Luckily for all of us, far more qualified people than yours truly have aired their opinions over the ensuing years on the competence or otherwise of British Great War generals, including some of you lot, so it isn’t their quality that we shall primarily be looking at during this series of posts, although doubtless we shall touch on it at times. Thus wrote John Terraine in his 1980 book ‘The Smoke and the Fire’, and yet here we are nearly forty years later, and still the debate rages. That is the only proper, the only sensible starting point for the examination of their quality.” Their Army and their country were on the winning side. The British Generals had done their duty. No British Government was forced to sign a humiliating peace treaty. No German Army of Occupation was stationed on the Thames, the Humber or the Tees. It was not a British delegation that crossed the lines with a white flag in November 1918. He married in 1915, and had a daughter and a son who succeeded him to the peerage.“It is a simple historical fact that the British Generals of the First World War, whatever their faults, did not fail in their duty. He was a good linguist, qualifying as an Army interpreter in seven languages. Nicknamed “Tiny” because of his great height, he has been described by a fellow officer as “simple, modest, and forthright … universally liked and respected … an intelligent, imaginative, and unconventional soldier” (Roderick Macleod in the Dictionary of National Biography, 1951-60 edition, pp. He was knighted in 1919, promoted to full general in 1935, and to field marshall in 1940, and raised to the peerage in 1941. Diary ).Īn edited volume of Ironside’s Persian diary High Road to Command was published in 1972. In return, Ironside recorded, Reżā Khan promised not to hinder British withdrawal or depose the shah (MS. Diary ) was because he wanted a strong military commander in the capital to save the country from the Bolsheviks and chaos and to safeguard the imminent withdrawal of NORPERFORCE from Persia. Ironside’s decision “to let the Cossacks go” (MS. Smythe of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, as is sometimes said), a British officer temporarily attached to the Cossacks, and after several visits to their camp at Āqā Bābā near Qazvin, where he was much impressed by the contingent ( ātriyād) from Hamadān under Reżā Khan “the most manly Persian I have yet struck” (MS. Colonel Henry Smyth of the Cheshire Regiment (not Lt. Colonel Reżā Khan as Starosselsky’s successor. He distrusted Russian loyalties after the 1917 Revolution and, with the help of Herman Norman, the British Minister in Tehran, persuaded a reluctant shah to dismiss Colonel Starosselsky, the Cossack Division’s commanding officer, and all the Russians under him. On each occasion Ironside acted on his own responsibility without authority from London. Ironside’s four and a half months in Persia were notable on two accounts: first, his role in the dismissal of more than a hundred Russian officers and NCOs of the Cossack Division and their replacement by Persians under the command of Reżā Khan, founder of the Pahlavi dynasty and second, his encouragement of Reżā Khan’s coup d’état of 1299/1921(q.v. In May 1940, when a German invasion of Britain seemed imminent, Ironside was appointed Commander-in-Chief of Home Forces but was retired in July of the same year. There followed a succession of senior staff appointments and promotions in the UK and India, culminating as Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) on the eve of World War II. After commanding Allied forces in Archangel, North Russia (1918-19) and British forces in Izmit, Turkey (1920), he commanded some 6,000 British forces in Persia (NORPERFORCE) with headquarters in Qazvin from 4 October 1920 to 18 February 1921. He served in the South African war, 1899-1902, and in France in World War I, 1914-18. He was the second child of Surgeon-Major William Ironside, and was educated at Tonbridge School and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and commissioned in the Royal Artillery Regiment in 1899. London, 22 September 1959), noted for his important role as commander of British forces in Persia in 1920-21. IRONSIDE, WILLIAM EDMUND, Field Marshall, 1st Baron Ironside of Archangel and Ironside (b. (1880-1959), Field Marshall, 1st Baron Ironside of Archangel and Ironside, noted for his important role as commander of British forces in Persia in 1920-21.Ī version of this article is available in print
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