Henry Hughes Wilson

Henry Hughes Wilson

Sir Henry Hughes Wilson, 1st Baronet GCB DSO (born May 5, 1864 in Edgeworthstown , Longford , Ireland , † June 22, 1922 in London ) was a British general in the First World War .

Life

Henry Wilson was born in 1864 as the second son of James and Constance Wilson, and this marriage resulted in a total of seven children.

Early military career

In December 1882 he joined the 6nd Battalion of the Longford Militia Brigade and was then trained with the 5th Munster Fusiliers. In July 1884 he was transferred to the Royal Irish Regiment, with which he went to Burma in the spring of 1885 . When used against insurgent groups in the Arakan highlands, he was injured and slightly disfigured over the left eye on May 5, 1887. The wound healed poorly. After spending six months in Calcutta , he returned to Ireland for a whole year in 1888. On October 3, 1891, he married Cecil Mary Wray, the marriage remained childless.

Henry Wilson served in the Boer War (1899-1901) under General Redvers Buller and took part in the defense against the Boer invasion of Natal . On September 1, 1900 Wilson secretary under deputy was adjutant general of Lord Roberts . Here he came into closer contact with the later officers, Captain Kerry, Heribert Wake, Walter Cowan and Archibald Murray . Returned to England in 1901, he served under Quartermaster General Hamilton for nine months in the personnel department of the War Department and was appointed major in December 1901 . In January 1907 he was promoted to temporary brigadier general , at the same time he was head of the British Staff College in Camberley .

In 1910 he became Chief of Clerk for Military Operations in the War Department. As director of this department, he soon worked closely with the French general Ferdinand Foch , with whom he first met in December 1909. In the course of the army reforms which the Minister of War, Richard Haldane initiated, he was able to convince him in November 1907 to expand the Staff College in order to have enough trained staff officers for the new territorial divisions.

During the Second Morocco Crisis , he traveled to Paris and on July 19, 1911, had clarifying talks with the French Minister of War Adolphe Messimy and General Dubail about the impending war with the German Reich . In September 1912 he visited Colonel Alfred Knox in Warsaw , the British military attaché in Russia, who arranged a meeting with the Russian General Jakow Schilinski in Saint Petersburg .

Wilson visited France seven times in 1913, and in August Generals French and Grierson accompanied him to observe the French troop maneuvers at Chalons. In September followed in the course of the exercises of the XX. Corps visits Foch in Nancy . Wilson's political support for the surging separation efforts in Ireland remained unclear. However, in April 1913, through his brother Jemmy, he was inaugurated about the plans of the nationalists there to form a provisional government in Ulster. In November 1913 he was promoted to major general. During the July Crisis of 1914, Wilson was primarily concerned with the apparently imminent civil war in Ireland (see Curragh incident ). At least at the end of June he was against General Charles Douglas's suggestion to intervene militarily in Ireland immediately and sought a balance.

In the first World War

With the outbreak of World War I, Wilson became Britain's main liaison officer to the French army under General Joffre in August 1914 . His urging moved General John French , the leader of the British Expeditionary Force , to once again support the French counter-offensive on the Marne (September 6th) with all his might after the retreat to the Seine . After the failure of the autumn offensive , Wilson took part in the Conference of the Allies at Chantilly (December 6-8, 1915), together with Murray and Robertson he represented the position of England. Wilson worked in London in agreement with War Secretary David Lloyd George , who had won his election as Prime Minister in December 1916 . The two men had been critical of the operations of the new commander in chief of the British forces in France, Sir Douglas Haig , since the Battle of the Somme . The poor cooperation with the new French chief of staff, Pétain , led Wilson to return to Great Britain in May 1917.

Chief of the Imperial General Staff

On February 19, 1918, Henry Wilson was appointed Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) by Prime Minister Lloyd George , making him his most important military advisor in the final year of the First World War. After the success of the German Michael Offensive , Wilson advocated at the Doullens Conference on March 26th that Foch was appointed Allied Commander in Chief. After the start of the new German offensive on the Lys in Flanders , Wilson went to Paris on April 10 and warned Prime Minister Clemenceau of the impending loss of the naval bases on the canal. General Pétain then hastily released French reserves under General de Mitry in support of the Flanders front.

post war period

Wilson was raised to personal nobility on December 17, 1918 as the Knight Grand Cross of the Bath Order (GCB). In July 1919 he was made Field Marshal and raised to the hereditary nobility as Baronet , of Currygrane in the County of Longford. In February 1920, Willsons wanted to reduce British involvement in Mesopotamia in the wake of the Iraqi uprising . He did not consider the occupation of the entire country to be expedient to secure Britain's oil fields there.

On February 19, 1922, he handed over his post as CIGS to the Earl of Cavan and withdrew completely from the army. He was elected to the House of Commons as a member of the Conservatives . Sir Henry Wilson was shot dead by members of the Irish Republican Army in London in June 1922; Reginald Dunne and Joseph O'Sullivan were later convicted of murder and hanged on August 10, 1922.

His murder was picked up in the television series Peaky Blinders : Here it is the main character who fires the fatal shots.

literature

• Sir Charles Edward Callwell : Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson. His life and diaries. Cassell, London 1927.
• Basil Collier: Brasshat. A biography of Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson. Secker & Warburg, London 1961.
• Keith Jeffery : Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson: a political soldier. Oxford University Press, Oxford et al. 2006, ISBN 0-19-820358-6 .
• Jeffrey Keith (Ed.): The military correspondence of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson 1918-1922 (= Publications of the Army Records Society 1). The Bodley Head for the Army Records Society, London 1985, ISBN 0-370-30683-X .

Web links

Commons : Henry Hughes Wilson  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

• Newspaper article about Henry Hughes Wilson in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

predecessor	Office	successor
Henry Rawlinson	Commandant of Staff College Camberley 1907–1910	William Robertson
Spencer Ewart	Director of Military Operations in the War Office 1910–1914	Charles Edward Callwell
William Robertson	Chief of the Imperial General Staff 1918–1922	Frederick Rudolph Lambart, 10th Earl of Cavan