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Wavell, Archibald Percival, 1st Earl Wavell (1883-1950), British army officer, active in World Wars I and II, later viceroy and governor-general of India. Wavell was born in Colchester, England, and educated at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He served in the Boer War and in various frontier campaigns in India. During World War I he fought in Flanders, where he lost the sight of an eye, and he also served in the Palestine campaign under General Edmund Henry Allenby. Wavell became a major general in 1933; he was then the youngest officer of that rank in the British army.
In 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, he was British commander in chief in the Middle East. In 1940-41 his forces expelled the Italians from Ethiopia and won a brilliant victory over Italian armies in Libya, accomplishing the first important Allied military success of the war. In March 1941, however, he was forced out of Libya again by General Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps, and in May he lost Crete to the Germans.
Wavell was subsequently appointed commander in chief in India. He served as supreme commander of Allied forces in Burma, Malaya, and the Netherlands East Indies for a period during 1942, and in December 1942 he was promoted to the rank of field marshal. He was raised to the peerage in 1943. From 1943 to 1947 he was viceroy and governor-general of India. During his term he helped to advance the cause of Indian self-government. His writings include The Palestine Campaigns (1928), Allenby (1940-43), Generals and Generalship (1941), and The Good Soldier (1948).
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