Edmund Ironside , 1st Baron Ironside Field Marshal William Edmund Ironside , 1st Baron Ironside GCB , CMG , DSO , ( 6 May 1880 - 22 September 1959 ) was a British Army officer 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 Boer War , 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 a Regular Army division during the first two years of the First World War , before being appointed as the chief of staff to the newly raised 4th Canadian Division in 1916 . In 1918 he was given command of a brigade on the Western Front , but was quickly promoted to command the Allied intervention force in northern Russia in 1919 , then an Allied force occupying Turkey , and finally a British force 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 became an advocate for the ideas of J . F . C . Fuller , a proponent of mechanisation . He later commanded a division , and military districts in both Britain and India , but his youth and his blunt approach limited his career prospects , and after being passed over for the role of Chief of the Imperial General Staff ( ' CIGS ' ) in 1937 he became Governor of Gibraltar , a traditional staging post to retirement . He was recalled from " exile " in mid - 1939 , and appointed as Inspector - General of Overseas Forces , a role which led most observers to expect he would be given the command of the British Expeditionary Force on the outbreak of war . However , after some political manoeuvering , Lord Gort was given this command , and Ironside appointed as the new CIGS . He himself believed that he was temperamentally unsuited to the job , but felt obliged to accept it . In early 1940 he argued heavily for Allied intervention in Scandinavia , but this plan was shelved at the last minute when the Finnish - Soviet Winter War ended . During the invasion of Norway and the Battle of France he played little part ; his involvement in the latter was limited by a breakdown in relations between him and Gort . He was replaced as CIGS at the end of May , and given a role to which he was more suited ; Commander - in - Chief Home Forces , responsible for anti - invasion defences and for commanding the Army in the event of German landings . However , he served less than two months in this role before being replaced . After this , Ironside was promoted to field - marshal and given a peerage , as Baron Ironside ; he retired to Norfolk to write , and never again saw active service or held an official position . Early life . Ironside was born in Edinburgh , Scotland , on 6 May 1880 . His father , Surgeon - Major William Ironside of the Royal Horse Artillery , died shortly afterwards , leaving his widowed wife to bring up their son on a limited Army pension . As the cost of living in the late nineteenth century was substantially lower in Europe than in Britain , she travelled extensively around the continent , where the young Edmund began to acquire a variety of foreign languages . This grasp of language would become one of the defining features of his character ; by middle age , he would be fluent enough to officially interpret in seven , with a partial command of perhaps ten more . He was educated at schools in St Andrews before being sent to Tonbridge School in Kent for his secondary education ; at the age of sixteen he left Tonbridge to attend a crammer , having not shown much academic promise , and was admitted to the Royal Military Academy , Woolwich , in January 1898 . at the age of seventeen . At Woolwich he flourished , working hard at his studies and his sports ; he took up boxing , and captained the second rugby team as well as playing for Scotland . He was built for both of these sports , six feet four inches tall and weighing seventeen stone , for which he was nicknamed " Tiny " by his fellow students . The name stuck , and he was known by it for the rest of his life . Boer War . After attending the Royal Military Academy , Woolwich he was commissioned into the Royal Artillery on 25 June 1899 . Later that year he was sent to South Africa , with the 44th Battery Royal Field Artillery . He fought throughout the Second Boer War , was wounded three times , and received a promotion to lieutenant and his first Mention in Despatches in 1901 . At the end of the war , he was part of the small force which escorted Jan Smuts to the peace negotiations . He then disguised himself as an Afrikaans - speaking Boer , and took a job as a wagon driver working for the German colonial forces in South West Africa . This intelligence work ended unsuccessfully , however ; he was identified , and escaped shortly before being caught . This escapade later led to claims that he was the model for Richard Hannay , a character in the novels of John Buchan ; it is interesting to note that Ironside himself enjoyed these novels , reading " Mr Standfast " in the implausibly romantic setting of the passenger seat of an open - cockpit biplane flying from Iraq to Persia . He was then posted to India , where he served with I Battery RHA , and South Africa , with Y Battery RHA . He was promoted to captain in February 1908 , appointed as a staff captain in September