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From: "Peter_McCrae" <>
Subject: GIBBS; Roland Christopher-OCT/2004-UK
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 13:12:03 +0100

Field Marshal Sir Roland Gibbs
(Filed: 02/11/2004)
The Daily Telegraph & the telegraph.co.uk

Field Marshal Sir Roland Gibbs, who died on Sunday aged 83, was Chief of the
General Staff from 1976 to 1979.



His term of office coincided with a period of high inflation and relatively
low public wages which gave the services severe problems with recruitment
and retention. Gibbs defended the Army's interests with characteristic
robustness, twice exercising his right of personal access to the Prime
Minister, James Callaghan, on the issue.

Primarily a front-line soldier rather than a "Whitehall warrior", Roly Gibbs
had a splendid operational record as a Green Jacket and a parachute
commander. Many who fought with him considered that the awards he was given
should have been repeated many times over for the sustained acts of courage
and leadership that he displayed.

Roland Christopher Gibbs was born at Flax Bourton, near Bristol, on June 22
1921, the younger son of an officer who had served in the North Somerset
Yeomanry in the First World War. The family money came from interests in
banking and shipping. At Eton he was a good games player and he passed high
into Sandhurst in the summer of 1939.

After a six-month course at the RMA, Gibbs was commissioned into the Kings
Royal Rifle Corps (usually known as the 60th Rifles).

Gibbs was considered too young to join the British Expeditionary Force and
started with the motor training battalion, which he helped to reform. He
went to North Africa with the 2nd Battalion as part of the 1st Armoured
Division in 1941 and saw his first action early in 1942 south of Benghazi.

The KRRC's mobile role had been restored between the wars by close formation
with armoured units. In the desert, the motorised battalion, with its
long-range reconnaissance and harassing role, came into its own. Hiding in
wadis during the day, it emerged to shoot up Axis supply columns before the
enemy could react.

In June 1942, Gibbs was commanding a carrier platoon that was acting as
advance guard to the column as it approached Bir Hacheim. As it neared the
ridge for which it was making, the platoon was attacked by armoured cars.
Although under heavy shellfire, Gibbs displayed the greatest coolness in
enabling the forward OP, for which he was responsible, to take up a position
of maximum advantage. When a carrier was hit and had to be abandoned, he
refused to withdraw until he had recovered it. He was awarded an immediate
MC.

Gibbs was wounded twice in North Africa, the first time at the battle of
Alam Halfa, but he returned for the second half of the battle of Alamein.
Promoted to major in March 1943, he took over command of C Company and
remained in this appointment for the rest of the war.

After the invasion of Italy, the 2nd Battalion landed in Taranto as part of
the 4th Armoured Brigade, and fought its way up the east coast of Italy. In
January 1944 the battalion was returned to England to prepare for Overlord.

Gibbs landed with his battalion in Normandy on D+1 - June 7. During a heavy
German counter-attack south-west of Caen, he was wounded for a third time
and evacuated, but rejoined his battalion just after the closing of the
Falaise gap.

After crossing the Somme, during the push towards Brussels, the battalion
liberated the village of Hamme, Belgium; the population crowded into the
square to cheer "Les Tommies".

Gibbs had his own incomparable style of command. One of his platoon leaders
could not recall ever having received a direct order from him. "If I were in
your shoes," Gibbs used to say during planning, "I would go about it like
this".

During the middle of one battle, Gibbs was seen strolling nonchalantly along
the crest of a ridge while shells went whizzing past his head. He had
brought some "goodies" with him, he told his two forward platoons as they
emerged rather tentatively from cover. Delving into a bag he produced an
assortment of apples and Mars Bars.

In April 1945, Gibbs's company entered the village of Halverde, near
Osnabruck, to discover 60 German soldiers in one house. Gibbs started to
negotiate surrender when a German was rash enough to fire his revolver. The
resultant fire from the Green Jackets' Bren guns taught many their last
lesson.

There were lighter moments. In mid-April, the battalion spent three days
working on their vehicles and Gibbs's company assumed temporary ownership of
the deer forest at Asendorf. The woods, reverberating with gunfire, gave
every indication of being the scene of violent battles as the riflemen honed
their skills in stalking.

Gibbs won a DSO in the Rhineland and fought with his battalion right through
to Hamburg. After the German surrender, his battalion moved to Denmark to
arrange the disarming and removal of German forces there.

In August 1945 Gibbs was appointed GSO2 at HQ Allied Land Forces South East
Asia, based at Poona. The planned invasion of Malaysia was forestalled by
the Japanese surrender, and he moved to Singapore for a short period before
being posted to the 5th Parachute Brigade in Malaya as brigade major.

