Ivor Maxse

Sir (Frederick) Ivor Maxse KCB , CVO , DSO (born December 22, 1862 in London , † January 28, 1958 in Midhurst , Sussex ) was a British Army officer, most recently a general , who commanded a division and a corps during the First World War .

Life

Maxse was born as the elder son of Admiral Frederick Augustus Maxse (1833-1900), his younger brother was the journalist and publisher Leopold Maxse (1864-1932). Ivor, as he was commonly known, received an education at Rugby School and the Royal Military College Sandhurst before joining the Royal Fusiliers as an officer in 1882 . He served in India for a long time and reached the rank of captain in his regiment before transferring to the Coldstream Guards in 1891 . He served from 1893 to 1894 as the aide-de-camp of General Sir Arthur Lyon Fremantle , who was Commander-in-Chief in Scotland and then Governor of Malta . In 1897 Maxse was released from service in the Egyptian army to take part in the campaign against the Mahdists in Sudan . He served here with the rank of Bimbashi ( Major ), among other things, in the battles of Atbara and Omdurman and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order in 1898 . In the battle of Umm Diwaykarat in 1899 he commanded a battalion. He then went to South Africa, where the Second Boer War had begun at the end of 1899 . Maxse served here on Lord Roberts' staff and as Commissioner of the Pretoria Police after his capture in June 1900.

At the end of the year he went back to England, where he took a position in the War Office . In 1903 he received command of the 2nd Battalion of the Coldstream Guards and in 1907 became the regiment's commander. In 1910 he took over the 1st (Guards) Brigade in the Aldershot Command , which he also led to France at the beginning of the First World War. He took part in the battles of Mons , the Marne and the Aisne here in 1914, promoted to major-general . In October 1914 he was commissioned to set up the 18th (Eastern) Division , one of the first divisions of Kitchener's Army , in Colchester . He and his division were transferred to France in the summer of 1915.

The 18th Division took part in the Battle of the Somme from the summer of 1916 under Maxse's command . It was one of the few divisions that on the first day of the fight, July 1st, achieved the goals set for it, in this case the capture of Montauban-de-Picardie (together with the 30th Division ). The division remained in action almost continuously on the Somme until the offensive was stopped in November 1916 and fought, among other things, on the Ancre . Maxse was mentioned several times in the war report for his successful leadership .

In January 1917 he took over the newly formed XVIII Corps on the Western Front with promotion to Lieutenant-General , with which he took part in the pursuit battles during the Alberich enterprise in March . From summer to autumn 1917, the corps was used in the Third Battle of Flanders as part of the Fifth Army under Hubert Gough . In the spring of 1918 it was in defensive battles during the German company Michael . The corps was then assigned to the First Army under Henry Horne , with whom Maxse was soon in dispute over tactics, supplies and training, so that the Commander in Chief of the British Western Front, Field Marshal Douglas Haig , looked for another use for him.

In June 1918 Maxse was appointed inspector general of the training of the British armies in France. Although Maxse was ideally suited for this position, he found his distance from the immediate front to be a degradation. In this role he paid great attention to the tactics shown by the Germans in their spring offensive and tried to incorporate them into the British training regulations, which had an effect on the Hundred Days Offensive .

After the end of the war, Maxse, after temporarily leading the IX Corps of the Rhine Army , was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the British Northern Command in June 1919 , which he remained until 1923. He was promoted to full general in the latter year and retired from active service in 1926. In Northern Command he played an active part in promoting the career of the then young Basil Liddell Hart . In retirement he became a successful owner of a fruit growing company. He suffered a severe stroke in 1956 and spent the last years of his life in a nursing home.

The military historian Corelli Barnett described Maxse in the entry he wrote in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as "one of the most capable officers of his generation".

literature

• John Baynes: Far from a Donkey: The Life of General Sir Ivor Maxse, KCB, CVO, DSO. Brassey's, 1995.

Web links

Commons : Ivor Maxse  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Biographical information on angloboerwar.com
• Entry on firstworldwar.com