of the same year , and then as a brigade major in June 1909 . He returned home in September 1912 , in order to attend the Staff College , Camberley . First World War . Ironside ' s two - year course at the Staff College , which he found unstimulating , was cut short by the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 ; on 5 August , he was appointed as a staff captain , and assigned to Boulogne - sur - Mer and then St . Nazaire , both large Army bases supporting the expeditionary force . By some accounts , he was one of the first British officers to arrive in France . He was promoted to major and attached to the newly arrived 6th Division at the end of October 1914 , ranked as a General Staff Officer , Grade 3 ( GSO3 ) . He remained with the division , and was promoted to GSO2 in February 1915 . He was promoted to temporary lieutenant - colonel and made a GSO1 in March 1916 . He had hoped to be made GSO1 - divisional chief of staff - to the 6th Division , but to his surprise he was assigned to the newly forming 4th Canadian Division to act as its GSO1 . Ironside pushed for a hard training regime , intending to get the division to the front as quickly as possible and prevent it being broken up to feed reinforcements to the other three divisions of the Canadian Corps . Because of the inexperience of the divisional commander , David Watson - a volunteer soldier with little professional experience - he found himself almost commanding the division on occasions , noting in his memoirs that Watson regularly passed on Ironside ' s orders with his own name attached . On its arrival in France in late 1916 , the division participated at the end of the Battle of the Somme , before being moved north to prepare for the attack at Vimy Ridge . During the final phase of the fighting at Vimy , Ironside again took unofficial command of the division , overruling an ambiguous order from Watson - who was out of contact at headquarters - to halt the attack , and personally ordering the leading battalions into action . He remained with the division through 1917 , when it fought at the Battle of Passchendale , and in January 1918 was appointed to an administrative posting , as commandant of the Small Arms School , with the temporary rank of colonel . He quickly returned to the Western Front , however , when he was appointed to command 99th Infantry Brigade as a temporary brigadier - general at the end of March . Russia and Persia . 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 , and promoted to the substantive 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 River 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 made a Knight Commander of the Bath , and promoted to substantive major - general for his efforts ; this made him one of the youngest major - generals in the 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 to command the elite Cossack Brigade ; Khan would later seize control of the country , and rule as Shah from 1925 to 1941 . The exact level of British involvement in Khan ' s coup is still 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 . Interwar period . After recovering from his injuries on half - pay , Ironside returned to active duty as commandant of the Staff College in May 1922 . He spent a full four - year term there , running the college efficiently as well as publishing several articles and a book on the Battle of Tannenberg . Most importantly for his future career , he became the mentor of J . F . C . Fuller , who was appointed a lecturer at the College at the same time , and became a close acquaintance of Basil Liddell Hart . Fuller ' s views were deeply influential on Ironside , who became a supporter of reforming the Army as an élite armoured force with air support , and of forming a single central Ministry of Defence to control the services . He argued frequently over the need for faster modernisation and rearmament , and the problem of the ' old men ' still filling the upper ranks of the army ; in the end , he had to be reprimanded by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff , Sir George Milne . After Camberley he was appointed to command 2nd Division , a post he held for two years with little effect or interest - he was frustrated by the task of training an infantry force with no modern equipment - and then sent to command the Meerut district , in India , in 1928 . He enjoyed life in India , but found the military situation to be equally uninteresting ; the equipment was old - fashioned , as were the regimental officers and the overall strategic plans . He was promoted to lieutenant - general in March 1931 , and left for England in May , where he returned to half - pay with the notional sinecure of Lieutenant of the Tower of London . He was relieved from this bleakness by a posting to India as Quartermaster - General in 1933 , where he travelled extensively , crossing the country to visit regiments and oversee the Indianisation process . For all this , however , it was the best of a bad job ; he was still far from the War Office , and unable to make significant impact on the Army ' s