Hubert Gough

GeneralSir Hubert de la Poer Gough ( ; 12 August 1870 – 18 March 1963) was a senior officer in the British Army in the First World War. A controversial figure, he was a favourite of the commander-in-chief of the on the Western Front, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, and the youngest of Haig's field army commanders.

Gough was educated at Eton and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, before commissioning into the 16th Lancers in 1889. His early career included notable service in the Second Boer War, and a more controversial role in the Curragh incident, in which he was one of the leading officers who threatened to accept dismissal rather than deploy into Protestant Ulster.

Gough experienced a meteoric rise during the First World War, from command of a cavalry brigade in August 1914, to division command at the First Battle of Ypres that autumn, to a corps at the Battle of Loos a year later. From mid-1916 he commanded the Reserve Army (later renamed the Fifth Army) during the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917. His tenure was marked by controversy around his leadership style, his perceived reputation as "a thruster", and the efficiency of the organisation of his army, especially relative to the reputation for caution and efficiency of General Sir Herbert Plumer's Second Army. Fifth Army bore the initial brunt of the German spring offensive in March 1918, but Gough was scapegoated and relieved of his command.

After the war, he briefly held a command in the Baltic until retirement in 1922, and stood unsuccessfully for Parliament. After a brief spell at farming, he made a new career for himself as a company director. Gough gradually re-emerged as an influential figure in military circles and public life, writing two volumes of memoirs. He was a senior commander in the London Home Guard in the Second World War and lived long enough to be interviewed on television in the early 1960s. Historians continue to study Gough's career as a case study of how the BEF coped with rapid expansion, with officers commanding forces far larger than during their peacetime experience, of the degree of initiative which should be granted to subordinates, and of the evolution of operational planning under stalemate conditions, from an initial emphasis on achieving breakthrough (with attrition regarded as preliminary "wearing out") to a stress on cautious advances under cover of massive, concentrated artillery fire.