Biography - The History Files

Sir William Carr Beresford, (1768-1854)

(c) National Army Museum; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

Appointed to reorganize the Portuguese armed forces in 1809, Beresford commanded the Allied forces at the Battle of Albuera in 1811 and remained commander in chief and marshal general of all the Portuguese armies until 1820.

Beresford was born on 2 October 1768, the illegitimate son of the Marquis of Waterford. His younger brother became Rear Admiral Sir John Poo Beresford. He attended a French military academy in Strasbourg and was commissioned into the 6th Foot at the age of seventeen, serving with his regiment in Canada where he lost the use of an eye in a shooting accident in 1786. In 1789 he purchased a lieutenancy in the 16th Foot. He saw active service with Sir John Moore and Admiral Alexander Hood in Italy and at the siege of Toulon, respectively.

**Admiral Sir John Jellicoe’s flagship, HMS Iron Duke at the Battle of Jutland, 1916.**

They may still have ruled the waves outside of the North Sea, but the British were deeply unhappy with the outcome of the Jutland fighting. They had dreamed of a glorious triumph but although they had gained a strategic victory it had been at high cost and there was a nagging feeling that a great opportunity had been missed. This air of depression was augmented by the sense of loss as Kitchener became a belated victim of the Scheer submarine and mine trap intended for the Grand Fleet, when the ship on which he was travelling, the Hampshire, was mined and sunk on the night of 5 June off the coast of Orkney. Kitchener may have lost some of his lustre after two years of war, but he was still a hero of the Empire and he had died while in the care of the Royal Navy.

Charles-Michael d’Irumberry de Salaberry — **(November 19, 1775–February 27, 1829) Canadian Militia Officer**

Salaberry raised and commanded the famous Voltigeurs Canadiens, a light infantry battalion recruited entirely from the Frenchspeaking inhabitants of Quebec. With them he fought and won the Battle of Chateauguay against impossible odds and staved off an invasion of Lower Canada.

(1881-1970)

Russian revolutionary leader Alexander Kerensky played a key role in toppling the czarist monarchy immediately before Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in 1917.

Kerensky, the son of a headmaster, was born in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk), which was also Lenin’s birthplace. Kerensky graduated in law from Saint Petersburg University in 1904. In 1905, Kerensky joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party and became editor of a radical newspaper. He was arrested and exiled but returned to Saint Petersburg in 1906 and worked as a lawyer, demonstrating his political sympathies by his frequent defense of accused revolutionaries. In 1912, he was elected to the duma, imperial Russia’s central parliament, as a member of the Moderate Labor Party. He was nominated to the Provisional Committee as a leader of the opposition to Czar Nicholas II.

Turenne marching with his troops

Turenne was transferred to the Rhineland to fend off German allies of the Dutch, skillfully fighting Brandenburgers and allied German and Imperial princes over the winter of 1672-1673. In a series of clever surprise maneuvers, he crossed Westphalia to desolate Brandenburg, forcing Friedrich-Wilhelm temporarily out of the war.

Otto Carius and His Tigers

Outside Leningrad, the German troops still clinging to their defences closest to the city were in desperate danger. Hitler finally relented early on 20 January and authorised their withdrawal. In some cases, the withdrawal threatened to become a rout. The Soviet offensive continued on 21 January with major attacks towards Krasnogvardeisk and Luga. Küchler desperately demanded that he be allowed to pull back to the Panther Line, but Hitler insisted on a fighting withdrawal – otherwise, he argued, the Red Army would arrive at the defensive line with sufficient strength to force its way through. In vain, Küchler pointed out …

The art of generalship does not age, and it is because Scipio’s battles are richer in stratagems and ruses—many still feasible today—than those of any other commander in history that they are an unfailing object-lesson to soldiers.

—B. H. Liddell Hart

As with Hannibal, details of Scipio’s early years are extremely sketchy. He was born into Rome’s upper crust, descended on both his father’s and mother’s side from the Cornellii, a family from whom consuls had been elected for 150 years. Other than that, little can be confirmed. Even Polybius, who wrote at length on Scipio’s military career, glossed over his youth. He was well educated and admired Greek culture, which in his day was not a respectable characteristic, as the Greeks were viewed as a declining and somewhat profligate society; he must, however, have absorbed some of the Greek rationality in thinking, given the innovations he brought to the battlefield.

Sir William Carr Beresford, (1768-1854)

First Sea Lord Admiral Sir John Jellicoe Replaced 1917

Charles-Michael d’Irumberry de Salaberry

Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky

Turenne in Germany

Otto Carius and His Tigers

Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus