BRITISH GENERALS

Dominion, Volume 33, Issue 2, 27 September 1939, Page 8

BRITISH GENERALS

Lord Gori A “Real Soldier”

CAREER BEFORE HIM

Sketches of the leaders of the British Army were given by Mr. J, Wentworth Day in a talk broadcast by Daventry last night.

Mr. Day said that General Lord Gort, Commander-in-Chief of the Field Force, gave to one who was in his presence the impression that he knew his job. At 53 years of age he was a voung man to have the responsibility of directing the British Expeditionary Force. Early in the Great War he was a captain in the Grenadier Guards and IDO to Earl Haigh. He was mentioned’ nine times in dispatches, had two bars to the D.S.O. and the v .C. Mr Day said he had the feeling that what Lord Gort had done was only the beginning of what he was going to do. Britain had a real soldier in command, and not one who would muddle through. .. . . General Sir Edmund Ironside, Chief of the imperial General Staff, was a man of very different type. He had fought not only in the Great War but also in the Boer War and in other campaigns. In the Great War he used to make his rounds with a bulldog. He was born in Aberdeen and went to the Boer War when 20. General Ironside never hesitated to speak his mind During the Great War he said, “The more I see of this war the more I am convinced we are losing it through lack of imagination.”. But there would not be lack of imagination this time. General Ironside was a man of great foresight. Great Britain owed it to him that Gibraltar, where he was in command 1 , was as nearly impregnable as it was possible for a modern fortress to be. Sir Walter Kirke, Commander-m-Chief of the Home Forces, has a strange and magnetic power of compulsion, said the speaker. He was probably the best speaker in the. Army, being unusually good, for a soldier. He was Director-General of the Territorial Forces from 1936 till this year.