A. P. Wavell (Field-Marshal Viscount Wavell, G.C.B., G.C.S.I., G.C.I.E., C.M.G., M.C.)

A Selection of Poetry by Wavell, include section on "good fighting" and "Last Post"

Wavell, Archibald Percival, first Earl Wavell (1883–1950), army officer and viceroy of India, was born on 5 May 1883 at Colchester, the only son and second of the three children of Major, afterwards Major-General, Archibald Graham Wavell (1843–1935) and his wife, Lillie (d. 1926), daughter of Richard N. Percival, of Springfields, Bradwall, Cheshire. The family (of whom traces have been found for four or more centuries in and around the city of Winchester) had for some generations been soldiers (A. J. B. Wavell was his cousin).

Wavell received his education at Winchester College, and passed fourth into the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, in 1900. After a six-month course he was gazetted to the Black Watch in time to see service in South Africa. In 1903 he went to India, where his early childhood (1888–91) had been spent, and he took part in the Bazar valley campaign of 1908. At his first attempt he headed the list of entrants to the Staff College and in 1911, having graduated with an ‘A’ pass, one of two awarded, he was sent for a year to the Russian army. When the First World War broke out in 1914 he was in the War Office, but managed to join the British expeditionary force in September. Wavell married on 22 April 1915 Eugénie Marie (Queenie), daughter of Colonel John Owen Quirk, with whom he was to have three daughters and one son. At Ypres on 16 June 1915 he lost his left eye in an artillery barrage and was awarded the MC. In October 1916 Major Wavell was sent as liaison officer to the army of the Grand Duke Nicholas, which was fighting in Turkey before Erzurum. On returning to London in June 1917, he became the chief of the Imperial General Staff's personal liaison officer to General Sir Edmund Allenby, who became his mentor and model in later years when Wavell held the equivalent post. After three months with the Supreme Allied War Council in Versailles, he returned to Palestine in March 1918 as a brigadier-general, and joined the staff of Sir Philip Chetwode, commanding the 20 corps. He played a major role in the final offensive which shattered the Turks, and was appointed CMG in 1919.

The next ten years were divided between the War Office and the staff. During this period Wavell, already well known within the army, became known outside it as an officer untrammelled by convention; and the general public came to associate him with a phrase he used in a lecture: that his ideal infantryman was ‘a successful poacher, cat-burglar and gunman’. In 1930 he received command of the 6th brigade at Blackdown which had been chosen for experimental purposes. This was his first significant experience of command in thirty years of service, and he excelled at it. In 1935, after fifteen months on half pay (which he spent on reconnaissance between Haifa and Baghdad and in rewriting field service regulations), he was appointed to the coveted command of the 2nd division at Aldershot, confirming the very high regard in which the army held him. He was recognized as an exceptional trainer of troops and a highly creative thinker. Among the younger generals there was a feeling that the older ones had grown lethargic; public interest in the army was at a low ebb. Wavell's views were sought with respect by both old guard and new. Before he had completed his term with the 2nd division, he was appointed in July 1937 to command in Palestine and Transjordan. Soon after his arrival Arab troubles, which had died down since the outbreak of 1936, broke out with fresh ferocity, and were at their height when he was brought home in April 1938 and promoted over many senior to him to take over the southern command, one of the two most important commands in the country.

In 1939 he gave the Lees Knowles lectures at Cambridge, ‘Generals and generalship’, one of the best statements on military command ever written: Rommel carried a copy with him in the north African campaign.

In late July 1939 Wavell was sent to Cairo to form the new command of the Middle East. When war broke out in September the forces at his disposal were small; when Italy came into the war in June 1940 his command had been reinforced by Australian, New Zealand, and Indian troops, but was menaced by superior forces on several fronts. Bold patrolling by light covering troops in the western desert imposed upon Graziani's Italians a caution quite out of proportion to the relative strengths of the two armies. Wavell was able also to delay the Italian advances into Sudan from Ethiopia; but upon the Somaliland front, where the defection of the French in Djibouti prejudiced the defence, the local commander was forced to give ground. During Wavell's temporary absence in London the decision was taken to evacuate the protectorate rather than lose its small but valuable garrison. The prime minister disapproved of this decision, Wavell defended it, and relations between Winston Churchill and Wavell were never very happy thereafter. But Wavell's stock never sank either with his troops or with the public, and it rose with the authorities during and after his remarkable run of success in the winter of 1940–41. He had been keeping a careful eye on the gingerly advance of the Italians in the west, and he detected unsoundness in their dispositions. Containing the threat to Sudan with an elaborate bluff, he switched the 4th Indian division from that front for use in the western desert, and caught the Italians napping at Sidi Barrani on 9 and 10 December. The 4th Indian division returned to Sudan, while the remainder of the western desert army swept up Bardia and Tobruk. By mid-February the whole of Cyrenaica was in British hands, with 125,000 prisoners, more than 800 field guns, and 400 tanks. This advance of 400 miles did much to raise British spirits after the losses of 1940.

