Wavell in the Middle East, 1939-1941: A Study in Generalship

by Harold E. Raugh Jr.

Overview

This masterly study of generalship covers two years of intense operational activity during which Field Marshal Wavell, as Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, was at one point conducting no fewer than five campaigns simultaneously. Two of those campaigns will stand in history as truly great victories, and one—the campaign in Greece in 1941—as a source of endless controversy.

Harold E. Raugh, Jr., has drawn upon previously unavailable official documents and interviewed or corresponded with a wide range of soldiers who served under Wavell. Raugh shows how Wavell’s early experience as a soldier and budding commander were reflected in his later decision making and shrewd military vision.

Although Wavell’s charismatic personality endeared him to all who served under him and earned him the profound respect of his fellows, and even of the enemy, his natural taciturnity brought him into conflict with his political masters. In spite of his enormous military achievements at one of the most critical periods in his country’s history, Wavell has been undeservedly relegated to obscurity—a historical oversight that Raugh corrects with this richly detailed book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806143057
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	03/13/2013
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	364
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Harold E. Raugh, Jr., is the Command Historian of U.S. Army V Corps in Heidelberg, Germany. Retired from the U.S. Army as a Lieutenant Colonel, he is the author of four books including Fort Ord and Presidio of Monterey.

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Wavell in the Middle East 1939â"1941

A Study in Generalship

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By Harold E. Raugh Jr.

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 University of Oklahoma Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4305-7

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Field Marshal Earl Wavell bore a mantle of responsibility greater than that of any other British general, with the possible exception of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, in the early years of the Second World War. He served as Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, from July 1939 to July 1941, and as Commander-in-Chief, India, from July 1941 to June 1943. During part of the latter period, he also served as Supreme Commander of the American-British-Dutch-Australian Command (ABDACOM), in the Sisyphean attempt to halt the initial Japanese onslaught against the Western Powers.

While in these positions, Wavell directly influenced every major operation in which British soldiers were engaged up to the middle of 1942–except for the brief campaigns of 1940 in Norway and France. During the crucial period from February to July 1941–the last six months of his tenure as Commander-in-Chief, Middle East–Wavell was directly responsible for the conduct of some eight campaigns, with three on hand at any one time and five running simultaneously in May 1941. This fact is all the more spectacular when one considers the immensity and geographical diversity of his 2,000 by 1,700-mile command, and the resources he had available with which to conduct those campaigns.

Some of Wavell's campaigns, such as the British expedition to Greece and the defence of Crete, were abject failures. Others, notably those in the Western Desert in the winter of 1940–1941 and in East Africa, were 'two of the most resounding military victories in history'. These victories, in the words of one military historian and contemporary observer, 'cheered and inspired the British Empire and the neutral world at a time when Axis power seemed invincible'. Indeed, one professional journal of the United States Army declared that Wavell was 'Britain's Soldier of the Hour', and that he had 'breathed new life, inspiration and confidence into the British Empire throughout the world'.

In spite of these accomplishments and achievements, and his subsequent service as Viceroy of India from 1943 to 1947, Wavell is little known and largely forgotten today. 'The fact is', a former colleague recently observed, 'that, sadly enough, W. [Wavell] is now an almost forgotten commander'. Although a great soldier of a nation which traditionally honours its military heroes, Wavell has suffered a curious neglect.

This historical 'oversight' can be directly attributed to five major factors.

First, Wavell's accomplishments and his tenure as Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, have been tarnished by inaccurate perceptions of his subsequent service as Commanderin-Chief, India; Supreme Commander, ABDACOM; and Viceroy of India. This apparently unwitting tendency to conflate Wavell's military accomplishments, especially in the Middle East, with his later military and political service, recurs in many post-war memoirs and documents. 'I am highly critical of [Wavell's] Viceroyalty', wrote Sir James Grigg, who served as Permanent Under-Secretary of State for War during the period Wavell was Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, 'though not so violently so as I am over the next one [Mountbatten's]. Whether it is this attitude towards Wavell as Viceroy that has led me into a slight tendency to belittle him as a soldier, I cannot tell'.