preparation for a future war . Preparation for war . He returned home in 1936 , recently promoted to full general , to lead Eastern Command , one of the corps - level regional commands in the United Kingdom , responsible for a single regular division and three Territorial divisions . Here , he realised that a European war would come sooner rather than later , and that the army was in a parlous state to defend the country . However , he found that as with his earlier posts , he could achieve little in Eastern Command - the major decisions would be made in Whitehall . He himself seemed to lose his opportunity for higher office in 1937 , when he was rebuked over his mishandling of a mobile force in the annual exercises ; until this point , he had been considered a possible candidate as Chief of the Imperial General Staff , but was dropped from consideration in favour of Lord Gort , whom Ironside considered unfit for the job . Officially , Hore - Belisha told him he was too old for the post , at 57 . He was appointed an aide - de - camp to the King in October , a purely ceremonial position , and early in 1938 accepted the offer of a posting as governor of Gibraltar , generally seen as a quiet role in which to retire . He was helped to accept Gibraltar by the suggestion that , in the event of war , he could be transferred to command the forces in the Middle East ; as he believed no major force could usefully be sent to France , this seemed to him likely to be the main focus of British attention in the war . He took up the governorship in November 1938 , and threw himself into preparing the colony for war ; here , finally , he had free rein . Under his tenure , the defences were strengthened and the garrison prepared for a long siege . In December 1938 , only a month after he had taken up the post , Hore - Belisha had begun to consider the possibility of recalling Ironside to become Inspector - General of Overseas Forces . The position gave him overall responsibility for the readiness of forces based outside the United Kingdom , and it was worried by many at the War Office that he would interpret it as a precursor to being given formal command of the Expeditionary Force on the outbreak of war . However , after some debate , Hore - Belisha went ahead and offered Ironside the position in May , appointing a corresponding Inspector - General of Home Forces at the same time , both under Lord Gort . The decision to recall Ironside may have been helped by the fact that Hore - Belisha was particularly reliant on the advice of Basil Liddell - Hart , an old acquaintance of Ironside ' s , and was already beginning to fall out with Gort . As expected , Ironside chose to interpret the posting as indicating that he was the presumptive commander in chief , and soon began to clash with Lord Gort over their respective powers . Whilst Gort was nominally in a more senior position , Ironside had seniority of rank and a far more dominant personality , and had concluded several months earlier that Gort was " out of his depth " as CIGS ; he is unlikely to have shown much deference . He held the post of Inspector for a few months , visiting Poland in July 1939 to meet with the Polish high command . Whilst his sympathetic manner reassured the Poles , the visit may have unintentionally given the impression that Britain was intending to provide direct military assistance . He returned able to report that the Polish government was unlikely to provoke Germany into war , but warned that the country would be quickly overrun and that no Eastern Front was likely to exist for long . His warnings , however , were broadly ignored . Polish journalist Piotr Zychowicz in his 2012 book Pact Ribbentrop - Beck wrote that Ironside ' s visit to Poland ( July 17 – 21 , 1939 ) , reassured the British that Poland , with her weak armed forces , should not be regarded as a serious partner in the war with Germany . Zychowicz quotes Władysław Studnicki , who wrote : " After getting acquainted with technological condition of the Polish Army , Ironside realized that Poland was too weak to oppose the Germans , and during a conference with Marshall Edward Śmigły - Rydz , he demanded that Poland signs a treaty with the Soviet Union . In response , Śmigły - Rydz stated : " To hand Poland over to the Soviets ? I had rather come to terms with Hitler " . Then Ironside , fearful of this alternative , changed his standpoint . He emphasized that Poland would not be abandoned , and that the allies would provide her with concrete help . " Zychowicz also writes that during the July 1939 visit , Ironside used all means possible to make Poles oppose Germany : " During meetings with Polish officers and politicians , he told fantastic , absurd stories . Among others , he fabled that squadrons of the Royal Air Force would be sent to Poland , and that a British aircraft carrier would anchor at Gdynia ( . . . ) Furthermore , Ironside promised that half of British army units concentrated in Egypt would be transferred to Poland , via the Black Sea " . Zychowicz adds that Polish hosts should have " grabbed the British liar by the neck , and put him on the next train to Paris . Instead , Polish generals were proud to party with British commander in chief " . Second World War . 