General Sir Richard Loudon McCreery, GCB, KBE, DSO, MC (1 February 1898 – 18 October 1967) was a career soldier of the British Army, who was decorated for leading one of the last cavalry actions in the First World War.

[7] Six months after the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, McCreery sat the entrance examination for the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, only days after his seventeenth birthday, the minimum age, and finished 12th of 212 entrants.

The next morning, the British cavalry came under heavy German artillery and machine gun fire before they were withdrawn; McCreery was shot in his right thigh, severing his femoral artery.

[13] The MC's citation reads: On 9th November, 1918, east of the Avesnes-Maubeuge road, for valuable and dashing work when in command of a mounted patrol sent forward to get in touch with the retiring enemy.

He pushed boldly forward skilfully clearing up an enemy machine-gun post which threatened to hold up his advance from the outset, capturing ten prisoners and one machine gun.

He had come close to death at Arras, a stroke of good fortune allowing him to survive a conflict in which a significant percentage of his generation had been swept away.

Like most of his contemporaries who had served for some time on the Western Front, he could not fail to have been profoundly affected by the experience, but he probably believed that what they had achieved would make the world a better place.

His fellow students in the Junior Division there included Gerard Bucknall, Gerald Templer, Alexander Cameron, Alexander Galloway, I. S. O. Playfair, John Harding, Philip Gregson-Ellis and Gordon MacMillan, whilst the instructors included Richard O'Connor, Bernard Paget, Henry Pownall, Harold Franklyn and Bernard Montgomery.

His outstanding skill as a horseman was achieved despite the loss of several toes and a hole in the riding muscle of his right leg, as a result of his wounding in the First World War, which left him with a pronounced limp for the rest of his life.

McCreery was impressed by de Gaulle's bearing during the latter's direction of a counter-attack at Abbeville, and remained an admirer of the French general in later years.

He evidently succeeded in this task, being described as the first British commander "to appreciate and demonstrate the power of an armoured division employed on the ground in defence."

He received further recognition from both the press and his superior officers in October 1941 when the army conducted large-scale manoeuvres, where McCreery's division was able to prove what it learned in the last few months.

X Corps, now under command of the US Fifth Army under Mark W. Clark, played a key role at the bitterly contested Salerno landings, in September 1943, then fought its way, reaching the River Garigliano at the end of 1943 to be halted in front of the Winter Line and were involved in the first Battle of Monte Cassino in January 1944 and later the capture of Rome on 4 June 1944.

From 1946 to 1948, McCreery was General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, British Army of the Rhine in Germany, succeeding Field Marshal Montgomery.

[16][26] He lived the rest of his life at Stowell Hill in Somerset, a house built by his mother and designed by a pupil of the architect Edwin Lutyens.

[citation needed] After his retirement from the Army in 1949, General McCreery did not play an active part in public life; however, at the time of the Suez crisis in 1956 he was moved to write a personal letter of protest to his war-time acquaintance Harold Macmillan, then a member of Sir Anthony Eden's cabinet, as he regarded the operation as dishonourable.

[citation needed] Appropriately for a man who was associated all his adult life with a cavalry regiment, McCreery was a highly accomplished horseman.

In 1924 he and his younger brother Captain Selby McCreery constituted 50 percent of the Army polo team that played against the United States.

He was not comfortable in public speaking, but as Doherty puts it: 'Not a self-publicist in the manner of Montgomery, McCreery managed nonetheless to gain the confidence of his soldiers who trusted him in peace and war'.

Following a meeting at Eighth Army Headquarters in Forli, Northern Italy, in April 1945, he wrote: ‘He [McCreery] has always struck me as one of the ablest of the military officers whom I have seen out here'.