Meanwhile Alan Gordon Cunningham's army from Kenya and William Platt's in Sudan were forcing the Italians from Ethiopia back into their remotest mountains; they capitulated in the north in May and in the south some weeks later. Elsewhere, however, the odds against Wavell had mounted. He had been urged to send help on a larger scale to Greece, which since the end of October 1940 had been fighting stoutly and successfully against greatly superior Italian forces in Epirus. Hitherto Britain had contributed only air support with ground defence, anti-aircraft, and medical units; but on 9 January 1941 he was told that the support of Greece must now take precedence of all operations in the Middle East. His first reaction was sharply adverse; but throughout January and February mounting pressure was brought to bear on him to reinforce the Greeks with fighting formations and units. After conversations with the Greeks, in which both the cabinet and the chiefs of staff were represented by Anthony Eden and Sir John Dill, and during which various stipulations which he made were accepted by the Greeks, Wavell agreed to intervention at a moment when the enthusiasm of the cabinet and chiefs of staff was cooling.

In two respects he had been misled: the Greeks had accepted in the conversations that they would withdraw from their exposed positions to a line on the River Aliakmon more in keeping with the weakness of the joint armies; and Wavell's intelligence had assured him that the German ground forces in north Africa, whose arrival was known to be imminent, would not be able to take the field until mid-April at the earliest. But the Greeks did not shorten their line; and the Germans appeared in strength on the frontiers of Cyrenaica before the end of March. By that time a high proportion of Wavell's army, and much of the best of it, was irrevocably committed in Greece; by the middle of April both Greece and Cyrenaica had been lost, Tobruk was invested, and vast quantities of fighting troops, military technicians, tanks, and material were in enemy hands.

Stout efforts were made to defend Crete, but it was invaded from the air on 20 May and lost after desperate fighting before the month ended. The Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force in the Middle East had both crippled themselves in these operations. New anxieties had developed; Rashid Ali in Iraq had thrown in his lot with the axis powers, and Syria, occupied by Vichy forces, was harbouring Germans and seemed likely to follow the example of Iraq. Wavell was urged to undertake three almost simultaneous operations: against Iraq, against Syria, and against Rommel in the desert. He protested that he had not the resources for all three, but was overruled. Although the operation against Iraq was successful by early June, operation Battleaxe against Rommel proved a costly failure by 17 June; in Syria, however, the French asked for an armistice early in July. Churchill had lost confidence in Wavell, particularly after learning that plans had been prepared for evacuation of the Middle East. After the failure of the offensive against Rommel, Churchill replaced Wavell with Sir Claude Auchinleck, whose place he took as commander-in-chief in India.

At first India was by comparison almost a sinecure; but when, in December 1941, Japan came into the war, Wavell, whose reputation stood high in the United States, was nominated supreme commander of the ill-fated American, British, Dutch, and Australian (ABDA) command of south-east Asia and the south-west Pacific. The speed, preparedness, and overwhelming strength of the Japanese were in inverse ratio to those of the defence. Wavell was criticized for the loss of the British 18th division in Singapore, which was landed only two days before the capitulation; but he still enjoyed the confidence of his troops, and his resilience as a commander was exemplified by the fact that he gave orders for the eventual recapture of Burma to be studied by his planning staff before its evacuation was complete. The ABDA command was dissolved in February 1942. Policy dictated that the German war should be won before the Japanese, and Wavell had to fight the war in Burma with the minimum of help from home. He had little success, and in June 1943 he was appointed viceroy of India in succession to the marquess of Linlithgow and in July was raised to the peerage as Viscount Wavell of Cyrenaica and of Winchester. He had been promoted field marshal in January of that year.

Wavell shouldered a profoundly difficult task in this his last public service, for which he had little of the diplomatic or political training customary for the viceregal appointment. He faced enormous political and administrative problems, presiding over an imperial government committed since the Cripps offer of 1942 to permitting Indians self-determination after the war, yet meantime having to maintain imperial authority and to extract from India all possible human and material resources for the war effort. Wavell's first challenge was the Bengal famine of 1943, which occurred when wartime shortages of rice were compounded by a devastating failure of administration. He went to Bengal within six days of taking office, offered the help of the army to move food grains, and prevailed on the provincial government to adopt a more interventionist role, including rationing. He continued thereafter to urge on an insensitive London government which had other priorities the vital need of more food imports into India.