When the brigade was disbanded, Gibbs returned to his battalion in Tripoli
and went with them to Palestine, where he volunteered to join the 7th
Battalion Parachute Regiment, which was short of officers. In 1949, soon
after the RMA's post-war re-opening, he was posted to Sandhurst as the
parachute regimental representative. He attended Staff College in 1951
before being appointed brigade major of the 5th Infantry Brigade the
following year at Iserlohn, Germany. In 1954 Gibbs transferred to the 1st
Battalion KRRC in BAOR and went with them to Derna, Libya. He took his
company to the Trucial Oman States where, in theory, its task was to prevent
the Saudis, who had been pushed out of the Buraymi Oasis, returning there.
In practice, they had a security role looking after the oil companies along
the coast.

Gibbs went to the Joint Services Staff College, Latimer, in 1957, before
going to the Ministry of Defence, which had just been formed under
Mountbatten, as GS02 in an inter-service planning team. He applied himself
with his usual energy to dealing with a range of problems, but confessed to
experiencing lapses of concentration when working up a paper on contingency
planning for invasion from outer space.

In 1960 he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel and took command of the 3rd
Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, at Aldershot. Half-way through his tour,
there was a perceived threat that Iraq might invade Kuwait, and the
battalion, which had been due to go to Cyprus, was flown to Bahrain at short
notice and spent a year in a tent encampment on the airport.

After a year in Washington as GSO1 on the British Army Staff, Gibbs returned
to England to command 16 Parachute Brigade. Following the attempted Greek
army coup in 1963, part of the brigade was posted to Cyprus to reinforce
British troops policing the so-called Green Line that separated the Greeks
and the Turks. Gibbs and his men were among the first British troops to don
the blue beret as part of a UN peace-keeping force.

In Cyprus, Gibbs believed that he had to try to take negotiations to the
very limit before taking any sort of violent action. Sometimes, in a
last-ditch attempt to broker a settlement, he would arrange a secret meeting
between representatives of the two sides - the headman of a Turkish village,
perhaps, and a Greek police chief - who had spent the past days trying to
murder each other.

If he had to give the order to open fire, Gibbs felt that he had failed -
and that order was never given. His skilful handling of his brigade greatly
impressed his divisional commander, Major-General Mike Carver (later Lord
Carver and Chief of Defence Staff). In 1966 Gibbs was posted to Aden as
chief of staff to Admiral Le Fanu, C-in-C Middle East Command.

The task that faced him was how to get the British troops and civilians out
of the former British Protectorate with the minimum of bloodshed.

After the decision to evacuate had been made, the Foreign Secretary, George
Brown (later Lord George-Brown), was informed that, in order to avoid
providing opportunities for trouble-makers, British forces would have to
leave the day before the official date given for the withdrawal. Brown
accepted the advice with great reluctance and the withdrawal was carried out
successfully.

Brown was not the most temperate of men, and his relationship with Gibbs was
not always harmonious. On one occasion, when Brown arrived on a visit by
helicopter, the throatlash securing his microphone caught on a fitting
inside the cockpit as he jumped out. A large man, but not very tall, he
found it impossible to reach the ground with his feet and remained dangling
in mid-air for what must have seemed long moments until Gibbs arrived,
without overhaste, to rescue him.

After a year at the Imperial Defence College, Gibbs returned to Bahrain in
1969, this time to the naval base as Commander British Land Forces in the
Persian Gulf. During his time in the Gulf, the Trucial States, a former
British Protectorate, became the independent United Arab Emirates. Gibbs had
the task of running down the British forces there while simultaneously
reorganising the Trucial Oman Scouts and organising support for the
Sultanate of Muscat and Oman.

Gibbs laid the foundations for a gradual build-up of the Sultan's armed
forces with seconded British officers and other ranks. His quiet but
effective handling of affairs in the Gulf heightened his profile in the Army
and marked him out as a possible future chief of the general staff.

Gibbs was given accelerated promotion to lieutenant-general in 1972 after a
single post as major-general, and appointed Commander 1st British Corps in
BAOR. Promotion to general followed in 1974 when he became GOC-in-C UK Land
Forces.

In 1976 he accepted the appointment to Chief of the General Staff, albeit
with reluctance. He disliked the prospect of competing - and perhaps
quarrelling with - the other service chiefs whom he regarded as his friends.

He was never really at home in Whitehall. His critics have argued that, as
higher commander, he wore his responsibilities lightly, but conceded that,
when pressed for a decision, Gibbs's judgments were usually right. He was
promoted to field marshal in July 1979, one day before his retirement from
active duty.

Gibbs was colonel commandant of the 2nd Battalion, the Royal Green Jackets,
from 1971 to 1979, and of the Parachute Regiment from 1972 to 1977. In 1985
he was installed as the 155th Constable of the Tower of London, holding the
post until 1990. He was Lord Lieutenant of Wiltshire from 1989 to 1996.

Gibbs retired to a rectory in Wiltshire, where for many years he enjoyed his
shooting and continued to hunt with the Beaufort until the insertion of a
metal knee put an end to this. He was an accomplished amateur artist.

Roly Gibbs was appointed CBE in 1968, KCB in 1972 and GCB in 1976. He
married, in 1955, Davina Merry, the artist. They had two sons and a
daughter.












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