William Edmund Ironside

Edmund Ironside commanded the Allied intervention force at Archangel and twenty years later was Chief of the Imperial General Staff at the outbreak of the Second World War. He was famously enormous - six foot four - spoke seven languages, and had spent the Boer war spying on German operations in South-West Africa disguised as an Afrikaner transport driver, which is the episode usually said to have given John Buchan the idea for Richard Hannay. In 1918 he was sent to north Russia as chief of staff and within weeks was commanding the whole Allied force at Archangel: British, American, French, Serbian, Polish and Russian troops, in a theatre where the temperature reached forty below and nobody could say what the political objective was. He held the position through the winter of 1918-19 with mutinous units and no clear mandate, and organised the evacuation in 1919. He always regarded the intervention as a mistake carried out badly. Between the wars he commanded in Persia and India, and in 1939 was made CIGS as a compromise candidate for a job he had not wanted and was not suited to; he was a field soldier rather than a Whitehall one, and he lasted until May 1940. He was then made Commander-in-Chief Home Forces during the invasion scare and replaced two months later. He was promoted field marshal on retirement and his diaries, published after his death, are among the sharpest sources for British policy in the 1930s. He had warned repeatedly and in writing that the army was unfit for a continental war. The judgement that removed him in 1940 was probably right and the warnings were also right, which is the ordinary condition of soldiers proved correct too late to matter.

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