Marshall Edward Rydz-Śmigły from Hungary to Poland via illegally boarder.

Frączysty was born in Chochołów in 1917. He joined army as a young boy. In 1942 the hero was arrested by the Germans, who placed him in Gestapo's place of torture in Zakopane and then in Auschwitz (number 27235). After World War II Frączysty spent many months in communistic prison.

He was awarded Virtuti Militari order for his bravery and service.




Frączysty ( in centre ) with Pope Benedict XVI in Auschwitz:

He was an officer with the 2nd Escort Group, commanded by the legendary Captain Johnnie Walker

NORA RYELL

Special to The Globe and Mail
April 3, 2009

In 1943, a young naval officer from the Royal Military College in Kingston, found himself hunting U-boats in the treacherous waters of the Atlantic. After being seconded to the Royal Navy as a Lieutenant, William Chipman served on the Wild Goose, one of the vessels that was part of the 2nd Escort Group commanded by the legendary Captain Johnnie Walker.
Capt. Walker was a hard taskmaster but his phenomenal success hunting U-boats made him one of the early heroes of the Battle of the Atlantic. In the space of only 10 days, 2nd Escort Group managed to sink six U-boats.
London newspaper reports flooded across the Atlantic praising the exploits of the group. For William Chipman it was the adventure of a lifetime. When he was interviewed by a British reporter, the exhilaration and excitement was
unmistakable. "What a party that was!" He exclaimed.
William Pennock Chipman was born in Ottawa, the only son of Marjorie Cowan Pennock and Kenneth Gordon Chipman. His father was a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the topographic engineering program and worked for the federal government.
William went to Lisgar Collegiate Institute before enrolling at the Royal Military College in 1936. During the next three years, he spent several summers of naval training in Halifax or aboard the training schooner, Venture.
War was declared in September, 1939, and Mr. Chipman and his classmates were hastily graduated a year early. After naval training, he served on Royal Navy ships on North Atlantic convoy escort duty.
In 1943 an opportunity for real adventure presented itself.
For the first three years of the war, the battle for the Atlantic had not gone well. The Germans were deploying more and more submarines, had learned to fight in groups - the dreaded wolf pack - and increasingly under the cover of darkness. The new tactics were stunningly successful, so by 1943
the Admiralty was open to suggestions even from a maverick like Capt. Walker, a career anti-submarine officer who had been slated for early retirement until war broke out.
Capt. Walker had had some success in fending off U-boats as part of a convoy escort in the Western Approaches, but he was frustrated that the escort ship's main priority was to protect the convoy itself.
He proposed that a second support group be commissioned to hunt U-boats in vulnerable areas, such as the Bay of Biscay and the far Atlantic. His ships were modified Black Swan class sloops and were naturally given the names of birds. While the Wren, Woodpecker, Cygnet, Wild Goose, Kite and Starling were free to roam the Atlantic with the sole purpose of hunting and destroying U-boats, the regular escort groups remained with the convoys.
Each vessel was equipped with ASDIC, the precursor to sonar, which became the essential tool in the underwater detection of U-boats. Mr. Chipman was assigned to the Wild Goose as senior watchkeeper and later as Lieutenant. Hunting U-boats was often likened to a big-game hunting expedition, but there were tedious days when the group patrolled the Atlantic, occasionally enlivened by rough weather when the wind reached Force 10 and the sloops, originally designed for service in the Mediterranean and Pacific, "endured some fierce bumping," as Lt. Chipman
recorded. Under those circumstances, it was felt that the U-boats were in a better situation while they remained submerged. If a U-boat captain was wily enough, the hunt could go on for hours or even days. The one consolation was that the submarine would eventually have to surface for air. When Capt. Walker's group sank the six U-boats in 10 days. Lt. Chipman was mentioned in despatches for "distinguished service." When the ships returned to Liverpool they were given a heroes' welcome. Lt. Chipman later described the reception: "Starling, Wild Goose, Magpie, and Wren arrived in Liverpool on the 25th of February. The four ships were cheered into the harbor in the best traditions of the Royal Navy. The First Lord made a speech to the assembled ships' companies in which he said that the patrol just ended had been "the most outstanding cruise undertaken in this war by an escort group." Meanwhile, Lt. Chipman had received glowing reports from his superior officers. He was promoted to acting Lieutenant-Commander and was now to command his own vessel after a much-needed four-month shore leave.
During his time at sea, LCdr. Chipman corresponded regularly with his high school sweetheart, Beatrice Kemp. He returned to Ottawa and they were married on Oct. 7, 1944. The Chipman's first child, Jill, was born in 1945
when he was once again at sea, in command of the sloop, HMS Weston. As the war wound down, he continued to escort convoys on cross-channel forays. In August, 1945, he was discharged in Ottawa after spending a total of 5½ years of almost continuous sea time.
His first order of business was to finish his BA at Queen's University, and he and Beatrice completed their family when a son, Kenneth, was born in 1947. In 1953, he was promoted to Commander, but found his niche when he joined the CBC in 1955. As an administrator, he was sent to various places throughout the country until his retirement in Toronto in 1970.
Beatrice died in 1985 and two years later, Cdr. Chipman surprised his family by eloping to Palm Springs with a close family friend, Marnie Taylor. They travelled together for many years and the commander was particularly
fond of rejoining his naval comrades at various reunions.
On one occasion, he was asked to speak at a reunion of Capt. Walker's Old Boys Association. "In the Battle of the Atlantic, under Capt. Walker's command, we did it all," he said. "Remember."

