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One of the many controversies in the history of the British army during the Second World War is Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s sacking of General Claude Auchinleck as commander-in-chief, Middle East in August 1942. During his year in command in the Middle East in 1941-42, Auchinleck had defeated the German-Italian army in Operation Crusader, but suffered a severe defeat at the Battle of Gazala, lost Tobruk with 30,000 prisoners going to the bag, and been forced to retreat back into Egypt. Auchinleck had stopped Rommel’s advance at the Alamein positions but his counterattacks in July 1942 had been ineffective. Churchill had had a difficult relationship with Auchinleck as he had been continually impatient for the British to take the offensive in the Western Desert; demands for early offensives that Auchinleck had resisted as impractical. Very shortly after the fighting had petered out at the Alamein lines, Churchill and General Alan Brooke, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, had flown out to Cairo to review the situation first-hand. Although Churchill described sacking Auchinleck as being “like killing a magnificent stag,” he nonetheless decided, with Brooke’s agreement, that Auchinleck had to go. Appointed theatre commander in Auchinleck’s place was Harold Alexander with Bernard Montgomery taking command of the Eighth Army and three months later winning the Battle of El Alamein, a victory that the prime minister said at the time represented, “not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Auchinleck’s life and career, including his sacking in August 1942, is studied in Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck by Evan McGilvray, a volume that included research in the Auchinleck papers deposited at the University of Manchester in its writing. McGilvray concludes that Auchinleck was a great soldier but he lacked the skills and experience to deal effectively with political leadership as commander-in-chief. It is a good biographical account.
Another of Churchill’s generals was Lieutenant-General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, a legendary figure in British military history. Pen & Sword has published a reprinting of de Wiart’s memoirs, Happy Odyssey. Churchill contributed a foreword to the book in which he called de Wiart “a model of chivalry and honour.”
An article on Carton de Wiart, “British Berserker,” by the author of this blog was published recently in Britain at War (August 2021). The magazine’s website is here and the article is available here.