Archibald Wavell

Archibald Wavell won Britain's first victories of the Second World War and was removed for losing the next battles. Born in 1883 into an army family, he was educated at Winchester and Sandhurst, served in South Africa and India, lost his left eye at Ypres in 1915, and spent time as a liaison officer with the Russian army, learning the language. He was an unusually literary soldier who compiled an anthology of poems he knew by heart, and an unusually silent one, which did not help him with Churchill. He was made commander-in-chief Middle East in 1939, responsible for an enormous theatre with very few troops. When Italy declared war in 1940 he was outnumbered several times over in Egypt. Operation Compass, launched in December as a five-day raid, destroyed the Italian Tenth Army and took Cyrenaica, capturing some 130,000 prisoners for a few thousand casualties. His forces simultaneously destroyed the Italian empire in East Africa and restored Haile Selassie to Ethiopia. The position then collapsed. Churchill ordered troops to Greece, which failed; Rommel arrived in Africa and drove the weakened force back; Crete was lost; and the counterattacks Churchill demanded, Brevity and Battleaxe, failed against a stronger enemy. He was replaced by Auchinleck in July 1941 and sent to India, where he presided over the fall of Singapore and Burma. He was Viceroy of India from 1943, handled the Bengal famine by finally using the army to move grain, and was replaced by Mountbatten in 1947. He died in 1950.

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