Andrew Gilchrist

Sir Andrew Graham Gilchrist KCMG (19 April 1910 – 6 March 1993) was a British Special Operations Executive operative who later served as the United Kingdom's Ambassador to Ireland, Indonesia, and Iceland during the Cold War.

Gilchrist was born on 19 April 1910 in the village of Lesmahagow, Lanarkshire, Scotland. He was educated at the Edinburgh Academy, before reading History at Exeter College, Oxford from where he graduated in 1931. After Oxford he entered the diplomatic service and had his first overseas posting in Siam, now Thailand.

During the war he spent time in a Japanese PoW camp, before being released in a prisoner exchange. He then joined SOE (Special Operations Executive) and was active in intelligence in India and Siam between 1944 and 1945. In a ltter to his fiance and later book. He wrote harrowing accounts of civilians in Calcutta under the British and of worker camps along the Kra Isthmus Railway in Thailand under the Japanese.

In his retirement he wrote a scholarly account of Britain's disastrous military collapse in the Pacific Theater. Winston Churchill himself was singled out for criticism, for failing to protect British assets and placing too much reliance on the support of the US Pacific fleet.

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