page_title: Edmund Ironside, 1st Baron Ironside
section_title: Russia and Iran
hierarchical_section_title: Edmund Ironside, 1st Baron Ironside / Russia and Iran
caption_attribution_description: English: General Sir Edmund Ironside, commander of British forces in Iran, 1920.
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: 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. This 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 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 Army.
  In early 1920 he commanded a military mission which supervised the withdrawal of Romanian Forces left in Hungary after the Hungarian–Romanian War of 1919, and in the summer was attached to the force occupying İzmit, Turkey, as it prepared to withdraw. His third overseas posting of the year was to Persia in late August, where – among other things – he appointed Reza Khan (after ousting the Russian officer Vsevolod Starosselsky and having his offered position declined by Sardar Homayoun) to command the élite Cossack Brigade; Reza Khan would later seize control of the country, and rule as Shah from 1925 to 1941. The precise level of British involvement in Reza Khan's coup remains a matter of historical debate, but it is almost certain that Ironside himself at least provided advice to the plotters. On his departure from Persia in 1921, the Shah awarded him the Order of the Lion and the Sun.
  After Persia, he attended the Cairo Conference, where Winston Churchill persuaded him to take command of the newly reorganised British force in Iraq; however, returning to Persia in April, the aircraft he was flying in crashed and he was invalided home after several months in hospital.
caption: Ironside in Iran in 1920
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