Charles Coleman (officer)

Sir Cyril Frederick Charles Coleman KCB CMG DSO OBE (born April 16, 1903 in Plymouth , England , † June 17, 1974 in Aldershot , England) was a British officer and Lieutenant General in the Army .

From 1951 to 1954 he was the fifth in command of the British Sector of Berlin and thus one of the Allied city ​​commanders and from 1964 to 1969 Military Governor of Guernsey .

Beginning of the military career

Charles Coleman first attended college in Plymouth and then graduated from the Royal Military College Sandhurst . In 1923 he was finally taken over as a lieutenant in the Welch regiment . His first assignments took him to China , Malaysia and India until 1935 as an adjutant of the 2nd Battalion .

During World War II , Coleman commanded the 4th Battalion of the Welch Regiment from 1941 to 1944 . As a representative for Brigadier Lashmer Whistler, he also took over command of the 160th Infantry Brigade from 1943 .

Together with Whistler, Coleman led the units during the campaign from Normandy to almost the border of Denmark in June 1944 .

For his achievements, Coleman was awarded the Distinguished Service Order in 1945 and the Dutch Military Order of William in 1947 .

In 1945 Coleman was temporarily appointed as commanding general of the 53rd Division . A year later he graduated from Staff College Camberley before taking over the 160th Brigade from 1947 to 1948 .

From 1949 to 1951 he was Major General Commanding General in the South-Western District and the 43rd Infantry Division . During this time, in 1950, Coleman was inducted into the Order of the Bath as a Companion .

City Commander in Berlin

As the successor to Geoffrey Bourne , Coleman became the new commander of the British sector of Berlin on October 24, 1951 and thus one of the Allied city commanders. Together with the Americans Lemuel Mathewson and Thomas Timberman (from January 1953) and the French Pierre Carolet and Pierre Mançeaux-Demiau (from January 1953), he formed the highest authority of the western allies in Berlin . He was thus a member of the Allied Command , which was subordinate to the Allied Control Council .

As city commander, he assumed one of the most important and outstanding posts that the British military had to fill outside of Great Britain. As such, he was on the one hand the military, but above all the "political leader" of his country and exercised a kind of representative capacity for the monarch , since Berlin was formally not part of the scope of the Federal Republic of Germany and Great Britain's ambassador residing in Bonn was not responsible.

Like his predecessors, Coleman, as city commander, concentrated primarily on the political and diplomatic representation of his country and his duties as a member of the Allied Command, while the respective brigade commander took over the purely military command of the British armed forces in the four-sector city .

With the move to Berlin Coleman moved with his family in the Berlin district Gatow located Villa Lemm . The members of the British royal family also resided on the property during their stays in Berlin. The function of the host towards the royal family was fulfilled by a British city commander at least once a year when the Royal Birthday Parade ("Queens Birthday Parade") was to be accepted on the Berlin Maifeld at the Olympic Stadium .

During his term of office in 1952, after the death of King George VI , the change of the throne to Elizabeth II and the popular uprising in the GDR on June 17, 1953 .

A day later, Coleman took over as commandant of the city a leading role of the western allies, as in East Berlin to the West Berlin Willi Göttling in riots by the GDR - German police arrested and because of espionage suspicion on arrangement of the Soviet military authorities summarily executed was.

Coleman and his US American and French colleagues then submitted a protest note ( sharp note from the commander in the name of the High Commission ) to the Soviet city commander Pyotr Dibrowa , who supported the killing of Göttling.

In September 1953, the former Reich Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath , who had been a prisoner in the Spandau war criminals prison since June 18, 1947 after his conviction during the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals , suffered a serious heart attack . Charles Coleman then implemented better conditions of detention and appropriate medical care during those months when Great Britain, the USA or France were responsible for the prison operations. During the “Soviet months” of March, July and November these were denied.

Ultimately, von Neurath was released early from prison on November 6, 1954 for health reasons.

On March 13, 1954 Coleman was recalled and replaced by William Oliver as British city commander.

Further commands

That same year Coleman was inducted into the Order of St Michael and St George as a Companion .

From 1954 to 1956 he took over the post of Chief of Staff of Army Group North of the Rhine Army and was a year later by Queen Elizabeth II. As a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath ennobled .

He took over his last command in 1956 with the post of Commanding General of Army Group East. Immediately before his retirement, in 1959, Coleman was promoted to lieutenant general.

In the same year, Charles Coleman finally retired . Nevertheless, he took over the post of military governor of Guernsey from 1964 to 1969, before he finally retired from public life.

Private

Charles Coleman grew up in his native Plymouth and was an avid hockey player . Since 1935 he was married to his wife Margaret. The marriage produced three daughters.

Still associated with the military, he took over the post of Honorary Colonel of the Welch Regiment from 1958 to 1965 . Coleman wrote a foreword in 1955 for a work on the history of the 53rd Infantry Division .

Coleman predominantly used his third first name Charles , although his real first name Cyril was often used in documents and in literature.

Charles Coleman died on June 17, 1974 at Cambridge Military Hospital in Aldershot at the age of 71.

He rests in the graveyard of the English parish of Bentworth, Hampshire .

literature

• Ilse Dorothee Pautsch, Matthias Jaroch, Mechthild Lindemann: Files on the Foreign Policy of the Federal Republic of Germany 1953 . tape 1 . R. Oldenbourg, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-486-56560-5 .
• Robert Corbett: Berlin and the British Ally 1945–1990 . 1991.

Web links

• The British city commanders on the GSU History website

Individual evidence

1. ↑ 53rd (Welsh) Infantry Division. Retrieved March 4, 2018 . 
2. ↑ Ilse Dorothee Pautsch, Matthias Jaroch, Mechthild Lindemann: Files on the Foreign Policy of the Federal Republic of Germany 1953. 2001, accessed on March 4, 2018 . 
3. ↑ Norman JW Goda: Cold War for Speer and Hess. 2007, accessed March 4, 2018 .