Archibald Wavell, 1st Earl Wavell

• 1. Introduction

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  Archibald Wavell lost his left eye at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, and he spent the next three decades commanding armies across some of the most strategically complex theatres of the twentieth century. He was a poet who disliked war, a quiet man whom Winston Churchill repeatedly mistook for a passive one, and a general who simultaneously managed campaigns in Iraq, the Horn of Africa, North Africa, and Crete during a single month in 1941. How does a soldier like that end up sacked? What does it mean to win spectacular victories and then be fired for the defeats that followed? And what role did luck, politics, and Churchill's distrust of bookish men play in shaping Wavell's reputation? Those questions run through every chapter of this story.

• 2. The Making of a Soldier

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  Born on the 5th of May 1883, Wavell was the son of Archibald Graham Wavell, who rose to become a major-general and military commander of Johannesburg after its capture in the Second Boer War. The family pattern pointed toward the Army, though Wavell's headmaster, Dr. Fearon, advised his father that the boy had "sufficient ability to make his way in other walks of life." That observation proved both true and irrelevant. Wavell was commissioned on the 8th of May 1901 as a second lieutenant in the Black Watch and shipped to South Africa. The battalion stayed through the war's formal end in June 1902 after the Peace of Vereeniging.

  Wavell was ill at the end of the Boer War and could not immediately follow his regiment to British India, departing Cape Town instead on the SS Simla bound for England. He joined the battalion in India in 1903, earned his promotion to lieutenant on the 13th of August 1904, and fought in the Bazar Valley Campaign of February 1908. He was one of only two in his class at the Staff College to graduate with an A grade. Intellectual ambition ran alongside military aptitude from the start.

  In 1911 Wavell spent a year attached as an observer to the Russian Army. At the Imperial Russian Army's annual war games in September 1911, he wore his kilt on parade and, by his own account, "created a veritable sensation." He was impressed by the Russian soldier's hardihood and discipline, but he noted the poor education of many regimental officers. In April 1912 he became a General Staff Officer Grade 3 in the Russian Section of the War Office, and the following year he was arrested at the Russo-Polish border as a suspected spy after the secret police searched his Moscow hotel room. He managed to remove from his papers an incriminating document listing what the War Office wanted to know before the border guards found it. His analytical instincts and his nerve were both already well developed.

• 3. War, Politics, and a Difficult Peace

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  When the First World War began, Wavell was serving as a staff officer. He was sent to France as a GSO2 at General HQ of the British Expeditionary Force, then in November 1914 he was appointed brigade major of 9th Infantry Brigade. The wound at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915 cost him his left eye and won him the Military Cross. He recovered, returned to General HQ in France, and was promoted to the substantive rank of major on the 8th of May 1916.

  By October 1916 Wavell had been assigned as a liaison officer to the Russian Army in the Caucasus, where he gathered intelligence about Russian operations against the Ottoman Empire by examining the divisional patches of Ottoman prisoners of war and matching them to known unit locations. He described the Grand Duke Nicholas, the Viceroy of the Caucasus, as "the handsomest and most-impressive-looking man," but charged that the Grand Duke, though an excellent host, shared almost nothing about actual operations. In April 1942, still only thirty-four years old, Wavell held the temporary rank of brigadier general, making him one of the youngest general officers in the British Army. He ended the war as the effective chief of staff of XX Corps, part of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force.

  The interwar years were a grinding succession of rank reductions and periods on half pay that many officers endured. In January 1934, after relinquishing brigade command, Wavell found himself unemployed on half pay once more. He was appointed aide-de-camp to King George V in March 1932 and eventually promoted to Major-General in October 1933, but jobs were scarce. In August 1937 he was sent to Palestine, where a counter-insurgency campaign was under way against Palestinian guerrillas who had risen up in 1936. Wavell refused to proclaim martial law on the grounds that he did not have enough troops to enforce it. He also opposed Zionism and regarded the Balfour Declaration as a political error, believing that the promise of a Jewish national home in Palestine was fuelling anti-British sentiment across the Islamic world. By February 1939 he was delivering the Lee-Knowles lectures at Cambridge, and in July 1939 he was named General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of Middle East Command.

• 4. A Command Stretched Thin

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  By the summer of 1940, when Italy declared war on the 10th of June, Wavell had only two British Army divisions, roughly 36,000 men, to hold Egypt against a much larger Italian army in Libya. The historian Robin Higham wrote that Wavell's forces were equipped for "a 1898 'Fuzzy-Wuzzy' colonial war" and little else. A structural problem compounded the shortage: the Admiralty and War Office had miscounted available shipping by including the Greek Merchant Marine and the Norwegian Merchant Marine in British totals and then counting their vessels separately under each national flag. That error was not corrected until April 1941.

  Churchill and Wavell met for the first time on the 12th of August 1940. Churchill called him a "good, average colonel" in a private note to Eden, the sort of man who might chair a suburban Conservative Party constituency association. Churchill saw Wavell's laconic manner as a lack of aggression, and he regarded Wavell's poetry writing as unsuitable softness for a British general. He seriously considered replacing Wavell with Bernard Freyberg that summer, and was only dissuaded by the War Office's assessment that Freyberg lacked the experience for Middle East Command. Anthony Eden, who had befriended Wavell when they met in February 1940 at Port Said, lobbied Churchill hard to keep him.

  Wavell's dealings with Churchill over the brief Italian invasion of British Somaliland in August 1940 did nothing to improve their relationship. The British lost 260 men (38 killed and 222 wounded) against Italian losses of 1,800. Churchill sent what Wavell called a "red-hot cable" complaining that the low British casualties meant his forces had fought poorly. Wavell responded that a "big butcher's bill" was not necessarily evidence of good tactics. Churchill found the remark greatly irritating. The exchange captured precisely the nature of their incompatibility: Wavell believed in economy of force; Churchill believed in spectacle and will. The tension between those two dispositions shaped everything that followed.

