Background
Herbert Plumer was born in Torquay on March 13, 1857, to an old Yorkshire family.
Herbert Plumer was born in Torquay on March 13, 1857, to an old Yorkshire family.
He was educated at Eton and in 1876 joined the Sixty-fifth Foot.
Plumer was promoted captain in 1882 and two years later took part in the Sudan campaign. Next came service in South Africa, to which he returned in 1899 in order to organize the Rhodesian Horse. He came home in March 1902, and was promoted brigadier general the following year. Lord Roberts appointed Major General Plumer quartermaster general of the newly formed Army Council; from 1906 to 1909 Plumer commanded the Fifth Division in Ireland. The following year he was promoted lieutenant general and commander in chief at York.
On Christmas 1914 Plumer was given command of the II Army Corps in France, and he proved to be as popular with his soldiers as General Hubert Gough was disliked by his. Plumer advanced to command the Second Army in May 1915, and for nearly two uneventful years held the salient at Ypres, training his regulars and drafts for modern siege warfare. In the meantime, the British field commander in France, Sir Douglas Haig, had desperately sought to drive the Germans from the high ground at Ypres, and throughout the costly battles of the Somme in 1916 and Arras and Lens in 1917 had almost destroyed his armies in this pursuit.
After the collapse of Ceneral Robert Nivelle's offensive in April 1917, an Allied conference in Paris decided that the British were to undertake an offensive at once while General Henri Pétain attempted to restore order and morale in the French armies. Haig instructed Plumer to mount an attack designed to take the high ground around Messines and Wytschaete, and on June 7, 1917, Plumer commenced operations by exploding nineteen great mines, each containing 600 tons of explosives, under the German trenches. This action was followed up by intensive artillery bombardment by nearly 1,000 guns, and an advance by twelve infantry divisions: the plateau was carried at a cost of one-fifth of the projected casualties.
The Allies decided to follow up this success by sending General Gough on July 31 from Messines toward Passchendaele, where General Henry Rawlin-son was deployed. The operation was a dismal failure, and on August 25 Haig transferred command from Gough to Plumer; the latter repeated the methods employed at Messines and managed by November 13 to capture the high ground at Passchendaele after eight great battles. However, the British artillery had destroyed the local drainage system and this, compounded by torrential downpours, turned the fields into a morass in which hundreds of soldiers drowned or were suffocated in the mud. In addition, the Italian collapse at Caporet to in October and the disappearance of Russia from the war vitiated these hard-fought gains.
General Plumer, a capable and cool commander, was hastily dispatched to Italy on November 9 to head an Allied force composed of six French and five British divisions in order to shore up the crumbling Italian front along the River Po. The Montello sector was restored by December, and four months later the Second Army was returned to France. Plumer wisely turned down an offer to become chief of the Imperial General Staff early in 1918, thereby clearing the way for Sir Henry Wilson to aspire to this position.
Plumer returned to the western front just in time to absorb the blows of General Erich Ludendorff's Michael offensive on March 21, 1918. In rapid succession, Messines was lost, Wytschaete fell, and even Passchendaele was taken by the enemy. Plumer refused to panic, however, and he held the Ypres salient and let the German assault exhaust itself. Thereafter, reinforced by the Americans, the Allies counterattacked; the Second Army advanced rapidly in the north, crossed the River Rhine, and marched in triumph through Cologne. Plumer was appointed commander of occupied German territory.
The popular commander was raised to the peerage as Baron Plumer, of Messines and of Bilton, Yorkshire, given the thanks of Parliament, a grant of £30,000, and promoted field marshal in 1919. He served as governor of Malta from 1919 to 1924, and in 1925 began a three-year tour as high commissioner in Palestine. Plumer was raised to the degree of viscount in 1929. He died in London on July 16, 1932, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Plumer was perhaps the best British general of the Great War. He understood modern siege warfare and he was not averse to standing up to general headquarters. Above all, he enjoyed the confidence of those who served under him and did not favor the callous strategy of attrition practiced by Generals Haig, Gough, and Kiggell. His white moustache, red face, and dumpy figure became the model for David Lowe's caricature, Colonel Blimp.
Club: United Service.
In July 1884 Plumer married Annie Constance Goss (1858–1941), daughter of George and Eleanor Goss; they had three daughters and one son.