William Marshall (General)

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William Marshall, before 1918

Sir William Raine Marshall GCMG , KCB , KCSI (* 29. October 1865 in Stranton , County Durham , England ; † 20th May 1939 in Bagnoles-de-l'Orne , France ) was a British Lieutenant-General in the First World War , the became famous for his leadership of the Mesopotamia campaign towards the end of the war.

Life

Marshall was born near Hartlepool on the east coast of England and educated at Repton School and the Royal Military College Sandhurst . He was accepted into the Derbyshire Regiment (Sherwood Foresters) in January 1886 and subsequently served in Ireland , British India and Malta . In 1893 he reached the rank of captain . In India he took part in the Malakand expedition and the Tirah campaign in 1897/98. He served from 1899 to 1902 in the mounted infantry in the Second Boer War in southern Africa, where he was wounded twice and was then the Brevet - Lieutenant Colonel appointed. He was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in 1911 under Edward Ingouville-Williams Assistant Commandant of the School of Instruction for Mounted Infantry at Longmoor , Hampshire, and the following year.

During the First World War, he initially served as the commander of the 1st battalion of his regular regiment on the Western Front , including in the Battle of Neuve-Chapelle in March 1915. A little later he was recalled to command the 87th Brigade during the Battle of Gallipoli to take over the 29th Division . He performed this during the landing at Cape Helles on X Beach , where he was wounded. In the further course of the battle he took over (temporarily) command of the 42nd (East Lancashire) Division , the 29th Division and the 53rd (Welsh) Division and was appointed major-general in June 1915 .

From January to September 1916 Marshall commanded the 27th Division on the Salonika Front and was then transferred to Mesopotamia, where he took command of the Indian III Corps (also known as the Tigris Corps ). With this he was involved in the re-capture of Kut al-Amara in February 1917 and in the capture of Baghdad in March 1917 . When the Commander-in-Chief on that front, Lieutenant General Frederick Stanley Maude , died of cholera in November 1917 , Marshall succeeded him.

As commander in chief of the 500,000-strong Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force , Marshall was praised for his circumspection and administrative skills. He pushed the Turkish troops back into the northern mountain regions of today's Iraq and accepted the surrender of the Ottoman troops in the region after the Moudros armistice on October 31, 1918. His instruction to occupy the entire Vilayet Mosul by British troops after the armistice is still controversial today . This was in contradiction to the Sykes-Picot Agreement with France of May 1916, but was arguably in line with British war policy during this phase, which aimed to prevent the French sphere of influence from expanding too far into the Middle East.

After the war Marshall went back to India, where he took over command of the Southern Command in 1919 , which he held until 1923. In 1924 he retired from active service. Marshall published the work Memories of Four Fronts in 1929 about his experiences in the First World War. He was from 1930 to 1935 regiment chief of the Sherwood Foresters. From 1917 he was Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath , from 1919 of the Order of the Star of India and from 1919 Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George .

literature

  • Frank Davies, Graham Maddocks: Bloody Red Tabs: General Officer Casualties of the Great War, 1914-1918. Pen & Sword, 2014.
  • Spencer C. Tucker (Ed.): The Encyclopedia of World War I. Vol. 1, ABC-Clio, 2005, p. 753.

Web links

Commons : William Raine Marshall  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Charles Townshend: When God Made Hell. The British Invasion of Mesopotamia and the Creation of Iraq, 1914-1921 , Faber & Faber, 2010, p. 435.
personal data
SURNAME Marshall, William
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Marshall, William Raine (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British Lieutenant General
DATE OF BIRTH October 29, 1865
PLACE OF BIRTH Stranton , County Durham
DATE OF DEATH May 20, 1939
Place of death Bagnoles-de-l'Orne