Aylmer Haldane

Aylmer Haldane around 1900

Sir James Aylmer Lowthorpe Haldane GCMG , KCB , DSO (born November 17, 1862 in Gleneagles , Scotland , † April 19, 1950 in London ) was an officer in the British Army , most recently a general .

Life

Haldane came from a noble family, he was the son of the Scottish doctor Daniel Rutherford Haldane and cousin of the later Secretary of War Richard Haldane . He attended Edinburgh Academy , Wimbledon College and the Royal Military College Sandhurst before he was accepted as a second lieutenant in the regiment of the Gordon Highlanders in 1882 . From 1894 to 1895 he served with the Waziristan Field Force on the Chitral Expedition and was promoted to captain the following year . From 1897 to 1898 he took part in the Tirah campaign and then became aide-de-camp of the Commander-in-Chief in India , General William Lockhart .

Haldane served in the Second Boer War in South Africa, where he was captured and imprisoned in Pretoria together with the future Prime Minister Winston Churchill , whom he already knew from India . His planned escape with Churchill failed, while the latter was able to escape and so rose to fame overnight. Only after a later attempt did Haldane manage to escape. He served in the Intelligence Section from 1901 and was promoted to major in 1902 . From 1904 to 1905 he was a military observer with the Imperial Japanese Army in the Russo-Japanese War . In 1906 he reached the rank of Colonel and served as Assistant Director of Military Intelligence until 1909 . In 1910 he was appointed Brigadier General Commander of the 10th Infantry Brigade.

Portrait of Haldane by Francis Dodd , 1917

This he led at the beginning of the First World War as part of the 4th Division of the British Expeditionary Force , before he received command of the 3rd Division in November 1914 after the " Race to the Sea " . He led this during the First Battle of Flanders in 1914. In August 1916, during the Battle of the Somme , he was relieved and took over as commander of the VI Corps, which was deployed as part of Edmund Allenby's 3rd Army near Arras and in early 1917 was involved in the Battle of Arras . In early 1918, Haldane's corps took part in the defense of the German "Michael" offensive . In the Hundred Day Offensive , it was used on the Sambre, among other places .

After the end of the war he was given half pay, but reactivated at the beginning of 1920 and sent to Mesopotamia as Commander in Chief , where an uprising against the British occupation forces broke out a little later . This was suppressed by the British under Haldane's leadership and in August 1921, after the Cairo Conference , Faisal I was installed as king. Haldane stayed in Iraq until 1922. In 1925 he resigned from his service as a general and subsequently published several autobiographical works. He was, among other awards, Knight of Grace of the Order of Saint John .

Web links

• General Sir James Aylmer Lowthorpe Haldane, on thepeerage.com , accessed September 15, 2016.
• Aylmer Haldane in the database of Find a Grave (English)