Auchinleck replaces Wavell

In June 1941, a few days after the failure of Operation Battleaxe, the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, decided to remove the Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Archibald Wavell. He did not sack him, however, but had him exchange posts with the Commander-in-Chief in India, General Claude Auchinleck. Wavell, who for a year had been running several campaigns at once, from Libya to Iraq, was to rest in Delhi, and to Cairo would come a commander who, as Churchill put it, would bring “a new eye and a new hand”. The change was the most important personnel decision in the British army in 1941. It coincided with Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, which transformed the whole strategic situation in the Middle East.

The dates: 21 and 22 June and 5 July

The change of command is often dated to 22 June. The telegram in which Churchill informed Wavell of the decision is dated 21 June, according to his memoirs; that same day the Prime Minister asked the Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow (Victor Hope), to pass on to Auchinleck an order to leave for Cairo at once. Wavell read the telegram in Cairo – in the morning, before breakfast, according to his biographers – when his chief of staff, General Arthur Smith, brought it to him. Some authors date the change itself to 21 June, because that was when the decision was taken. Formally, Wavell remained in command for another two weeks. Auchinleck flew into Cairo on 1 July and took over command on 5 July 1941, and Wavell left for India. The decision was kept secret until both men had taken up their new posts.

The Prime Minister’s telegram

“I have come to the conclusion that public interest will best be served by the appointment of General Auchinleck to relieve you in command of the armies of the Middle East,” Churchill wrote on 21 June. The Prime Minister assured Wavell that he had admired the way he had held command “both in success and adversity”, and that the victories associated with his name would go down in the history of the British Army. “I feel, however, that after the long strain you have borne a new eye and a new hand are required in this most seriously threatened theatre.” He called Wavell “incomparably the best” candidate for Commander-in-Chief in India. To Auchinleck he wrote briefly: he was to go to Cairo, relieve Wavell and concert with him common action against “the eastward movement of German armies which is clearly impending”.

Wavell, as Churchill relates after his biographer, replied calmly: “The Prime Minister is quite right. There ought to be a new eye and a new hand in this theatre.” Without protest he placed himself at the government’s disposal. To President Roosevelt Churchill explained the change more frankly, stipulating that this was not to be said in public: after the long strain Wavell was “tired”, and the theatre needed “a fresh eye and an unwearied hand”. In his memoirs he added that in London they had the impression that Wavell was “a tired man”, and perhaps also that they had “ridden the willing horse to death”.

Why Wavell had to go

Churchill never fully trusted Wavell. From their first meeting in August 1940 he had been irritated by the general’s taciturnity, which he took for a lack of fighting spirit. The winter victories over the Italians in Libya and East Africa changed this for a time, but the spring brought a series of defeats. Within two weeks Rommel took Cyrenaica from the British, the corps sent to Greece had to be evacuated, and at the end of May Crete was abandoned. Churchill was displeased that more tanks had not been sent to the island. Over Iraq, Wavell opposed intervention until he was given an explicit order. The campaign ended in success and the surrender of Baghdad on 31 May, but London remembered that it had been achieved in the teeth of Wavell’s objections. Then came the dispute over Syria: according to the British official history Wavell judged his position impossible and asked to be relieved if his view was not accepted. Churchill wrote that he did not take up this offer of resignation at the time, but did not reject it either. On 8 June the invasion of Syria and Lebanon began, an operation Wavell had long had to be persuaded to undertake.

In the end the matter was settled by Battleaxe, which Wavell undertook under pressure from the Prime Minister although he doubted it would succeed. Churchill judged that the operation had been badly coordinated with the Tobruk garrison and that the staff in Cairo had not properly prepared for the reception of the tanks from the Tiger convoy. As General Hastings Ismay recalled, the collapse of the desert front in April had already affected Wavell deeply; the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, is said to have remarked that the general had “aged ten years in a night”. Churchill acknowledged years later that a single commander on whom five or six theatres of operations had fallen at once had been subjected to a strain such as few soldiers had ever borne. Historians point out that some of Wavell’s defeats stemmed from decisions taken in London, above all the expedition to Greece.

Why Auchinleck

Auchinleck was an officer of the Indian Army, with which he had spent almost his entire career. Churchill had had reservations about him since the spring of 1940, when Auchinleck commanded the land forces at Narvik: he seemed too cautious and inclined to make action dependent on the fulfilment of “minimum requirements”. Churchill was, however, impressed by his bearing and character, and very good reports reached the Prime Minister from Southern Command in England, which Auchinleck had taken over in the summer of 1940. Iraq weighed most heavily. When a pro-German government seized power in Baghdad in April 1941, Wavell did not want to disperse his forces, whereas Auchinleck at once offered to send troops from India, and as early as 18 April an Indian infantry brigade landed at Basra. Churchill remembered this readiness. He concluded that in Auchinleck he would gain a new, fresh figure for the Middle East, while Wavell would recover his strength in India. In London, as he wrote, the decision met with no opposition from either ministers or soldiers.

A new order in Cairo

The change of commander was part of a wider reorganisation. At the beginning of June Churchill had already created in Cairo the new post of Intendant-General, which went to General Robert Haining; he was to take over supply and the administration of the rear from the Commander-in-Chief. The matter was hastened by a telegram sent to his father from Cairo on 7 June by the Prime Minister’s son, Randolph Churchill, who was then serving in the desert: he urged that a member of the War Cabinet be sent out to take over political direction. On 29 June the King appointed the President of the Board of Trade, Oliver Lyttelton, Minister of State in the Middle East, with a seat in the War Cabinet. Lyttelton was to take over the matters that had hitherto burdened the soldiers: relations with the Free French and with the Emperor of Ethiopia, the administration of occupied territories, propaganda and economic warfare.

Auchinleck later wrote appreciatively in his despatch on operations of the “solid foundations” left by his predecessor and of the immensity of the problems Wavell had faced in a command in which the British and Allied troops spoke some forty languages.

Its place in the war

Auchinleck immediately came under the same pressure as Wavell. Churchill expected a swift resumption of the offensive in the desert while the Germans were busy in Russia, whereas the new commander judged that Syria, Iraq and Cyprus must first be secured and the army rebuilt. The dispute lasted all summer, and at the end of July Auchinleck flew to London to defend his position. The offensive, Operation Crusader, began only on 18 November 1941 and brought the relief of Tobruk. In India, in August 1941, Wavell directed the British part of the invasion of Iran, and after the outbreak of war with Japan he held command in Asia during the most difficult months. Auchinleck lasted a little over a year in the Middle East: in August 1942, after the loss of Tobruk and the retreat to El Alamein, Churchill removed him too. In June 1943, when Wavell became Viceroy, Auchinleck returned to the post of Commander-in-Chief in India. The two generals whom the Prime Minister had made exchange places in June 1941 thus shared the same fate: both were judged too cautious by a politician who demanded faster victories of them than their forces allowed.