Archibald Wavell, Lord Wavell

Military career and appointment

Wavell had a long and distinguished military career before becoming Viceroy. He commanded British forces in the Middle East at the outset of the Second World War, leading the successful early campaign against Italian forces in North Africa in 1940-41, before reverses against German forces under Erwin Rommel and a subsequent transfer of command. He was then made Commander-in-Chief, India, and in that capacity oversaw the difficult early campaigns against Japan in Burma. He was appointed Viceroy in 1943 in succession to Lord Linlithgow, moving from a military to a civil office at a moment of acute crisis, arriving in India as the Bengal famine of 1943 was at its height. He is generally credited by historians with taking more decisive action than his predecessor to organize military-assisted relief and grain distribution, including the direct involvement of army transport and personnel in moving food into the affected province, which helped check the famine's worst effects during the following months, though the crisis had already caused very large loss of life before his arrival and its causes, including wartime administrative failures, the loss of Burmese rice imports after the Japanese occupation of Burma, and restrictions on grain movement between Indian provinces, remained a matter of dispute between the imperial and provincial governments and, later, historians.

Political negotiations

Wavell inherited a political landscape frozen since the failure of the Cripps Mission in 1942 and the subsequent imprisonment of the Congress leadership after the Quit India movement. He pressed London for authority to reopen negotiations, and in June-July 1945 convened the Simla Conference, releasing the Congress leaders from detention to attend and bringing together Congress and Muslim League figures to discuss an expanded, more representative Executive Council as a step toward self-government. The conference collapsed over the Muslim League's insistence, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, on the exclusive right to nominate all Muslim members to the council, a demand Congress, which itself included prominent Muslim members such as Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, would not accept, since it would have amounted to conceding the League's claim to sole representation of Indian Muslims before any such claim had been tested. Following the 1945-46 central and provincial elections, which showed Congress and the League each dominant among their respective communities and hardened the sense that India's two largest parties spoke for two largely separate electorates, Wavell hosted the Cabinet Mission sent from Britain in early 1946, comprising Pethick-Lawrence, Stafford Cripps and A. V. Alexander. The mission proposed a complex three-tier federal structure intended to hold a united India together by grouping provinces and limiting the powers of the central government; the plan was initially accepted in principle by both Congress and the League but broke down within months over differing interpretations of compulsory grouping and of an interim government's composition. The League subsequently withdrew its earlier acceptance and called for Direct Action Day on 16 August 1946, which triggered severe communal rioting, most notably in Calcutta, and set off a cycle of retaliatory violence that spread to Bihar, Noakhali and elsewhere over the following months.

The Breakdown Plan and replacement

As communal violence spread through 1946, Wavell prepared what became known as the "Breakdown Plan," envisaging a phased British withdrawal from India by stages if a negotiated political settlement could not be reached, intended partly as a fallback to avoid British forces being caught in escalating civil conflict. The Attlee government in London judged Wavell's approach too slow and insufficiently decisive, and in early 1947 replaced him with Lord Mountbatten, who was given a mandate to accelerate the transfer of power, ultimately advancing the target date for independence to August 1947. Wavell's private diaries and correspondence, published after his death, offer a detailed and often critical account of the final years of British rule and of the leading Indian and British political figures with whom he dealt, and are regarded by historians as an important primary source for the period despite Wavell's own removal before the endgame he had helped set in motion.