General Sir Walter Pipon Braithwaite, GCB (11 November 1865 – 7 September 1945) was a British Army officer who held senior commands during the First World War.

After being dismissed from his position as Chief of Staff for the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, he received some acclaim as a competent divisional commander on the Western Front.

[3][9] He was later promoted in January 1906 to lieutenant colonel and succeeded Richard Haking as a deputy assistant adjutant general (DAAG) at the Staff College, Camberley.

[14] He only had to endure this until March, however, when he was subsequently promoted to temporary brigadier general and named commandant of the Staff College, Quetta,[15] a position he still held at the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914.

[1] At this point, the college was closed, and he was again transferred to England and the War Office, this time as director of staff duties, taking over from Major General Francis Davies.

Although the division struggled to make headway during the Battle of Arras in April 1917, it proved a solid and reliable unit during the German spring offensive in March the following year.

Pushing on through the dawn's early light, a battalion of the North Staffordshire Regiment overran the German machine gun positions;[25] the bridge's defenders were shot and killed, as the infantry fixed bayonets and charged.

As successes emerged on the battlefields in late 1918, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the Western Front, was effusive in praise of his officers' and men's achievement, showing the friendship and esteem for which he was held by Braithwaite all his life.

[33][36] He served as a commissioner of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission from 1927 to 1931, as Governor of the Royal Hospital Chelsea from 1931 to 1938, and as King of Arms of the Order of the Bath from 1933 until his death.

Captain Valentine Braithwaite MC was killed in action at Serre while serving with his father's former regiment, the Somerset Light Infantry, on 1 July 1916 aged 20.