Lt Colonel Dudley Coventry

I found the text of the obituary we originally posted for this amazing warrior....

Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Coventry

Edgar Walter Dudley Coventry was commissioned in 1938 after Sandhurst and served tours of duty with the East Lancashire Regiment in Ireland, India’s North West Frontier and Afghanistan before the outbreak of World War Two.
By 1942 his aptitude for unconventional tactics was apparent and he served first in 5 Commando and Parachute Troop and then in the Special Service Raiding Forces. In 1943 he was in a unit which was smuggled on to the French coast to pin down German troops while scientists took soil samples from the beaches in preparation for the D Day landings.
In the same year Coventry achieved notoriety through an incident in the occupied Channel Isles when a German sentry, captured by his unit, was shot dead, leading to charges from Berlin that British soldiers were executing prisoners.
After the D Day landings, Coventry by this time a captain with the Royal Marines 45 Commando, harried retreating German troops behind the lines from commandeered vehicles mounted with Vickers machine guns. David Young the author of Four Five, a history of 45 Commando recounts how Coventry bumped into a startled SS trainee on the Weser River in Germany and killed him with a single punch to the jaw.
Coventry ended the war with a lieutenant colonels field commission but afterwards reverted to being a captain. He then served in Germany Cyprus and Palestine with the 1st Parachute Regiment. In 1948 on a training exercise in France he broke his back in a parachuting accident but made an excellent recovery.
During the anti communist campaign in Malaya in 1955 he was with the 22 SAS Regiment. His remit was to be dropped in the jungle with a small unit and slowly cross grid a large area in search of insurgents. He emerged at the end weighing 137 lbs.
To avoid a desk job he then joined the French Foreign Legion serving in Algeria in the bloody but vain effort to put down the independence movement.
By 1960 however he had rejoined the SAS and was serving in Central Africa. But a year later he had resigned again from the British Army and had joined the Rhodesian Light Infantry. When Ian Smith, the Rhodesian Front leader made his Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, Coventry helped form a squadron of about 120 men which severely set back first attempts by black nationalist guerrillas to launch their armed struggle. Coventry became the CO of C-Squadron, Rhodesian SAS.


[Lt Colonel Coventry while with the Rhodesian SAS]

In 1970 when he was 55 he transferred from the Rhodesian SAS to the Central Intelligence Organisation as a civilian field officer. But in effect he was running “ S – Desk “ in the Central Intelligence Organisation, known as the “funnies department” a job demanding an even greater degree of involvement in the world of subterfuge.
Among the tasks he was involved in was the formation of Renamo the right wing guerrilla movement which fought the Frelimo government in Mozambique after the independence from Portugal. After running training courses on a farm in eastern Rhodesia, Coventry, by then in his sixties, escorted units on foot through the border minefields into Mozambique.
Following Zimbabwe’s independence in April 1980 Coventry was among hundreds of commandos assassins saboteurs and spies flown secretly too South Africa to avoid the feared reprisals from the new black government. He took a dislike to the South African military and within hours he was back in Salisbury (now called Harare). He rejoined the army as a major and in the same year helped establish the Parachute Group and three years later the Zimbabwean SAS where he was promoted to lieutenant colonel the highest substantive rank he reached in his career.
In 1987 Coventry led a parachute assault on the Gorogoza mountain, Mozambique, the headquarters of his former student Afonso Dhlakama the head of Renamo. One of his last tasks, later that year was to attempt to assassinate an anti government Zimbabwean guerrilla chief in neighbouring Botswana but he aborted the mission when he found he was being tailed by a South African hit squad.
During his British military service Coventry stuck for years at the rank of major, apparently because of a court martial charge for punching a Colonel who pointed a pistol at him in Madagascar in 1942. The former SAS commander David Stirling had stopped the charge being pressed. The incident is believed to be the reason Coventry never received any British decorations for valour. He was however awarded two Orders of the Legion of Merit by the Smith government. The Rhodesian civil war probably gave him his most serious injuries, he was shot once in the scrotum in 1960 as he charged guerrillas concealed in the back of a truck near the village of Karoi in the north of the country and through the knee when he walked into a guerrilla ambush near Deka on the Zambezi river in 1975.
In military retirement, losing the sight in one eye and hard of hearing Dudley Coventry was adjusting with difficulty to civilian life as a director of a transport company. He was asleep in his Harare home when a drunken intruder crushed his skull with the butt of an 1973 Winchester rifle that Coventry had obtained on one of his long marches in Mozambique.[ I was told that Coventry was attempting to work the bolt on the rifle with arthritic hands, when the intruder disarmed him and clubbed him into a coma]
He died having been in a coma ever since the attack.
He had no children by either of his two marriages, the first of which to Mickey, ended in amicable divorce and the second to Frances, in separation



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I think readers will agree, that Colonel Coventry was one of a very rare breed. I was told by friends of mine who served in the Rhodesian SAS, that Coventry would join in the selection marches while in his sixties! He had no children, so found carrying a pack over the Matopas hills a way of avoiding boredom.
He also suffered more injuries than listed in the obituary. For example, he led an operation to destroy a terrorist target in Zambia. The explosive charge evidently detonated prematurely. To quote an SAS history "The SAS commander was knocked unconscious. He came to with his hair alight and both eardrums perforated; and the scene that greeted him was not a pretty one. Bob Bouch, Mick Cahill and John Wickended were dead. Geordie Wright was still alive, but it was obvious that there was no hope for him, and he died in his commander's arms.The cream of the unit had been brutally wiped out, and, but for a fold in the ground Dudley Coventry would have also died that day.
[As the rescue team approached the scene, they were greeted by Coventry]"Hullo Sergeant-major, how are you?" the SAS Commander asked in his normal, cal, cultured tone; not sounding at all like a man who had just escaped death by a miracle. Nothing, it seemed, could rattle the SAS man"
A final epitaph from another former SAS soldier, "A hard man, Coventry laid the foundation for our unit.
Cheers,