Leachman: O.C. Desert: The Life of Lieutenant-Colonel Gerard Leachman, D.S.O.

by H.V.F. Winstone

. with dustjacket, bright clean copy

246 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Harry Victor Frederick Winstone, FRGS

Reviews

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Gerard Leachman

Lieutenant-Colonel Gerard Evelyn Leachman, CIE, DSO (27 July 1880, Petersfield, Hampshire – 12 August 1920, Iraq) was an English soldier and intelligence officer who travelled extensively in Arabia.

Career

Leachman was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Royal Sussex Regiment on 20 January 1900, and the following month left with his battalion for service in South Africa during the Second Boer War.

He served there until the end of the war, in June 1902, and left Cape Town in the SS Bavarian in August, returning to Southampton the following month.

He later served in India, but spent most of his career as a political officer in Mesopotamia, where he was instrumental in pacifying warring tribes to bring stability to the new country.

Leachman also made various expeditions further south into Arabia, where he contacted Ibn Sa'ud on behalf of the British government. He travelled as a naturalist of the Royal Geographical Society, but was in fact a British agent.

In December, 1915, during the Siege of Kut, the British commanding officer, Major General Charles Townshend, ordered Leachman to save the British cavalry by breaking out and riding south. This he did and the cavalry were the only British unit to escape before the fall of the city to the Ottomans.

Death

After the war, he was assigned as Political Officer for the Mosul Division within Mesopotamia, up until October, 1919.

He was murdered during the 1920 Iraqi Revolt by a son of Dhari ibn Mahmoud, an Arab tribal leader of the Zoba tribe in the Shammar confederation, in Abu Ghraib near Fallujah on 12 August 1920.

The episode is famous in Bedouin oral lore. Leachman had visited Dhari in an effort to renegotiate repayment of advances made to him by the government and to persuade him to remain loyal to the current administration, but was shot in the back by Dhari's son and then beheaded after a verbal disagreement over a local robbery.

Leachman's death sparked an immediate outbreak of tribal uprisings on the Euphrates between Falluja and Hit, and was responsible for General Haldane's advance on the same area in September 1920.

He was buried in Baghdad (North Gate) War Cemetery.

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He was played by Oliver Reed in Al-Mas' Ala Al-Kubra (aka Clash of Loyalties), a 1983 film financed by Saddam Hussein, which was nominated for the Golden Prize at the 1983 Moscow International Film Festival.