WILLIAM CHIPMAN
William Pennock Chipman was born in Ottawa. He died in his sleep in Oakville, Ont., on Jan. 25, 2009. He was 91. He was predeceased by his first wife, Beatrice, and by his second wife, Marnie. He leaves daughter Jill and son Kenneth and numerous stepchildren and extended family.

From The Times

April 3, 2009

Squadron Leader Richard Muspratt: wartime photographic reconnaissance pilot

As a photographic reconnaissance pilot flying over enemy occupied France in 1941 and 1942, Richard Muspratt flew numerous sorties in 140 Squadron, notably in a Spitfire high-level reconnaissance aircraft. Lacking the camaraderie in the air that is available to the squadron fighter pilot, the PR pilot developed, as he penetrated enemy territory on his own, a certain lone-wolf mentality, knowing that he was always waiting for the enemy to pounce.

With the expulsion of the British Expeditionary Force from France in the spring of 1940 it became an RAF priority to find out for the British high command exactly what was going on in the enemy-occupied French harbours that faced the coasts of southern Britain. With the countryside of the Pas de Calais a veritable nest of German fighter fields, venturing alone into this heavily defended airspace was a perilous business.

Accurate navigation was also essential if the pilot's photographs were to have any value (and if he needed to flee for home in a hurry). A thoroughly self-reliant pilot, Muspratt was very much at home in the lone-wolf (or as he preferred to put it "hare" ) role, and this quality subsequently made him a fine test pilot on the new, powerful single-engined aircraft types that were emerging in the second half of the war.

Richard Vivian Muspratt was born the son of an Indian Army major in 1917 and educated at Oundle, which he left in 1935 to take a diploma at Chelsea College of Aeronautical Engineering.

He had just emerged with a first-class pass when the war broke out and he enlisted in the RAF, to be commissioned in 1940. After a first posting to 53 (Army Co-operation) Squadron, he was posted in 1941 to 140 Squadron, where he embarked on a series of reconnaissance sorties, mainly taking photographs of French harbours from an altitude of just under 30,000ft.

On one occasion, in May 1942, while photographing the docks at Cherbourg, he was intercepted by a Focke-Wulf Fw190, a fighter that had demonstrated its superiority over the Spitfire when it had first come into action the previous year.

Having obtained his photographs Muspratt put his Spitfire into a steep diving turn which prevented the Fw190 from getting on to his tail at close range. He then used the PR Spitfire's just superior speed to draw steadily away during a chase that lasted for 30 miles, with the despairing German pilot firing bursts at him from 600 yards astern as he drew away. "Chalk one up to the hare!" he recorded in his log book on landing later that day.