• 5. Operation Compass and Its Aftermath

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  On the 8th of December 1940, Wavell summoned British and Australian journalists and told them: "Gentleman, I asked you to come here this morning to let you know that we have attacked in the Western Desert. This is not an offensive and I do not think you ought to describe it as an offensive. You might call it an important raid." It was, in fact, the beginning of one of the most decisive campaigns of the North African war.

  The Battle of Sidi Barrani began on the 9th of December 1940. A numerically inferior British, Indian and Australian force overwhelmed three Italian divisions, which surrendered. On the 3rd of January 1941, Wavell launched a further offensive that destroyed the Italian Tenth Army and captured the Cyrenaica province of Libya. By February 1941, Richard O'Connor's Western Desert Force had taken 130,000 prisoners at the Battle of Beda Fomm and appeared ready to clear the last Italian forces from Libya entirely. Ending Axis control of North Africa was within reach.

  Then the decision was made to send forces to Greece. The sequence of meetings that produced that choice stretched from November 1940 through late February 1941. A crucial meeting on the 19th of February 1941 in Cairo, attended by Wavell, General Sir John Dill, Eden, and Major William Donovan (Roosevelt's personal representative), turned on Donovan's argument that American public opinion would be strongly impressed by a British expedition to Greece. Congress was still debating the Lend-Lease bill, and Wavell accepted the argument that failing to help the Greeks would have a "deplorable" effect in Washington. The next day another Cairo meeting concluded there was "agreement upon utmost help to Greece at the earliest possible moment." The Western Desert Force was stripped of its best units. The 4th Indian Division went to Ethiopia, the 6th Australian Division went to Greece, and O'Connor was replaced by General Sir Philip Neame, who had no experience of desert warfare. Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps went on the offensive on the 31st of March 1941. By the end of April the Commonwealth forces had been pushed back to the Egyptian border.

• 6. A Month of Simultaneous Disasters

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  In May 1941, Wavell was simultaneously running campaigns in Iraq, the Horn of Africa, North Africa and Crete. Churchill, writing his memoirs years later, divided these campaigns into separate chapters, which had the effect of making Wavell's documented strain appear small-minded rather than reasonable.

  The Battle of Crete had opened on the 20th of May when German airborne forces, the Fallschirmjäger, attacked. The British had broken the Luftwaffe codes and knew the entire German plan for Operation Mercury, including the three Cretan airfields targeted. But Freyberg, who commanded the Allied forces on Crete and had won the Victoria Cross in 1916, refused to accept the Ultra intelligence and kept the majority of his forces on the coast to resist a seaborne invasion. The Allies successfully held two of the three airfields. At Heraklion and Rethymno, British and Australian and Greek troops inflicted heavy losses on elite German paratroopers, and General Kurt Student, commanding the Fallschirmjäger, nearly cancelled the operation as reports of German failures came in. Hitler insisted on continuing. The turning point came when Brigadier L.W. Andrew of the 22nd New Zealand Battalion pulled his forces back from Maleme airfield. That withdrawal allowed the Germans to fly in reinforcements, and once Maleme was lost, so was Crete.

  On the 27th of May 1941, Wavell reported to London that the position in Crete was "no longer tenable." By the 1st of June the last Allied forces, totalling 16,000 men, had been evacuated. The Germans lost 4,000 killed and 2,500 wounded taking the island, more than all their losses on the Greek mainland and in Yugoslavia combined. About 16,000 Allied soldiers were killed or captured, and the Royal Navy lost three cruisers and six destroyers, with a battleship and an aircraft carrier badly damaged. The British ambassador to Egypt, Sir Miles Lampson, wrote on the 29th of May that Wavell was "looking the picture of gloom," but Wavell recovered his humor enough to joke that Churchill's "snappy, caustic telegrams" didn't help him beat the Germans.

• 7. The Sacking and Its Logic

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  Churchill told Wavell on the 20th of June 1941 that he was to be replaced by Claude Auchinleck. The immediate trigger was the failure of Operation Battleaxe, launched in mid-June to relieve the siege of Tobruk. Most of the British tanks lost in that operation were not destroyed by German tanks but by 8.8 cm anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns. British doctrine sent tanks forward in a "cruiser" role, independently and without supporting artillery that might have neutralised those guns. Churchill blamed Wavell, partly because he could not reveal in public that the British had been reading German codes; he claimed instead that MI6 had a spy in the Afrika Korps staff and that Wavell had failed to use the intelligence properly.

  The historian David Reynolds wrote that Churchill "seems not to have understood" the distinction between strategic intelligence, at which the British excelled by reading German codes, and tactical intelligence, at which the Afrika Korps excelled through better maps and more aggressive patrolling of the no-man's land between the lines. Auchinleck, on arriving to take command, wrote that he was "greatly impressed by the solid foundations laid by my predecessor" and described the vastness of the problems Wavell had faced in a command where some forty different languages were spoken by British and Allied forces. Rommel himself rated Wavell highly. Averell Harriman, yet another of Roosevelt's personal emissaries, had described Wavell to the president as "a man of true integrity and a true leader."

  Wavell in effect exchanged jobs with Auchinleck, moving to India as Commander-in-Chief, India. Within a month he launched an invasion of Persia in cooperation with the Russians to secure oil fields and supply lines to the Soviet Union. He later served as Viceroy of India until his retirement in February 1947. When Wavell left the Middle East, Damascus had fallen to British forces on the 21st of June 1941, the same day Auchinleck replaced him, suggesting that the combined pressure of all those simultaneous campaigns had produced results even as it consumed Wavell's command.