WAVELL, LORD

WAVELL, LORD (1883–1950), viceroy of India (June 1943–March 1947). Field Marshal Lord Archibald Wavell was commander-in-chief of British India's forces prior to his appointment as Britain's penultimate viceroy of India. Born at Colchester, the son of an army officer who first brought him to India as a child, Wavell was educated in Winchester College and also graduated from Sandhurst, returning to serve in India at the age of twenty. At the start of World War I, he worked in the War Office, but was soon shipped over to fight in Ypres, Belgium, where he lost an eye.

Wavell was assigned to Field Marshal Allenby's staff in 1918, and two decades later to the command of British forces in the Middle East, but he failed to anticipate the swift power of General Erwin Rommel's tank corps, and was ordered in June 1941 to switch his command in North Africa with Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck's in India. Since Wavell's India command included the British 18th division, which in the following year surrendered Singapore to the Japanese, he was blamed by many for that loss as well. His battlefield wounds and losses appear to have predisposed Wavell for the rest of his life to long, lugubrious interludes of silence. Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi distrusted him; others considered him too "wooden."

Prime Minister Winston Churchill chose Wavell to be India's viceroy in 1943, when Lord Linlithgow finally stepped down after six years at that post, precisely for all the reasons that India's Congress leaders feared, mistrusted, and disliked him. Churchill wanted Wavell to hold the line against any and all political demands from Congress for concessions of any kind as long as the war lasted. He felt certain, of course, that good soldier Wavell agreed. But Wavell, whose intellectual interests included poetry and the classics, wanted, in fact, to try his hand at diplomacy, which as viceroy he thought only appropriate. He had ideas about bringing Mahatma Gandhi and M. A. Jinnah together for a summit meeting at his vice-regal mansion in Simla, hoping to persuade them to work out their differences and agree to a new formula he toyed with for Hindus and Muslims sharing power. Student of Herodotus and Thucydides that he was, and knowing well from his own bitter experience the painful cost of all combat, Wavell hoped to bring peace to sorely troubled and conflicted India. But when Churchill heard of Wavell's idea, he vowed that only "over his dead body" should any approach to Gandhi be made during the war.

By the end of 1943, Bengal's dreadful famine had claimed more than one and a half million lives. Wavell tried his best to secure shipments of grain to relieve that starving province, knowing as he did that 6 million tons of wheat were floating nearby inside a fleet of British storage vessels, their holds full of food for "emergency" British military needs only, as Churchill's tight-fisted minister of war transport, Baron Leathers, coldly informed Wavell.

In the summer of 1945, after Germany surrendered, Wavell released all his Congress prisoners from jail and convened the Simla summit he had dreamed of holding two years before. Gandhi, Jinnah, and Nehru all went up, as did lesser party leaders, but no agreement could be reached. Then Britain held its first postwar elections and Churchill lost his seat, as did most of his Tory colleagues. Prime Minister Clement Attlee's Labour Party moved into London's halls of power, determined to end Britain's exorbitant imperial expenditures as quickly as possible. Now, however, instead of appearing too eager to launch a plan of peace and political reform, Wavell proved too cautious and outdated for both Attlee and Sir Richard Cripps, Attlee's Chancellor of the Exchequer, who looked for a much younger and more genial viceroy to effect the swift transfer of power they had in mind. Their choice was dashing Dickie Mountbatten, the king's cousin.

Stanley Wolpert

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mansergh, N., and E. W. R. Lumby, eds. The Transfer of Power, 1942–7, vol. IV: The Bengal Famine and the New Viceroyalty, 15 June–31 August 1944; vol. V: The Simla Conference, Background and Proceedings, 1 September 1944–28 July 1945; vol. VI: The Post-War Phase: New Moves by the Labour Government, 1 August 1945–22 March 1946; vol. VII: The Cabinet Mission, 23 March–29 June 1946; vol. VIII: The Interim Government, 3 July–1 November 1946; vol. IX: The Fixing of a Time Limit, 4 November 1946–22 March 1947. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1973–1980.

Moon, Penderel, ed. Wavell: The Viceroy's Journal. London: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Wolpert, Stanley. Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.