Archibald Wavell was an extremely able soldier and administrator (as well as an intellectual, a lover of poetry and speaker of Russian) who, from just before the outbreak of World War II until the two years immediately following it, occupied positions of the highest military and political importance (General Officer Commanding Palestine and Transjordan, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Middle East, Command-in Chief, India, Viceroy of India). His reputation throughout this time was of a magnitude which made it extremely difficult for his superiors to dispense with his services – even when he was not too obviously triumphant – or, moreover, when leading politicians, Churchill and Attlee among others, did not always find his personality to their taste. Wavell's big problem in the political jungle (as Adrian Fort's most readable and eminently sensible biography shows) was that he lacked both a desire for and an ability to promote his reputation by a process of what today is known as ‘spin’, in contrast to Montgomery and Mountbatten, for example; two men who were destined to follow in his footsteps and in many respects reaped what he had sown. It is interesting that this trait of modesty, directness and brevity was shared with Wavell's fellow Wykehamist and contemporary, Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, a hero strangely unappreciated by his masters. Adrian Fort reveals but one rare example of a Wavell self-promotion (or, rather, a request for promotion by way of Churchill) when, following his appointment to the supreme command in India, with all its enormous lateral responsibilities, he asked to be appointed a Field Marshal: and one must assume that he only did this because he was convinced that the added stature was essential to what he was being asked to do.

Another trait, and an odd one in a commander as elevated as Wavell, was a marked reluctance to sack subordinates even when their faults were all too apparent. Adrian Fort is probably right in pointing to the dangerous survival in command in Cyrenaica of Philip Neame when in fact he had lost Wavell's confidence: he also lost his way while driving unescorted effectively behind enemy lines – in a conspicuous white Cadillac – along with surely the best British field commander of the time, Sir Richard O'Connor, so that the two generals were scooped up by the Germans on 6 April 1941.

Not long after this episode, Wavell was removed from the Egyptian command and exchanged places more or less as Commander-in-Chief in India with Sir Claude Auckinleck. This post involved much more than India. Wavell was soon to have supreme responsibility, for example, for the defence of Malaya against the Japanese, and here again his reluctance to sack may (or, possibly in that situation which was inherently hopeless, may not) have had serious consequences. Wavell visited Singapore in October 1941 when he concluded that the defences, and those who planned them, were manifestly inadequate, and they had not been improved when he returned in early January 1942 after war had broken out with Japan: but he did not replace any of the commanders (Percival and others) as to whose failing he was in no doubt. Adrian Fort notes that Wavell's understanding of the needs of the defence of Singapore was essentially correct and he suggests that, perhaps, had he decided to assume direct command himself he might, given the British local numerical superiority on the ground, just have held out long enough for allied naval rescue to arrive. The realities of Japanese naval strength at this point suggest to me that it was indeed unlikely that such a heroic decision would have achieved anything beyond depriving the British war effort of Wavell's services (unless, like MacArthur, he could have been lifted off at the last moment to abandon his forces to Japanese captivity, an unlikely eventuality if only because of Wavell's profound sense of duty).

Nowhere did Wavell's strange reluctance to resist orders or dispose of subordinates become more apparent than in the Greek adventure of early 1941. At this point Wavell's command had more or less cleared the Italians out of Eastern Africa and was well on the way to expelling them from all of Libya. At the turn of 1940–1941 the Cabinet in London, for a variety of reasons which were not all the direct concern of Wavell in Egypt, resolved upon a policy of sending military assistance to Greece, at that time under rather ineffective attack from Italy but potentially from Germany as well. Given the limited resources available to Wavell, such a policy could only weaken the British in Libya, where they were on the verge of a triumph with the potential of the total expulsion of the Italians from North Africa. Wavell, not surprisingly, opposed this step, not least because of the highly qualified welcome offered to it by the Greek authorities under the control of General Metaxas. The sudden death of Metaxas (29 January 1941) however produced a moderate change in the Greek attitude: his successor, General Papagos, showed greater enthusiasm, and this was enough for the British Cabinet to decide to put aside any consideration of Wavell's hesitations. The British would send forces from North Africa to reinforce the Greeks, which meant, there was no doubt in the minds of Wavell and his colleagues, a halt to the dramatic advances which the British had been making in Libya.

