Archibald Wavell, 1st Earl Wavell
Archibald Percival Wavell, 1st Earl Wavell, was a senior officer of the British Army. He served in the Second Boer War, the Bazar Valley Campaign and the First World War, during which he was wounded in the Second Battle of Ypres. In the Second World War, he served initially as Commander-in-Chief Middle East, in which role he led British forces to victory over the Italian Army in Eritrea-Abyssinia, western Egypt and eastern Libya during Operation Compass in December 1940, only to be defeated by Erwin Rommel's Panzer Army Africa in the Western Desert in April 1941. He served as Commander-in-Chief, India, from July 1941 until June 1943 and then served as Viceroy of India until his retirement in February 1947.
Early life
Born the son of Archibald Graham Wavell and Lillie Wavell, Wavell attended Eaton House, followed by the leading preparatory boarding school Summer Fields in Oxford, Winchester College, where he was a scholar, and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. His headmaster, Dr. Fearon, had advised his father that there was no need to send him into the Army as he had "sufficient ability to make his way in other walks of life".Early career
After graduating from Sandhurst, Wavell was commissioned into the British Army on 8 May 1901 as a second lieutenant in the Black Watch, and joined the 2nd battalion of his regiment in South Africa to fight in the Second Boer War. The battalion stayed in South Africa throughout the war, which formally ended in June 1902 after the Peace of Vereeniging. Wavell was ill, and did not immediately join the battalion as it transferred to British India in October that year; he instead left Cape Town for England on the SS Simla at the same time. In 1903 he was transferred to join the battalion in India and, having been promoted to lieutenant on 13 August 1904, he fought in the Bazar Valley Campaign of February 1908. In January 1909 he was seconded from his regiment to be a student at the Staff College. He was one of only two in his class to graduate with an A grade.In 1911, he spent a year as a military observer with the Russian Army to learn Russian, returning to his regiment in December of that year. In September 1911, Wavell attended the annual war games of the Imperial Russian Army. He reported to London:
It was my first acquaintance with the Russian Army and practically the first acquaintance of the Russian Army with a British officer for many years...So I was quite a novelty and when for a formal parade, I put on the kilt I created a veritable sensation. I was impressed from the first with the Russian soldier, with his hardihood, physique, marching powers and discipline. But the lack of education of many of the regimental officers was noticeable.After the Second Moroccan crisis of 1911, Wavell became convinced that a war with Germany was likely and that closer Anglo-Russian ties would be needed. Wavell reported to London that many elements in the Russian elite still hoped for a rapprochement with Germany against Britain or believed that a war against Germany was unlikely to occur; that much of the intelligentsia wanted Russia to lose a war against Germany as the best way to bring about a revolution; and that the Russian public in general did not care about foreign affairs at all.
In April 1912, he became a General Staff Officer Grade 3 in the Russian Section of the War Office. In July, he was granted the temporary rank of captain and became GSO3 at the Directorate of Military Training. On 20 March 1913 Wavell was promoted to the substantive rank of captain. After visiting manoeuvers at Kyiv in the summer of 1913, he was arrested at the Russo-Polish border as a suspected spy following the secret police's search of his Moscow hotel room. However, he managed to remove from his papers an incriminating document listing the information wanted by the War Office.
Wavell was working at the War Office when Army officers refused to act against Ulster unionists in March 1914; the government was expecting Unionist paramilitary opposition to introduction of devolved government in Ireland. His letters to his father record his disgust at the government's behaviour in giving an ultimatum to officers – he had little doubt that the government had been planning to crush the Ulster Scots, whatever they later claimed. However, he was also concerned at the Army's effectively intervening in politics, not least as there would be an even greater appearance of bias when the Army was used against industrial unrest.
First World War
Wavell was working as a staff officer when the First World War began. As a captain, he was sent to France to a posting at General HQ of the British Expeditionary Force as General Staff Officer Grade 2, but shortly afterwards, in November 1914, was appointed brigade major of 9th Infantry Brigade. He was wounded in the Second Battle of Ypres of 1915, losing his left eye and winning the Military Cross. In October 1915 he became a GSO2 in the 64th Highland Division.In December 1915, after he had recovered, Wavell was returned to General HQ in France as a GSO2. He was promoted to the substantive rank of major on 8 May 1916. In October 1916 Wavell was graded General Staff Officer Grade 1 as an acting lieutenant-colonel, and was then assigned as a liaison officer to the Russian Army in the Caucasus. Wavell called the Grand Duke Nicholas, the Viceroy of the Caucasus "the handsomest and most-impressive-looking man". However, Wavell charged that the Grand Duke, though an excellent host, failed to share much information about the Russian operations against the Ottoman Empire. Wavell learned about the state of Russian operations by looking at the divisional patches of Ottoman POWs, which he then matched with the known locations of the said Ottoman divisions. In June 1917, he was promoted to brevet lieutenant-colonel and continued to work as a staff officer, as liaison officer with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force headquarters.
In January 1918 Wavell received a further staff appointment as an assistant adjutant and quartermaster-general working at the Supreme War Council in Versailles. In late March Wavell was made a temporary brigadier general although this only lasted for a few days before reverting to his previous rank, only to be promoted once again to temporary brigadier general in April, making him, at just 34, one of the youngest general officers in the British Army. He then returned to Palestine where he served as brigadier general, general staff, effectively the chief of staff, of XX Corps, part of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, until the war's end.
