All language subtitles for The General Who Won the War and Was Erased From History [DownSub.com]

In 1942, a British general did something

that most military historians now agree

saved the entire Allied position in the

Middle East. He stopped Erwin Rommel,

the legendary Desert Fox, dead in his

tracks [music] at a tiny Egyptian

railway halt called El Alamein. He did

this with a battered, demoralized army

that had just been chased across

hundreds of miles of scorching [music]

desert. He did it by choosing the right

ground, making the right calls under

[music] impossible pressure, and

sleeping in the sand alongside his men

while the fate of the Suez Canal and the

Persian oil fields [music] hung in the

balance. His name was Claude Auchinleck,

and you have almost certainly never

heard of him. What nobody knew at the

time was that the man who would replace

him, Bernard Montgomery, would spend the

next three [music] decades taking credit

for the victory that Auchinleck made

possible. Montgomery [music] would

become a household name, celebrated as

the hero of El Alamein, the general who

beat Rommel, the man who turned the tide

in North [music] Africa. Auchinleck

would be quietly pushed aside,

remembered only as the general who was

sacked, the cautious commander Churchill

lost patience [music] with. And the real

story, the one that Rommel himself knew,

would be buried for decades. If you had

asked anyone [music] in the British

Indian Army about Claude Auchinleck at

the turn of the 20th century, they would

have told you he was one of the finest

young officers they had ever seen. They

had no idea what [music] was coming.

Auchinleck was born in 1884 in

Aldershot, England, [music]

into a military family with roots in

Ulster. His father was a colonel in the

Royal Artillery,

>> [music]

>> and young Claude grew up consumed by

soldiering. As a boy, he [music] used to

drill his brother and two sisters in the

back garden, and then hand out tasks

[music] around the house like a

miniature commanding officer. By the

time he was 12, he had designed and

built an entire [music] trench system in

the family orchard. The kid was born for

this. He went to Wellington College and

then to Sandhurst, but his family did

not have money. Scholarships carried him

through school, [music] and when he

graduated in 1904, he could not afford a

commission in a fashionable British

regiment. So, he joined the Indian Army

instead, the 62nd Punjabis.

It was considered the less glamorous

path,

>> [music]

>> the option for officers who could not

buy their way into something better. It

turned out to be the making of him.

Because Auchinleck [music] did something

that very few British officers in India

ever bothered to do.

He learned Punjabi.

Not a few polite phrases.

He became fluent. He studied the local

dialects, the customs, the food, the

religious practices [music] of his

soldiers. He did not treat India as a

colonial posting to be endured until

something [music] better came along. He

treated it as home. His Indian soldiers

adored him for it, and that mutual

respect would define his entire [music]

career. They called him the Auk, and

when he spoke, they listened not because

of his rank, but because he had earned

it. When the First World War broke out

in 1914,

Auchinleck deployed with his regiment to

defend the Suez Canal. He fought the

Ottoman Turks at Ismailia in Egypt,

served in the scorching port of Aden,

and then moved into Mesopotamia,

modern-day Iraq, where the British

Empire was [music] grinding through a

brutal campaign against the Ottomans. It

was thankless, exhausting fighting in

extreme heat with [music] inadequate

supplies. Auchinleck thrived in it. By

the war's end, he had been promoted and

mentioned in dispatches for his

exceptional staff work in Kurdistan.

After the armistice, he was offered a

place at the staff college at Quetta,

recognized as the gateway to advancement

in [music] the Indian Army. He was

marked as a man to the

Between the wars, Auchinleck rose

steadily through the ranks.

He married an American woman named

Jessie Stewart after a whirlwind

courtship on the French Riviera. He

served as an instructor at Quetta and

then took command of the Peshawar

Brigade on the violent Northwest

Frontier of India in 1933

where he led operations against tribal

uprisings alongside Harold Alexander,

[music]

another future field marshal.

By 1938, he was chairing the committee

that would [music] modernize the entire

Indian Army. The recommendations from

that committee transformed [music]

the Indian military from a force of

183,000

men in 1939

into [music] a fighting machine of over

2 and a quarter million soldiers by the

war's end. That transformation was

[music] one of the great logistical

achievements of the Second World War and

almost nobody remembers it. This is

where the story takes a turn nobody

expected. When World War II broke out,

Auchinleck was called back to England.

An Indian Army officer commanding a

purely British Corps was almost unheard

of, a sign of just how highly he was

regarded. He was given four core.

Then in May of 1940, he was sent to

Norway to command 25,000 British,

French, and Polish troops in one of the

war's most doomed campaigns. The mission

was to capture the port of Narvik and

deny Germany access to the Norwegian

fjords for submarine operations.

Auchinleck took Narvik on the 28th of

May, but the wider campaign was falling

apart. France was collapsing on the

continent and every available resource

was being pulled back to prepare for the

defense of Britain itself. Auchinleck

was ordered to withdraw from Norway. The

Norway operation was strategically

important, but operationally a mess. The

forces were inadequate, the logistics

[music]

were chaotic, and the air cover was

practically nonexistent. The campaign

collapsed, and Auchinleck's forces were

evacuated back to Britain. It produced

the first serious friction between

Auchinleck and Winston Churchill, who

was [music] then First Lord of the

Admiralty. Auchinleck had demanded more

supplies, more artillery, and more air

cover before committing [music] his

forces. Churchill thought he was being

timid. Auchinleck thought he was [music]

being realistic about what his troops

actually needed to succeed. He was

right. The under-equipment and

mismanagement of the Norway campaign

proved [music] that. But, being right

did not win him any favors with

Churchill. That clash of temperaments,

[music] the cautious professional versus

the impulsive politician, would follow

them both for the rest of the war. After

Norway, Auchinleck returned to India as

Commander-in-Chief.