Among Muspratt's most important sorties were the two that he flew over Dieppe on August 5 and 6, 1942. His large-scale photographs were to be part of a valuable intelligence resource for what nevertheless turned out to be the disastrous Dieppe raid of August 19, which at least demonstrated conclusively that an assault on a heavily defended harbour town could be no blueprint for any serious Allied landings on the German-occupied littoral (and when they eventually came in June 1944 it was over open beaches).

On being rested from operations Muspratt was awarded the DFC for his skill and leadership as a flight commander. The citation noted: "He never hesitates to undertake a difficult operational task himself rather than detail a less experienced pilot."

In 1943 Air Marshal Sir Ralph Sorley, the controller of research and development, became increasingly concerned by the rising number of fatalities in test flying and a lack of standardisation of flying techniques. The result was the founding of the Empire Test Pilot's Training School at Boscombe Down for whose No 1 course Muspratt was selected. He is its last survivor.

On passing through the school and being promoted to squadron leader he was invited to join Hawker, then developing a new generation of powerful piston-engined fighters, the Tempest and the Fury (and Sea Fury). Muspratt flew intensive testing flights in these superlative aircraft — the ultimate expression of the piston-engined fighter — with various weapon loads. With its level-flight top speed of 450mph the Tempest was to become highly effective in the role of intercepting V1 rockets, while the Navy's Sea Fury, flew right through the Korean War where it scored a number of combat victories over the Russian MiG15. It served with the Royal Navy until it was replaced by the turbojet Sea Hawk.

After leaving Hawker in 1948 Muspratt joined the Ferguson tractor company and spent 13 years in Australia, where he greatly boosted the firm's sales. Back in the UK after 1960, he bought and ran a business at Leamington Spa, Witney Welding and Engineering, which he ran until his final retirement in 1985.

His wife Jane, whom he had met and married during his time in Australia, died in 2003. He is survived by his two daughters.

Squadron Leader Richard Muspratt, DFC, wartime photographic reconnaissance and test pilot, was born on November 16, 1917. He died on January 15, 2009, aged 91

From The Times
April 3, 2009
Squadron Leader Ted Wass
One of the dwindling band of aircrew who served with the celebrated 617 "Dambusters" Squadron during the Second World War, Ted Wass also rendered sterling service to the Squadron Association as its secretary for a dozen years from the early 1990s onwards.
In this his early experience with the RAF's supply branch, in which he served before joining 617 as an air gunner in 1944, stood him in good stead. He was highly valued for his meticulous record-keeping, which enabled the association to function effectively in keeping its membership together in those years.
Joining the squadron in the year after the Ruhr dams raid, Wass took part as rear gunner in Flight-Lieutenant Tony Iveson's Lancaster, in attacks on the Dortmund-Ems canal and the Tirpitz, including the attack of November 1944
that finally sank the battleship in a Norwegian fjord. He became a POW after bailing out during a raid on Bergen in January 1945.
Born in 1920 Edward Wass enlisted in the RAF Volunteer Reserve as an equipment assistant four months before war broke out, and from June 1941 operated a mobile stores unit in the Middle East, supporting fighter squadrons and repair units. When the chance came he volunteered for aircrew in 1943, and in July 1944 was posted to 617 Squadron.
Flying as rear gunner to Iveson he took part in a number of 617's destructive attacks on U and E-boat pens using the 12,000lb "Tallboy" deep penetration bomb designed by Barnes Wallis (author of the "bouncing bombs" which had ruptured the Möhne and Eder dams).
The crew next set off with 617 for Russia, flying to Yagodnik airfield on an island in the Dvina River, from where, on September 15, 1944, they attacked and severely damaged — but did not sink — Tirpitz, then berthed at Kaa Fjord high inside the Arctic Circle. November 11 was a different story. By that time the damaged Tirpitz had been brought south to Tromsø Fjord, where she was within reach of Lancasters based at Lossiemouth, in Scotland.
For this raid, in order to carry the extra fuel required, the mid-upper turret was removed to save weight, placing the onus for defence against fighters on the rear gunner. No fighters were encountered and Tirpitz was sunk.
Wass' last operation with 617 was an attack on U-boat pens at Bergen on January 12, 1945. The Mustang fighter escort that had been expected failed to materialize and two Lancasters were shot down. Iveson's Lancaster was attacked by an Fw190, its controls, port fin and tail plane were severely damaged by cannon fire and its port inner engine was set on fire. With the aircraft barely controllable the order was given to bail out. Wass and two other crewmen got ready to jump, and on receiving what they took to be an affirmative order, bailed out, Wass landing in a snowdrift. Taken to Germany he was eventually liberated from a PoW camp at Moosburg in April. Iveson had in fact managed to nurse his damaged Lancaster home and received the DFC.
After the war Wass returned to the supply branch and was commissioned, retiring as a squadron leader in 1975. In his work as secretary of the squadron association he was stalwartly supported by his wife, Isabel, who died in 1999. He is survived by a son and a daughter.

