John Crocker

There is also John Crocker (jazz musician).

Crocker in France, August 1944, as I Corps commander.

General Sir John Tredinnick Crocker, GCB, KBE, DSO, MC (4 January 1896 – 9 March 1963) was a British Army officer and corps commander during World War II.

Upon the outbreak of the First World War Crocker enlisted as a private in the Artists' Rifles, a training corps for officers, before joining the Machine Gun Corps (MGC) as an officer. He had a distinguished career in the war and won both the Distinguished Service Order and Military Cross with 174th Machine Gun Company of 59th Division in France. After the armistice, Crocker left the army to train as a solicitor. However, he did not enjoy his new profession and decided to return to soldiering. After a short period as an infantry officer in the Middlesex Regiment, Crocker specialised in the then new field of armour and joined the Royal Tank Corps in 1923. He held a number of both field and training posts and by the time the Second World War began he was in command of 3rd Armoured Brigade in the 1st Armoured Division.

Crocker's brigade, like much of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), was virtually destroyed in the Battle of France in 1940. Landed at Cherbourg as the rest of the BEF retreated to Dunkirk, 1st Armoured Division unsuccessfully attacked the German bridgeheads over the River Somme before returning to Cherbourg where the remnants (including the brigade's last 13 tanks) were evacuated. Crocker learned a lot about armoured warfare during this campaign.

Back in Britain, Crocker was given command of the new 6th Armoured Division, and then in September 1942 of IX Corps, before again being sent overseas in 1943, this time to Tunisia. Crocker showed impatience at Fondouk Pass on 8 April 1943, when his attempt to to push 6th Armoured and 34th US Infantry Division though a gap ran onto hastily-prepared German defences. He was wounded in a training accident shortly after his arrival and saw no further action in North Africa. He did, however, create something of a controversy when he criticised the performance of American troops to the press.

On his return to service in August 1943 he was given command of I Corps, part of Miles Dempsey's Second Army, training for Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of France. Despite Crocker's background in armoured warfare, I Corps was predominantly an infantry formation, but Field-Marshal Montgomery, commanding Twenty-first Army Group, had confidence in his organisational skills and assigned I Corps the difficult task of capturing Caen. On D-Day Crocker had a larger task than any other corps commander: he had to control two landing beaches ( Juno and Sword) and an airborne assault. The fact that in spite of inevitable mishaps the landings went so well was a testimony to Crocker's planning.

However, Caen did not fall on D-Day as planned, and Crocker's corps, operating under Harry Crerar's First Canadian Army, took part in the bloody two-month Battle for Caen, including Operation Charnwood, and then the unglamorous mopping up operations along the French and Belgian coastline. When the final German surrender came in May 1945, I Corps was still on the south bank of the River Maas facing the German 25th Army. Crocker's secondary role in the later months of the war was not due to any loss of confidence in him by Montgomery, but more to the fact that his only son, Wilfred Crocker, a tank officer in the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, had been killed on 20 October 1944 fighting in Holland.

After the war he held a number of commands, culminating in Adjutant-General to the Forces, before retiring in 1953. In 1949 Montgomery selected Crocker to be his successor as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, but the prime minister, Clement Attlee, appointed the better-known Sir William Slim (later 1st Viscount Slim). Crocker's most important postwar contribution was to write the training manuals that laid down the British Army's doctrine of armoured warfare through the years of the Cold War

References

• Biographical Dictionary of British Generals of the Second World War, Nick Smart. ISBN 1-84415-049-6.
• Crusade in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower. ISBN 0-8018-5668-X
• D-Day 1944, Ken Ford. ISBN 1-84176-368-3.
• Delany, Douglas (Autumn 2007). "A Quiet Man of Influence: General Sir John Crocker". Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research. 85: 185–207.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)