Roger Keyes, 1st Baron Keyes

Sir Roger Keyes (1918)

Roger John Brownlow Keyes, 1st Baron Keyes GCB KCVO CMG DSO (born October 4, 1872 in Punjab , British India , † December 26, 1945 in Buckingham , Buckinghamshire , England ) was a British Navy Admiral in the Royal Navy and a politician of the Conservative Party who represented the constituency of Portsmouth North as a member of the House of Commons from 1934 to 1943 .

Life

First World War and post-war period

Keyes (front, seated) as commander of the HMS Fame (1900)

Commodore Roger Keyes (left) with Vice Admiral John de Robeck , General Sir Ian Hamilton (2nd from right) and General Walter Braithwaite (right) during the 1915 Dardanelles Expedition

After attending school, Keyes joined the Royal Navy in 1885 at the age of thirteen and in 1890 took part in the battles for the until then German protected area of the Sultanate of Witu in what is now Kenya and in 1900 as commander of the torpedo boat destroyer Fame in the suppression of the Boxer uprising in China .

During the First World War he was in the sea ​​battle at Heligoland in 1914 as a commodore commander of the British submarines and then between 1915 and 1916 Chief of Staff of the naval forces in the eastern Mediterranean . After the Battle of the Skagerrak in 1916, he became the commandant of the battleship HMS Centurion . In 1918 he became the commander of the Dover Patrol naval forces stationed in Dover and Dunkerque , and in this function commanded the so-called " Raid on Zeebrugge and Ostend ", the attacks on the submarines of the Imperial Navy in Zeebrugge and Ostend from his flagship HMS Warwick were stationed. For his services he was raised to Baronet of Zeebrugge, and of Dover in the County of Kent in 1919 .

After the First World War, he was Deputy Chief of Naval Staff from 1921 to 1925 , before becoming Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet on June 8, 1925 , and this function until his replacement by Admiral Sir Frederick Field on June 7 Dressed in 1928. In 1926 the modernized HMS Warspite became the fleet's flagship. Under his command, the Mediterranean fleet reached a peak of its efficiency. Under Keyes there were outstanding officers such as Dudley Pound (chief of staff), Ginger Boyle (commander of the cruiser squadron) and Augustus Agar (commander of a destroyer flotilla). Later, he was from 1929 until his transfer to the retirement in 1931 commander of the Naval Base Portsmouth .

Member of the House of Commons, World War II and member of the House of Lords

In a by-election ( by-election ) in the constituency Portsmouth North , he was elected on 19 February 1934 a member of the House of Commons and was one of this until 23 January 1943rd During the Norwegian debate in May 1940, he criticized the government of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain for failing against the Wehrmacht to defend against the Weser Exercise in Norway . Keyes justified his criticism in particular with the fact that he had previously offered in April 1940 to command a fleet consisting of the battleships HMS Valiant and HMS Warspite , the battle cruiser HMS Renown , the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious and four anti- aircraft cruisers , 20 destroyers and numerous transporters to penetrate the Trondheimfjord to fight the German occupation forces . The attack was planned for April 22nd under the code name "Hammer", but was canceled by the Council of Chiefs of Staff on April 18, 1940. Keyes' subsequent offer to carry out the operation with the ships about to be dismantled was also rejected. The debate contributed to Chamberlain being replaced a few days later by Winston Churchill as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom .

With the entry of the United Kingdom into World War II , Keyes was recalled to active military service on July 17, 1940 and was initially director of combined operations and liaison officer with King Leopold III of Belgium . In this capacity he reported on the morning of May 27, 1940 to Lord Gort , the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in Belgium and France in the 1940 campaign in the west , that a surrender of the Belgian armed forces was imminent. During the day, the Belgian army actually surrendered in the middle of the Battle of Dunkirk on the night of May 27th to May 28th 1940.

On October 27, 1941 Keyes was replaced by Louis Mountbatten as director of the Combined Operations Headquarters . On 1 and 2 July 1942, a further debate in the House of Commons was a by Sir John Wardlaw Milne , a deputy of the conservative Tories , introduced no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Churchill instead. Alongside Keyes, Churchill was attacked by his best friend: Leslie Hore-Belisha , his colleague against the Munich Agreement of September 3, 1938. Hore-Belisha and Keyes were in favor of separating warfare from government. In the subsequent vote, however, the two suffered a serious defeat, as only 25 MPs supported the motion of censure, while 475 MPs in the lower house expressed confidence in the prime minister and thus approved his warfare.

After leaving the House of Commons, he was given the hereditary title of Baron Keyes , of Zeebrugge, and Dover in the County of Kent on January 22, 1943 . A hereditary seat in the House of Lords was associated with the title .

His son Geoffrey Keyes served as a lieutenant colonel during World War II , was awarded the Military Cross and fell in the attack on the headquarters of Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel , for which he was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross .

When he died in 1945, his second-born son, Roger George Bowlby Keyes , inherited his titles of nobility.

Publications

• Naval Memoirs , 2 volumes, 1934–1935
• Adventures Ashore and Afloat , 1939
• Amphibious Warfare and Combined Operations , 1943

literature

• Cecil Faber Aspinall-Oglander: Roger Keyes: being the biography of Admiral of the Fleet Lord Keyes of Zeebrugge and Dover, GCB, KCVO, CMG, DSO , 1951
• Barrie Pitt: Zeebrugge , 1958
• Una McGovern (Ed.): Chambers Biographical Dictionary . Chambers, Edinburgh 2002, ISBN 0-550-10051-2 , p. 848

Web links

• Admiral Sir Roger Keyes at the Hansard (English)
• Bibliography in the Open Library
• Newspaper article about Roger Keyes, 1st Baron Keyes in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Raymond Cartier : The Second World War , Munich 1967, p. 100, 103.
2. ^ Raymond Cartier: The Second World War , Munich 1967, p. 169 f.
3. ↑ Hansard
4. ^ Raymond Cartier: The Second World War , Munich 1967, p. 565.

predecessor	Office	successor
Osmond Brock	Commander in Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet 1925–1928	Frederick Field
New title created	Baron Keyes 1943-1945	Roger Keyes