Three Kings

General Archibald Wavell was a singularly important man in the hierarchy of British war plans late in 1940. After a wave of bitter reversals, it was his theater that would have the honor of launching the first counteroffensive against the Axis forces, and much was riding on its outcome. The British had been looking for some way to get back on their feet after the hard knockdowns they had suffered in the early rounds with Germany. The most recent setback at Gibraltar was a hard right cross to the chin that had been delivered by Operation Felix, a blow that evicted the Royal Navy from one of its oldest and most important bases. The whole of the Western Mediterranean was now lost, with enemies on every shore until the tempestuous waves washed ashore over a thousand miles to the east on the tiny island of Malta.

Wavell, the nominal Commander of all British Operations in the Middle East, was soon to be thrust into the fire of war, with threats on every side. On his immediate western front The Italian 10th Army under General Rodolfo Graziani had crept across the wire into Egypt, setting up a series of armed camps as they came, and pushing all the way toSidiBarani on the coast. Behind him, across the searing deserts of Jordan and Arabia, the coup de tat staged by the Golden Square and Rashid Ali in Iraq was now threatening R.A.F. Habbiniyah and the British Petroleum oil concerns near Basra. North on the borders of Palestine, a hostile Vichy French presence in Syria threatened to become a danger to his right flank if reinforced by Germany, and the wolves were coming, slowly devouring the Balkans as columns of tanks and infantry pressed a relentless attack that had swept all the way to Greece as the bitter year of 1940 began to wither and die.

With threats on every side, and a supply line that stretched over 12,000 miles, all the way around the Cape of Good Hope, Wavell was now at the center of a gathering storm, and with impossible orders issued from Whitehall-attack!

Churchill had promised him more armor, sent the 6th Australian Division, and troops from India had been rushed to fill the ranks, yet with no more than five divisions, he was opposed by two times that number in General Graziani’s force, and also faced with an active war front to his south in the Horn of Africa. It was a typical case of finding oneself surrounded by threats on every compass heading, and something had to be done.

The solution would be to take on the most imminent threat, and turn his own compass needle due West against the encroaching Italians. He knew Whitehall was correct in prodding him to action. To sit there and wait for his enemies to slowly invest Egypt in a stranglehold of steel would invite disaster. And so, on this day he met with his Western Desert Force commander, Lieutenant General Richard O’Connor, to see what they could do about the situation.

“We’re to take the matter in hand,” he said to O’Connor, a quiet, self-effacing man who had recently been promoted from command of the backwater 7th Division in Palestine, the same division where he had served as Brigade Signals Officer in the First Battle of Ypres during WWI. Wavell had been there, losing sight in his left eye in that battle. There was no scar, no eye patch. The rugged handsome face still seemed unblemished, but the liability bothered him at times, particularly when the desert sand would blow on the fitful wind.

Wavell was no stranger to the desert. He had braved its tempestuous whirlwinds in his youth, standing with the fabled Lawrence of Arabia when he made his triumphant entry into Jerusalem at the end of that campaign in WWI.

Now Wavell looked to General O’Connor to be his foil in the battle that was looming like a threatening sandstorm in the Western Desert. Mentioned in Dispatches nine times during that war, O’Connor rose steadily in the ranks, achieving his Brigadier post quite early. No stranger to the suffering of war himself, O’Connor’s experience in WWI, where grueling hardship and attrition style battles were the order of the day, led him to believe strongly in a new concept of maneuver in battle. So it was that he soon found service in a new unit pioneering theories of armored warfare between the wars, 5 Brigade under the command of J.F.C. Fuller, an early tank warfare expert.

Theory and practice of combined arms was only then emerging, a craft the Germans seemed to have mastered instinctively. Another General who had literally read Fuller’s book was a man named Heintz Guderian, who had just ably demonstrated his mastery of the craft in the lightning Blitzkrieg across France.