REPUTATIONS
General Sir Alexander Godley has been blamed for the failure of attacks at Gallipoli and at Passchendaele. Prominent New Zealand historian Terry Kinloch considers the case for and against this controversial British general.
IMPERIAL SCAPEGOAT?
General Sir Alexander Godley commanded Australian, British and New Zealand soldiers in two of the most disastrous battles of The Great War: the August 1915 offensive on Gallipoli, and the attempts to capture Passchendaele in October 1917. To many Australians and New Zealanders, Godley’s alleged ineptitude was the root cause of these failed attacks. But, is this fair?
Alexander John Godley was born in what was then the Kentish village of Gillingham in 1867; his parents were an Irish-born British army officer and a clergyman’s daughter from Essex. After graduating from Sandhurst in the middle of his class in 1886, Lt Godley was commissioned into the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. By 1900, when he transferred to the newly-raised Irish Guards as a substantive captain, Godley had notched up two successful operational deployments in Africa: in Mashonaland (part of modern-day Zimbabwe) in 1896/1897, and in the Cape Colony and the Transvaal during the Second Boer War.
