Page 123 - They Also Served

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Eric Dorman-Smith 1914.
Eric Edward Dorman-Smith was born in
Ireland on 24th July 1895. Educated at
Uppingham School, he was a friend of
Brian Horrocks, another future general.
Entering Sandhurst, he was tenth in his
intake and commissioned into the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers in February
1914. On his first night in the officers’
mess, a brother officer noticed the
buck-toothed newcomer’s resemblance
to the regimental mascot, a chinkara
(Indian gazelle), and the nickname ‘Chink’ was coined.
Dorman-Smith was wounded at Mons in August 1914 and again in December. In May 1915, he was wounded at the Second Battle of Ypres and awarded one of the first of a new decoration for junior officers, the MC. During the remainder of the war, he served with the 10th Battalion of his regiment in France as well as the 12th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry in Italy and added a second award bar to his MC – he was also MiD three times. Immediately after the war, he served in Ireland, where his loyalties were confused. His childhood nurse was married to the local IRA commander. Dorman-Smith helped her bury a cache of grenades before her home was raided.
With a good war record, having served as an instructor at Sandhurst and with JFC Fuller awarding him 1,000 out of 1,000 on his Staff College strategy paper, this should have been the next step in a glittering career. However, Dorman-Smith was seen as a self-opinionated know-all by his peers, many of whom would be generals in the coming war. Worse still, he clashed with his directing staff, Montgomery, and publicly burned his lecture notes at the end of the course. During subsequent staff jobs, he advocated rapid mechanisation, clashing with Brooke, a future chief of the general staff who he considered a ‘dinosaur’. Dorman-Smith continued to spoil career-enhancing opportunities and, when ending his time as an instructor at the Staff College, he upset the commandant, another future CGS, Lord Gort, by praising the Italian Army’s mechanisation over that of the British.
As a temporary brigadier, he served in India, becoming a close advisor to Auchinleck
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