Edmund Ironside, 1st Baron Ironside

William Edmund Ironside

Field Marshal William Edmund Ironside, 1st Baron Ironside GCB , CMG , CBE , DSO (born May 6, 1880 in Edinburgh , † September 22, 1959 in London ) was a British officer and chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1939 to 1940.

Life

Ironside was born the son of a military doctor from the Royal Horse Artillery . After the early death of his father, he toured the continent with his mother, where he acquired his first foreign language skills. Ironside would later be fluent in seven languages. After an education in schools in St. Andrews and the private school in Tonbridge , he was admitted to the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich in 1898 at the age of 17 .

In 1899 he joined the Royal Artillery and in the same year was transferred to South Africa with the 44th Battery Royal Field Artillery , where he took part in the Second Boer War . He was wounded three times and first Mentioned in Despatches in 1901 . At the end of the war he was part of the military escort that accompanied the Boer general Jan Christiaan Smuts to the peace negotiations. Later he disguised himself as a Bure and entered the service of the protection force in German South West Africa , but was soon exposed as a spy .

He then served with the Royal Horse Artillery in British India and was promoted to captain in 1908 . In 1912 he returned to England to complete a two-year course at Staff College Camberley . After the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, he was transferred as a staff officer to Boulogne-sur-Mer and Saint-Nazaire . He was promoted to major and in October 1914 assigned to the 6th Division staff. In 1916 he became chief of the divisional staff of the newly formed 4th Canadian Division. In this capacity he took part in the Battle of the Somme , the Battle of Arras and the Battle of Passchendaele . In March 1918, he was given the command of a brigade as a Brevet Brigadier General .

In September 1918 he was assigned to the Allied Expeditionary Corps in Northern Russia and took over the supreme command of this association in November. In November 1919 he gave the post to Henry Rawlinson and returned to England, where he was awarded the Bath Order and promotion to Major General . At the beginning of 1920 he commanded a military mission that monitored the withdrawal of Romanian troops after the Hungarian-Romanian War . In the summer of that year he was assigned to the occupation forces in İzmit , Turkey . In August 1920 he was transferred to Persia , where he appointed Reza Khan as commander of the Cossack Brigade . When he left Persia in early 1921, Ahmad Shah Kajar awarded him the Order of the Sun and Lion . At the Cairo Conference in March 1921, Winston Churchill convinced him to take command of the British forces in Mesopotamia , but he was injured in a plane crash and could not take up the post.

After his recovery, Ironside became Commandant of Staff College Camberley for four years in May 1922 . During this time he published numerous articles and a book about the battle of Tannenberg . At the same time he stood out as an advocate of the military theorists JFC Fuller and Basil Liddell Hart , whose views on an accelerated modernization of the army and the future importance of armored forces and the air force he adopted. In 1926 he became commander of the 2nd division for two years, after which he served for three years as district commander in Merath, India . In March 1931 he was promoted to lieutenant general . Back in England he was temporarily constable of the Tower of London before he was reassigned to India in 1933 as Quartermaster General .

Ironside with Polish officers 1939

In 1936 he was appointed as a general to command the Eastern Command . In 1937 he was passed over in favor of John Vereker, 6th Viscount Gort, when he was promoted to Chief of the Imperial General Staff . In 1938 he became governor of Gibraltar , which seemed to end his military career. Nevertheless, the then Secretary of War Leslie Hore-Belisha saw him as Inspector General of the Foreign Forces and a possible candidate for the leadership of the British Armed Forces overseas, should a war break out. After being appointed General Inspector of the Foreign Forces in 1939, he traveled to Poland in July, where he sounded out the Polish attitude towards a possible war with Germany.

On September 3, 1939, the day the British declaration of war at the beginning of World War II , he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) - the post Ironside had actually expected for himself - at Churchill's instigation to succeed him Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) appointed. In this position, he pushed through the expansion of the BEF deployed on the Franco-Belgian border through associations of the Territorial Army . He also advocated a smaller landing of British troops in Norway in order to cut off the Germans from their main iron ore supply via Narvik and to support Finland in its winter war with the Soviet Union . But since Norway remained neutral and Finland came under strong pressure in early 1940 and had to conclude the peace of Moscow in March , these plans came to nothing. In early April the Germans landed shortly after the British mining of Norwegian waters in operation weserübung strong troops in Norway. British and Allied forces, in turn, landed at several points on the west coast to aid the Norwegians. The German land superiority and the development of the situation in the west after the beginning of the German campaign in the west ultimately led to the withdrawal of the troops.

Ironside himself had flown to France on May 20 to discuss the situation with the commander of the Northern French Army Group, General Gaston Billotte . Looking back on the encounter, he later described Billotte as a “defeated man”. His proposal of an Allied armored counter-attack at Arras did not lead to the hoped-for success and resulted in the withdrawal to Dunkirk . On May 27, Ironside was appointed Commander-in-Chief of Home Defense, his post as Chief of the Imperial General Staff was taken over by his deputy, John Dill . Due to the enormous material losses suffered by the British army during the evacuation from Dunkirk , he developed a plan for defense in depth and had anti- tank trenches built and the construction of pillboxes started on the invasion-prone south coast . Differences of opinion with Churchill led to his replacement by General Alan Brooke in July .

In August 1940 he was appointed Field Marshal and in early 1941 he was raised to the hereditary nobility of the Peerage of the United Kingdom as Baron Ironside of Archangel and of Ironside in the County of Aberdeen . He withdrew to his country estate in Norfolk , gave lectures and devoted himself to the writing of books. Only a few requests to speak in the House of Lords have survived. After a fall in his home, he was admitted to the Queen Alexandra Military Hospital in London, where he died on September 22, 1959 at the age of 79. His coffin was escorted to Westminster Abbey with full military honors and the burial took place near his home in Norfolk. His son Edmund succeeded him as a peer.

Ironside kept an extensive diary with daily entries throughout his life. Parts of it were later published in a volume covering the period 1937–1940. Another volume, based in narrative form on his notes and covering the period 1920–1922, was compiled by him shortly before his death and also published posthumously.

Works

• The Ironside diaries, 1937-1940. Edited by Colonel Roderick Macleod and Denis Kelly. London, Constable 1962.
• High Road to Command. The Diaries of Major-General Sir Edmund Ironside, 1920–1922. Edited by Lord Ironside. Leo Cooper, London 1972, ISBN 0-85052-077-0 .

literature

• James Eastwood: General Ironside (= "How They Did it." Life Stories 17, ZDB -ID 2458052-1 ). Pilot Press, London 1940.
• Andrew Soutar: With Ironside in North Russia. Hutchinson, London 1940.

Web links

Commons : Edmund Ironside, 1st Baron Ironside  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Newspaper article about Edmund Ironside, 1st Baron Ironside in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

predecessor	Office	successor
Hastings Anderson	Commandant of Staff College Camberley 1922–1926	Charles William Gwynn
Charles Harington	Governor of Gibraltar 1938–1939	Clive Liddell
John Vereker, 6th Viscount Gort	Chief of the Imperial General Staff 1939–1940	John Dill
New title created	Baron Ironside 1941-1959	Edmund Oslac Ironside