Captain James Rawe, naval officer who served on D-Day and later helped to develop the Nigerian navy – obituary

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.