Wavell was ill, and did not immediately join the battalion as it transferred to British India in October that year; he instead left Cape Town for England on the SS Simla at the same time.

[49] Wavell was opposed to Zionism and thought that the Balfour Declaration had been a mistake as the promise of British support for a "Jewish national home" in Palestine led to militant anti-British feelings throughout the Islamic world.

[55] By the time, Wavell returned to the Middle East, the revolt in Palestine had finally been put down with the last of the fedayeen bands being hunted down or laying down their arms by the summer of 1939.

[58] Wavell complained in a letter in August 1939 of "wishful thinking" in Britain about the Danzig crisis as he wrote: "News smells of mustard gas and antiseptics and other unpleasant things".

[69] The Royal Egyptian Army was not well regarded, but the possibility that King Farouk of Egypt would join the Axis powers meant that Wavell always had to keep forces in the Nile river valley instead of in the Western Desert.

Churchill had wanted to arm the Jewish population of the Palestine Mandate (modern Israel) as an militia to assist with the defence of the Middle East, a plan that Wavell had vetoed.

[91] In October–November 1940, Anthony Eden, now Secretary of State for War, made an extended visit to the Middle East to see Wavell who told him about his plans for an offensive in the Western Desert.

Throughout the winter of 1940–1941, Metaxas had sought German mediation to end the war with Italy, and promised Hitler that he would never allow British bombers to strike the oil fields of Romania.

[101] Wavell told Donovan that he saw little hope in success in Churchill's plans to bomb the Romanian Ploesti oil fields as the Germans had constructed a powerful air defence system around them.

[102] Wavell stated that air defence system of radar stations, searchlights, flak batteries, and fighter squadrons would make it almost impossible to bomb the oil fields.

[95] In February 1941, Wavell launched an offensive into the colony of Italian East Africa with the British advancing into what is now Somalia from Kenya and making amphibious landings in Somaliland and Eritrea.

[119] In early 1941, the 6th British Division was training in Egypt for amphibious operations for an invasion of Rhodes as Churchill hoped that seizing the Italian Dodecanese islands might bring Turkey into the war.

[122] Wavell's staff officers led by Freddie de Guingand stated that Britain did not have sufficient troops to defend Greece, and favoured an advance to drive the Italians out of Libya.

[125] After visiting Ankara to meet President İsmet İnönü, Eden and Dill returned to Athens on 2 March 1941 to find that Alexandros Papagos had refused to redeploy the Royal Hellenic Army to the Aliakhmon Line as he had promised in February, saying he was not going to abandon northern Greece without a fight.

[126] On 6 March 1941, the South African prime minister General Jan Smuts arrived in Cairo for a conference with Wavell, during which he strongly expressed support for the Greek expedition.

The Germans were given the opportunity to reinforce the Italians in North Africa with the Afrika Korps and by the end of April the weakened Western Desert Force had been pushed back to the Egyptian border, leading to the Siege of Tobruk.

[131] Inspired by the German victories, on 3 April 1941 a group of pro-German Iraqi Army generals staged a coup in Baghdad and installed the pro-Axis Rashid Ali al-Gaylani as the new prime minister of Iraq.

[135] With the Germans having advanced into northern Greece, Wavell decided that the Aliakhmon line was indefensible and ordered Force W to retreat south with the aim of holding the Thermopylae Pass.

[135] The British and New Zealand troops holding the Thermopylae line fought bravely, but the lack of air support and devastating attack from Stuka dive bombers forced their retreat.

[139] Further south, the successful campaign in the Horn of Africa led to the Emperor Haile Selassie returning to his throne and the surrender of 100,000 Italian soldiers under the command of the Duke of Aosta.

Wavell, hard pressed on his other fronts, was unwilling to divert resources to Iraq and so it fell to Claude Auchinleck's British Indian Army to send troops to Basra.

[148] However, Freyberg refused to believe the Ultra intelligence which warned him of an airborne assault and even named the three Cretan airfields targeted, and persisted in keeping the majority of his forces on the coast to resist a seaborne invasion.

[153] About 16,000 Allied soldiers were killed or captured while the Royal Navy had lost three cruisers and six destroyers to German air and naval attacks during the evacuation while a battleship and an aircraft carrier had been badly damaged.

[132] In early June Wavell sent a force under General Wilson to invade Syria and Lebanon, responding to the help given by the Vichy France authorities there to the Iraq Government during the Anglo-Iraqi War.

[159] One of Wavell's last duties was to serve as the host for W. Averell Harriman, another of President Roosevelt's friends whom he had sent out on a diplomatic mission to the Middle East in late June 1941.

[166] Initially his command covered India and Iraq so that within a month of taking charge he launched Iraqforce to invade Persia in co-operation with the Russians in order to secure the oilfields and the lines of communication to the Soviet Union.

[169] While waiting for his flight to Chungking, Wavell met at Rangoon airport with Claire Lee Chennault and the other pilots of the American Volunteer Group, better known as the "Flying Tigers" who were also on their way to China.

[184] Wavell was strongly critical of Churchill's decision to give priority to the strategic bombing offensive against Germany, which he complained left his command deprived of the aircraft needed to defend India.

[200] Wavell planned to call a secret conference to be attended by all of the leading Indian politicians such as Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru of the Congress Party and Mohammad Ali Jinnah of the Muslim League.

[222] Wavell advised London that given that the way that Indian public opinion was hostile towards any continuation of the Raj after the war the best that could be done was the so-called Breakdown Plan under which the British would withdraw in stages with India achieving independence on 31 March 1948.