Field Marshal William Edmund Ironside, 1st Baron Ironside (6 May 1880 – 22 September 1959) was a senior officer of the British Army who served as Chief of the Imperial General Staff during the first year of the Second World War.
Ironside joined the Royal Artillery in 1899, and served throughout the Second Boer War. This was followed by a brief period spying on the German colonial forces in German South West Africa. Returning to regular duty, he served on the staff of the 6th Infantry Division during the first two years of the First World War, before being appointed to a position on the staff of the newly raised 4th Canadian Division in 1916. In 1918, he was given command of a brigade on the Western Front. In 1919, he was promoted to command the Allied intervention force in northern Russia. Ironside was then assigned to an Allied force occupying Turkey, and then to the British forces based in Persia in 1921. He was offered the post of the commander of British forces in Iraq, but was unable to take up the role due to injuries in a flying accident.
He returned to the Army as Commandant of the Staff College, Camberley, where he advocated the ideas of a close friend, J. F. C. Fuller, who was a proponent of mechanisation. He later commanded a division, and military districts in both Britain and India, but his youth and his blunt approach limited his career prospects, and after being passed over for the role of Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) in 1937 he became Governor of Gibraltar, a traditional staging post to retirement. He was recalled from "exile" in mid-1939, being appointed as Inspector-General of Overseas Forces, a role which led most observers to expect he would be given the command of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the outbreak of war.
However, after some political manoeuvring, General John Vereker, 6th Viscount Gort, was given this command and Ironside was appointed as the new Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Ironside himself believed that he was temperamentally unsuited to the job, but felt obliged to accept it. In early 1940 he argued heavily for Allied intervention in Scandinavia, but this plan was shelved at the last minute when the Finnish–Soviet Winter War ended. During the invasion of Norway and the Battle of France he played little part; his involvement in the latter was limited by a breakdown in relations between him and Gort. He was replaced as CIGS at the end of May, and given a role to which he was more suited: Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, responsible for anti-invasion defences and for commanding the Army in the event of German landings. However, he served less than two months in this role before being replaced. After this, Ironside was promoted to field marshal and raised to the peerage as Baron Ironside.
Lord Ironside retired to Morley Old Hall in Norfolk to write, and never again saw active service or held any official position.
Early life Ironside was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 6 May 1880 to Surgeon-Major William Ironside (1836–1881) of the Royal Horse Artillery and Emma Maria (1845–1939), daughter of William Haggett Richards.Burke's Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage, 107th edition, vol. 2, ed. Charles Mosley, Burke's Peerage Ltd, 2003, p. 2061 His father died shortly afterwards, leaving his widowed wife to bring up their son on a limited military pension. As the cost of living in the late nineteenth century was substantially lower in mainland Europe than in Britain, she travelled extensively around the Continent, where the young Edmund began learning various foreign languages.Ironside (1962), p. 13 This grasp of language would become one of the defining features of his character; by middle age, he was fluent enough to officially interpret in seven, and was proficient in perhaps ten more.The issue of which languages Ironside spoke, and how well, is an interesting one. Cairns says that he was "credited with a working knowledge of anything from a dozen to eighteen". Bond merely notes that he was an interpreter in seven (Bond, p. 17). Harold Nicolson recorded that as a child he had learned Flemish, and during the Boer War learned 'Taal'. (Nicolson, p. 675) He was a first-class interpreter in five (German, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, and Afrikaans), a second-class interpreter in French, and had a grasp of Russian, Turkish and Persian; by the time of writing in 1940, he could speak a total of fourteen languages. (Nicolson, p. 674) Including English, this gives a total of eleven (counting Taal and Afrikaans together). In his diaries he noted that he learned Italian in 1919, and as a subaltern had learned Hungarian, (Ironside (1972), p. 8); he also notes a conversation with an old man in Persia who "spoke good Urdu" (Ironside (1972), p. 173), strongly suggesting Ironside himself spoke it well enough to pass judgement – as would many of officers who had spent significant time in India. This gives fourteen in total, with the possibility that some others are simply not mentioned.
He was educated at schools in St Andrews before being sent to Tonbridge School in Kent for his secondary education; at the age of sixteen he left Tonbridge to attend a crammer, having not shown much academic promise, and was admitted to the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, in January 1898 at the age of seventeen. At Woolwich he flourished, working hard at his studies and his sports; he took up boxing, and captained the rugby 2nd XV as well as playing for Scotland. He was built for both of these sports, six feet four inches tall and weighing seventeen stone (108 kg), for which he was nicknamed "Tiny" by his fellow students. The name stuck, and he was known by it for the rest of his life.Bond, pp. 16–17
Second Boer War After attending the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich he was commissioned into the army as a second lieutenant with the Royal Field Artillery on 25 June 1899. Later that year his unit, 44th Battery, RFA, was despatched to South Africa.Ironside (1962), p. 14 He fought throughout the Second Boer War being wounded three times, and was mentioned in despatches in 1901. He was also promoted lieutenant on 16 February 1901.
