Lieutenant General Sir Aylmer Gould Hunter-Weston, KCB, DSO (23 September 1864 – 18 March 1940) was a British Army officer who served in the First World War at Gallipoli in 1915 and in the very early stages of the Somme Offensive in 1916.

Nicknamed "Hunter-Bunter", Hunter-Weston has been seen as a classic example of a "donkey" general; he was described by his superior, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, as a "rank amateur", and has been referred to by one modern writer as "one of the Great War's spectacular incompetents".

[21][22] He was described as having "reckless courage combined with technical skill and great coolness in emergency",[23] was mentioned in dispatches (including 31 March 1900[24]) and received the Queen's South Africa Medal.

[37][38] A few weeks after the outbreak of the war in 1914, he led his brigade to France as part of 4th Division on the Western Front, including at the battles of Le Cateau and the Aisne, where he supervised his command from a motorbike (at a time when senior generals used cars and most other officers used horses).

[45] When asked for his advice before the landings, Hunter-Weston cautioned General Sir Ian Hamilton that the Turks had had ample time to turn the peninsula into "an entrenched camp", that Helles was less vulnerable to Turkish attack than Suvla Bay but conversely offered little room for manoeuvre and given Britain's lack of high explosive shells needed to cover attacks risked an Allied bridgehead being tied up in front of Kilitbahir Plateau and becoming "a second Crimea" which would damage Britain's standing with neutral Greece and Romania.

Major General William Birdwood also privately wrote the same, and Travers suggests that, as British officers of the era were expected to remain cheerful and optimistic in public, this may have been "a safety outlet" to be pointed to if the operation went wrong.

[79] Colonel Wolley Dod, a staff officer of 29th Division, later called Krithia "a mad adventure without the necessary artillery support" and "had some difference of opinion with Hunter-Weston" about using the 125th Brigade again after their initial defeat.

[86] After Second Krithia Hunter-Weston still believed that the capture of Achi Baba was a realistic aspiration, as did Henri Gouraud, who had replaced d'Amade in command of the French troops on 15 May.

[87] Brigadier-General William Marshall recorded how Hunter-Weston insisted that the 127th Manchester Brigade sap forward during a full moon on the night of 2 June, despite his protests that they were advancing into a re-entrant.

Afterwards he blamed wire, machine-gun fire and the French, lack of training stopping the Royal Naval Division holding onto captured trenches, and loss of officers.

[95] In Prior's view "there is strong evidence that (Hunter-Weston) took to heart the lessons" that concentrated High Explosive bombardment by heavy howitzers was needed for success and held meetings with the French General Gouraud at which they agreed to cooperate with their artillery and adopt this method.

In some cases these inflicted greater casualties on the Turkish defenders than the attackers, as lack of space, reserves and guns did not allow the Turks to adopt the defensive tactics used by the Germans later in the war: holding the front line thinly, counter-attacking and counter-battery fire on Allied artillery.

[100] On 3 July 1915 John Churchill reported "The 29th Div is down to small numbers now … These continual frontal attacks are terrible, and I fear the generals will be called butchers by the troops.

[104] On 13 July, in an attempt to forestall a Turkish counterattack (there had been an incident of panic amongst the 7th Highland Light Infantry), Hunter-Weston ordered the Royal Marine Brigade to attack at 16.30.

[111] Godley wrote (23 July) "with all his faults Hunter-Weston was a gallant soul … At the same time, one is rather thankful to think he will not be (as he calls it) "blooding" Freddie Stopford's reinforcements (IX Corps) against Achi Baba".

[112] Political leaders in London had agreed to commit a further five divisions to Gallipoli in July, but had decided instead that further attacks from the Helles bridgehead were too slow and costly and that a fresh landing at Suvla Bay offered a better chance of swift victory.

[118] At a Fourth Army Conference 30 March 1916 Hunter-Weston told Rawlinson that he was "strongly opposed to a wild rush … for an objective 4,000 yards away" and that "to lose the substance by grasping at the shadow is a mistake that has been made too often in this war".

[119] Haig—who had recently rejected Rawlinson's initial proposal to concentrate on capturing the German First Line on the first day of the offensive, before bringing guns forward and attacking the Second Line several days later—was critical that Hunter-Weston "was only going to take the enemy first system to begin with, and proceed slowly stage by stage" which would give the Germans a chance to bring up reserves, like the French at Verdun (Haig Diary 7 and 8 April 1916)[120] He urged Hunter-Weston that his men should push on as far as possible without consolidating, as far as artillery cover allowed (Haig Diary 10 May 1916).

Rees spent three days condensing this to a summary of eight pages and five maps, before having "a severe argument" with Hunter-Weston to have the plan amended to allow his brigade an extra ten minutes to take an orchard just east of Serre.

The northernmost mine of 40,000 pounds (18,000 kg) of explosives was under the Hawthorn Ridge Redoubt, a front-line fortification west of the village of Beaumont Hamel in the VIII Corps sector.

Artillery fire was weaker here and the Germans had the advantage of high ground, whereas in the southern sector the opposite was true, but the decision had been made by senior generals (Haig and Rawlinson) to launch the attack over a wide front.

[141] After the event, Hunter-Weston (to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Robertson, 2 July) blamed the failure on the ineffective artillery bombardment, including lack of howitzer shells.

[153] Hunter-Weston was deeply concerned at the problem of defending the ground which had been gained and wrote claiming that he would resign for the good of the Empire if Haig attempted to renew the offensive (7 December 1917).

[158] In May 1918, during the reshuffling of Allied units, now under the Supreme Command of General Ferdinand Foch, to meet the German spring offensives, VIII Corps was at one point on the verge of being sent to join French Fourth Army.

Although he has been ridiculed for this, it has also been pointed out that VIII Corps was not involved in fighting at the time and that such events boosted morale and encouraged care of horses, which were still extensively used for transport and hauling equipment.

[160] He played an active role leading his corps in the Hundred Days Offensive, revisiting the battlefield of Le Cateau (11 October) and recollecting his successful handling of his brigade there.

Aged in his early fifties, he took great pride in his physical fitness and was proud of reducing more junior officers, including on one occasion a battalion commander in his mid-thirties, to breathlessness whilst out walking.

He laid on a lavish lunch for the Portuguese President Machado in October 1917, taking his party on a tour of the Messines battlefield, where the ground had been carefully seeded with interesting souvenirs for them to "find".

Compton Mackenzie, author of Gallipoli Memories, comments on the way in which he was regarded as a "butcher" but wrote that "Actually no man I have met brimmed over more richly with human sympathy.

[182] He comments on his time as a Western Front commander that he was "an officer of intelligence, but lacking mental balance, given to extravagant and flamboyant gestures, and far too interested in irrelevant detail".