Secondly, Wavell's accomplishments in the Middle East during the 'lean years' of the Second World War have been overshadowed by those of later generals who possessed a marked superiority of manpower, weapons, vehicles, and logistical resupply capabilities– as well as the all-important factor of unrestrained political support. Anthony Eden (The Rt Hon Earl of Avon), who served Churchill as Secretary of State for War and later Foreign Affairs, was keenly aware of this situation when, during an interview, he admonished those 'listeners [who] have military ambitions. I would strongly advise them against holding a high military command in the first two years of any war in the British Army,' and concluded: 'Better wait until the stuff begins to come along. Which, I am afraid, in the last two experiences was after the third year or later.' Many tend, moreover, to overlook the fact that until the end of 1941, Britain was fighting against the Axis powers alone; the United States was not involved in the conflict during Wavell's Middle East tenure as Commander-in-Chief.

A third factor explaining the neglect of Wavell is the inability of historians to penetrate the shroud of obscurity surrounding his remote personality. Wavell's renowned taciturnity and stoicism have been interpreted as some sort of phlegmatic detachment from his soldiers and ongoing events. But this analysis, as will be seen, is incorrect. In many respects, his personality was self-contradictory: apparent aloofness, discomfiture and boredom, in public, contrasting sharply with wit, warmth and vivacity when in the company of his family and friends.

Fourthly, most of the senior commanders of the Second World War, on both sides of the Atlantic, took the opportunity within the first two decades after the war to present their own accounts of themselves and their actions, either in autobiographies or memoirs, or by authorising others to edit their journals or reminiscences. Many of these chronicles were written for purposes of self-justification and/or self-aggrandisement. Wavell, who was well-equipped to do so, never wrote a word to cast aspersions on his superiors or to exonerate himself of any accusation. The simple yet eloquent comment made recently by an officer who first met Wavell in the 1930s highlights this assertion: '[Wavell was] a very fine soldier who got a raw deal but never held this against his masters'. No one could have served the Prime Minister, or Great Britain, more loyally or more selflessly. As a result, Wavell's reputation and accomplishments in the Middle East have fallen prey to, or have been further adumbrated by, those who have better publicised their own activities and martial achievements.

A final factor is the existence, at a minimum, of a conscious effort by others to denigrate, or at least obfuscate, Wavell's military accomplishments in the Middle East. This appears to be the method which has been, and is still being used, by the 'Churchillians', in an attempt to enhance further the inviolability of their mentor, 'the greatest Englishman of them all'. Wavell, of course, was not without fault. A number of studies written about him and his Middle East campaigns have accurately shown as much, although each study remains flawed, for one or more of the reasons already cited.

Biographical sketches of Wavell began to appear towards the end of 1941, in the wake of his great victories in North Africa and Italian East Africa. However, at a time when public sentiment had been deeply stirred by those victories after a period of intense gloom, during which Britain's lone stand could only be seen by many as a forlorn hope, the early studies tended to verge, understandably, on the brink of hagiography. Yet it is a measure of the impact of Wavell's achievements upon the morale of the home front that one finds Clement Atlee, Deputy Prime Minister in Churchill's war government, writing some years later:

People sometimes forget, in thinking of the later victory at EI Alamein, how greatly Wavell's victory over the Italians raised our spirits when things everywhere were very dark.

Cyril Falls, when reviewing Major General RJ Collins's admirable, if rather subjective, Lord Wavell (1883–1941): A Military Biography, recalls how Field Marshal Jan Smuts, that close wartime colleague of Winston Churchill and stalwart supporter of Wavell, had said in a rather similar vein:

The early African campaigns 'were the first rays of sunlight to pierce the gloom of those early years of the war'. That is something which ought never to be forgotten of Lord Wavell.

