page_title: Edmund Ironside, 1st Baron Ironside
section_title: Second World War
hierarchical_section_title: Edmund Ironside, 1st Baron Ironside / Second World War
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of Field Marshal Sir Edmund Ironside and Lord Gort studying a map in the War Office, London.
context_page_description: Field Marshal William Edmund Ironside, 1st Baron Ironside, GCB, CMG, DSO 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 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 J. F. C. Fuller, a proponent of mechanisation.
context_section_description: His appointment on 3 September 1939 as Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) came as something of a surprise to Ironside; he had been led to believe he would be appointed as the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), and indeed had already despatched his Assistant to Aldershot to begin preparing his headquarters. The reorganisation was politically driven; Hore-Belisha had fallen out heavily with Viscount Gort during 1939, and the outbreak of war provided an excellent pretext for Gort to leave Whitehall. This left the post of CIGS vacant, and after heavy lobbying by Churchill, Ironside was chosen over Sir John Dill, then the General Officer Commanding, Aldershot Command.
  As CIGS, Ironside adopted a policy of rapidly building up a strong force in France, aiming to put some twenty divisions in the field. However, this force would be broadly defensive, acting to support the French Army, and he aimed to influence the course of the war by forming a second strong force in the Middle East, which would be able to operate in peripheral operations in the Balkans. He strongly supported the development of a close-support air force, preferably under Army command, but at the same time argued that when a German offensive began in the West, the RAF should throw its main strength into strategic bombing of the Ruhr rather than attacking the forward units.
caption: Ironside (right) with Lord Gort (left) at the War Office in 1940
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