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 expeditionary force , 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 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 , the commander of home forces at Aldershot . 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 . Norway . His enthusiasm for peripheral operations led him to the plans for Allied intervention in Scandinavia ; rather than the limited approach of simply mining Norwegian waters to stop Swedish iron - ore shipments to Germany , he argued for landing a strong force in northern Norway and physically occupying the orefields . If successful , this would allow the resupply of Finland - then fighting the Soviet Union , and aligned loosely with the Allied forces - as well as interdicting the ore supply , and could potentially force Germany to commit troops on a new and geographically unfavourable front . The plan was enthusiastically supported by both Ironside and Churchill , but opposed by many other officers , including Gort - who saw his forces in France being depleted of resources - and Newall , the Chief of the Air Staff . Planning continued through the winter , and by March 1940 the force , of around three divisions , was prepared to sail . On 12 March , however , Finland sued for peace , and the force had to be abandoned . Norway was the first time major British forces were committed to action during the war , and the flaws in the command system quickly began to show . War Cabinet meetings were dragged out at great length to little effect , as did meetings of the Chiefs of Staff , both to Ironside ' s great frustration . He also found it hard to cope with Churchill ' s mood swings and insistence on micromanagement of the campaign , and a gulf began to grow between the men . Ironside ' s main contribution to resolving the campaign was to insist on a withdrawal when the situation worsened , and he pushed through the evacuation of central Norway at the end of April despite ministerial ambivalence . Battle of France . Ironside himself was sent to France in May 1940 to liaise with the BEF and the French in an attempt to halt the German advance . He was not well - qualified for this task , having a deep dislike and distrust for the French , whom he considered " absolutely unscrupulous in everything . " At a conference in Lens he clashed with the French generals Billotte and Blanchard , whom he considered defeatists . He wrote : " I lost my temper and shook Billotte by the button of his tunic . The man is completely defeated . " Although Billotte was supposed to be co - ordinating the British , French and Belgian armies ' operations in Belgium , Ironside took over the job himself , ordering Gort and Blanchard to launch a counter - attack against the Germans at Arras . This attack achieved some local success , but the German onslaught proved unstoppable . The French commander - in - chief , General Weygand , so resented Ironside ' s actions that he said he would " like to box Ironside ' s ears . " Ironside , despairing of the French Army ' s willingness to fight , accepted Gort ' s view that evacuation of the BEF was the only answer . Home Defence . In his diary on the afternoon of 25 May , Ironside wrote that " I am now concentrating upon the Home Defence . . . [ The Cabinet ] want a change to some man well - known in England . They are considering my appointment . " That night , he spoke to Churchill , offering to take up the new post , and - again from his diary - His appointment as Commander - in - Chief Home Forces was announced to the public on 27 May , succeeding Sir Walter Kirke . Ironside was succeeded as CIGS by his deputy , Sir John Dill . In his new command , Ironside had a force which amounted - on paper - to fifteen Territorial infantry divisions , a single armoured division , fifty - seven home - defence battalions , and the Local Defence Volunteers ( later the Home Guard ) . However , all of these were deficient in training and organisation , as the operational units had already been sent to France . They were also lacking in equipment ; the force as a whole had almost no modern artillery or anti - tank guns , and the armoured division had just a small number of light tanks . The deficiencies with equipment led to an overall lack of mobility , which coupled with the limited training of the units meant that very few were capable of organised offensive counter - attacks against an invading force . As a result , the only way they could practically be used would be to commit them to static defence ; Ironside planned to steadily pull units away from the coast and into a central mobile reserve , but this was not possible until they were trained and equipped for the role . He threw himself into the details of the strategy , laying out plans for the static defence of village strongpoints by the Home Guard , patrols of " Ironsides " armoured cars to strengthen the divisions , and light artillery mounted on trucks as