General Sir Walter Colyear Walker, KCB, CBE, DSO** (11 November 1912 – 12 August 2001) was a senior British Army officer who served as Commander-in-Chief of Allied Forces Northern Europe from 1969 until his retirement in 1972.

[2] Even as a child Walker had a militaristic streak; in his memoirs Fighting On he writes that he ordered the previously "idle, unpatriotic, unkempt" pupils into "showing the school what smartness on the parade ground meant".

[3] Walker then went to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and in 1933 after a short attachment to the Sherwood Foresters he joined the 1/8th Gurkha Rifles in Quetta which his grandfather had formerly commanded.

[6] Walker distinguished himself and was recommended for the Military Cross, he had come to senior officers' attention and was appointed staff captain at the Razmak Brigade headquarters.

[9] In early 1944, Walker was appointed second-in-command, alongside a new commanding officer, of the 4/8th Gurkha Rifles, who had suffered severely in the Arakan Campaign.

In March the battalion was moved to the Imphal area where the Japanese had launched a major offensive and spent several months in hard fighting.

[10] In early 1945 he led the 4/8th Gurkhas, part of IV Corps, across the River Irrawaddy and hard fighting against the main body of the Japanese Army in Burma.

He was mentioned in dispatches and at the end of the war he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO)[4] and 7th Indian Infantry Division moved to occupy Thailand where Walker was involved in negotiating the surrender of Japanese forces in that country.

Walker created a very effective jungle fighting battalion with many notable successes, including killing high ranking communists, in the three years he was in command.

[8] In 1954 he returned to the UK as a senior (Colonel) staff officer in Headquarters Eastern Command where he was involved in planning and mounting the Suez operation in 1956.

Walker maintained an excellent relationship with police Special Branch; he took great pains in the development of intelligence, and made frequent use of ambushes.

[18] Walker was appointed COMBRITBOR on 19 December with command over all British forces (land, sea and air) in the colonies of Sarawak and North Borneo, and the protectorate of Brunei.

However, Walker was master of the situation and developed an effective operational concept and tactics to contain the threat, and most importantly retain the military initiative.

[4] Finally in 1969 he was promoted to general and appointed NATO's Commander in Chief Allied Forces Northern Europe with headquarters in Oslo.

In July of that year he wrote a letter to The Daily Telegraph calling for "dynamic, invigorating, uplifting leadership... above party politics" to "save" the country from "the Communist Trojan horse in our midst."

[23] Shortly afterward, the London Evening News gave Walker a front-page interview and asked him if he could imagine a situation in which the British Army could take over Britain.

[2] By August 1974, Walker had joined the anti-Communist Unison group (later renamed to Civil Assistance), which claimed that it would supply volunteers in the event of a general strike.

[24] Walker claimed it had at least 100,000 members, which led Defence Secretary Roy Mason to interrupt his holiday by condemning this "near fascist groundswell.

[26] After Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative Party, Walker and Civil Assistance faded from the media; however, he still travelled abroad, including visits to Rhodesia and South Africa.

He was an early member of the Conservative Monday Club and in 1984 became Patron of the ultra-conservative and anti-communist Western Goals Institute, a position he retained for the rest of his life.