Brigadier Frank Henn
Officer who saw bitter fighting after D-day and later commanded the British UN force in Cyprus
BRIGADIER FRANK HENN, who has died aged 99, saw wartime action in France and the Low Countries both with the BEF and after D-day, and later commanded the British contingent of the UN forces in Cyprus when the island was invaded by Turkey.
At the end of 1939 the newly commissioned Henn was posted as a platoon commander to the 5th Bn, the Gloucestershire Regiment, a TA unit and part of the 48th (South Midlands) Infantry Division, then in France.
When the Germans invaded Holland, the 5th Glosters moved forward to a position near Waterloo, south of Brussels, and then undertook a series of delaying actions as the BEF fell back.
The Luftwaffe was dive-bombing roads that were clogged with refugees. At one stage, 95 miles were marched in 83 hours. All ranks were tired. Stragglers were detached or lost and casualties caused by enemy action were mounting fast.
By May 26 Henn’s platoon was reduced to 10 men. He was involved in fierce fighting near Wormhoudt, and said afterwards that his small force was lucky not to have suffered the fate of some 80 men, mostly from the 2nd Warwicks, who were herded into a barn and massacred in cold blood. By the early hours of May 31, he and the survivors had embarked from Dunkirk.
In 1941 the battalion, retitled 43rd Reconnaissance Regiment, was equipped with armoured cars and tracked carriers. Henn became the Battalion Intelligence Officer before commanding the regiment’s anti-tank battery of 12 six-pounder guns.
About two weeks after D-day, the regiment embarked at Tilbury but a Channel storm forced the vessel to lie at anchor off Sword Beach for three days until the weather subsided. As the ship moved to begin disembarking, it struck a mine and broke in half, with the loss, killed or wounded, of about half the regiment.
Henn was one of the fortunate survivors. He commanded the
Headquarters Squadron and his regiment led the 43rd Wessex Division in the break-out from Normandy. It took part in the forced crossing of the Seine, the link-up with the Airborne Division at Arnhem and bitter fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. There it was responsible for holding all the crossings over a 30-mile stretch of the River Meuse. The division finished the war at Bremen.
Francis Robert Henn was born in Cairo on November 20 1920. His father, Colonel W F Henn CBE, MVO, served with the Munster Fusiliers in the First World War before joining the Cairo City Police.
Young Frank spent a carefree childhood at his family home overlooking the Shannon in Co Clare. He was educated at Aldenham School, Hertfordshire, before going to Sandhurst in August 1939. The Second World War broke out soon after and he was commissioned into the Gloucestershire Regiment after only four months’ training.
In 1946, 43rd Recce Regiment was disbanded and Henn transferred to the 11th Hussars at Jever, a former Luftwaffe airfield near Wilhelmshaven. After Staff College, followed by two years on the staff of the Military Secretary at the War Office, he rejoined his regiment in Malaya during the Emergency. He was in command of a squadron based at Johor Baru and was Mentioned in Despatches.
After a staff appointment at the RAC Centre at Bovington, Dorset, in 1959 he was posted to the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars as Training Major. He then returned to the War Office as a member of the Military Operations Directorate before promotion to lieutenant-colonel with the task of helping to establish a new Tri-service Defence Operations Staff at the Ministry of Defence.
In 1966 he was appointed to the Directing Staff of the Australian Army Staff College. From early 1969 to 1972 he was head of the Chief of Defence Staff ’s briefing section at the MOD and had the exacting task of preparing papers for policy meetings at home and abroad between ministers and the Chief of Defence Staff. He was appointed CBE at the end of his tour.
In July 1972 he became Chief of Staff and Commander of the British Contingent of the UN Force in Cyprus. UNFICYP, the Peacekeeping Force, deployed to Cyprus some 10 years earlier, was by then reduced to about 3,000 lightly armed soldiers drawn from eight countries.
There were occasional violent incidents but the situation between the Greek and Turkish Cypriots was relatively calm. At weekends, Henn and his family left Nicosia for the village of Bellapais, high above the port of Kyrenia, where they rented the house made famous by Lawrence Durrell in his book Bitter Lemons.
In July 1974, following growing anti-government violence within the Greek Cypriot community – in which UNFICYP was not authorised to intervene – a coup d’état instigated by the Greek military junta in Athens compelled Archbishop Makarios, President of Cyprus, to flee the island.
Five days later, mainland Turkish troops invaded in overwhelming strength and imposed the partition which persists to this day. Henn and his family left their house just before it came under mortar and heavy machine-gun fire.
Fighting was savage and UN soldiers were killed and wounded in an effort to halt a quarrel which was not theirs. Henn’s wife and daughter were evacuated to the British bases in the south of the island and eventually to England. In October, when his tour of duty expired, he followed them home.
His final Army service was managing the Army Presentation Team at the MOD. He retired from the Service in 1975, but for several years lectured at home and abroad on UN peacekeeping operations, and for three years he was a Special Adviser on Cyprus to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee.
In 1999 Henn and his family moved from Somerset to a village in Oxfordshire and he took over as president of the 43rd Wessex Division Association. In 2004 he published A Business of Some Heat: The United Nations Force in Cyprus Before and During the 1974 Turkish Invasion.
After the war, when he was stationed in Schleswig Holstein, he had enjoyed sailing in the Baltic. When cruising, he could always pinpoint his exact position on the chart. Until a week before his death he checked the barometer every day and was never far from his pocket compass.
Frank Henn married, in 1957, Monica Russell, whom he first met in Singapore and who had served as an officer in the WRNS and as a member of the security services. She predeceased him, and he is survived by their daughter.
Brigadier Frank Henn, born November 20 1920, died October 15 2020