Background
Miles Christopher Dempsey was born in Wallasey, Cheshire on 15 December 1896.
Brigadier Miles Dempsey and his staff, with their mascot 'Tiny' at Wervicq, France, pictured here in late 1939.
Lieutenant General Dempsey with two of his staff (Major Priestly and Captain Hay) in Sicily, July 1943.
Half length portrait of Lieutenant General Sir Miles Dempsey taken at his desk, April 1944.
Lieutenant General Dempsey crossing the Rhine in a small boat, March 1945.
Lieutenant General Sir M.C. Dempsey (right) with the 21st Army Group commander, General Sir Bernard Montgomery (centre), and U.S. First Army commander, Lieutenant General Omar Bradley (left), 10 June 1944.
Miles Christopher Dempsey was born in Wallasey, Cheshire on 15 December 1896.
Miles Dempsey was educated at Shrewsbury School, entering there in 1911, where he captained the first eleven Cricket team in 1914. On leaving Shrewsbury he attended the Royal Military College, Sandhurst during the First World War.
He was a lieutenant colonel when World War II began in 1939, and he commanded an infantry brigade in France that helped to cover the British rear guard during the evacuation from Dunkirk in May-June 1940. Promoted to lieutenant general, Dempsey in November 1942 took command of the XIII Corps of the Eighth Army in North Africa under Genукфд Bernard Montgomery.
Dempsey’s corps formed the right wing of Montgomery’s forces in the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, and that September it spearheaded the invasion of the "toe" of the Italian peninsula across the Strait of Messina. Dempsey led the XIII Corps 300 miles (480 km) northward along Italy’s west coast in 17 days to link up with Lieutenant General Mark Clark’s American forces at Salerno.
Montgomery picked the quietly competent and methodical Dempsey to command the Second Army, which contained several Canadian and Polish units as well as British forces, in the invasion of Normandy in June 1944. The Second Army landed successfully on Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches on June 6, drove inland to capture Caen on July 9, and then kept up pressure on the bulk of the German armoured forces while the U.S. First Army to the west broke out of Normandy on July 25. Dempsey led the Second Army in the Battles of Mortain and Falaise and then swept eastward across northern France and Belgium. After taking part in the failed British attempt to capture Arnhem in the Netherlands (September 1944), Dempsey led the Second Army across the Rhine River in late March 1945 and drove northeastward into Germany, capturing Bremen, Hamburg, and Kiel and reaching the Danish frontier by May 1945.
With Germany’s surrender, Dempsey served successively as commander in chief of Allied land forces in Southeast Asia (1945-1946) and the Middle East (1946-1947). He was knighted in 1944 and retired in 1947.
After the war, in 1919, Dempsey played two first-class cricket matches for Sussex against Oxford University and Northamptonshire. Between 1926 and 1932, he also played Minor Counties Championship cricket for Berkshire.