In the event there were two immediate consequences: the British disasters suffered in Greece and the arrival of German forces (with the charismatic Rommel) in North Africa. What is particularly interesting in the context of a life of Wavell is the light these events shed on his essential character, as Adrian Fort analyses with tact and skill. It is possible that some other commander would have resisted the Greek adventure with such vehemence that the Cabinet would have given way: Wavell, having made his protests, then loyally did his best to comply with the wishes of his masters, the true Imperial servant (in the Great Wykehamist tradition). It may well be also, that other leaders could have avoided the culmination of the Greek catastrophe, the loss of Crete to German air invasion. This could have involved, firstly, the replacement of the British commander on that island, the New Zealander Major-General Freyburg, and secondly, with or without Freyburg, ensuring the adequate defence of the Cretan airfields, notably Maleme. As Adrian Fort points out, in the context of the claim that such a defence would have revealed vital secret ‘Ultra’ information of which Freyburg was apparently in receipt, it did not require the resources of Bletchley Park to indicate the practical benefits of measures to neutralise landing grounds. Wavell refused to remove Freyburg from command in Crete. Freyburg, it may perhaps be significant, was like Neame a holder of the Victoria Cross.

The Greek failure, followed by the activities in Libya of the Africa Corps and Rommel, effectively ended, justly or unjustly, Wavell's command in Egypt, where he was replaced by Auchinleck (who also suffered a similar fate, which some commentators have considered undeserved – he did, after all, establish the basis for the Alamein victory). Wavell went on to India, first as commander-in-chief and then as Viceroy (1943–1945). His appointment as Viceroy was in some ways surprising, but in practice it was an admirable choice and some have argued that it was far, far, better than the selection of the other candidate favoured by the Cabinet, Lord Killearn (Sir Miles Lampson).

Viceroys in the last years of the British Raj were peculiar creatures living in great pomp and circumstance but with surprisingly little direct executive power. On the one hand they were in close communication with, and closely watched by, political London: on the other hand they were very much at the mercy both of their extremely experienced, and generally able, professional civil servants and the complex political forces indigenous to India. Wavell faced as Viceroy two key problems: first, the maintenance of India as an effective polity in the war against Japan, and second, devising the basis for a post war settlement in which India would inevitably acquire virtually effective independence in some form or other. As long as the war continued, Wavell played his part in keeping the various Indian factions either on board or, at least, adequately contained without undue repression. One cannot help feeling that the major Indian players were, on the whole, not too eager to precipitate a collapse of the British position (while publicly demonstrating their opposition to the Raj to their various consistutencies so long as the Japanese threat remained. Given the limited British resources, a really serious Indian resistance movement (perhaps something with echoes of 1857) could well have been far more devastating than any of the respectable Indian parties were prepared to contemplate. The post-war problem was far more difficult.

Adrian Fort wisely avoids a too detailed analysis of the independence issue culminating in Wavell's dismissal and the subsequent Partition of India presided over by his successor, the Last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, but he does deal competently enough with the essentials. It is probable that Wavell would have preferred to leave behind him a single Indian state as a truly self-governing dominion within the British commonwealth. In practice, from at least the end of 1944, he had come to appreciate that one possibility was the Partition of the old united Raj into Muslim and Hindu portions, a prospect which failed to amuse him not least because of his experience in Palestine in 1937 when a British project to partition the Mandate into Arab and Jewish entities gave immediate rise to an Arab rebellion (one of the leaders of which, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was the head of the great Palestinian Husayni clan and the uncle of Yasser Arafat, a later player in post-British Palestinian history). He saw clearly enough that Indian Partition could well lead to a similar, but larger scale, series of crises with no obvious solution in sight. Yet, by the end of 1945, with the failure of the attempted reconciliation of the two major Indian factions, Jinnah's Muslim League and Nehru's Congress, Wavell did consider very seriously indeed the question of Partition and, so the records show, outlined a possible scheme which anticipated in extraordinary detail that line of division which Sir Cyril Radcliffe is alleged to have devised in July-August 1947 and which was implemented by Mountbatten with a number of disastrous consequences which are with us still, and which, it is certain, would have caused Wavell no surprise.

