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Field Marshal William Edmund Ironside, 1st Baron Ironside (6 May 1880 – 22 September 1959) was a senior officer of the British Army, who served as Chief of the Imperial General Staff during the first year of the Second World War. Ironside joined the Royal Regiment of Artillery in 1899, and served throughout the Second Boer War, followed by a brief period spying on the German colonial forces in South-West Africa. Returning to regular duty, he served on the staff of a Regular Army division during the first two years of the First World War, before being appointed on the staff of the newly raised 4th Canadian Division in 1916. In 1918 he was given command of a brigade on the Western Front, but was quickly promoted to command the Allied intervention force in northern Russia in 1919, then an Allied force occupying Turkey, and finally a British force in Persia in 1921. He was offered the post of the commander of British forces in Iraq, but was unable to take up the role due to injuries in a flying accident. He returned to the Army as Commandant of the Staff College, Camberley, where he advocated the ideas of J. F. C. Fuller, a proponent of mechanisation. He later commanded a division, and military districts in both Britain and India, but his youth and his blunt approach limited his career prospects, and after being passed over for the role of Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) in 1937 he became Governor of Gibraltar, a traditional staging post to retirement. He was recalled from "exile" in mid-1939, being appointed as Inspector-General of Overseas Forces, a role which led most observers to expect he would be given the command of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the outbreak of war. However, after some political manoeuvring, General The Viscount Gort was given this command, and Ironside was appointed as the new Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Ironside himself believed that he was temperamentally unsuited to the job, but felt obliged to accept it. In early 1940 he argued heavily for Allied intervention in Scandinavia, but this plan was shelved at the last minute when the Finnish-Soviet Winter War ended. During the invasion of Norway and the Battle of France he played little part; his involvement in the latter was limited by a breakdown in relations between him and Gort. He was replaced as CIGS at the end of May, and given a role to which he was more suited: Commander-in-Chief Home Forces, responsible for anti-invasion defences and for commanding the Army in the event of German landings. However, he served less than two months in this role before being replaced. After this, Ironside was promoted to Field Marshal and raised to the peerage as Baron Ironside. Lord Ironside retired to Morley Old Hall in Norfolk to write, and never again saw active service or held any official position. ==Early life== Ironside was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 6 May 1880. His father, Surgeon-Major William Ironside of the Royal Horse Artillery, died shortly afterwards, leaving his widowed wife to bring up their son on a limited military pension. As the cost of living in the late nineteenth century was substantially lower in Europe than in Britain, she travelled extensively around the Continent, where the young Edmund began learning various foreign languages.〔Ironside (1962), p. 13〕 This grasp of language would become one of the defining features of his character; by middle age, he was fluent enough to officially interpret in seven, and was proficient in perhaps ten more.〔The issue of which languages Ironside spoke, and how well, is an interesting one. Cairns says that he was "credited with a working knowledge of anything from a dozen to eighteen". Bond merely notes that he was an interpreter in seven (Bond, p. 17). Harold Nicolson recorded that as a child he had learned Flemish, and during the Boer War learned Taal. (Nicolson, p. 675) He was a first-class interpreter in five (German, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, and Afrikaans), a second-class interpreter in French, and had a grasp of Russian, Turkish and Persian; by the time of writing in 1940, he could speak a total of fourteen languages. (Nicolson, p. 674) Including English, this gives a total of eleven or twelve, if Taal is counted. In his diaries he noted that he learned Italian in 1919, and as a subaltern had learned Magyar / Hungarian, (Ironside (1972), p. 8); he also notes a conversation with an old man in Persia who "spoke good Urdu" (Ironside (1972), p. 173), strongly suggesting Ironside himself spoke it well enough to pass judgement. This gives fourteen or fifteen in total, with the possibility that some others are simply not mentioned.〕 He was educated at schools in St Andrews before being sent to Tonbridge School in Kent for his secondary education; at the age of sixteen he left Tonbridge to attend a crammer, having not shown much academic promise, and was admitted to the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, in January 1898 at the age of seventeen. At Woolwich he flourished, working hard at his studies and his sports; he took up boxing, and captained the rugby 2nd XV as well as playing for Scotland. He was built for both of these sports, six feet four inches tall and weighing seventeen stone, for which he was nicknamed "Tiny" by his fellow students. The name stuck, and he was known by it for the rest of his life.〔Cairns (2004); Bond, pp. 16–17〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Edmund Ironside, 1st Baron Ironside」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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