About William Birdwood
Field Marshal William Riddell Birdwood, 1st Baron Birdwood was a British army officer who spent most of his career in the British Indian Army. He saw active service in the Second Boer War on the staff of Lord Kitchener. Birdwood saw action again in the First World War, initially as commander of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps during the Gallipoli campaign in 1915, leading the landings on the peninsula and then the evacuation later in the year, before becoming commander-in-chief of the Fifth Army on the Western Front during the closing stages of the war. He then went on to be general officer commanding the Northern Army in India in 1920 and Commander-in-Chief, India, in 1925, and retired as a field marshal. Birdwood took effective command of the First Australian Imperial Force in May 1915 while still commanding Allied troops on the ground at Gallipoli. When I ANZAC Corps became the first to depart for France, Birdwood, as senior corps commander, took over command. Promoted to the rank of major general on 3 October 1911, Birdwood became quartermaster-general in India and a member of the Viceroy's Legislative Council in 1912 and then Secretary of the Indian Army Department in 1913.
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