Edwin Alderson
Sir Edwin Alfred Hervey Alderson, KCB was a senior British Army officer who served in several campaigns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From 1915 to 1916 during the First World War he commanded the Canadian Expeditionary Force on the Western Front, during which time it saw heavy fighting.
Early life
Born in 1859 in Capel St Mary, a village in Suffolk, Edwin Alderson was the son of Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Mott Alderson and his wife Catherine Harriett Swainson. He was educated at Ipswich School.Early military career
Aged 17, Alderson received a commission into the Norfolk Artillery Militia, and at 19 he was transferred to the 1st Foot on 4 December 1878. He transferred again ten days later, replacing a promoted officer, to his father's regiment, the 97th Regiment of Foot. Joining the regiment in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Alderson was soon transferred to Gibraltar and later South Africa, where he was detached to the Mounted Infantry Depot at Laing's Nek.Mounted Infantry
The Mounted Infantry Depot was a post where young officers could be stationed, forming a ready reserve of young, educated officers available as volunteers for staff or command positions in African colonial campaigns. It was whilst attached to this post that Alderson saw service in the First Boer War in 1881 in the Transvaal. The following year, Alderson served in the 1882 Anglo-Egyptian War, fighting at the battles of Kassassin and Tel-el-Kebir. Two years later, he was attached to the Mounted Camel Regiment during the failed expedition to relieve Khartoum and rescue General Gordon. During this campaign, Alderson was presented with the Bronze Medal of the Royal Humane Society after diving into the Nile to rescue a drowning soldier. For his service in these campaigns, Alderson was promoted to captain, upon being transferred to the Queen's Own in June 1886, and was stationed at Aldershot with the European Mounted Infantry Depot. The same year he married the daughter of the vicar of Syresham, Northamptonshire, a Miss Alice Mary Sergeant. The couple had one son.The next ten years of Alderson's career were spent on staff duties and with his old regiment in England and Ireland. He also undertook training at the Staff College, Camberley, from 1895 to 1896. and in 1896 was sent to Mashonaland as a commander of a regiment of local troops during the Second Matabele War. Following the campaign's successful conclusion he returned to Aldershot to serve as a deputy assistant adjutant general, taking over from Frederick Stopford. While there, he published his first book, With the Mounted Infantry and the Mashonaland Field Force, 1896, an account of the war and a thesis on the tactical uses of mounted infantry. A second book on military tactics followed in 1898 called The Counter-attack. His third book, "Pink and scarlet" was published in 1900 and was another tactical treatise concerning the relationship between fox-hunting and the cavalry, and the connection that these gentlemanly and military concerns had in training young officers and developing innovations in cavalry tactics.
Second Boer War
In 1900, shortly after the Second Boer War started, Alderson returned to South Africa to command the Mounted Infantry against the Afrikaner forces. His experience with mounted infantry made him suitable for this role in fighting the highly mobile horsed Boer Commandos, as they moved in the latter part of the conflict to a strategy of hit and run attacks upon the British Expeditionary Force in South Africa. Alderson was instrumental in forming British counter-tactics and used his brigade to good effect against the Afrikaners, the troops under his command including two battalions of Canadian Mounted Rifles. The force was under the overall command of experienced British soldier Edward Hutton, previously General-Officer-Commanding the Canadian Militia, who became a lifelong friend of Alderson's. Among the Canadian troopers Alderson was a popular commander, being preferred to the tactless Hutton by the Commander of the 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles, and in 1901 the then Governor General of Canada, Lord Minto, unsuccessfully petitioned the British government to have Alderson brought to Canada as G.O.C. of its Militia.He participated in the battles of Paardeberg and Driefontein as well as the relief of Kimberley and the capture of Bloemfontein and Pretoria. The result of Alderson's contribution in these campaigns was to be rewarded with confirmation as a brigadier general, appointment as a Companion of the Order of the Bath and to receive the ceremonial post of Aide-de-Camp to Queen Victoria. By 1901, Alderson's innovations had resulted in several victorious operations, and in July that year he was appointed Inspector General of Mounted infantry in the Natal District.
