Montagu Brocas Burrows

Lieutenant General Montagu Brocas Burrows CB DSO MC (31 October 1894 – 17 January 1967) was a senior British Army officer who became Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) of West Africa Command from 1945 to 1946.

Military career

Educated at Eton College and Oxford University, Burrows was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the 5th Dragoon Guards, British Army. He served in the First World War and became a prisoner of war. He was deployed to the Murmansk coast with the North Russia Expeditionary Force in 1918. In the 1920s he played cricket for Surrey County Cricket Club.

He remained in the army and continued to serve during the interwar period; he became adjutant at Oxford University Officers' Training Corps in 1920 and an Instructor at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst in 1922. He became brigade major with the Nowshera Infantry Brigade in India in 1928 and then joined the 1st Cavalry Brigade at Aldershot in 1930. He was on the General Staff at the War Office from 1935 to 1938 when he became the military attaché in Rome.

He also served in the Second World War as General Officer Commanding (GOC) 9th Armoured Division in the United Kingdom from December 1940 to March 1942 and of the 11th Armoured Division from October 1942 to December 1943; he was appointed Head of the British Military Mission to the Soviet Union in 1944.

After the war he became General Officer Commanding-in-Chief (GOC-in-C) of West Africa Command; he retired in 1946.