Background

Walter Colyear Walker was born in Cuttack, Odisha, India, on 11 November 1912, the second of the four sons (there were also two daughters) of Arthur Colyear Walker, a former soldier working as a tea-planter in Assam.

Education

Walker was educated at Blundell's school, near Tiverton, Somerset, in the 1920s. He attended the Royal Military College in 1931 and 1932. In 1942 Walker attended the Staff College in Quetta (now Command and Staff College Quetta).

Career

Walker went on to Sandhurst with the aim of obtaining a commission in the 1/8 Gurkhas, which his grandfather had once commanded. He settled quickly into the discipline and austere atmosphere of the Royal Military College, though he privately doubted the wisdom of allowing so much time to be spent cleaning weapons and so little on firing them. After a short attachment to the Sherwood Foresters, Walker joined the 1/8 Gurkhas. He had the first of his many narrow escapes from death in the Quetta Earthquake of 1935 before his battalion moved up to Razmak for operations against the Fakir of Ipi. In 1944 he took over command of the 4/8 Gurkhas, who had been involved in heavy fighting in the Arakan.

Walker applied the lessons that he had learned in Waziristan, particularly in relation to ambush techniques, of which he became the supreme exponent. His abrasive manner and his painstaking attention to detail won him enemies, but in the ensuing battle with the Japanese, the 4/8 acquitted itself brilliantly. During the Burma campaign, Walker was again mentioned in dispatches. After a short period on the Staff at GHQ Delhi, where he worked closely with Wavell and Auchinleck, Walker became General Staff Officer, Grade 1 (GSO1) in Kuala Lumpur. He was given the task of training "Ferret Force," which consisted of British, Gurkhas, Chinese, Dyaks, and ex-Force 136 soldiers.

In 1948-1949, as outbreaks of Communist terrorism increased in Malaya, Walker commanded the Far East Land Forces Training Centre, establishing what later became the Jungle Warfare School at Kota Tinggi. Next, in 1950, he took over command of the 1/6 Gurkhas. Walker went into the jungle with each company to determine where the mistakes were being made. He then withdrew the battalion from operations and again put them through the ruthless re-training that he had developed in Burma. After that, he once more achieved startling results in jungle operations.

The high standards that Walker demanded from his officers and riflemen became the yardstick in all the Gurkha regiments, greatly enhancing their reputation as the British Army's best jungle fighters. Nowhere was this better displayed than in the execution of Walker's Operation Tiger in 1958, when his 99 Gurkha Brigade eliminated the last 100 communist terrorists operating in Johore State. Ten-day ambushes, laid on the basis of Special Branch information, became the norm, and Walker once ordered an ambush group to stay in position for 28 days.

On his return to Britain, he faced a different battle in Whitehall, where the government was reducing the size of the Army, a policy which would involve cutting Gurkha numbers by half. Walker, now a Major-General, did not hesitate to call this "a betrayal." His campaign to retain Gurkha's fighting strength was interrupted when he was made Director of Operations in Borneo from 1962 to 1965. Here, his versatility in fighting a defensive war with Indonesia along a 1,200-mile frontier with limited resources showed him to be a field commander of genius.

Many of the tactics he employed - using four-man SAS patrols as his "eyes and ears" to give warning of border incursions, flying in howitzers by helicopter to provide support fire for forwarding company bases and, above all, his "Claret" operations - broke rules but were devastatingly effective. Although both the C-in-C Far East and Earl Mountbatten had recommended Walker for a knighthood, the Army Board did not approve and he did not get it. A proposal for the CMG was also rejected, though he was appointed to Construction Battalions (CB).

In 1965 Walker became Deputy Chief of Staff, Army Land Forces Central Europe, in which post he supervised the removal of United States Air Forces Central Command (AFCENT) to Brunssum, in Holland, after General de Gaulle had withdrawn France from NATO. Next, from 1967 to 1969, he was General Officer Commander (GOC) of Northern Command. His final post was Commander-in-Chief of Allied Forces Northern Europe from 1969 to 1972. Once more he found his subordinates, and his allies, less dedicated to their tasks than he would have wished. His command was marked by some stormy occasions.

After Walker retired from the Army in 1972, he continued to express extreme concern (often in letters to The Daily Telegraph) about the dangers to Britain. Walker also was the author of several books, including The Defense of the Western World (1977), The Bear at the Back Door (1978), Wake up or Perish (1979), The Next Domino (1980), and his 1997 autobiography, Fighting On.

Achievements

• Sir Walter Colyear Walker is best known as general of the British Army who distinguished himself by his leadership in campaigns in Burma and Malaysia. Walker joined the 4/8th Gurkha Rifles and bravely led his soldiers to military successes against the Japanese in World War II. He became well known for his ability to retrain men under his command to fight with fierce efficiency and successfully routed communist terrorists in the Malaysian Emergency in 1958.
  
  Walker succeeded in making all the services work together, and with the local population. Though a martinet, he became known as "soldier's general," and the best there was. To the Gurkhas, in particular, whose talents he used to the full, he was nothing less than the hero of the age.
  
