Page 119 - They Also Served

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Willoughby Norrie 1913.
Charles Willoughby Moke-Norrie was
born in Brompton, London, on 26th
September 1893. Educated at Eton
College, he was an under-officer at
Sandhurst before being commissioned
into the 11th Hussars in 1913. In
the early months of the Great War,
many cavalry officers, realising that
their regiments were unsuited to
trench warfare, embarked on careers
as ‘professional staff officers’. Thus, he
served as a captain in the 73rd Brigade, then the 18th Corps, brigade-major of the 90th Brigade, and finally in the 2nd Battalion, Tank Corps. Clearly, he didn’t spend the war hidden away in châteaux far behind the front line, for he was awarded the DSO, MC, and Bar, and was wounded four times.
In 1919, he shortened his name by deed poll to Norrie and attended the Staff College, Camberley, in 1924. In 1931, he commanded the 10th Royal Hussars and, after attending the Imperial Defence College, commanded the 1st Cavalry Brigade which, after mechanisation, was retitled 1st Armoured Brigade. In June 1941, Norrie was promoted to major-general and assumed command of the 1st Armoured Division, taking it to Egypt in November. However, no sooner had they arrived than the commander of 30 Corps, Lieutenant-General Vyvyan Pope, was killed in an air crash and Norrie took his place.
It says much for the parlous state of the British Army in the early stages of the Desert War that a front-line corps was given to an officer whose last operational command was as a troop commander in 1914. 30 Corps achieved some success during Operation Crusader in late 1941, a series of battles which the historian Geoffrey Cox described as being ‘won by a hair’s breadth’. However, at the Battle of Gazala in June 1942, the British were defeated by Rommel, losing the strategically important Port of Tobruk and leaving over 1,100 disabled and destroyed tanks littering the Western Desert. Norrie was sacked by Auchinleck, the Eighth Army commander and returned to the UK as commander RAC, an advisory rather than command role. Finally, in September
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