This man was a loser. Known informly as “the Auk”, in his role as chief commander in North Africa confronting the Germans and the Italians during WW2, he was summarily dismissed by Field Marshal Alan Brooke, the foremost military advisor to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill,  as providing "nothing less than bad generalship”. The Auk ignominiously and abruptly exited the world stage to be replaced by his subordinate Bernard Montgomery who said of him “when I served under Auchinleck ... I cannot recall that we ever agreed on anything”. This all occurred at a crucial pivotal moment in the war, for there soon followed the so-called decisive Battle of Alamein (1942), the first major Allied victory over the Germans in North Africa of which Churchill later observed “we had neither a victory before it, nor a defeat after it”.

This assessment of “the Auk” arguably may be unfair, his being perhaps a hapless victim of circumstance with a goodly dose of elitist military politics thrown in for good measure. But his checkered military career was also encumbered before by questionable command adroitness in Denmark against the Germans and then dogged after by meddlesome intrigues in his various commands in India. Nonetheless, he certainly was the man of the moment at a crucial time in the last world war and is saddled in history as being a key player who might well have lost everything for the Allies had he continued in his command. [ and the 3rd Reich's boast that it would endure for a 1000 years might well still be a valid possibility].

[work on process]

As time passes not only is life turned into history, but the contours of history itself change.

Historians today are thinking about WW2, for example, in challenging new ways reflecting the the growing distance between the country that fought the war and the country that remembers it. Of the 16 million Americans who fought in the “good war”, today some 60 years later, only some 1.5 million remain alive.

[work in process]