  He also earned the Distinguished Service Order with two bars and was named Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1959. He also received the Order of the Defender of the Realm in 1965, among other military honors.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Two Dude Defense

    (Presents private detective Hector Gronig's investigation ...)

    1977
  • The Bear at the Back Door

    (Discussing the threat to Africa from the USSR.)

    1978
  • The Next Domino? 1980

Politics

When Walker was commander of allied forces in northern Europe, he warned of what he saw as NATO's weakness, in terms of men, tanks, and firepower, compared to the Warsaw Pact countries. He urged the setting up of voluntary civilian groups to man essential services in the event of strikes or other disruption.

In 1974, the year of the continuing Conservative battle with the miners, the fall of the Heath government, and two general elections, Walker supported an organization calling itself the Unison Committee for Action. With an inner committee including bankers, barristers, and businessmen, the UCA claimed it could run the country's essential services, such as fire, ambulance, and auxiliary police if there was a collapse of law and order, and if "the means of sustenance" ran short. Nonetheless, Walker said, it was neither a private army nor a paramilitary body. He turned down approaches from the National Front, saying, that he hated anything extremist. He added that he hated the thought of anything approaching a military junta in Britain. Instead, he dabbled with a broader organization, the National Association of Ratepayers' Action Groups, whose equivocal aims combined demands for rate relief and, more controversially, a "strong leader".

Walker dispersed his opinions over a wide front. He backed corporal punishment, denounced domestic communist subversion, supported Ian Smith's white supremacist regime in what was then Rhodesia, denounced homosexuals, called for a tougher policy against the IRA, and backed Enoch Powell as Conservative party leader, pointing out that Winston Churchill had spent the 1930s in the wilderness before the menace of Hitler was recognized.

In the era of Heath, Harold Wilson, Jeremy Thorpe, and James Callaghan, Walker announced that he would not have employed any of the then party leaders. Only with Margaret Thatcher's arrival at the head of the Conservative Party in 1975, and her first electoral victory four years later, did his fears on the domestic front ease, though he still campaigned for adequate civil defense.

Views

For wanton lawbreakers, Walker favored the re-introduction of corporal punishment. Walker warned that the Soviet Empire was waiting for its moment to strike. In addition, he deplored the hostility shown to Ian Smith's rebel government in Rhodesia and attacked what he considered the feeble policy adopted towards the IRA, which he saw as a Marxist organization inspired by Russia.

In an interview in the Evening News in 1974, he raised the possibility that the Army might have to take over in Britain. Soon afterward, claiming the encouragement of (among others) Admiral of the Fleet Sir Varyl Begg, Marshal of the RAF Sir John Slessor, and Michael Bentine, the former Goon, Walker set up an "anti-chaos" organization, known at first as Unison, and later as "Civil Assistance."

The proclaimed aim was to create a force of "trustworthy, loyal, level-headed men," who would be ready to ensure the continuance of essential services should public order break down - as Walker considered all too likely. Though he named Enoch Powell as the right man to lead the nation, he insisted that his movement existed only to support the properly constituted authorities. There was no question of anyone being armed.

By the end of August 1974, 100,000 people supported his movement, and Walker spoke of the numbers rising to three million within another month. But Civil Assistance was fatally easy to mock. Journalists wrote of Lambrook-Les-Deux-Eglises in reference to Walker's home in Somerset, and in the Telegraph Maurice Weaver fashioned a masterpiece of mockery from the leader's own remarks. Britain survived; Civil Assistance petered out. Walker persisted in his jeremiads, proclaiming in 1977 that the West's only hope of salvation lay in the neutron bomb.

Even in extremis, his views remained as forthright as ever. The claim of homosexuals to equal treatment caused him especial distress. He said: "There could be no place for such people - "who use the main sewer of the human body as a playground" - in the armed forces." His own recreations were listed in Who's Who as "normal."

Personality

Walker had such qualities as clarity of vision, the single-mindedness of purpose, fierce insistence on discipline, fearlessness in the face of both the enemy and his superiors - also ensured that he was a highly controversial figure.

In the early 1960s, his efforts to defend the Gurkhas against plans to reduce their numbers were so forceful that he was threatened with a court-martial and - under threat of losing his command in Borneo - forced to apologize to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. In 1974 he was accused of attempting to form a private army to combat the dangers to Britain which he discerned both from without and within. The charge was absurdly exaggerated; it is undeniable, though, that he was rarely capable of trimming his views, compromising his principles, or entertaining the notion that he might be mistaken.

Physical Characteristics: In 1985 Walker had two botched hip replacement operations by Army and RAF surgeons. He faced this disaster with courage. The only consolation was that he received £130,000 in damages from the Ministry of Defence.

Connections

In 1939, Walker married Beryl Johnston. They had two sons and a daughter.

Father:

Arthur Colyear Walker

(1873–1947)

Wife:

Beryl Johnston

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series In response to the escalating need for up-to-date information on writers, Contemporary Authors New Revision Series (Volume 198) brings researchers the most recent data on the world's most popular authors.
  2010
• Fighting General: The Public and Private Campaigns of General Sir Walter Walker The public and private campaigns of General Sir Walter Walker.
  1973