Page 109 - They Also Served

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Harold Alexander 1911.
Born into an Anglo-Irish aristocratic
family, Harold Rupert Leofric George
Alexander was born in London on 10th
December 1891. Educated at Harrow
and a cadet colour sergeant at Sandhurst,
he was commissioned into the Irish
Guards in 1911. Serving on the Western
Front in 1914, he was wounded at the
First Battle of Ypres and invalided home
but returned to action in time for the
Battle of Loos in October 1915, for
which he was awarded the MC. In 1916, after the Battle of the Somme, he was awarded DSO and the French Legion d’Honneur. For much of the remainder of the war, Alexander commanded the 2nd Battalion Irish Guards.
Remaining in the army between the wars, he commanded troops in Latvia in 1919, where he was wounded by an overzealous sentry before, in 1922, commanding the Irish Guards again. He then attended the Staff College, Camberley, where two of his instructors, future field marshals Brooke and Montgomery, were unimpressed by him. Nevertheless, further promotion followed, and he commanded brigades in the UK and on the North-West Frontier of India. Finally, in 1937, he became the youngest major-general in the army, taking command of the 1st Infantry Division soon afterwards. Alexander took the division to France in 1939 and successfully led it during the withdrawal to Dunkirk the following May. He was one of the very last of the 338,000 troops to be evacuated. Promoted to lead Southern Command, one of Alexander’s corps commanders was Montgomery. Despite the earlier antagonism, Alexander was sufficiently sanguine to recognise Monty’s talents.
In early 1942, Alexander was knighted and took command of British forces in Burma at the height of Japanese expansion. Often in the thick of the action, he had to be rescued by Chinese troops after his headquarters became surrounded. However, despite his undoubted bravery, he was unable to hold Burma. Field command was delegated to Bill Slim while Alexander smoothed the way to greater cooperation with the Chinese under Chiang Kai-shek and his irascible Anglophobe American advisor ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell. In July, Alexander was recalled to the UK and sent to command
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