Lieutenant-General Sir George Tom Molesworth Bridges (20 August 1871 – 26 November 1939) was a British Army officer and the 19th Governor of South Australia.
Bridges had a distinguished military career, seeing service in Africa, India, South Africa, and most notably Europe during the First World War, where he was involved in the first British battle of the war at Mons, and later commanded the 19th (Western) Division during the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and then in the Battle of Passchendaele the following year. After the war, he served in Greece, Russia, the Balkans, and Asia Minor before becoming Governor of South Australia from 1922 to 1927.
Early life
Bridges was born at Park Farm, Eltham, Kent, England, to Major Thomas Walker Bridges and Mary Ann Philippi. He was educated at Newton Abbot College and later at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. He was married in London on 14 November 1907, to a widow, Janet Florence Marshall; they had one daughter, Alvilde Bridges, born in 1909. Alvilde married Anthony Chaplin, 3rd Viscount Chaplin and then James Lees-Milne.
Early military career
After graduating from the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, Bridges joined the Royal Artillery as a second lieutenant on 19 February 1892, and soon served in India and Nyasaland (now Malawi). He was promoted to lieutenant on 19 February 1895, and was seconded to the Central Africa Regiment from July to November 1899. and served in South Africa till the end of the war in June 1902, after which he left Cape Town in SS Plassy in August, returning to Southampton the following month. For his war service, he was mentioned in dispatches, including the final despatch by Lord Kitchener dated 23 June 1902, and received a brevet promotion as major on 22 August 1902.
Later that year saw him leave the United Kingdom for Berbera, where he took charge of Guns in a Flying Column serving in Somaliland. Promoted from supernumerary captain and brevet major in July 1904, in 1908, he became the chief instructor at the Cavalry School at Netheravon. Seeking a more rapid promotion in the army, Bridges transferred to the 4th Queen's Own Hussars in 1909, attaining the substantive rank of major. He was appointed military attaché to the Low Countries and Scandinavia between 1910 and 1914. to rally the men and led them to rejoin the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), commanded by Field Marshal Sir John French In September he transferred to the 4th Hussars as a lieutenant colonel. In October, French flew Bridges to the besieged Belgian city of Antwerp to provide intelligence there for the British headquarters.
He was appointed a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in late 1915 and given command of the 19th (Western) Division, a Kitchener's Army formation, which was demoralised after severe casualties at the Battle of Loos. and promoted to major general. He set about turning the 19th Division into an efficient fighting unit, purging the senior officers. The division was in reserve on the disastrous first day of the Battle of the Somme, and thus avoided serious casualties. It acquitted itself well in the small subsequent attacks around La Boiselle in July. was sent on the Balfour Mission, the military liaison to the United States under Arthur Balfour, soon after the American entry into the war in April 1917, to coordinate the sending of American soldiers to Europe. He ran into some difficulty because, like most senior British commanders and politicians, he pushed for the amalgamation or incorporation of Americans into understrength British units to be commanded by British officers. This caused much friction with the senior American commanders, who felt that American troops should be commanded by American officers.
thumb|left|Lieutenant-General Tom Bridges, head of all British war missions to the United States, pictured here at his headquarters in [[Washington, D.C., 29 April 1918]]
Bridges returned in time to lead his division in the Battle of Passchendaele in the second half of 1917. He was severely injured on 20 September at the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge. It occurred after he had left his headquarters (HQ) at Sherpenburg to visit Brigadier-General Thomas Cubitt, commanding the 57th Brigade, whose HQ was in a dugout on Hill 60. While a German artillery barrage was ongoing, Bridges left Cubitt's dugout when a shell exploded nearby, shattering Bridges' right leg, which was amputated later that night at Wulveringham. Not wanting to return to England, the next six weeks were spent at a base hospital at Montreuil, near Bologne.
He recovered quickly, however, and after a three-month stint as head of the trench warfare department of Winston Churchill's Ministry of Munitions, was sent back to the United States, specifically Washington, D.C., to coordinate the dispatch of American reinforcements to the Western Front. The rate of reinforcements was soon increased threefold.
After the war, he was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (1919) and a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (1925). His uncle, the Poet Laureate Robert Bridges, honoured him with an ode To His Excellency. She wrote about her experiences in A Walkabout in Australia published in 1925.
Bridges became frustrated with the Labor ministries of 1924–27. He was particularly angered by Premier John Gunn's publishing of a secret memorandum of a former premier to the governor. When he was offered a second term as governor in 1927 he refused it, and returned to London that year.