William Oliver (officer)

Sir William Pasfield Oliver GBE KCB KCMG ( September 8, 1901 , † February 26, 1981 ) was a British officer and Lieutenant General of the Army .

From 1954 to 1955 he was the sixth in command of the British Sector of Berlin and thus one of the Allied city ​​commanders . From 1959 to 1965 he was British High Commissioner in Australia and 1967 plenipotentiary for the Expo in Montreal .

Military career

William Oliver joined the not yet renamed Queens Own Royal West Kent Regiment in 1920 and served after his training in various countries of the Commonwealth , including as the youngest captain in India .

In 1927 Oliver became an adjutant of his regiment and in 1931 switched to the Army School for Physical Training in Aldershot as an instructor .

In 1936 he took over the position of chief of staff of a unit in India and finally in 1937 became a general staff officer .

During the Second World War he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel , again instructor at a military academy . From 1940 he was a staff officer at Army Command South.

In 1941 Oliver was appointed commanding officer of the 70th Battalion of the Welch Regiment . A year later he was appointed deputy head of department in the War Ministry , before he was transferred as a brigadier to the General Staff of the 9th Army in the Middle East in 1943 .

In 1944 Oliver commanded the land forces in the Middle East and later returned to the General Staff. As early as 1945, General Sir Bernard Paget was appointed Chief of Staff .

After the Second World War, Oliver took over the post of commanding general of the 31st Infantry Brigade of the Rhine Army as major general .

From 1949 Oliver taught as a trainer at the Imperial Defense College before he became chief of staff in the Eastern Command in 1951. Just a year later, he was given the job of Staff Officer of the High Commissioner in Malaya .

City Commander in Berlin

As the successor to Charles Coleman , Oliver became the new Commander of the British Sector of Berlin on March 13, 1954, and thus one of the Allied City Commanders. Together with the American Thomas Timberman and the French Pierre Mançeaux-Demiau, he formed the highest authority of the West Allies in Berlin . He was thus a member of the Allied Command , which was subordinate to the Allied Control Council .

As city commander, he assumed one of the most important and outstanding posts that the British military had to fill outside of Great Britain. As such, he was on the one hand the military, but above all the "political leader" of his country and exercised a kind of representative status for Queen Elizabeth II , since Berlin was formally not part of the scope of the Federal Republic of Germany and Great Britain's ambassador residing in Bonn was not responsible.

Like his predecessors, Oliver, as city commander, concentrated mainly on the political and diplomatic representation of his country and his duties as a member of the Allied Command, while the respective brigade commander took over the purely military leadership of the British armed forces in the four-sector city .

With the move to Berlin Oliver moved with his family in the Berlin district Gatow located Villa Lemm . The members of the British royal family also resided on the property during their stays in Berlin. The function of the host towards the royal family was fulfilled by a British city commander at least once a year when the Royal Birthday Parade ("Queens Birthday Parade") was to be accepted on the Berlin Maifeld at the Olympic Stadium .

On April 30, 1955, Oliver was recalled and replaced by Robert Cottrell-Hill as city commander.

Further stations

After his time in Berlin, Oliver took over the post of Vice-Chief of the General Staff of Queen Elizabeth II as Lieutenant General.

Finally, he joined in the 1957 retirement .

From 1957 to 1959 he was a staff officer with the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Affairs. He then moved to the post of British High Commissioner for Australia until 1965 .

He took on one last office in 1967 as General Manager for the Expo in Montreal.

Oliver was ennobled several times by Queen Elizabeth II . He became Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in 1956, Knight Commander of the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George in 1962 and Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire in 1965 .

William Oliver died in 1981.

literature

• Robert Corbett: Berlin and the British Ally 1945–1990 . Berlin 1993.

Web links

• The British city commanders on the GSU History website

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Knights and Dames: MIG-OS at Leigh Rayment's Peerage
2. ^ Lieutenant General Sir William P. Oliver. In: King's College London. Retrieved March 4, 2018 .