Squadron Leader Ted Wass, 617 Squadron veteran, was born on October 8, 1920.
He died on February 20, 2009, aged 88

Dunlop: his plan for promoting officers put an end to 'Buggins's turn'
At the end of the Second World War, the Royal Navy's peacetime reductions generated problems in personnel structures and career management. A prime problem was how to create a modern, less class-based Navy with fairer
promotion opportunities as well as dealing with excessively old-fashioned approaches to the welfare of sailors. Many had observed an American navy well able to combine massive firepower and creature comforts.
Colin Dunlop's career as a supply and secretariat officer (determined by his defective eyesight) held innovations in opportunity for which he was either personally responsible or played a major role. He himself was appointed to
posts previously reserved for the mainstream executive (ie, "seaman") branch.
Born in 1918, the son of a naval engineer officer who also rose to rear-admiral, Colin Charles Harrison Dunlop was educated at Marlborough College from where he joined the Royal Navy in 1935. His first operational ship was the cruiser Shropshire, in which, alongside in Barcelona during the chaos of the Spanish Civil War, he witnessed the lawlessness of Spanish government forces, their summary executions and other atrocities.
He joined the cruiser Kent in March 1938 and was appointed secretary to the captain while still a midshipman. After war was declared, he took part in
Kent's China Station patrols against German shipping and commerce raiders until transferred to the Mediterranean fleet. While bombarding the port of Bardia, in modern Libya, in September 1940, Kent was torpedoed by an Italian aircraft and disabled. She returned to the UK where Dunlop joined the battleship Valiant, in which he served in the Indian Ocean and at the Salerno landings. He also saw the surrender of the Italian fleet. Back in the UK, he passed out top of the naval staff course and in March 1945 was appointed to the cruiser Diadem and then secretary to the commodore of the 15th Cruiser Squadron in the Orion which supported the American advance in Italy. For Orion, the end of the war in Europe was followed by involvement in Marshal Tito's aggressive aspirations towards Trieste. He then served in Palestine.
Dunlop was appointed secretary to the Naval Secretary, having hitched his wagon to the star of Rear-Admiral Robert Mansergh whom he served for seven years. The Naval Secretary is responsible for the appointment of all senior officers; it quickly became apparent that only a rigorous approach to promotion given the number of posts and length of tenure would work and be fair. Dunlop's plan (evolved with Captain Deric Holland-Martin) was accepted and its principles still apply today. "Dead men's shoes" and "Buggins's turn" ceased. Dunlop followed Mansergh to sea in charge of a carrier squadron and then in August 1949 to the Admiralty as 5th Sea Lord overseeing naval aviation during a difficult period of shortages of aircrew. Dunlop's innovative idea that supply branch officers should be allowed to qualify somewhat eased the situation. Mansergh was appointed Flag Officer Plymouth with Dunlop accompanying him.
After Mansergh retired Dunlop was given a humdrum supply job in Portsmouth barracks. When a high-level officer structure committee was formed and authorised anyone to write directly to it with ideas, Dunlop, believing that the navy undervalued its non-executive officers and that Admiral Lord Fisher's pre-First World War engineer officer reforms had been allowed to wither, wrote a long paper setting out the problems and his solution.
These were virtually identical to the celebrated Admiralty Fleet Order No 1 of 1956, which removed specialists' coloured stripes (which had immediately identified them as being non -"seaman" officers) from their sleeves, opening some higher posts to all specialisations. It also opened avenues for advancement from the lower deck. As a member of the committee on officer structure and training, Dunlop moved to align an obsolete structure with modern practice.
Early in 1957 Dunlop joined the cruiser Sheffield which had been fitted with a dining hall for junior ratings, an improvement intended to do away with ancient messing systems notorious for waste and malnutrition. Dunlop's
innovations included multi-choice menus, previously unheard of, and these were finally introduced Navy-wide.
In 1960 he was asked for by the formidable Sir Caspar John, Vice-Chief of the Naval Staff, and resumed his career at the higher levels of naval policy, continuing to serve John when he became First Sea Lord later that year.
In May 1964 Dunlop was appointed to his first command, the Chatham barracks and the Naval Supply School - the former until then an executive officer's post. He served in the MoD until 1969, first for the Defence Secretary, Denis Healey, on an important resource planning committee and then as a director of the tri-service Defence Policy Staff - a "first" for a supply officer.
Promoted rear-admiral, he was appointed commander of the British Navy Staff in Washington, where his ebullient and cheerful personality clicked with the iconic Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, the USN's Chief of Naval Operations. His final tour, another supply "first", was as Flag Officer Medway and Port Admiral, Chatham, during which he was also Chief Naval Supply and Secretariat Officer, father of the branch. He was appointed CBE in 1963 and CB in 1972. Retiring in 1974, he was for ten years the director-general of the Cable TV
Association and the National TV Rental Association. Playing for naval teams around the world, Dunlop was a fanatically keen cricketer. Noted for his accurate and analytical mind, his warm and enthusiastic personality made him many friends.
His wife Pat, whom he married in 1941, died in 1991; in 1995 he married Commandant Elizabeth Craig-McFeely, formerly Superintendent of the WRNS. He is survived by her and the two sons of his first marriage.