improvised tank destroyers . He agreed to release two divisions for the " second BEF " in early June , but was dubious about Churchill ' s decision to bring home forces from the Middle East and India ; even after the fall of France and the potential collapse of the defences in Britain , he still held to his pre - war position that " [ it ] is essential to hold the East firmly , whatever happens here " . By mid - June , he had begun to collect a scanty mobile reserve - the 8th RTR , with infantry tanks , and six regiments of armoured cars beginning to form - and the pillboxes and coastal defences were being prepared , though he emphasised to the local commanders that the latter " are only meant as delaying lines , and are meant to give the mobile columns a chance of coming up to the threatened points " . The fall of France led to a brief interlude where the Cabinet debated sending Ironside on a diplomatic mission to meet Charles Noguès , the French commander in North Africa and a personal acquaintance of Ironside ' s , but decided to retain him in Britain and send Lord Gort instead . On June 25 , he was called to the War Cabinet to brief them on the plans for home defence ; his system of defence in depth provided for : The plan was " on the whole " approved by the Cabinet , and by the Chiefs of Staff later in the week . He was clear in his diaries that he saw the static focus as an undesirable option - " [ the ] eternal preaching of the defensive and taking cover behind anti - tank articles has been the curse of our tactics " - but that it was the only practical way to make use of untrained and badly - equipped forces . By early July , he was optimistic that more troops could soon be pulled out of static positions and used in a mobile role , with the Home Guard taking over the local defences , but strongly resisted orders from Churchill to pull divisions out of the coastal areas before they could be effectively replaced . On 19 July , he was summoned to the War Office and informed that he was to be replaced by Alan Brooke as C - in - C Home Forces , effective immediately . The formal reason was that the Cabinet wished to have someone with recent combat experience in command , and Ironside accepted the dismissal gracefully - " I was quite prepared to be released . I had done my best . . . I can ' t complain . Cabinets have to make decisions in times of stress . I don ' t suppose that Winston liked doing it , for he is always loyal to his friends . Retirement and writing . A month and a half after his resignation as Commander in Chief of Home Forces , Ironside was appointed a field marshal at the end of August . He was raised to the peerage in the New Year Honours , being created 29 January 1941 as Baron Ironside of Archangel and of Ironside in the County of Aberdeen , and retired to the country with his family . He was never given another military posting , and was avoided by the Army establishment ; he rarely visited London , and never spoke in the House of Lords . He turned to lecturing and writing books , including a study of the Archangel expedition , and farming his estates in Norfolk . After almost two decades in retirement , having survived a driving accident , he was injured in a fall at his home ; he was taken to Queen Alexandra Military Hospital in London where he died on 22 September 1959 , aged 79 . His coffin was escorted to Westminster Abbey with full military honours , and he was buried near his home in Norfolk . His son , Edmund , succeeded him in the peerage . Ironside kept a diary throughout his life , starting as a subaltern at the turn of the century , with the goal of keeping a clear recollection of what had happened during the day and allowing him to reflect on the day ' s events . These were written directly into bound foolscap volumes , a page or more a day , each night ; throughout his life , he totalled some twelve volumes and the best part of a million words . He did not ask for these to be destroyed on his death , though their content was sometimes quite contentious , but did write a will - in 1930 - asking that they not be published . In the late 1950s , however , a former colleague persuaded him to allow extracts to be published as part of an account of the run - up to the Second World War , although he died shortly before it saw print . This was published as " The Ironside Diaries : 1937 - 1940 " , edited by Colonel Roderick Macleod and Denis Kelly , in 1962 ; the material was selected from May 1937 to his retirement in June 1940 , and published as numbered daily entries with editorial notes . A second volume , " High Road to Command : the diaries of Major - General Sir Edmund Ironside , 1920 - 1922 " , was published in 1972 , edited by his son ; this covered the period from 1920 to 1922 , during his service in the Middle East . The book was assembled by Ironside shortly before his death and , whilst it drew heavily on the diaries , it was written in a more conventional narrative form rather than as a strict day - by - day account , with editorial remarks kept to a minimum . Honours . Ribbon bar ( as it would look today )