Vice-Admiral T. S. V. Phillips.

Evening Post, Volume CXXIX, Issue 96, 23 April 1940, Page 9

Vice-Admiral T. S. V. Phillips.

the A.F.C. He has been Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, at the Air Ministry, since 1937. The oldest son of Admiral Sir Richard Peirse, he was born in 1892. He was Deputy Director of Operations and Intelligence at the Air Ministry from 1930 to 1933 and Air Officer Commanding the British Forces in Palestine and Transjordan from 1933 to 1936.

Among the general officers available for high command under -Lord Gort there is none on whom stronger hopes are based by his colleagues than General Sir John Dill, G.0.C., Aldershot Command. Born in 1881, in time to see service in the South African War with.the Ist Battalion, The Leinster Regiment, he was, like Ironside, a Staff College student at the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. All his service was on the staff. Outstanding episodes were his period as G.5.0.l of the 37th Division—his old commander, Sir Hugh Bruce Williams, a very exigent master, never tires of singing his praises—and that when he was at G.H.Q. as G.5.0.l and Brigadier-General, General Staff. In the dark :days of March and April, 1918, he exercised a strong steadying influence. He has since commanded a Territorial Brigade, has served on a Command Headquarters in India, and has been Director of Military Operations at the War Office. From Septem-

ber, 1936, to October, 1937, he was G.O.C. Palestine and Transjordan. It is of interest to recall that he took the leading role on the British side in the Anglo-French Staff talks of 1936. Three or four years ago the leader of the Arab rebels, El Kaukaji, offered a reward of £506 to anyone who would bring Lieutenant-General Dill (as he was then) to him. "dead or alive." Australian officers who had learned to appreciat the worth of General -Dill as a military leader laughingly suggested that the reward had been fixed at far too low a figure..