Between the world wars
Wavell was given a number of assignments between the wars, though like many officers he had to accept a reduction in rank. In May 1920 he relinquished the temporary appointment of Brigadier-General, reverting to lieutenant-colonel. In December 1921, he became an Assistant Adjutant General at the War Office and, having been promoted to full colonel on 3 June 1921, he became a GSO1 in the Directorate of Military Operations at the War Office in July 1923.Apart from a short period unemployed on half pay in 1926, Wavell continued to hold GSO1 appointments, latterly in the 3rd Infantry Division, until July 1930 when he was given command of 6th Infantry Brigade with the temporary rank of brigadier. In March 1932, he was appointed aide-de-camp to King George V, a position he held until October 1933 when he was promoted to Major-General. However, there was a shortage of jobs for Major-Generals at this time and in January 1934, on relinquishing command of his brigade, he found himself unemployed on half pay once again.
By the end of the year, although still on half pay, Wavell had been designated to command 2nd Division and appointed a CB. In March 1935, he took command of his division. In August 1937 he was transferred to Palestine, where there was growing unrest, to be General Officer Commanding British Forces in Palestine and Trans-Jordan and was promoted to Lieutenant-General on 21 January 1938. During his time in Palestine, Wavell found himself leading a counter-insurgency campaign against the Palestinian fedayeen who had risen up in 1936. Wavell refused to proclaim martial law under the grounds that he did not have enough troops to enforce it. Wavell was opposed to Zionism and thought that the Balfour Declaration had been a mistake as the promise of British support for a "Jewish national home" in Palestine led to militant anti-British feelings throughout the Islamic world. In common with many British Army officers, Wavell disliked prime minister Neville Chamberlain less because of appeasement, but rather because of Chamberlain's "limited liability" rearmament policy. Under that policy, the Royal Air Force was given first priority in terms of defence spending, the Royal Navy the second and the Army the third. Like many British Army officers, Wavell charged that the policy left the Army starved of funds, based on the unrealistic assumption that Britain could win a major war by only fighting in the air and on the sea while barely doing any fighting on land.
In April 1938 Wavell became General Officer Commanding-in-Chief Southern Command in the UK. In February 1939, Wavell delivered the Lee-Knowles lectures at Cambridge. In July 1939, he was named as General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of Middle East Command with the local rank of full general. Subsequently, on 15 February 1940, to reflect the broadening of his oversight responsibilities to include East Africa, Greece and the Balkans, his title was changed to Commander-in-Chief Middle East. By the time, Wavell returned to the Middle East, the revolt in Palestine had finally been put down with the last of the fedayeen bands being hunted down or laying down their arms by the summer of 1939. Germany and Italy had signed the Pact of Steel, a defensive-offensive military alliance, on 22 May 1939. As the Danzig crisis had pushed Britain to the brink of war with the Reich in the summer of 1939, Wavell assumed that war was near, and that should Germany invade Poland, it was almost certain that Italy would enter the war at some point. Wavell wrote an anti-appeasement poem about the Danzig crisis that read in jest: "Lord Halifax is ready/To take off for Berlin/And if he gives them Danzig/We might just save our skin/Why should we do the fighting?/The Jews will stand to gain/We are the ones who'll suffer/If England fights again". Wavell complained in a letter in August 1939 of "wishful thinking" in Britain about the Danzig crisis as he wrote: "News smells of mustard gas and antiseptics and other unpleasant things".
The British official whom Wavell met in a "weekly waffle" from August 1939 onward was Sir Miles Lampson, the Ambassador to Egypt, who was regarded as the senior British official in the Middle East. Lampson described Wavell as shy and reserved, but "that when one gets to know him better, he is rather a good fellow". On 18 August 1939 in a conference held abroad the battleship HMS Warspite in Alexandria harbour, Wavell first held a meeting with Admiral Andrew Cunningham, the GOC of the British Mediterranean fleet and Air Marshal William Mitchell, the GOC of RAF Middle East to discuss the plans to be executed if the Danzig crisis should turn to war. Wavell was a frequent visitor to Alexandria as Cunningham chose to command the Mediterranean fleet from the Warspite. Because of the "limited liability" doctrine which governed British defence spending, Wavell's Middle East command was short of modern equipment, and the American historian Robin Higham wrote Wavell's forces were fitted for "a 1898 'Fuzzy-Wuzzy' colonial war" and nothing else. On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Wavell was angry about what he regarded as the weakness of Chamberlain about honouring the British "guarantee" of Poland as he wrote to Lord Gort on 2 September 1939 that Chamberlain was "making a rather pompous, long-winded, old-fashioned" entry in the war as he was surprised that the United Kingdom had not declared war on the Reich the previous day. On 3 September 1939, Britain declared war on Germany and Wavell immediately put the British forces in the Middle East on the highest state of alert. Wavell's first action was to order General Richard O'Connor, the GOC of the 7th British Division to move his formation from Palestine to the Egyptian-Libyan border as Wavell believed it was only a matter of time before Italy entered war. Wavell's next step was to go to Beirut to meet General Maxime Weygand, the commander of the Armée du Levant, to discuss Anglo-French war plans. He reported that Weygand was a "sagacious ally" whose thinking about opening a front in the Balkans was very close to his own.