A talent for losing

Wavell was a great soldier and a great man: wise, courageous, clear-headed, an inspired and inspiring leader, a pattern of integrity. It is peculiarly unfair that the three greatest tasks he undertook all ended in near total failure.

He made his name between the wars as a thoughtful, forward-looking soldier who did as much to prepare the British army for war as any of the men who were his titular superiors. On one thing all his officers agreed; that with him they were learning all the time. His basic principle, which may appear obvious but seemed daring, even heretical to the more hidebound commanders, was, ‘There is nothing fixed in war, except a few elementary rules of common sense.’ Training must be not for ‘a war’ but for ‘war’. He was not always right. After a visit to the Russian army in 1936 he concluded that paratroopers were ‘of doubtful tactical value’, a judgment he had cause to revise after the crushing defeat of the forces under his command in Crete. But he was more often right than most of his contemporaries.

His finest hour came at the end of 1940, with his brilliant victory in the Western Desert over numerically far superior Italian forces. Briefly he was a popular hero, even in the eyes of his severest critic, Winston Churchill. But then it all went wrong. In the Middle East he found himself forced to detach divisions he could not spare to a doomed campaign in Greece and then was unable to counter a German assault in North Africa. He was transferred to the post of Supreme Commander, South- West Pacific, just in time to be nominally responsible for a series of overwhelming defeats at the hands of the Japanese.