Lieutenant-General Sir Brian Gwynne Horrocks, (7 September 1895 – 4 January 1985) was a British Army officer, chiefly remembered as the commander of XXX Corps in Operation Market Garden and other operations during the Second World War. He also served in the First World War and the Russian Civil War, was taken prisoner twice, and competed in the modern pentathlon at the 1924 Paris Olympics. Later he was a television presenter, wrote books on military history, and was Black Rod in the House of Lords for 14 years.
In 1940 Horrocks commanded a battalion during the Battle of France, the first time he served under Bernard Montgomery, the most prominent British commander of the war. Montgomery later identified Horrocks as one of his most able officers, appointing him to corps commands in both North Africa and Europe. In 1943, Horrocks was seriously wounded and took more than a year to recover before returning to command a corps in Europe. It is likely that this period out of action meant he missed out on promotion; his contemporary corps commanders in North Africa, Oliver Leese and Miles Dempsey, went on to command at army level and above. Horrocks' wound continued to impair his health and led to his early retirement from the army after the war.
Since 1945, Horrocks has been regarded by some as one of the most successful British generals of the war, "a man who really led, a general who talked to everyone, down to the simplest private soldier" and the "beau ideal of a corps commander".
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in Western Europe, called him "the outstanding British general under Montgomery".
Brian Gwynne Horrocks was the only son of Colonel Sir William Horrocks, a Lancashire born doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), and his wife, Minna Horrocks, "who had all the gaiety and charm of the Irish". Born in Ranikhet in British India on 7 September 1895, young Brian—after having had "particularly happy memories of the four years spent at Gibraltar when my father was working on the causes of Malta fever"—returned to Britain, where he was educated at Bow School, Durham, then later Uppingham School, Rutland, an English public school, "where I gravitated automatically into the army class. There was never any question of my entering a profession other than the army." Of his childhood, he claimed to have had "an extremely happy childhood". Horrocks later wrote that, as his life was devoted almost entirely to sport, he had very little aptitude for hard work.
He entered the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, in October 1912, "bottom but one". Horrocks's time at Sandhurst was, by his own admission, not very distinguished. "Let me be quite honest about it; I was idle, careless about my turnout—in army parlance, scruffy—and, due to the fact that I am inclined to roll when I walk, very unsmart on parade". His score was sixth-lowest of the 167 successful applicants for cadetships—even after the addition of 200 bonus points for an Officer Training Corps (OTC) certificate, which not all the other candidates had. An unpromising student, he might not have received a commission at all but for the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914.
Horrocks was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Middlesex Regiment, a line infantry regiment of the British Army, on 8 August 1914. Horrocks, in charge of a ninety-five-man draft of replacements, joined the 1st Battalion of his regiment as part of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) during the BEF's retreat following its baptism of fire at the Battle of Mons. By the time he and his men had got to Southampton his ninety-five-man draft had increased to ninety-eight, with three others, in their keenness to get into the war, having sneaked in. He described the feeling at the time:
This was, I should think, the last time there was any romance attached to war. It is impossible now after the bitter experience of two world wars to recapture the spirit of this country in August, 1914. As I marched through those cheering crowds I felt like a king among men. It was all going to be over by Christmas and our one anxiety was whether we would get over there in time. And all ranks felt the same.
Arriving in France, Horrocks was assigned to No. 16 Platoon of the 1st Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment, with Captain Edward Stephen Gibbons (who was killed in 1918) as his company commander. The battalion was part of the 19th Independent Brigade, which was not assigned to a division. Horrocks wrote that his "chief memory of those days, and the memory retained by all platoon commanders, was of marching—endless and exhausting marches. I had never realised before that it was possible to go to sleep while the legs continued automatically to function." He found comfort in "that priceless Cockney sense of humour. A small private soldier in the rank in front of me looked up at his neighbour, who was blessed with a long lugubrious face, and said, Why don't you give your face a holiday, chum? Try a smile." He also came to greatly admire Captain Gibbons, along with his platoon sergeant, Sergeant Whinney. Once, while it was pouring with rain, the officers of the battalion were offered billets in a comfortable farmhouse, while the other ranks slept in a field covered with manure which had recently been departed by some cows; Captain Gibbons was furious, insisting that the officers should share in the misery of their subordinates. "My heart sank but I knew instinctively that he was right", Horrocks later wrote. Douglas Delaney writes that the "willingness of soldiers to follow was constructed on gestures like this. It is interesting how some events, though seemingly insignificant in the bigger scheme of things, become embedded in memory, making lifelong memories of themselves." Horrocks was not to last much longer in battle, as on 21 October, at the Battle of Armentières, his platoon was surrounded, and Horrocks, while defending the town of Maisnil against a German attack, received a bullet wound through the lower abdomen and upper thigh, and was taken prisoner. "The war for me was over and my active military career had stopped for four years."
Incarcerated in a military hospital, he was repeatedly interrogated by his German captors, who believed that the British were using expanding bullets in contravention of the 1899 Hague Convention. Horrocks' captors refused to change his clothes or sheets, and denied him and a fellow officer basic amenities. Both had temporarily lost the use of their legs, and were forced to crawl to the toilet, which caused Horrocks' wounds to become infected. Conditions improved after his discharge and transfer to a prisoner of war camp. On his way to the camp, Horrocks befriended his German escort—he attributed their rapport to the mutual respect that front line troops share. He was promoted to lieutenant on 18 December 1914, despite being in enemy hands, and often tried to escape, once coming within 500 yards (460 m) of the Dutch border before being recaptured. He was eventually placed in a compound for Russian officers, in the hope that the language barrier would hinder his escape attempts; Horrocks used the time to learn the Russian language. Years later, working in the House of Commons, he startled Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin by greeting them in their native tongue. In the latter part of the war he was held in Holzminden prisoner-of-war camp. His resistance in captivity would earn him the Military Cross (MC), awarded in 1920 and backdated to 5 May 1919.
Repatriated at the end of the war, Horrocks had difficulty adapting to a peacetime routine. He went on sprees in London, spending four years of accumulated back-pay in six weeks.
In 1919 Horrocks was posted to Russia as part of the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. After landing at Vladivostok on 19 April, he was briefed at British headquarters. The White Army under Admiral Kolchak, with the help of released Czechoslovak Legion prisoners, had driven the Red Army out of Siberia. Kolchak's Czech troops were returning home, and the British military contingent was urgently trying to replace them with Russians. To accomplish this, the British had only two infantry battalions and two small administrative missions, one charged with training and arming the Russians with British war-surplus equipment, and the other with improving the White Army's communications.