Richard O'Connor

Richard O'Connor

General Sir Richard Nugent O'Connor, (21 August 1889 – 17 June 1981) was a senior British Army officer who fought in both the First and Second World Wars, and commanded the Western Desert Force in the early years of the Second World War. He was the field commander for Operation Compass, in which his forces destroyed a much larger Italian army – a victory which nearly drove the Axis from Africa, and in turn, led Adolf Hitler to send the Afrika Korps under Erwin Rommel to try to reverse the situation. O'Connor was captured by an Italian reconnaissance patrol during the night of 7 April 1941 and spent over two years in an Italian prisoner of war camp. He eventually escaped after the fall of Mussolini in the autumn of 1943. Read more on Wikipedia

His biography is available in different languages on Wikipedia. Richard O'Connor is the 1,671st most popular military personnel (up from 1,760th in 2019). (up from 3,789th in 2019)