Generals of the British Army/Gough, Sir H. De La Poer
GENERAL SIR HUBERT GOUGH
IV
GENERAL SIR HUBERT DE LA POER GOUGH,
K.C.B., K.C.V.O.
SIR HUBERT GOUGH was born on August i2th, 1870; the eldest son of the late Sir Charles John Stanley Gough. He was educated at Eton and Sandhurst, and, in 1889, obtained a commission in the i6th Lancers. He served in the Tirah Expedition and in the South African War. On the outbreak of the European War he commanded the 3rd Cavalry Brigade during the Retreat from Mons and the Battle of the Marne. His Brigade was one of the first to arrive at the Aisne on September i2th, 1914, and, a few weeks later, when the Cavalry Corps was formed under Sir Edmund Allenby, he was given command of the 2nd Cavalry Division. His Division was the first part of the British force to leave on October 3rd for Flanders.
In the First Battle of Ypres, when the small British Army bolted the door of the North against the German sweep, his Division played a foremost part. In General Smith-Dorrien's advance towards La Bassee it moved on the left flank, clearing out the Germans from the forest of Dieppe, the Hill of Cassel, and Hazebrouck. Along with the 1st Cavalry Division it reconnoitred the line of the Lys, and later held the front between Zandvoorde and Messines on the left of Allenby's Corps. In the great struggle of October 3oth and 3ist it had desperate fighting to hold the line, and, on November 1st, before the French XVI Corps arrived in support, it was forced back from Hollebeke and Messines.
Sir Hubert Cough's 2nd Cavalry Division was at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, but failed to get the expected chance of going into action. Shortly after this he took command of the 7th Infantry Division and was engaged in the operations at Festubert. About the middle of July, 1915, he was appointed to command the I Corps in succession to Sir C. Monro, who went to the Mediterranean.
At Loos Sir Hubert Gough commanded this Corps, which contained at the time the 2nd, 7th and 9th Divisions. It was his men who stormed Fosse 8 and the Hohenzollern Redoubt.
During the spring of 1916 he was put in command of a Reserve Army, which at the time consisted chiefly of Cavalry and a Staff. After the first day of the Battle of the Somme, when it was apparent that Sir Henry Rawlinson's Fourth Army was engaged on too long a line, the part of the front from la Boiselle northwards was handed over to the Reserve Army, which now became known as the Fifth. There, for five months, Sir Hubert Gough was hotly engaged. It was under his command that Pozieres and Mouquet Farm were taken by the Australians and Courcelette by the Canadians, and the Thiepval Ridge cleared at the end of October. His greatest success came in the Battle of the Ancre on November 13th, when, in two days, he took more than 5,000 German prisoners.
When the German retreat began in the spring of 1917, Sir Hubert Gough's Army operated in the Bapaume area and towards the country between Cambrai and St. Quentin. It was engaged on the right of the Third Army during the Battle of Arras.
Sir Hubert Gough belongs to one of the most famous of British fighting families. His brother, Brigadier-General John Gough, V.C., was Sir Douglas Haig's Chief-of-Staff during the first nine months of the war, and died by a chance rifle bullet at Estaires on February 2Oth, 1917. Sir Hubert, who is only 46, is by far the youngest of British soldiers in high command the youngest Army Commander, indeed, among all the Allies. He first made his name as a dashing Cavalry leader, a man of infinite courage and resource in an open campaign. In the long months of trench fighting he has won a reputation second to no British General for skill in our modern scientific and mechanical form of warfare. His energy, his daring, and his boyish good-humour made him an ideal Cavalry leader, and they have endeared him to every man who has had the honour to serve under his command. He is not the least notable of the many great soldiers whom Ireland has given to the British Army.