Field Marshal Sir Roland Gibbs

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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