He was mentioned in despatches several times, and received the Queen's South Africa Medal. After the end of the war in June 1902, Alderson stayed in South Africa another couple of months as Inspector General of Mounted Infantry, returning home on the SS Scot in November.
1902–1914
On his return, Alderson was attached to the 1st Army Corps, stationed at Aldershot. In May 1903 he was given command of the 2nd Infantry Brigade which was part of the 1st Division in the 1st Army Corps at Aldershot, and in December 1906 was promoted to the rank of major general. In 1908, he released a compilation of notes made on campaign entitled Lessons from 100 notes made in peace and war. The same year he was posted to India to command the 6th Division based in Poona.In 1912 he returned to England in semi-retirement on half-pay, later becoming a master of foxhounds in the South Shropshire Hunt, and developing an enthusiasm for yachting.
First World War
At the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914, Alderson was, on 5 August, placed in charge of the 1st Mounted Division and all troops in the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. However he was given larger duties when he was appointed by Field Marshal Lord Kitchener to lead the Canadian Expeditionary Force because of his experience with the Canadians in South Africa. Soon after his appointment he came into conflict with Sir Sam Hughes, Canadian Minister of Militia. Hughes had preceded his men and insisted that the Canadian contingent was not only fully trained and battle ready but also equipped with the best weaponry available. Alderson however, after reviewing the Canadian formation was concerned about its combat readiness, particularly regarding some of its commissioned officers, who appeared to owe their positions to political connections rather than through professional military qualifications, the degree of training of the troops had received, and the mechanically temperamental Ross rifle, a weapon personally approved by Hughes.During training on Salisbury Plain, Alderson, promoted to lieutenant general in October, made some headway in toughening the Canadian troops encamped in the wet, autumn weather, and dismissed some commissioned officers, appointed at Hughes' discretion, whom he thought incompetent. When Hughes' representative in England, Colonel John Wallace Carson, secured preferential accommodation for the Canadian soldiers at the expense of a British Army brigade, Alderson refused the barracks and in doing so, drew personal hostility from both Carson and Hughes upon himself. Carson wrote to the Canadian Prime Minister Robert Laird Borden that Alderson "does not treat our men with a firm iron hand covered with the velvet glove which their special temperaments require".
Second Battle of Ypres
The Canadian Division sailed from England and landed in France in February 1915, and was briefly initiated to trench warfare on the periphery of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in March 1915, before being attached to the British 2nd Army, under the command of Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, in the Belgian town of Ypres. It was in front of Ypres on 22 April 1915 that the Canadians bore the brunt of the opening by the Imperial German Army of the 2nd Battle of Ypres, presaged by the first use in history of poison gas as a military weapon. At 5.00 pm the Germans began heavily shelling the French trenches adjoining the Canadian Division's sector, and the Canadians and the French Algerian troops stationed next to them saw a fog traveling across no-mans land towards their positions, which also concealed the advance of German forces behind it wearing gas masks. The fog was chlorine gas. The Algerians broke and fled, suffering over 6000 casualties in a matter of minutes, and the Canadians were consequently forced to defend twice the length of the front line they had vacated. Although the Canadian Division held on for more than two days, ground was lost to the attacking Germans, and the Canadian Division suffered over 50% casualties.For Alderson the battle had been a failure. Although his troops had held the line, he had found himself out of touch with the action at times during its course, and unable to get accurate information about the situation. At one stage he had been commanding 33 battalions across several miles of front line with no central co-ordination and great confusion between his distant headquarters and the trenches. In addition the Ross rifles had proved almost useless in battle, and some of Canadian officers had performed poorly in their first battle. In particular Brigadier-General Richard Turner, commander of the 3rd Brigade, and Turner's brigade-major, Colonel Garnet Hughes, the son of Sam Hughes, caused havoc when on the second day of the battle they unilaterally withdrew the 3rd Brigade from the front line in the process opening up a 4000-yard gap in the British front, through which the Germans briefly threatened the defence of the Ypres Salient as a whole. Colonel Carson however, who reported personally to Hughes, downplayed the mishaps, and blamed the Division's heavy casualties on Alderson's leadership, indicating that it had only been saved from annihilation by the actions of Turner and Hughes.