Harold Alexander

Alexander was born in London 10 December 1891,United Kingdom, the third son of the Earl and Countess of Caledon, the latter being a daughter of the Earl of Norbury. Alexander was educated at Hawtreys and Harrow School —there participating as the 11th batsman in the notorious Fowler's Match against Eton College in 1910 before moving on to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. From Sandhurst, Alexander was in September 1911 commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Irish Guards,which, when the First World War erupted only three years later, formed part of the original British Expeditionary Force (BEF). Alexander was by then a 22-year-old lieutenant (having been promoted in December 1912) and platoon commander, until February 1915, when he was promoted to the rank of captain,and, in February 1917, to major.However, during certain periods, Alexander acted in higher ranking capacities, notably for three months in 1917 when he was an acting lieutenant-colonel while still only a substantive captain,as well as for nearly all the time between November 1917 and the end of the war, when he acted in the same rank in command of a battalion.In October 1918, Alexander was further charged with the command of a corps infantry school as an acting lieutenant-colonel. During his service on the Western Front, Alexander was wounded twice in four years of fighting. For his bravery and sacrifice, he received in January 1916 the Military Cross,and in October of the same year was appointed to the Distinguished Service Order,the citation for which read: "For conspicuous gallantry in action. He was the life and soul of the attack, and throughout the day led forward not only his own men but men of all regiments. He held the trenches gained in spite of heavy machine gun fire."In the same month Alexander was also inducted into the French Légion d'honneur. Rudyard Kipling, who wrote a history of the Irish Guards, in which his own son fought and was killed, noted that, "it is undeniable that Colonel Alexander had the gift of handling the men on the lines to which they most readily responded... His subordinates loved him, even when he fell upon them blisteringly for their shortcomings; and his men were all his own." In 1919 and 1920, as a temporary lieutenant-colonel,Alexander led the Baltic German Landeswehr in the Latvian War of Independence, commanding units loyal to the Republic of Latvia in the successful drive to eject the Bolsheviks from Latgalia.After later serving in Turkey and Gibraltar, in 1922 Alexander's temporary rank was made substantive when he was appointed to command the 1st battalion of his regiment,and in January 1926 he was released from that role to attend Staff College, Camberley.Alexander was then in February 1928 promoted to colonel,and was the next month appointed as commandant of the Irish Guards and its regimental district,a post he held until January 1930, when he again returned to school, to attend the Imperial Defence College for one year. After the completion of his courses, Alexander, on 14 October 1931, married Lady Margaret Bingham, the daughter of the Earl of Lucan and with whom Alexander had two sons — Shane, born 1935, and Brian, born 1939 — and a daughter, as well as adopting another daughter during his time as Canada's governor general.Alexander then held staff appointments as GSO2 and GSO1 before being made in October 1934 a temporary brigadier and given command of the Nowshera Brigade,on the Northwest Frontier in India.For his service there, and in particular for his actions in the Loe-Agra operations between February and April 1936, Alexander was that year made a Companion of the Order of the Star of India and was mentioned in despatches.He was mentioned once more for his service during operations in Mohamad Province during August and October of the same year. In March 1937, Alexander was appointed as one of the aides-de-camp to the recently acceded King George VI and in May returned to the United Kingdom to take part in this capacity in the state procession through London during the King's coronation.Alexander would have been seen in this event by two of his Canadian viceregal successors: Vincent Massey, who was then the Canadian high commissioner to the United Kingdom, and Massey's secretary, Georges Vanier, who watched the procession from the roof of Canada House on Trafalgar Square.Following the coronation celebration, Alexander returned to India, where he was made the honorary colonel of the 3rd Battalion 2nd Punjab Regiment,and then in October 1937 was promoted to the rank of major-general,making Alexander the youngest general in the British Army.He relinquished command of his brigade in January 1938,and in February returned to the United Kingdom to take command of the 1st Infantry Division. Following the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Alexander brought the 1st Infantry Division to France, where, in late May 1940, he successfully led the division's withdrawal to Dunkirk. Shortly after Bernard Montgomery had been appointed to command II Corps, Alexander was, while still on the beachhead, placed in command of I Corps, and left the beach on 3 June after ensuring that all British troops had been evacuated.In recognition of his services in the field from March to June 1940, Alexander was again mentioned in despatches. Having been confirmed as a lieutenant-general in July 1940,Alexander returned to the UK to be made the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief (GOC-in-C) of the Southern Command, which was responsible for the defence of south-west England.On 1 January 1942 he was knighted and appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath,and in February, after the Japanese invasion of Burma, was sent to India to become GOC-in-C