James Dible

James Kenneth Victor Dible (born May 24, 1890 in South Stoneham , Hampshire , † December 1976 ) was a British diplomat .

Life and activity

James Dible was a son of William Dible and his wife Margaret Anne. He studied at Haileybury College and then embarked on a military career: in 1908 he entered the Royal Military College in Camberley . On September 18, 1909, he was assigned to the Royal Warwickshire Regiment . From October 1910 he was stationed in British India . In 1910 he reached the rank of lieutenant and in 1914 that of captain. In December 1919, Dible resigned as a paymaster from the army. Instead, he joined the British diplomatic service on September 19, 1919.

As a diplomat, Dible was initially used as a vice consul on probation in Algiers . On April 1, 1921, he received the rank of Vice Consul. From July 12, 1921 to February 11, 1922 he acted as the acting consul general in Algeria. On June 14, 1922, he was transferred to Strasbourg as Vice Consul . There he took over the function of executive consul general in 1922 (August 7th to October 27th) and every year from 1924 to 1927 while the consul general was absent or prevented from doing business. From October 1, 1927, Dible headed the British Vice Consulate in Lima . By order of February 2, 1928, he was permanently transferred there. As of September 1, 1928, he was used as the executive consul in Callao . On October 5, 1928, he was promoted to consul in Lima. From January 6th to February 15th, 1929 he acted as Chargé d'Affaires there.

On January 17, 1930 Dible was transferred to the post of Vice-Consul for Pas-de-Calais in Lille . From there he moved to Oporto on September 16, 1936 . With effect from June 17, 1938 Dible was sent by the Foreign Office to Amsterdam , where he received the local rank of consul general. At that time he came under the Gestapo's sights due to his relations with the Nazi opponent Theo Hespers : at least one meeting of the two men in the British consulate in Amsterdam was shadowed by spies from the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service. The National Socialist police officers who found out about this classified Dible as an important target. In 1940 the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people whom the Nazi surveillance apparatus regarded as particularly dangerous or important, which is why, in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht, the occupying troops of the subsequent special commandos SS should be located and arrested with special priority.

On November 20, 1939, Dible was transferred to Bordeaux . After the outbreak of World War II , he was assigned to the Home Office , the British Home Office , on August 1, 1940 , where he worked until March 1942. That month he moved to the Board of Trade. On December 19, 1944 Dible was appointed consul general and assigned with the rank of major general to the supreme command of the Allied Invasion Forces in Europe ( Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force ).

In December 1945 Dible was appointed consul general in Valparaíso , Chile . He remained in this post until he retired in 1950, which he spent in Huntingdon.

literature

• The Foreign Office List and Diplomatic and Consular Year Book , 1949, p. 211.
• Who was Who , Vol. 7, 1971, p. 214.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Fritz Schmidt: Another Germany: Resistance and persecution by NS organs. The circle around Hans Ebeling and Theo Hespers in Exile , 2005, p. 73.
2. ^ Entry on Dible on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .