Albert d'Amade

Albert d'Amade

Albert-Gérard-Léon d'Amade (born December 24, 1856 in Toulouse , † November 11, 1941 in Fronsac , Gironde department ) was a French army officer, most recently Général de division .

Life

D'Amade completed training at the Saint-Cyr military school from 1874 and entered the 3e régiment de tirailleurs algériens in Constantine as a sous-lieutenant in 1876 , where he served for the next five years. In 1881 he took part in the expedition to pacify Tunisia with the 143e regiment d'infanterie . From 1882 to 1884 he attended the École supérieure de guerre and then served briefly on the staff of War Minister Jules Louis Lewal . In the spring of 1885 he came as a captain to the 108e regiment d'infanterie , with whom he embarked to participate in the Tonkin campaign . In Indochina he served under General Munier on the staff of the 2nd Brigade in Tonkin , and later in Annam . In 1887 he was selected the post of military attaché in China of the Qing Dynasty to take over. After his return to France in 1891, he served in the Deuxième Bureau of the French General Staff.

D'Amade on the title page of Les Hommes du jour , 1908

From 1901 d'Amade held the rank of lieutenant-colonel as military attaché in the United Kingdom. In this capacity he also took part as an observer in the war against the Boers in South Africa, where he made the acquaintance of Field Marshal Roberts and General Kitchener as well as Ian Hamilton and Winston Churchill . In 1904 he returned to France and, as Colonel, was commander of the 77e regiment d'infanterie and in 1907 he was commander of the 69e brigade d'infanterie . With the latter he was sent in the same year to the Moroccan region of Chaouia , which he should pacify. Among other things, he set up the Goumiers marocains auxiliary force .

In 1909, d'Amade became commander of the metropolitan 9e division d'infanterie , after he had been promoted to Général de division the year before. At the end of January 1912 he was commanding general of the XIII. Army Corps in Clermont-Ferrand , in June of the same year he took over the VI. Army corps in Châlons-sur-Marne . In April 1914 he became a member of the Conseil supérieur de la guerre .

At the beginning of the First World War in 1914 he was given command of the briefly existing Armée des Alpes , before being put in charge of the Groupe de divisions territoriales , which was deployed in northern France, in mid-August . After only a month he was replaced by General Brugère after the commander-in-chief, General Joffre , had shown himself dissatisfied with his performance. He was demoted to military governor of Marseille.

At the beginning of 1915, d'Amade was selected to take command of the French contingent in the Dardanelles expedition , the Corps expéditionnaire d'Orient . In this role he was under the orders of his old friend, General Hamilton, who led the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force . He and his troops landed on April 25 at Kumkale on the Asian side of the Dardanelles, from where they were soon redirected to support the British at Cape Helles . After a few weeks, the sick d'Amade was replaced by General Gouraud and was then no longer used as a front officer. He traveled to Russia on a military diplomatic mission, had various inspection tasks in his home country and was military governor of the 10th military region in Rennes from the beginning of 1917 until the end of the war . He ended his military career in 1919 and lived in Fronsac until his death. His remains were transferred to the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris after the end of World War II .

literature

• Spencer C. Tucker (Ed.): World War I: The Definitive Encyclopedia and Document Collection. ABC-Clio, 2014, ISBN 978-1-85109-965-8 , pp. 82-83.

Web links

Commons : Albert d'Amade  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Biography on memoireafriquedunord.net