Rear-Admiral Colin Dunlop, CB, CBE, Flag Officer Medway and Chief Naval Supply and Secretariat Officer 1971-74, was born on March 4, 1918. He died on March 8, 2009, aged 91

He helped develop the G-suit during WWII
Top-secret work on centrifuges was transformed after the war into life-saving cardiovascular research

SANDRA MARTIN

March 25, 2009

As an aerospace medical researcher, Earl Wood spanned the era from fighter pilots to astronauts.

The version of the G-suit that he helped develop for bomber pilots flying at high altitudes and fighter pilots who were blacking out in dogfights with the Japanese during the Second World War, made a successful transition to peacetime. In a modified and advanced form, these pressurized suits were used by the test pilots who broke the sound barrier and the astronauts who circled the globe and landed on the moon.

"As both a physician and researcher, Dr. Wood provided nearly five decades of outstanding leadership to Mayo Clinic and scientific advancements to the world," Denis Cortese, Mayo Clinic president and CEO, said in a news release. The author of more than 700 scholarly articles and several book chapters, Dr. Wood's research was also instrumental in modifying an air pressure gauge from an aircraft into the standard tool for measuring arterial blood pressure; developing the first diagnostic cardiac catheterization in humans; refining the heart-lung bypass machine to enable Mayo to perform open-heart surgery as a routine procedure; formulating indo-cyanine green dye to measure heart pump function in diagnosing congenital heart disease; and creating advanced X-ray imagery of the heart, lungs and circulation leading to an X-ray-based computed tomography machine that evolved into CT scanner technology.

Well into extreme old age, Dr. Wood continued to work and consult with colleagues around the world. "He was a giant as a person," said Jan Stepanek, a Swiss internist who is now medical director of the Mayo Clinic in Arizona. Dr. Stepanek credits Dr. Wood with sparking his own interest in researching aerospace medicine. "Many things are called mentorship today, but one key ingredient is a dedicated presence when people have time together," he said. "When you were sitting with Dr. Wood, nothing else mattered. He was there with you and for you and he was going to give you the most in-depth answers to your questions that you could ever hope for."

Born in the American Midwest before the First World War, Earl Wood was the second youngest of six children of William G. Wood and his wife Inez. Both his parents were teachers, despite their lack of secondary education, and his father also worked as a farmer and a real estate salesman. After attending local schools, he attended Macalester College, a liberal arts institution in St. Paul, Minn., graduating in 1934. Two years later, on Dec. 20, 1936, he married Ada Peterson, his college sweetheart. Together they raised four children.

