CAPTAIN JAMES RAWE, NAVAL OFFICER WHO SERVED ON D-DAY AND LATER HELPED TO DEVELOP THE NIGERIAN NAVY – OBITUARY
Captain James Rawe, who has died aged 97, was a landing craft officer on D-Day in 1944; he later employed his amphibious experience during the civil war in Nigeria.
In 1955, while serving in the Far East, Rawe answered a call for volunteers to help to form the fledgling Royal Nigerian Navy, which was emerging from several Colonial marine services. All other personnel were seconded from different departments, and Rawe was the first person to join the new service directly.
After independence, Rawe received a letter from the Governor General asking him to remain in the navy; for this to be possible he had to join Her Majesty’s Overseas Civil Service, which put him in the unusual position of being both a serving naval officer and a civil servant.
He played an important part in the formation and development of the Nigerian navy; having navigated a delicate path through the military coups of January and July 1966, he worked closely with Joseph Edet Akinwale “Joe” Wey, the chief of naval staff, and with Yakubu “Jack” Gowon, head of state and Commander-in-Chief. Rawe developed a high regard for the honesty and integrity of both men.
Rawe played an active role in the Biafran Civil War between 1967 and 1970, planning and executing the series of seaborne landings which were critical to the eventual Federal victory. In these landings he closely worked with Benjamin Adekunle, the commander of the 3rd Division, who was a highly effective soldier but also a controversial and feared figure.
Rawe was slightly wounded in one of these operations by a bomb lobbed from a helicopter manned by Frenchmen on to his ship. As the helicopter was directly overhead, Rawe’s guns could not be brought to bear, but as they were on the same radio frequency he was able to express his views.
In 1969, with the war drawing to a close, he retired from the Nigerian Navy as a captain.
A book on the Nigerian Civil War described Rawe as “a swashbuckling, hired gun who planned and executed combined operations [who] walked around in seaboots with a cavalry pistol slung low on [his] hip”.
Rawe objected to being called a mercenary, and in 1974 his solicitor Sir Hugh Rossi, with whom he had been at school, and his barrister, Leon Brittan (subsequently Home Secretary under Margaret Thatcher), obliged the author and the publishers, Hodder and Stoughton, to admit libel, to pay damages and costs, and make an apology.
Despite his appointments as MBE (Military) in 1964 and OBE (Military) in 1967, the Government was nonplussed by the involvement of a British naval officer in Nigeria during the coups of 1966 and the civil war, and questions were asked in Parliament. Rawe was equally nonplussed by the various UK agencies which paid his naval pension: while he could understand receiving a pension from the Crown Agents, he was amused that in later years he received it from the Department for International Development.
James Rawe was born on July 14 1925 in Constantinople, where his grandfather, a naval architect from a Cornish family, had moved in the late 19th century, becoming superintendent of the Sultan’s arsenal. He had died in 1917 while interned by the Turkish authorities.
Rawe’s father, a talented linguist, had worked for British naval intelligence in the eastern Mediterranean during and after the First World War: indiscreetly, his marriage certificate in June 1918 recorded his profession as Naval Intelligence Agent.
When the last sultan, Mehmed VI, departed his Ottoman capital in 1922, he did so through the Rawes’ walled garden and their private steps on the banks of the Bosphorus. As a result of James’s father’s wartime activities, however, the family’s assets in Turkey were expropriated. James was born when his father returned to the country to try to retrieve some of the family fortune.
Educated at home by his mother and then by the brothers of Our Lady of Mercy at St Aloysius’ College in Highgate, north London, Rawe joined the Navy in 1943 as an officer cadet under the wartime Y scheme.
He volunteered for Combined Operations on the basis that the training was short and volunteers were given a week’s leave. After completing a commando training course near Fort William in early 1944, Rawe was appointed first lieutenant of a tank landing craft, LCT 977.
His squadron worked up in the Sound of Jura, practising changing formation, testing guns, beaching, and, most importantly, judging when to let go the kedge anchor which was essential to pull themselves off the beach.
As an 18-year-old midshipman in LCT 977 he landed the US 12th Infantry on Utah beach in the early morning of June 6 1944. He recalled that after 48 hours milling about in the Channel, “we felt like knights of old going out to slay the dragon … the sea had moderated and, on the order to go, our flotilla, keeping almost perfect formation, wheeled from line ahead to line abeam. Painted in white and pale grey camouflage with large battle ensigns standing out stiffly in the breeze, we made a brave sight.”
Fortuitously, strong currents pushed the landing flotilla about 2,000 yards eastwards to a less heavily defended part of the beach. Rawe was bringing various personal weapons on to the bridge when US Colonel James Luckett tapped him on the shoulder and asked: “Hey, mid, who’s making this landing? You or me?” Some of the soldiers noticed that the cumulus clouds had formed a cross over the beaches and took this to be a positive sign.
In September, Rawe was appointed first lieutenant of LCT 1051, still under US command, which over the next few months landed troops and supplies on Omaha and Utah beaches and at Arromanches, Le Havre and Cherbourg.
Postwar, Rawe joined the Hydrographic Service, serving in the survey ships Cook in UK waters and Dampier in the South China Sea.
After leaving Nigeria, he served as a probation officer in Oxfordshire but opted for early retirement and moved to Dorset. He is believed to have been one of the longest serving fellows of the Royal Geographic Society, with a 71-year stint. He was appointed to the Légion d’honneur in 2016, and a memoir, That Reminds Me!, was published privately in 2021.
In 1952 he married Irene Craig, enjoying five days’ honeymoon in Paris before he sailed for the Far East. She survives him with three sons; another son predeceased him.
James Rawe, born July 14 1925, died April 15 2023
2023-05-30T13:51:05Z dg43tfdfdgfd