Sir William Robertson, 1st Baronet


Sir William Robertson

Robertson in 1915
Nickname(s)"Wully"
Born(1860-01-29)29 January 1860
Welbourn, Lincolnshire, England
Died12 February 1933(1933-02-12) (aged 73)
London, England
Buried
Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey, England
AllegianceUnited Kingdom
Service/branchBritish Army
Years of service1877–1920
RankField Marshal
Unit16th The Queen's Lancers
Commands heldBritish Army of the Rhine
Eastern Command
Chief of the Imperial General Staff
Staff College, Camberley
Battles/warsChitral Expedition
Second Boer War
First World War
AwardsKnight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath
Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George
Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order
Distinguished Service Order
Mentioned in Despatches
Order of the White Eagle[1]

Field Marshal Sir William Robert Robertson, 1st Baronet, GCB, GCMG, GCVO, DSO (29 January 1860 – 12 February 1933) was a British Army officer who served as Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) – the professional head of the British Army – from 1916 to 1918 during the First World War.

As CIGS he was committed to a Western Front strategy focusing on Germany. He had increasingly poor relations with David Lloyd George, Secretary of State for War and then Prime Minister, and threatened resignation at Lloyd George's attempt to subordinate the British forces to the French Commander-in-Chief, Robert Nivelle. In 1917 Robertson supported the continuation of the Battle of Passchendaele at odds with Lloyd George's view that Britain's war effort ought to be focused on the other theatres until the arrival of sufficient US troops on the Western Front.[2] Robertson is the only soldier in the history of the British Army to have risen from an enlisted rank to its highest rank of field marshal.[2]

  1. ^ Acović, Dragomir (2012). Slava i čast: Odlikovanja među Srbima, Srbi među odlikovanjima. Belgrade: Službeni Glasnik. p. 591.
  2. ^ a b Woodward, David R. (September 2004). "Robertson, Sir William Robert, first baronet (1860–1933)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/35786. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)

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