Perhaps the greatest soldier produced by Britain in this century, Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, in his Foreword to Robert Woollcombe's The Campaigns of Wavell, 1939– 1943, left us in no doubt of the measure of the man:

It is my fervent hope that the account of the campaigns of Wavell may be extensively read and deeply studied, so that the true stature of this very great man may be fully appreciated, and that adequate feelings of gratitude may be engendered for the immense services he rendered to his country under conditions of appalling difficulty.

Whilst the early studies contained much that was of very great value, despite their subjectivity, they inevitably became outdated, written as they were either very close to the events described or well before the release of a wealth of invaluable new material under the terms of the Public Records Act 1967. This measure made available a host of declassified government and military documents under what became known as 'the thirty year rule'. Some of the most significant of these were those relating to the impact of 'Ultra' (the decryption of German signal traffic) upon the higher control of the war–a subject which had previously been a closely guarded secret.

Sadly Ronald Lewin's study, The Chief: Field Marshal Lord Wavell, Commander-in-Chief and Viceroy, 1939–1947, published in 1980, while taking full advantage of the new material and presenting a study that was not hero-worshipping, suffered a number of blemishes, so that it did not live up to its publisher's claim on the dustjacket that it was 'the definitive treatment of the subject Wavell'. Something more was clearly required if a full and fair assessment was to be made of Wavell's achievements as a fighting commander in the first two years of the Second World War. To provide that assessment has been the aim of this book and of the author's doctoral thesis, upon which the book is based.

To attain that goal, primary source material has included documents from the British Foreign Office and War Office; Ultra-based intelligence and the minutes and correspondence of the Prime Minister; unpublished papers and the oral reminiscences of leading British Government, Army, Navy, and Royal Air Force and Dominion personnel; and the recollections of private soldiers, non-commissioned officers and junior officers who served in the Middle East during Wavell's tour of command. Army Headquarters and unit war diaries, operation orders, and after-action reports have all been scrutinised. To enhance the objectivity of the study, it also covers narratives of events and perceptions from 'the other side of the hill', as reflected in a number of monographs written by former senior officers of the German Army and government officials under the auspices of the Operational History (German) Section of the European Theater Historical Division, United States Army, immediately after the end of the Second World War. Official Histories and other published primary sources have, of course, been used to full advantage. In no previous study of Wavell has this whole range of sources been used in conjunction.

A multitude of secondary source material has been juxtaposed with the primary sources described above. Much of this is in the form of contemporary articles from professional British military journals, invaluably and accurately reflecting the often ephemeral opinions and concepts of those, including Wavell, who were involved in the modernisation and mechanisation of the British Army in the years between the Wars.

Few people today realise the immensity of the strain imposed upon Wavell as a result of the inherent responsibilities he bore, not only as military commander but also as chief diplomat and principal logistician. Yet it is impossible to maintain objectivity and balance in any assessment of Wavell's accomplishments as Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, without taking account of the omnipresent military and political exigencies and emotional pressure under which he laboured. The author has sought to keep this factor in the forefront of his mind in the process of analysis and evaluation.

In considering Wavell's achievements, this has been done within the framework of the resources available not only to him but also to his opponents. Where he suffered a defeat, the reasons for this and for his enemy's success have been analysed. His personality and attributes, in success as well as in adversity–the keys to the proper understanding of Wavell the soldier and Wavell the man–and their impact upon his performance as Commander-in-Chief, have been continuously studied and assessed. His generalship has been appraised against those standards which may be seen as the most stringent posited in the twentieth century–his own Lees Knowles Lectures on 'Generals and Generalship', delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1939–five months before he became Commander-in-Chief, Middle East.

Within this book, the chapters have been arranged chronologically, in so far as this has been possible in the light of the simultaneous conduct of numerous campaigns during 1941. At times, it has also been necessary to arrange chapters topically. The Source Notes and Bibliography have had to be kept within the bounds imposed by a normal book. However, the extensive and meticulous documentation of the doctoral thesis upon which the book is based is available to the student in the University of California's University Research Library at 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, California 90024 USA where the dissertation is lodged. Based mainly upon a large number of unpublished primary source documents, correspondence and interviews, the 1586 endnotes alone run to 241 manuscript pages.

