Edgar Williams

Brigadier Sir Edgar Trevor Williams (20 November 1912 – 26 June 1995) was a British historian and Army military intelligence officer who played a significant role in the Second Battle of El Alamein in the Second World War.

He was one of the few officers who was privy to the Ultra secret, and served on the staff of Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery as his intelligence officer for the rest of the war.

Edgar Trevor Williams was born in Chatham, Kent, on 20 November 1912, the second of the three children and oldest son of (Joseph) Edgar Williams, a clergyman, and his wife, Anne Ethel Evans.

His father served as a chaplain in the Royal Navy during the Great War, and served on the Western Front.

After the war the family moved to Wolverhampton.

Trevor (known to his friends as "Bill") was educated at Tettenhall College, Staffordshire, and then at King Edward VII School in Sheffield after his father was posted there in 1928.

A graduate of Merton College, Oxford, where he obtained a First in modern history in 1934, Williams was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 1st King's Dragoon Guards in June 1939.

He secured a postmastership at Merton College, Oxford, where he played soccer and cricket, and obtained a First in modern history in 1934.

Williams remained at Merton as a Harmsworth senior scholar, then became an assistant lecturer at the Liverpool University in 1936.

He returned to Merton in 1937 as a junior research fellow, studying the Cabinet of the United Kingdom in the 18th century.

He earned a Master of Arts degree in 1938, and commenced work on his PhD, in which he argued that it was the Treaty of Waitangi that granted Britain sovereignty over New Zealand, and the land was not terra nullius.

Today his argument is universally accepted.

In 1938 Williams married Monica Robertson, the daughter of Philip Robertson, a professor from New Zealand.

Williams was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 1st King's Dragoon Guards on 21 June 1939.

After the Second World War broke out in September 1939, his unit became an armoured car regiment in the 2nd Armoured Division.

In February 1941, the troop he was commanding was the first British unit to encounter the German Afrika Korps.

He was recruited to work in military intelligence by Brigadier Francis de Guingand, who later became Montgomery's chief of staff.

As an historian, Williams was accustomed to integrating different sources of information to build up a larger picture.

He integrated information from Ultra with that from other sources such as the Y service, prisoner of war interrogations, aerial reconnaissance and ground reconnaissance behind enemy lines by the Long Range Desert Group.

After the war Williams became a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and the Warden of Rhodes House, Oxford, and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography.

As secretary to the Rhodes Trustees, he was concerned with the selection and subsequent well-being of nearly two hundred Rhodes scholars each year.

The division was sent to Cyrenaica, where, on 24 February 1941, Williams was in command of a troop of C Squadron, 1st King's Dragoon Guards when it was ambushed near El Agheila.

It became the first British unit to encounter the German Afrika Korps (DAK).

The desert sun affected his already weak eyes, so he was sent to recuperate in Cairo, where he was posted to General Headquarters (GHQ) Middle East Command in which Brigadier Francis de Guingand became Director of Military Intelligence (DMI) in February 1942.

The appointment of de Guingand, an officer with no experience in intelligence, said much about the state of intelligence in the British Army at the time, where it was assumed that staff college training and a good brain were all that was required.

Aware of his lack of expertise, de Guingand selected Williams and James Oliver Ewart to serve on his staff.

According to de Guingand: "Ewart and Williams were an ideal combination. They understood each other perfectly. Both had first-class brains, both were university dons, and hated soldiering as a profession!"

When de Guingand was appointed Brigadier General Staff of the Eighth Army in August 1942, he arranged for Williams to be transferred to Eighth Army headquarters as a GSO2.

While working at GHQ, Williams had been indoctrinated into the Ultra secret.

Knowledge of this was highly restricted; the Eighth Army commander was shown the original text, but not the corps commanders, who were only given summaries with no indication of the source of the information.

The quality of the information coming from Ultra was very high, but over-reliance on it could be very dangerous, both militarily, when Erwin Rommel and the DAK did not act as expected, and professionally, when the DMI was fired for failing to forecast this.

Williams's academic training came to the fore; as an historian, he was accustomed to integrating different sources of information to build up a larger picture.

Information coming from Ultra was integrated with that from other sources such as the Y service, prisoner of war interrogations, aerial reconnaissance and ground reconnaissance behind enemy lines by the Long Range Desert Group.

Williams and his staff would attempt to provide an assessment and then use Ultra to verify it.

He would prepare his intelligence summaries in the early hours of the morning by the light of a pressure lamp, wearing a crochet jacket that had once belonged to a German general.

When Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery assumed command of the Eighth Army in August 1942, he was impressed with Williams and identified him as the man he wanted to head his intelligence section.

For the Battle of Alam Halfa, Ultra provided information on German intentions that was accurate in every detail except for a two-day delay caused by a shortage of petrol.

In his memoirs Montgomery recalled how Williams pointed out a crucial weakness in Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel's deployment of his troops, in that they were arranged in a manner that Williams described as "corsetted", with German troops between and behind the Italians.

Williams suggested that if the two could be separated, then it might be possible to break through the Italian forces.

They had one child, a daughter, and divorced in 1945.