ARMY COMMANDS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 December 1940, Page 6

ARMY COMMANDS

GENERAL MARTEL’S NEW POST. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 11.55 a.m.) RUGBY, December 9. The King has approved the appointment of General H. R. L. G. Alexander to be General Officer commanding in chief in the Southern Command and that of Major-General G. Le Q. Martel to be commander of the Royal Armoured Corps. General Alexander will succeed General Auchinleck, who has been appointed Commander-in-Chief in India. He was in command of the B.E.F. during the last days of the evacuation from Dunkirk. He is 49 years of age. The appointment of a commander of the Royal Armoured Corps is a new appointment and General Martel is particularly fitted for it. He served on the staff of the Tank Corps in France for Eighteen months in 1917/18 and was Assistant Director of Mechanisation at the War Office .from October, 1936, to December, 1937, and thereafter Deputy-Director of the same branch until February of last year. He is 51 years old. The creation of such an appointment marks a definite stage in the policy of increasing rapidly the armoured strength of the Army, a policy to which the military authorities have been devoting themselves.