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Wavell certainly deserves a better fate than the position of relative obscurity grudgingly conceded him by the Churchillians and to which he has been relegated by history. It is to be hoped that this study will prove that Wavell's accomplishments as Commander-inChief, Middle East during the stormy years of 1939–1941 entitle him to be seen as a general who ranks as the most farsighted and able of all the British Army commanders of the Second World War. The seeds of military preparedness and ultimate victory in the Middle East, sown and nurtured by Wavell, were later reaped by generals who took and received the lion's share of the public recognition and credit. 'He [Wavell] was unlucky, in that he was a senior commander at the start of the war, when things were not going too well: it was the younger ones who picked up the prizes nearer the end', observed an officer recently who had known Wavell well before the outbreak of the Second World War.

The self-effacing Wavell never personally desired publicity, courted recognition or sought fame. His attitude towards self-promotion was very similar to that of Field Marshal Viscount Allenby, of whom Wavell himself wrote '[he] was the last man who would have cared what his biographer wrote of him, or, indeed, that his biography should have been written at all'. Whatever his feelings about himself may have been, Wavell cared deeply about the health and well-being of his soldiers. Captain Alec Walkling, who served in the Middle East under Wavell's command, wrote to his wife in June 1943, describing his reaction to the film Desert Victory, which recorded the operations of the Eighth Army under Montgomery and had recently been released:

One thing before I start. Desert Victory paid homage to the men of the Eighth Army as it was at El Alamein and afterwards–it forgot to pay homage to the thin red line which held against vastly superior armies for two years and kept them away from the Nile when mail took months, comforts were few, and numbers were still fewer. I hope and trust that they have not been forgotten.

This book has been written to elucidate and evaluate the generalship of Wavell, the Commander-in-Chief of that 'thin red line'–and to ensure that he, and they, are not forgotten.

CHAPTER 2

Born to Serve: The Years of Apprenticeship and Burgeoning Experience 1883–1918

Archibald Percival Wavell was the son and grandson of professional soldiers. His family name can be traced back to one William de Vauville of Normandy, who came to England with the Conqueror in 1066. That name became gradually anglicised over the centuries until in 1478 we find the first of eleven Wavells to become a Scholar of Winchester College. The family became closely associated with both the city and college of Winchester and a number of Wavells served as Mayors of the city in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Wavell's father, Archibald Graham Wavell, was a Major in the Norfolk Regiment when his son was born on 5 May 1883. However, in order to save his family from the privations of a tour in Burma, he 'exchanged' with an officer of the 2nd Battalion The Black Watch who was anxious to serve abroad for financial reasons. So began a family link with the Royal Highland Regiment which was to last for three generations. From his preparatory school, Summer Fields at Oxford, where he showed himself not only to be a keen games player but also to have rare powers of detachment and concentration, a natural talent for literature, and a quiet, reserved, but kindly, character marked by quite a sense of humour—all characteristics which would remain and play a significant part in his remarkable life–Wavell won a scholarship to Winchester in 1896. This was evidence enough of his marked intellectual ability.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Foreword Field Marshal Lord Carver ix

List of Plates x

List of Maps and Figures xii

Glossary of Abbreviations and Code Names xiv

Acknowledgements xxi

1 Introduction 1

2 Born to Serve: The Years of Apprenticeship and Burgeoning Experience, 1883-1918 7

3 Journeyman Soldier and Consummate Commander, 1919-1939 20

4 Bellicose Non-Belligerency, August 1939-June 1940 39

5 Italy Declares War and Wavell's First Clash With Churchill, June-December 1940 67

6 Operation 'Compass', December 1940-February 1941 96

7 Greek Diversion, February-April 1941 132

8 Italian East Africa, January-May 1941 168

9 Breach of the Western Flank, April 1941 184

10 Western Desert, Iraq, Syria and Crete, May-July 1941 206

11 The Generalship of Wavell: An Assessment 244

Epilogue 271

Source Notes 273

Bibliography 303

Index 315