Wavell, in fact, appreciated that there were a very limited number of possibilities of which Partition was the simplest to outline in any detail. The British could, of course, go on attempting to muddle through (which, indeed, might have worked for a while – though in the end would have been catastrophic – Britain faced enormous economic restraints combined with the hostility to the continuation of the Raj manifested by most elements of Indian, not to mention American, opinion). Or they could just pull out (as, indeed, they did in Palestine in 1948 following a Cabinet declaration of intent in February 1947, a declaration which, still technically on Wavell's watch, also related to India). Finally, it was just possible that some kind of ingenious, even if largely cosmetic, scheme might be cobbled together to preserve the illusion of continuing Indian unity, perhaps based upon a tweaking of the Government of India Act of 1935. Certainly, when Wavell in early 1946 discussed with London a number of possibilities, including Partition, one direct result was the Government decision to send a Cabinet mission to India which came up with just such a plan, the so-called Cabinet Mission Plan. Wavell's perceived failure by the end of 1946 to secure Indian agreement to this project was probably the major factor in London's decision to replace him as Viceroy by Mountbatten whose brief was to preserve a united India by some version of the Cabinet Mission Plan.

Here we can see one of the great ironies of South Asian history. The Cabinet Mission Plan was opposed by Jinnah who saw it as an obstacle to the creation of Pakistan. It was also, in fact, opposed by Congress. However Indian leaders like Patel, and possibly Nehru too, had also concluded, advised by a number of Indian members of the British Government of India, notably the constitutional specialist V. P. Menon, that it was not in the interest of effective Congress administration that some of the Muslim-majority areas of the old Raj should be included within the Congress sphere. Rather than the complexities of the Cabinet Mission Plan they preferred some form of Partition, albeit on a basis which gave the Muslims (Jinnah) as little as possible. Thus Mountbatten, whose outlook became very closely aligned to the Indian side, far from securing agreement for the Cabinet Mission Plan, ended up advocating more or less one of the possibilities that Wavell had been exploring, namely Partition. The story is complex and, perhaps wisely, not elaborated by Adrian Fort. The fact remains that Mountbatten, in the end, brought about one of the very solutions (on much the same timetable) that Wavell had considered in despatches which had been so ill received in London. Behind all this one can detect the hand of V.P. Menon who had advised both the penultimate and the ultimate Viceroys (and who was, as Wavell indeed came to appreciate, something of an Indian Congress mole within the Government of India). The final outcome was rather unfair to Wavell. My own interpretation of the documentary evidence (which is indeed abundant) is that in the end Wavell, advised by V. P. Menon as was Mountbatten, would have come up with much the same outcome as his successor: but that Wavell would perhaps have taken better precautions to avoid some of the nastier consequences of which his experiences of the proposed partition of Palestine in 1937 had warned him.

The conclusion, inescapable from Adrian Fort's narrative, is that Wavell was, in a very real sense as we have already noted, his own worst enemy not through failure of statesmanship and political analysis but, rather, through his inability to sell his ideas to the British politicians in London. The problem lay in Wavell's very decency, modesty (or reticence), and reluctance to challenge his masters beyond the norms of the ideals of service and duty.

Many military historians have recognised Wavell's true stature. Correlli Barnett, for example in his admirable The Desert Generals (1960) declared that “Wavell was one of the very greatest British soldiers of any age, and certainly the greatest in the Second World War”: yet there has been, relatively speaking, little written about him in the context of the massive historiography of World War II and the last years of the British Empire. Wavell never produced any autobiography, despite keeping very a detailed journal (of which only a selected portion relating to his Viceroyalty has been published – edited by Penderel Moon in 1973). John Connel's planned large-scale biography did not run beyond a first volume which ends before the Indian Command and Viceroyalty. Adrian Fort's excellent book, therefore, which covers Wavell's entire career, will certainly meet a very real need.