Brian Horrocks (7 September 1895 – 4 January 1985) was a Lieutenant-General of the United Kingdom's British Army during World War II. He led the British XXX Corps during the liberation of France and the push into Germany, including in Operation Market Garden.
Biography[]
Horrocks was born in Ranikhet, British Raj, United Kingdom to Sir William Horrocks. He entered the Royal Military College in 1913 and served in World War I, the Russian Civil War, and the Anglo-Irish War. While a prisoner-of-war in World War I, Horrocks was put in a section of the prison for Imperial Russian Army troops by the German guards in hopes of using the language barrier to block his attempts at escape, but he became fluent in Russian. In 1919, he returned to the British Army when they asked for volunteers who knew Russian, and on 19 April 1919 he was sent to Vladivostok to help Admiral Alexander Kolchak in fighting against the Red Army. He helped in training the White Army against the communists, but he was captured by the Bolsheviks and held for ten months before being released.
World War II[]
Horrocks in 1944
Back home, Horrocks served in the Anglo-Irish War and finished 19th out of 38 in the modern pentathlon at the 1924 Paris Olympics for the British Olympic team. From 1938, he taught at the Staff College, and he fought in the Battle of France as a Lieutenant-Colonel. In March 1942 he took over the British 9th Armored Division as a Major-General and fought in the victories at the Battle of Alam el-Halfa and the Second Battle of El Alamein, and he was wounded in a German air force attack in June 1943 that pierced his lungs, stomach, and intestines and left him with lifelong pains. Horrocks replaced Gerard Bucknall as commander of the British XXX Corps during the Falaise Gap campaign in Normandy in August 1944 after recovering from his injuries, and he also fought in the costly defeat of Operation Market Garden. Horrocks fought in Operation Veritable and on 9 February 1945 breached the Siegfried Line, having reluctantly authorized the unleashing of 1,406 tons of explosives on the city of Cleves and said that he had many nightmares afterwards about the hard choice. In 1949, he was invalided out of service due to his illnesses, and he retired from the army. Having appeared in the 1974 The World at War documentary, Horrocks died in 1985 at the age of 89.