Although Wavell was thought of by his London masters as a ‘stop-gap Viceroy’ to hold India steady until political change occurred after the war, he saw that the political situation was not static, and that as viceroy he could not avoid politics but must do what he could to encourage Indians to co-operate not only in the war effort but in preparations for a new peacetime political order. In this he displayed considerable political acumen, sensitivity, and courage, but was severely hampered, indeed debilitated, by the lack of understanding from London, either from Churchill or from Attlee's Labour government after 1945. In 1943 he prevailed on London to permit the release of Gandhi from gaol, having been assured that the aged nationalist leader would never be strong enough to become politically active again. When Gandhi proved resilient, Churchill was greatly angered. Two years later, in the summer of 1945, the cabinet permitted the release of the remaining leadership of the Indian National Congress, who had been imprisoned since the autumn of 1942 and the Quit India campaign. Even this conciliatory move to enable the resumption of political negotiations with authoritative Indian voices had cost Wavell frustrating weeks of valuable time in London as he tried to persuade Churchill of the urgency of political movement in the face of growing administrative weakness, Indian expectations of post-war change, and the erosion of the raj's legitimacy in the eyes of many Indians. Immediately Wavell began the process of political discussion and negotiation with various groups of Indian politicians, in the hope of securing their agreement in a new form of executive council which, by providing opportunities for co-operation among them, would ease the way to a new constitution for a united post-war India. But the war years had served to harden divisions between the predominantly Hindu Congress, which claimed to speak for all Indians, and the Muslim League, led by the astute and intransigent M. A. Jinnah, which claimed to represent all Muslims as a separate political ‘nation’. Moreover, the Cripps offer, confirming that no minority would be coerced into a post-war settlement, had given Jinnah an enormously strengthened bargaining position and a virtual veto in any negotiations. The issue of whether the League alone could nominate Muslim members of any new government became the rock on which were wrecked Wavell's attempt at political advance through the Simla conference of 1945, and, subsequently, the plans of the three-man cabinet mission in 1946, dispatched by Attlee's government to achieve agreement on the future of India and an interim representative government

Meanwhile, Wavell was acutely aware of the ebbing strength of the raj, and the inability of the British to control a continent increasingly wracked by vicious communal conflict, such as the ‘Great Calcutta Killing’ of 16 August 1946. In September 1946 he argued that on administrative grounds alone the raj could not last more than eighteen months, and urged the cabinet to accept a ‘breakdown plan’ for orderly British withdrawal at a time of their own choosing, if agreement with Indians could not be reached. London judged Wavell, unfairly, to be politically incompetent and alarmist: and in February 1947 he was sacked, to make way for the flamboyant Viscount Mountbatten. Wavell noted laconically in his journal on 4 February that he had received a letter from Attlee ‘dismissing me from my post at a month's notice. Not very courteously done’. (Mountbatten rapidly concurred with Wavell's diagnosis of the Indian situation, and, given co-operation and considerable freedom by London, presided over the end of the raj within six months.)

Wavell's journal testifies to his vivid appreciation of a complex political situation; to the tireless political efforts he made to achieve political co-operation and advance, despite his distaste for some of the Indian leaders, particularly Gandhi; and to his intense frustration at the attitude of successive London governments, and at the intransigence of the three elderly politicians who seemed to thwart political advance, Gandhi, Jinnah, and Churchill (entry of 11 June 1944). He was created Earl Wavell with the additional title of Viscount Keren of Eritrea and Winchester, and returned to London, free at last from the burden of high office.

The last three years of his life were spent in London and in travel. He was able to indulge at leisure the taste in literature which had long been among his most precious relaxations. He became president of the Royal Society of Literature, and of the Kipling, Browning, Poetry, and Virgil societies; he had been chancellor of Aberdeen University since 1945. He was colonel of the Black Watch; and he steeped himself in regimental matters, visiting its allied regiments in Canada and South Africa. He received honorary degrees from the universities of Aberdeen, St Andrews, Cambridge, London, Oxford, and McGill. He was a commander of the Légion d'honneur and received decorations from many countries including Greece, Ethiopia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, China, Russia, and the United States. He was appointed CMG (1919), CB (1935), KCB (1939), GCB (1941), and GCSI and GCIE in 1943, in which year he was sworn of the privy council.

In 1950 Wavell showed signs of illness, culminating in jaundice; in May he underwent a severe operation, from which he seemed to be recovering, when he relapsed and died at Beaumont House, Beaumont Street, London, on 24 May. His body lay in the chapel of St John at the Tower, of which he had been constable since 1948; on 7 June it was carried upriver in a barge to Westminster, where a service was held; and he was buried that evening by the men of his regiment in the chantry close of his old school at Winchester. His wife survived him...

Bernard Fergusson, rev. Robert O'Neill and Judith M. Brown