Background
Horrocks was born in 1895 in India, where his father was a doctor in the British Army.
Horrocks was born in 1895 in India, where his father was a doctor in the British Army.
Brian Horrocks was the only son of Colonel Sir William Horrocks, a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Born in India, Brian returned to Britain, where he was educated at Bow School, Durham, later Uppingham School, Rutland, an English public school, and entered the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, in 1913. His score was sixth-lowest of the 167 successful applicants for cadetships—even after the addition of 200 bonus points for an Officer Training Corps (OTC) certificate, which not all the other candidates had. An unpromising student, he might not have received a commission at all but for the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914.
Horrocks's platoon was surrounded and he was wounded at Ypres, in October 1914. He became a prisoner of war in Germany. In 1919, he volunteered to join the British force which intervened on the White Army side in the Russian civil war. He received one of Britain's highest awards for gallantry, the Military Cross, but he was captured and held prisoner until 1920. Returning to Britain, Horrocks became British modern pentathlon champion and competed in the 1924 Olympics. He studied at Camberley Military College and later became a chief instructor there. In the Second World War Horrocks went with the British Expeditionary Force to France, and was promoted to brigadier during the Dunkirk evacuation in June 1940.
He became a corps commander in 1942, subsequently commanding forces in the Allied victories at El Alamein and Tunisia. Horrocks commanded XXX Corps from the D-Day landings in June 1944. Horrocks and his troops subsequently liberated Amiens (31 August), Brussels (3 September) and Antwerp (4 September) and later in September were the armoured spearhead of Operation Market Garden in the drive on the Rhine bridges. They took Bremen in Germany on 27 April 1945. Horrocks retired from the British Army in 1949.
