John Grover (British Army officer)

Major General John Malcolm Lawrence Grover CB MC (6 February 1897 – 1979) was a senior British Army officer who commanded the 2nd Infantry Division in the Burma Campaign of the Second World War.

Military career

Grover was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the British Army's King's Shropshire Light Infantry (KSLI) in 1914.^[1] He was awarded the Military Cross for his service in the First World War^[2] and was wounded three times during the four years of war.^[3]

Remaining in the army between the wars, he became Commanding Officer (CO) of the 1st Battalion, KSLI in 1938.^[4]

He served in the Second World War as Commander of the 11th Infantry Brigade from June 1940 and as General Officer Commanding (GOC) 2nd Infantry Division from October 1941, leading it to India when it arrived there in early June 1942.^[4] He devised and implemented a strategy to remove the Japanese from the Kohima region of India leading to the defeat of the Imperial Japanese Army at the Battle of Kohima between April and June 1944.^[5] Despite being victorious in this battle, he was removed from command on 4 July 1944 by Lieutenant General Montagu Stopford, the XXXIII Corps GOC, who was unhappy with Grover's methods.^[6] Grover went on to be Director of Army Welfare Services at the War Office in 1944 before retiring in 1948.^[4]

He became Colonel of The King's Shropshire Light Infantry in 1947.^[7] In 2014, on the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Kohima, a memorial to General Grover was unveiled at Jotsama on the site of his 2nd Division Headquarters.^[8]

References

External links

• Imperial War Museum Interview