General Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley, who died on Saturday 11th March 2006, aged 81,

Provided inspiring leadership in Korea at the battle of the Imjin river.
June 1950 North Korean forces crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded South
Korea; by October Chinese "volunteers" had joined them. The UN Security
Council resolved to go to South Korea's assistance and American ground
forces were ordered in, followed by a force from Hong Kong and, two months
later, the British 29th Infantry Brigade. Britain's main Commonwealth
partners also pledged their forces and these formed the 1st Commonwealth Division.
Farrar-Hockley went to Korea in 1950 as adjutant of the 1st Battalion
Gloucestershire Regiment. In April the following year 29 Brigade was holding
the line along the Imjin with the Glosters defending the main river
crossing, an ancient invasion route to Seoul.
The battle began on April 22 and, during its final phase, the 1st Battalion
was concentrated on Hill 235 with "A" Company holding a long spur towards
the west. On April 24, at about midnight, the Chinese attacked "A" Company
in great strength, pressing home the offensive for more than 10 hours.
During the night the only two platoon commanders became casualties, and by
dawn the forward platoons had been driven back. The company was then
concentrated on a knoll about 50 yards from battalion headquarters; had it
been captured the battalion's situation would have become untenable.
It rapidly became clear that the one officer remaining with the company
would require assistance to maintain the defence of this vital point.
Farrar-Hockley volunteered for this dangerous task, and his impact on the
desperate position of the company was immediate. Trenches in which the
defenders had become casualties were re-manned and fire superiority was regained.
The enemy working around the left flank were caught by grenades and small
arms fire and fell back with heavy losses. Establishing themselves about 40
yards away, they attacked again and again but each time they were beaten off.
Farrar-Hockley was in one of the forward trenches, encouraging his men and
taking a leading part in the fierce, close-quarter fighting. His order to
the drum-major, at the height of the battle, to counter the nerve-wracking
blare of the Chinese assault trumpets with snatches of British Army bugle
calls passed into regimental legend.
When orders were received to abandon the position, Farrar-Hockley covered
the withdrawal with fire and a smokescreen and he was one of the last to
fall back; but, when the battalion's position was eventually overrun by the
Chinese, he was taken prisoner.
The citation for the DSO awarded to him for his part in the battle stated:
"Throughout this desperate engagement on which the ability of the Battalion
to hold its position entirely depended, Captain Farrar-Hockley was an
inspiration to the defenders. His outstanding gallantry, fighting spirit and
great powers of leadership heartened his men and welded them into an
indomitable team. His conduct could not have been surpassed."
During the two years that Farrar-Hockley spent in PoW camps, he frustrated
efforts to brainwash him by vigorously debating with his gaolers. He made
six attempts to escape. On one occasion he reached the Korean coast before
he was recaptured; on another he crawled and swam for seven hours along a
river bed, feigning death when spotted by enemy soldiers and surviving the
intense cold by wrapping himself in a blanket taken from a dead mule.
Following recapture, he was often tortured or brutally interrogated.
Farrar-Hockley was released after the Armistice was signed in July 1953 and
was mentioned in dispatches for his conduct as a prisoner of war.
A journalist's son, Anthony Heritage Farrar-Hockley was born at Coventry on
April 8 1924 and educated at Exeter School. On the outbreak of the Second
World War, at the age of 15, he ran away from school and enlisted in the
Gloucestershire Regiment, but he was found out and discharged. He
re-enlisted in 1941 and was posted to the 70th Young Soldiers' Battalion.
In 1942, after volunteering for parachute training, he was granted an
emergency commission in the Parachute Regiment. At the age of 20 he was in
command of a rifle company of the 6th Battalion and he won an MC during the
Communist rebellion in Athens. He said afterwards that getting food through
to the starving people of Thebes was one of the best things he ever did.
After serving in Palestine, Farrar-Hockley returned to the Glosters and went
with them to Korea. Following his release from prisoner-of-war camp, he
attended Staff College before rejoining the Airborne Forces, serving as
deputy assistant adjutant and quartermaster-general, then as brigade major
of the 16th Parachute Brigade. He saw active service during this period in
the EOKA campaign in Cyprus, the landings at Port Said in 1956 and the
British intervention in Jordan in 1958.
The following year he became chief instructor at the Royal Military Academy,
Sandhurst, before taking command of the 3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment in
the Persian Gulf in 1962. The greatest feat of arms of his career was,
perhaps, his battalion's capture, in 1964, of the Arab Nationalist
stronghold at Wadi Dhubsan deep in the Radfan mountains north of Aden.
