The field marshal who chose withdrawal at Dunkirk
“Here we go again, marching to war.”
John Gort was a British field marshal remembered both for battlefield courage and for the contested command decisions of the Second World War. He won the Victoria Cross after leading an assault while severely wounded at the Canal du Nord in 1918. As commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force in France, he judged in May 1940 that the Allied front was collapsing and ordered the withdrawal toward Dunkirk, preserving much of the force but provoking debate over his generalship. He later restored his reputation by directing the defence of besieged Malta as its governor.
Also known as: Lord Gort · John Vereker
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1905Commissioned into the Grenadier Guards
- 1914–1918Served on the Western Front as staff officer and battalion commander
- 1936–1937Commandant of the Staff College
- 1937–1939Chief of the Imperial General Staff
- 1939–1940Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force in France
- 1941–1942Governor of Gibraltar
- 1942–1944Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Malta
- 1944–1945High Commissioner for Palestine and Transjordan
Related historical events
- 1914–1918First World WarWestern Front battalion commanderHe served as a staff officer and commanded a battalion on the Western Front.
- 1940–1944The Fall of France and the Vichy RegimeCommander who ordered the Dunkirk withdrawalIn May 1940, judging the Allied front to be collapsing, he ordered the withdrawal toward Dunkirk.
- 1940.07–1941.05Battle of BritainCommander of the British Expeditionary ForceJudged the continental defense line collapsing and chose the evacuation at Dunkirk.
Chief of the Imperial General Staff, 1937–1939
On 6 December 1937, in the course of War Minister Leslie Hore-Belisha's purge of senior officers, Gort was appointed to the Army Council, made a general and replaced Field Marshal Sir Cyril Deverell as Chief of the Imperial General Staff. His appointment was generally well received in the army, but it caused resentment because he passed over a number of much older and more senior officers, among them John Dill, Archibald Wavell and Alan Brooke, who would later become an outspoken critic of Gort. He was not especially highly regarded for his intelligence, and Major General Ronald Adam was therefore appointed as his Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff.
Gort's tenure at the head of the Army coincided with rearmament and planning for a continental commitment. On 2 December 1938 he submitted a report on the readiness of the British Army, observing that Nazi Germany, as a result of the acquisition of Czechoslovakia, was in a stronger position than the previous year and that the government's 1937 decision to create a "general purpose" army had left Britain without the forces needed for the defence of France. On 21 December he recommended to the Chiefs of Staff that Britain should help France defend the Netherlands and Belgium, and that for that purpose the Army needed complete equipment for four Regular army infantry divisions and two mobile armoured divisions. The First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Roger Backhouse, responded that such a commitment would be substantial. Gort also attacked as a fallacy the theory of strategic mobility through seapower, arguing that in modern war land transport was faster and cheaper than transport by sea. He held that a purely defensive position would see the Maginot Line broken, and noted that the Army, including anti-aircraft defence, was receiving only 277 million pounds out of a total 2 billion pounds spent on defence.
His standing in this period was ambiguous. Hore-Belisha described Gort as "utterly brainless and unable to grasp the simplest problem". Gort dismissed his subordinates' critiques of the Allies' Plan D, including his former friend Alan Brooke's prediction that the Wehrmacht would outflank the Allied forces, as defeatist. The Pillbox affair, as it was known, resulted in Hore-Belisha's dismissal.