Maj Gen Vladimir Nikolaevich von Dreyer
Maj. Gen. Vladimir Nikolaevich von Dreyer in his Tsarist uniform. The son of Baltic German nobles with a 200 year history of service to the Romanovs, he was trained as an artilley officer then lectuered on the subject at the Vilnius Military Academy before the war. A scholarly man, he served as a military correspondent in the Italian-Turkish war in 1911 then, in 1912-1913, in the Balkan Wars. During WWI, while a colonel, he assumed command of the encircled 20th Army Corps in February 1915 and led a breakout. He went on to command the 275th Khotyn Infantry Regiment (69th Inf Divsion) then the 8th Zaamurskii Frontier Border Regiment, and by 1917 was commander of the 7th Cavalry Division until he was cashiered with the Revolution. Rumored to have been a secret force behind the uprising against the Bolsheviks in Moscow in 1918, when he appeared in the South and offered his services to Denikin he was turned down. Ultimatly living in exile in the U.S. and France, he went on to write no less than four tomes of military history. Passing away in 1967 at age 90, he is buried among other high ranking White Russians in their Russian cemetery in Saint-Genev de Bouis in Paris.