A giant's strength
PETER FLEMING
Wavell : Supreme Commander John Connell, completed And edited by Michael Roberts (Collins 45s) I do not know whether there is a collector's market in official stationery, whether connois- seurs vie with each other for possession of rare items like 'Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources, 1964 (slightly tea-stained)' and similar relics of the Groundnuts Scheme, the German occupation of the Channel Islands or the Provisional Government of Archangel (1918). If such a market does exist I would expect a sheet of notepaper headed ABDACOM to fetch a fairly high price.
ABDA presumably stood for Australian- British-Dutch-American, although the initials of the governments concerned read Animus in their first (and last) directive to the Supreme Commander. From his headquarters in Java Wave!l assumed, in mid-January 1942, opera- tional responsibility for an area extending, roughly, from the north coast of Australia to the southern frontier of Tibet. The flood-tide of disaster, which had already engulfed Hong Kong, the 'Prince of Wales' and the 'Repulset and most of the Malay Peninsula, continued to run strongly. Burma and New Guinea were in- vaded, Singapore surrendered on 15 February and it was clear that the Dutch East Indies would be swiftly overrun; ABDACOM, which even to the most sanguine armchair strategist had never looked like making sense, was dissolved six weeks after being created. Wavell returned to India, to direct the melancholy closing phases of the Burma campaign. He was now, though he did not know 11t7 on the threshold of his last year of active ser- vice. It was a sadly unrewarding period. In Delhi the administrative hierarchy, spending its first hot weather in the plains, accepted with an ill grace the need for a wartime sense of urgency. From London the Chiefs of Staff, for all the sympathy with which they con... sidered Wavell's manifold requirements, were unable to conceal from him the fact that he was back, as he had once been in Cairo, at the end of the queue. The 'Quit India' cam- paign burdened him with problems of internal. security, and there was a frightful famine in Bengal. As allies Chiang Kai-shek and 'Vinegar Joe' Stilwell were neither cooperative nor con- genial; and in 1943 the only offensive opera- tion he had the capacity to mount—an advance down the Arakan to take Akyab—was a failure. In June of that year he was offered, and accepted, the Viceroyalty.
In 1939 Wavell had defined 'the first essen- tial of a general' as 'the quality of robustness; the ability to stand the shocks of war.' On his last tour of duty, which he began after con- ducting ten separate and arduous campaigns in the Middle East, he displayed this quality in a marked degree. In the hectic days of ABDACOM the qpnditions under which he travelled about his far-flung command were such as to impose the maximum of strain If the ravaged airfields on which he landed were not actually being bombed, the chances were that, owing to a breakdown in wireless com- munications, there was no transport to meet him; on his last visit to Singapore, parts of which were in flames, he fell off a quay in the darkness and badly damaged his back. Jeeps, in 1942, were to the British a novelty so com- plete that Wavell's ADC, encountering his first, entered it in his-dialy as a `gepe: In Delhi, with the temperature over one hundred in the shade, I remember the sensation caused by the belated installation in the Commander-in- Chief's office of an air-conditioning machine.
It is fair to say that in the period covered by this book the responsibilities that Wavell shouldered, the odds he faced and the reverses he suffered would have broken a less stout- hearted commander. I saw a lot of him in some of the darkest of those days, and I never heard him make a complaint or an excuse, or show any sign of strain; he had a giant's strength.
John Connell had written all but the last two chapters of this book before his death; Brigadier Michael Roberts, who finished it and prepared it for the press, has done a workman- like job, but the maps are a very perfunctory selection.
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