Field-Marshal Earl Wavell - Generals And Generalship

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Text originally published in 1941 under the same title.

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GENERALS AND GENERALSHIP:

THE LEES KNOWLES LECTURES DELIVERED AT TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE IN 1939

BY

GENERAL SIR ARCHIBALD WAVELL

WITH A FOREWORD BY

GENERAL SIR JOHN DILL

Chief of the Imperial General Staff

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER

GENERAL WAVELL learnt his soldiering in his family regiment, The Black Watch, with which he served in South Africa and in India. Before the last Great War he passed top into the Staff College, and was attached to the Russian Army. When war broke out he first saw service in France, where he was severely wounded, and afterwards on a mission to the Russian Army.

In 1917, when General Sir Edmund Allenby took over command of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, Lieut.-Colonel Wavell was appointed Liaison Officer between his command and the War Office. In that capacity he took back Allenbys plan for the offensive known as the Third Battle of Gaza to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, for the approval of Whitehall.

In the following year there was a reorganization of staffs in Palestine and he was appointed Chief General Staff officer (Brigadier-General, General Staff) to Sir Philip Chetwode, commanding the XX Corps. He afterwards became B.G.G.S. to General Allenby himself, giving up that appointment in 1920.

After further service in Cologne and at the War Office, he was on the staff of the 3rd Division, where he trained for war under the original and brilliant mind of General Burnett-Stuart. He was next commander of the 6th Brigade, known as the Experimental Infantry Brigade. After this he went on half pay for a year, during which he compiled the latest version of Field Service Regulations. He also made a reconnaissance of the oil pipe-line to Haifa. He had been informed that he was to be appointed Commandant of the Imperial Defence College, but was given command of the 2nd Division at Aldershot instead. During the period of this command he attended the Russian manuvres. In the command both of the Experimental Brigade and of the 3rd Division he was succeeded by General Wilson.

In 1937 he succeeded General Dill in command of the Troops in Palestine and Trans-Jordan, where the High Commissioner was his friend General Wauchope, the present Colonel of his Regiment. After nine months there he returned to England to succeed General Burnett-Stuart in the Southern Command at Salisbury. In July 1939 he became Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, until June 1941, when he was appointed C.-in-C. India.

The greater part of these lectures was delivered to the Royal United Services Institution as long ago as 1936. In their present form the lectures were delivered at Cambridge in the first two months of 1939.

I FEEL it a privilege to be able to say how warmly I welcome the publication of these lectures by General Wavell. They show very clearly how he and the army under his direction have gained their great victories in Africa and why they will gain others. For these lectures, though delivered over two years ago, could only have been delivered by a man capable of winning and keeping the confidence of all men in all walks of life. They deal with the relationships between man and man, on which must be founded both the success of an army and the success of a whole nation at war. I am glad indeed to think that they will have a wide audience, and particularly among soldiers, for whom they have deep lessons.

When General Wavell delivered these lectures not one in a hundred of his fellow-countrymen had ever heard of him. Today there is not one in a million who has not heard of him. But I am confident that if the victorious general of today had to give his own reasons for his victory he would repeat word for word the principles enunciated by the general so little known to the public two years ago.

JOHN DILL

WHEN you did me the honour to ask me to deliver this series of lectures I chose, instead of a campaign or a period of history, as I believe has been customary, to inflict upon you some general observations on generals and generalship. I felt that certain points which I wished to put before you with regard to the study of military history could thus be better illustrated than in the relation of some particular campaign. Comparatively few of you are perhaps likely to become generals; but many of you are likely to suffer, perhaps even to triumph, under generals; and all of you are likely to have opportunity to criticize generals. I should like your criticism to be as well informed as possible. Generalship, and especially British generalship, has had a bad Press since the late War; and I am afraid that the public idea of a British general is still represented to many by a popular poster of the day calling attention to the merits of Oxo I am not proposing to deliver to you an apologia for generals, but to explain the qualities necessary for a general and the conditions in which he has to exercise his calling.

While I was trying to define to myself the essential qualifications of a higher commander, I looked back in history to see how these qualifications had been defined in the past. I read a number of expositions, by various writers, of the virtues, military or otherwise, that were considered necessary for a general. I found only one that seemed to me to go to the real root of the matter; it is attributed to a wise man named Socrates. It reads as follows:

The general must know how to get his men their rations and every other kind of stores needed for war. He must have imagination to originate plans, practical sense and energy to carry them through. He must be observant, untiring, shrewd; kindly and cruel; simple and crafty; a watchman and a robber; lavish and miserly; generous and stingy; rash and conservative. All these and many other qualities, natural and acquired, fie must have. He should also, as a matter of course, know his tactics; for a disorderly mob is no more an army than a heap of building materials is a house.

Now the first point that attracts me about that definition is the order in which it is arranged. It begins with the matter of administration, which is the real crux of generalship, to my mind; and places tactics, the handling of troops in battle, at the end of his qualifications instead of at the beginning, where most people place it. Also it insists on practical sense and energy as two of the most important qualifications; while the list of the many and contrasted qualities that a general must have rightly gives an impression of the great field of activity that generalship covers and the variety of the situations with which it has to deal, and the need for adaptability in the make-up of a general.