Brian Horrocks

Lieutenant General Sir Brian Horrocks--charismatic, self-deprecating, insightful - had an extraordinary career as a professional British soldier in both World Wars and the British intervention against the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1919, as an Olympic athlete, military instructor, and military adviser to film and television. Horrocks was born in 1895 in India, where his father was a doctor in the British Army. He graduated from Sandhurst (the West Point of the British Army - by his own account, bottom of his class but one) and was a junior lieutenant in the British Army at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Horrocks's platoon was surrounded and he was wounded at Ypres, in October 1914. He became a prisoner of war in Germany. In 1919, he volunteered to join the British force which intervened on the White Army side in the Russian civil war. He received one of Britain's highest awards for gallantry, the Military Cross, but he was captured and held prisoner until 1920. Returning to Britain, Horrocks became British modern pentathlon champion and competed in the 1924 Olympics. He studied at Camberley Military College and later became a chief instructor there. In the Second World War Horrocks went with the British Expeditionary Force to France, and was promoted to brigadier during the Dunkirk evacuation in June 1940. He became a corps commander in 1942, subsequently commanding forces in the Allied victories at El Alamein and Tunisia. Horrocks commanded XXX Corps from the D-Day landings in June 1944. Horrocks and his troops subsequently liberated Amiens (31 August), Brussels (3 September) and Antwerp (4 September) and later in September were the armoured spearhead of Operation Market Garden in the drive on the Rhine bridges. They took Bremen in Germany on 27 April 1945. Horrocks retired from the British Army in 1949. His autobiography, "A Full Life" (1960), is among the most candid, amusing and thought-provoking soldierly memoirs of the 20th century. He was interviewed for the documentary miniseries, _"World At War, The" (1974)(mini)_, and was military adviser to Richard Attenborough's film, A Bridge Too Far (1977)". He died in 1985.