"He was there for the individual, as an advocate for his graduate fellows, his students, his technicians and his family," said his youngest son Andrew (Andy) Wood, a wellness facility entrepreneur. "He was the ultimate in a leader because he emphasized people's strengths and leveraged those strengths," said Mr. Wood, explaining how his father took time to help him, "a severe dyslexic," learn to read and do math problems. "He basically got me through high school and into college and eventually graduate school. He was never critical, but he would come up with a plan and pose it in such a way that it seemed like it was my idea so I took ownership of it."

Dr. Wood earned postgraduate degrees, including a PhD and an MD at the University of Minnesota and a National Research Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, before being hired to teach pharmacology at Harvard University. That is where he met Charles Code, the Canadian-born physiologist who had set up an Aero Medical Unit in the late 1930s at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., researching the deleterious effects of high acceleration on pilots of civilian and military aircraft.

A few months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Dr. Code hired Dr. Wood to help solve a deadly problem affecting American pilots. Some of them were blacking out because blood was rushing from their heads and pooling in their legs as they climbed and swooped in bombing runs and dogfights with the enemy. Dr. Wood and other members of Dr. Code's research team turned themselves into human guinea pigs by building a human centrifuge in the lab.

The researchers took their experiments aloft in an Army A-24 plane, a Dauntless dive-bomber they called the G-Whiz, which made dives and loops over the Minnesota cornfields. These experiments in gravitational pull led them to develop a G-suit, with pouches or bladders around the legs that the wearer could pump full of air, thus blocking an excessive downward flow of blood and obviating the tendency for pilots to lose consciousness from a lack of blood in the brain.

This top-secret work on centrifuges was transformed after the war into internationally recognized cardiovascular research that extended to heart, lung and blood physiology and cardiac catheterization.

"Dr. Wood was absolutely instrumental in the development of cardiopulmonary bypass, a technology that saves hundreds of thousands of lives every year," Thoralf Sundt III, a Mayo Clinic surgeon, said in a statement.

Dr. Wood's academic career proceeded apace with his medical research. He became a professor in the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine in 1951. Seven years later, the U.S. Air Force and NASA asked Dr. Wood to continue his G-forces research with the result that he and his team began testing prototypes of the Project Mercury astronaut couches on the Mayo centrifuge.

By the early 1960s, Dr. Wood, who was head of Mayo Clinic's Cardiovascular Laboratory, was hosting research fellows, visiting scientists and clinicians who came to study in his lab and learn new techniques.

Even though he retired from the Mayo Clinic at age 70 in January, 1982, Dr. Wood continued to correspond and consult with researchers and colleagues from around the world. One of them was Dr. Stepanek, who, in the late 1990s, was investigating the differences between air- and water-pressured G-suits. The two men, one in his mid-80s and the other in his early 30s, began an e-mail and fax conversation. "It was probably the time in my life when I looked the smartest," said Dr. Stepanek, who would send questions in the late afternoon from Switzerland and stand by the fax machine the next morning to receive reams of technical reports and documents dating back to the Second World War from Rochester.

"He was sharp as a tack," Dr. Stepanek said. "I would never have gotten some of the ideas and some of the thought processes without the interaction with him."

Two years later, the two men met in Rochester. "He had grey hair and a sparkle in his eyes, he was minimally hunched over and slightly hard of hearing, but he was an extremely attentive listener," said Dr. Stepanek. "In everybody's career and life there are these moments when you have the opportunity to spend time with somebody who is not just talented and a scientifically brilliant person, but somebody who manages to influence your life," he said. "He was brilliant, humble and a gentleman. What a wonderful human being."

Earl Wood

Earl Wood was born on Jan. 1, 1912, in Mankato, Minn. He died March 18, 2009, in Rochester, Minn., of pneumonia following surgery for a broken hip. Predeceased by his wife Ada in 2000, Dr. Wood, who was 97, leaves four children and four grandchildren.

to them all.

to all of them.

to all.

TO