At the end of the war in May 1902, he was a member of the small force which escorted Jan Smuts to the peace negotiations. He then disguised himself as an Afrikaans-speaking Boer, taking a job as a wagon driver working for the German colonial forces in German South West Africa. This intelligence work ended unsuccessfully when he was identified, but managed to escape. This escapade later led to claims that he became the model for Richard Hannay, a character in the novels of John Buchan;Cairns (2004) Ironside was always amused by these novels when reading about Mr Standfast in the implausibly romantic setting of the passenger seat of an open-cockpit biplane flying from Iraq to Persia.Ironside (1972), p. 143 He left Cape Town on the HMT Britannic in early October 1902, and arrived at Southampton later the same month. However, according to other sources, he conducted his spying activities embedded as a member of the German military staff in 1904, during the early phase of the Herero Wars, and witnessed German atrocities against the native inhabitants.
Ironside was subsequently posted to India, where he served with I Battery Royal Horse Artillery (RHA), and South Africa, with Y Battery RHA. He was promoted to captain in February 1908, appointed to the Staff in September of the same year, and then as a Brigade-Major in June 1909. He returned home in September 1912, in order to attend the Staff College, Camberley.
First World War
Ironside's two-year course at the Staff College, which he found unstimulating, was cut short by the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914; on 5 August, he was confirmed in his appointment as a staff captain, and assigned to Boulogne-sur-Mer and then St. Nazaire, both large Army bases supporting the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). By some accounts, he was one of the first British officers to arrive in France.Life, 31 July 1939, p. 62. Online edition He was promoted to major and attached to the newly arrived 6th Division at the end of October 1914, ranked as a General Staff Officer, Grade 3 (GSO3).
In February 1915 he succeeded Lieutenant Colonel John Burnett-Stuart as a general staff officer, grade 2.
He was promoted to temporary lieutenant-colonel and appointed GSO1 in March 1916. He had expected to be made GSO1 – divisional chief of staff – to the 6th Division, but to his surprise he was assigned to the newly formed 4th Canadian Division. Ironside pushed for a hard training regime, intending to get the division to the front as quickly as possible and prevent it being broken up to feed reinforcements to the other three divisions of the Canadian Corps. Because of the inexperience of the divisional commander, Major-General David Watson – a volunteer soldier with little professional experience – he found himself almost commanding the division on occasions, noting in his memoirs that Watson regularly authorised Ironside's orders in his name.Ironside (1972), pp. 70–4. On its arrival in France in late 1916, the division participated at the end of the Battle of the Somme, before being moved north to prepare for the attack at Vimy Ridge. During the final phase of the fighting at Vimy, Ironside again was required to take unofficial command of the division, overruling an ambiguous order from Watson – who was out of contact at headquarters – to halt the attack, and personally ordering the leading battalions into action.Ironside (1972), pp. 74–75
He remained with the division through 1917, when it fought at the Battle of Passchendale, and in January 1918 was appointed to an administrative posting, as commandant of the Small Arms School, with the rank of acting colonel. He quickly returned to the Western Front, however, when he was appointed to command the 2nd Division's 99th Brigade as a temporary brigadier-general at the end of March.
Interwar period Russia and Iran
Ironside remained with 99th Brigade for only six months; in September 1918, he was attached to the Allied Expeditionary Force fighting the Bolsheviks in northern Russia, and in November given command of the force, retaining his temporary rank of Brigadier-General. Before leaving, he appeared on the electoral platform of Oswald Mosley, who campaigned successfully as a Conservative from the Harrow constituency in the December 1918 general election. The posting to Arkhangelsk was his first independent command, and he threw himself fully into it; for over a year, he travelled continually along the Northern Dvina to keep control of his scattered international forces, at one point narrowly escaping assassination. However, the Red Army managed eventually to gain a superior position in the Civil War and in late 1919 he was forced to abandon the White Army to their fate. In November he handed command over to Henry Rawlinson, who would supervise the eventual withdrawal, and returned to Britain. Ironside, promoted on 1 January 1919 to brevet colonel, was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, and promoted to substantive major general for his efforts; this made him one of the youngest major generals in the British Empire.Bond, p. 18