Burma as a full general.While he commanded what would later be the Fourteenth Army, Alexander left the tactical conduct of the campaign to his corps commander, Bill Slim, while Alexander himself handled the more political aspects of relations with Joe Stillwell, the nominal commander of the Chinese forces. By July 1942, the British and Indian forces in Burma had completed their fighting retreat back into India, and Alexander, having yet again been mentioned in despatches for his Burma service,was recalled to the United Kingdom. He was at first selected to command the First Army, which was to take part in Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa. However, following a visit in early August to Egypt by British prime minister Winston Churchill and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, Alexander flew to Cairo on 8 August to replace Claude Auchinleck as the Commander-in-Chief of Middle East Command, the post responsible for the overall conduct of the campaign in the desert of North Africa. At the same time, Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery replaced Auchinleck as the general officer commanding the Eighth Army.Alexander presided over Montgomery's victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein and the advance of the Eighth Army to Tripoli, for which Alexander was elevated to a knight grand cross of the Order of the Bath,and, after the Anglo-American forces from Operation Torch and the Eighth Army converged in Tunisia in February 1943, they were brought under the unified command of a newly-formed 18th Army Group headquarters, commanded by Alexander and reporting to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean at the Allied Forces Headquarters. The Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered by May 1943, and Alexander's command became the 15th Army Group, which was, under Eisenhower, responsible for mounting in July the Allied invasion of Sicily, again seeing Alexander controlling two armies: Montgomery's Eighth Army and George S. Patton's Seventh United States Army. After Sicily, and in preparation for the allied invasion of Italy, the Seventh Army headquarters were replaced by those of the Fifth United States Army, lead by Mark Clark. When Eisenhower was appointed Supreme Allied Commander for the planned Normandy Landings he suggested that Alexander become ground forces commander, as he was popular with both British and US officers. Brooke, however, applied pressure to keep Alexander in Italy, considering him unfit for the assignment in France.Thus, Alexander remained in command of the 15th Army Group, and, with the support of numerous allied commanders, controversially authorised the bombing of the historic abbey at Cassino, which resulted in little advance on the German Winter Line defences. It was not until the fourth attempt that the Winter Line was breached by the Allies, and Alexander's forces moved on to capture Rome in June 1944, thereby achieving one of the strategic goals of the Italian campaign. However, US Fifth Army forces at Anzio, under Clark's orders, failed to follow their original breakout plan that would have trapped the German forces escaping northwards in the aftermath of the Battle of Monte Cassino, instead favouring an early and highly publicised entry into Rome two days before the Allied landings in Normandy. Alexander remained in command of 15th Army Group, as well as its successor, the Allied Armies in Italy, for most of the Italian Campaign, until December 1944, when he relinquished his command to Clark and took over as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces Headquarters, responsible for all military operations in the Mediterranean Theatre. Alexander was concurrently promoted to the rank of field marshal,though this was backdated to the fall of Rome on 4 June 1944,so that Alexander would once again be senior to Montgomery, who had himself been made a field marshal on 1 September 1944, after the end of the Battle of Normandy. Alexander then received the German surrender in Italy, on 29 April 1945. Further, as a reward for his leadership in North Africa and Italy, Alexander, along with a number of other prominent British Second World War military leaders, was elevated to the peerage on 1 March 1946 by King George VI; he was created Viscount Alexander of Tunis and Errigal in the County of Donegal. Alexander departed the office of governor general in early 1952, after Churchill asked him to return to London to take the post of Minister of Defence in the British government,as the ageing Churchill, had found it increasingly difficult to cope with holding that portfolio concurrently with that of prime minister. Soon after, George VI died on the night of 5-6 February, and Alexander, in respect of the King's mourning, departed quietly for the United Kingdom, leaving Chief Justice of Canada Thibaudeau Rinfret as administrator of the government in his place. After his return to the UK, Alexander was on 14 March 1952 elevated in the peerage by the new queen, becoming Earl Alexander of Tunis, Baron Rideau of Ottawa and Castle Derg.He was also appointed to the organising committee for the the Queen's coronation,and was charged with carrying the Sovereign's Orb in the state procession on that occasion in 1953. The Earl served as the British defence minister until 1954, when he retired from politics, and, in 1959, the Queen appointed Alexander to the Order of Merit.Canada remained a favourite second home for the Alexanders, and they returned frequently to visit family and friends, until Alexander died on 16 June 1969 of a perforated aorta.His funeral was held on 24 June 1969 at St. Georges Chapel, in Windsor Castle, and his remains are buried in the churchyard of Ridge, near Tyttenhanger, his family's Hertfordshire home.