The battalion was called upon to undertake a difficult 10-mile advance into
mountainous enemy territory and then attack a highly inaccessible and
strongly-defended rebel base. Helicopters were not available in sufficient
numbers to permit an assault from the air, so his men roped themselves down
the sheer sides of the flanking ridges and achieved complete surprise over
the rebels in the gorge below.
During a hard-fought battle, Farrar-Hockley's Scout helicopter was shot down
beyond his own lines. With some difficulty, he rejoined his battalion and,
finding it pinned down, he launched a well-executed attack which drove the
enemy from their position. This action led to the submission of the
dissident Radfani tribes and to the award of a Bar to Farrar-Hockley's DSO.
After relinquishing command of his battalion in 1965, Farrar-Hockley went to
the Far East to be Chief of Staff to the Director of Operations in Borneo,
where he helped to organise secret operations inside Indonesian territory
which brought about the end of President Sukarno's "Confrontation" with Malaysia.
Farrar-Hockley took command of the 16th Parachute Brigade in 1966 and, in
1968, went to Exeter College, Oxford, on a Defence Fellowship. He carried
out research into the effects of national service on British society; after
conducting a poll of 2,000, Farrar-Hockley reported that 84 per cent said
that they would welcome a return to conscription. He admitted, however, that
there was a strong political bias against a compulsory call-up and that the
Services did not want conscription.
After a four-month tour as Director of Army Public Relations, Farrar-Hockley
was promoted to major-general and posted to Belfast as Commander Land
Forces. Urban rioting and terrorism were rising, and Farrar-Hockley was the
first senior officer to acknowledge publicly that the IRA was behind the violence.
Although he left Ulster well before "Bloody Sunday", his unremitting
campaign against the IRA and his close association with the Parachute
Regiment made him a prime target. In 1971 he took command of the 4th
Armoured Division in BAOR before moving to the Ministry of Defence in 1974;
his innovative thinking and operational experience were given full scope as
Director of Combat Development (Army).
He was promoted to lieutenant-general in 1977 on his appointment as GOC
South East District, and was knighted in the Birthday Honours of that year.
In 1979 he moved to Oslo to take up his final military appointment as Nato's
C-in-C Allied Forces Northern Europe.
After retiring from the Army in 1982 Farrar-Hockley acted as a defence
consultant and spent much of his time writing. His publications included The
Edge of the Sword (1954), an account of his experiences in the Korean War;
The Somme (1964); and Goughie (1975), a well-reviewed biography of General
Sir Hubert Gough, the commander of the ill-fated Fifth Army in 1918. He
joined the Cabinet Office's historical section to write the official history
of the Korean War in two volumes, A Distant Obligation (1990) and An
Honourable Discharge (1995). He wrote many articles in newspapers,
periodicals and journals.
Even in his retirement to a village in Oxfordshire, the IRA remained a
threat. In 1990 a bomb was attached to the reel of his garden hose, but was
spotted by his gardener and defused. "I keep my eyes open," said
Farrar-Hockley, "and I don't much care for people who place explosive
devices in my garden."
Farrar-Hockley was a man of boundless energy with an infectious enthusiasm
for soldiering. A lucid, forceful speaker, his pugnacious face appeared
regularly on television commenting on military events or terrorist incidents
affecting the Army.
In response to new evidence that emerged in successive enquiries into
"Bloody Sunday", when 13 Catholics were shot dead during a civil rights'
march in Londonderry in 1972, Farrar-Hockley robustly defended the role of
the Parachute Regiment: "It is all part of a long-running public relations
exercise," he told the BBC, "to persuade people that soldiers were all
murderers and nothing wrong was done by the people on the other side." He
voiced strong concerns following the ruling by the judges sitting on the
Saville Tribunal that the former Paras could not rely on being granted anonymity.
He was also an outspoken opponent of the European Court of Human Rights
ruling that the British Armed Forces were obliged to permit avowed
homosexuals to enlist. He maintained that the military was a unique
institution which should be allowed to run its own affairs, and that the
concession would damage morale and discipline.
Farrar-Hockley was ADC General to the Queen from 1981 to 1983, Colonel
Commandant of the Prince of Wales Division (1974-1980) and of the Parachute
Regiment (1977-1983), and Colonel of the Gloucestershire Regiment from 1978
to 1984. He was appointed GBE in 1981.
Tony Farrar-Hockley married first, in 1945, Margaret Bernadette Wells; she
died in 1981. He married, secondly, in 1983, Linda Wood, who survives him
with two sons (one son predeceased him) of his first marriage; the eldest,
Major-General Dair Farrar-Hockley, followed his father into the Parachute
Regiment and was awarded the MC in the Falklands War.