Hubert Gough (12 August 1870 – 18 March 1963) was a British Army general who commanded the British 5th Army from 1916 to 1918 during World War I.
Biography[]
Hubert de la Poer Gough was born in London, England in 1870, the son of the Anglo-Irish general Charles John Stanley Gough, a nephew of Hugh Henry Gough, and the brother of John Edmond Gough. He graduated from Eton and then from Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst in 1888, after which he was commissioned a British Army cavalry lieutenant in 1889. Gough served in British India from 1890 to 1898 and then in the Second Boer War, during which he held a regimental command and was taken prisoner in 1901. He was promoted to Major in 1902, served as a staff college instructor from 1904 to 1906, became a lieutenant-colonel in 1906, and refused to participate in any "active operation" against Ulster which might emerge from the Home Rule crisis of 1914. Gough went on to command a brigade on the Western Front of World War I, experiencing a meteoric rise through the ranks and becoming Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig's right-hand man. He held a corps command at the 1915 Battle of Loos and the 1916 Battle of the Somme before becoming commander of the British 5th Army in October 1916, leading the attack on the Germans at the Ancre at the end of the Somme offensive. Gough was in command at the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917, during which he failed to exploit the victory at the Battle of Messines, and he was sidelined by Herbert Plumer. He was sacked amid the German Spring Offensive of 1918, and he went on to serve as an advisor to the White Russians in the Baltics during the Russian Civil War and contemplated a political career as a Liberal. Gough spent his last years as a farmer and businessman, briefly commanding the Chelsea Home Guard during World War II, and he died in 1963.