About William Birdwood
Field Marshal William Riddell Birdwood, 1st Baron Birdwood (13 September 1865 – 17 May 1951), was a senior and highly decorated and distinguished British Indian Army officer. 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 of the Australian Corps and 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. == Early life == William Riddell Birdwood was born on 13 September 1865 in Kirkee, India. His father, Herbert Mills Birdwood, born in Bombay and educated in the UK, had returned to India in 1859 after passing the Indian Civil Service examination. In 1861, Herbert Birdwood married Edith Marion Sidonie, the eldest daughter of Surgeon-Major Elijah George Halhed Impey of the Bombay Horse Artillery and postmaster-general of the Bombay Presidency. They had five sons and a daughter; William was their second son. At the time of William's birth, his father held positions in the Bombay legislative council, and went on to become a Bombay high court judge. William Birdwood was educated at Clifton College.
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