He impressed Churchill [music] briefly

in the spring of 1941 by acting

aggressively when a pro-Axis regime in

Iraq threatened the RAF base at

Habbaniya.

Auchinleck did not hesitate. He sent a

battalion by air, and the Indian 10th

Infantry Division by sea to crush the

threat. Churchill loved decisiveness

when it worked. In July 1941, he swapped

Auchinleck and Archibald Wavell, sending

the Ork to take over as

Commander-in-Chief of the Middle East,

the most important theater in the war at

that point. And this is where the real

pressure began. Churchill wanted [music]

an immediate offensive against Rommel in

the Western Desert. Auchinleck pushed

[music] back. He told Churchill directly

that his troops were not properly

trained, not [music] adequately

equipped, and not ready for a major

offensive. Churchill, desperate for a

victory to boost morale back home, kept

pushing. The exchanges between London

and Cairo became increasingly heated.

Auchinleck held firm. He finally

launched Operation Crusader in November

1941 on his own terms, and it [music]

worked. His forces pushed Rommel back

across Libya, relieving the besieged

garrison [music] at Tobruk after 8

months of brutal isolation, and driving

the Africa Corps deep [music] into

retreat. But here is the detail that

everyone missed at the time.

Rommel was not finished. The desert war

had a rhythm to it that outsiders rarely

understood. One side would advance,

outrun its supply lines, [music] and

stall. The other would counterattack,

push the first side back, and then

outrun [music] its own supply lines in

turn. The whole campaign seesawed across

Libya and Egypt [music] like a pendulum,

and Rommel was the best in the world at

exploiting that rhythm. He was weakened

after Crusader,

>> [music]

>> desperately short on fuel and

ammunition, stretched thin across

hundreds of miles [music] of barren

desert, but he was studying the British,

probing for weaknesses, waiting for them

to make a mistake. [music]

In January 1942, he struck again. His

forces recaptured Benghazi in Libya, and

the British were pushed back yet again

[music] to the Gazala Line, a chain of

defensive positions running south from

the coast. For months, both sides sat

behind their fortifications, rebuilding,

resupplying, and preparing for the next

round of what [music] was becoming the

most exhausting seesaw campaign of the

entire war. That next round came in May

1942 at the Battle of Gazala, and what

followed was a catastrophe for the

British. Rommel launched his assault on

the 26th of May, and his armor swept

around the southern flank of the British

defensive line in exactly the kind of

bold, sweeping maneuver that had made

him the most feared commander in the

theater. The Eighth Army, under General

Neil Ritchie, was outfought and

outmaneuvered at almost every turn. The

defensive boxes that were supposed

[music] to anchor the Gazala line,

brigade-size strong points surrounded by

minefields and barbed wire, crumbled in

days. Rommel punched through the center,

isolated the defenders of [music] Bir

Hakeim, where Free French forces held

out heroically for 2 weeks, and then

rolled up the entire British position

from behind. [music] On the 20th of

June, the fortress port of Tobruk fell.

33,000 Allied soldiers surrendered in

[music] a single day. Churchill, who was

in Washington meeting with President

Roosevelt when the telegram arrived,

called it [music] a disgrace. It was the

worst British military disaster since

the fall of Singapore just 4 months

earlier, and it sent shockwaves through

the Allied leadership. The Eighth Army

was now in full retreat, streaming

eastward into Egypt.

Rommel's Panzers chased them across the

desert, smelling complete victory.

Panic gripped Cairo. At British

headquarters, rear-echelon units began

[music] frantically burning sensitive

documents. Embassy officials packed

their bags. The Mediterranean Fleet

evacuated [music]

the port of Alexandria. People called it

Ash Wednesday. The entire British

position in the Middle East, the Suez

Canal, the Persian [music] oil fields,

the supply route to the Soviet Union

through Iran, all of it was on the

[music] edge of collapse. Rommel was

just 70 miles from Alexandria. And this

is the part where things stopped being

funny. On the 25th of June, 1942,

Auchinleck made [music] two decisions

that would change the course of the war.

First, he fired General Ritchie and took

personal command of the Eighth Army

himself. He flew to the front

>> [music]

>> and told his staff that the danger of

complete catastrophe was too great

>> [music]

>> to leave the responsibility with a

subordinate.

Second, he chose where to make his

stand. Not at Mersa Matruh, where most

[music] of his officers wanted to fight.

He overruled them.

Instead, he fell back further, all the

way to a tiny [music] desert railway

stop called El Alamein. The choice was

brilliant.

>> [music]

>> El Alamein sat on the Mediterranean

coast, 60 miles west of Alexandria.

[music]

40 miles to the south, the Qattara

Depression, a vast expanse of impassable

salt marshes, quicksand, and steep

escarpments made any flanking movement

impossible. For the first time in the

entire desert war, Rommel could not use

his favorite tactic. He could not swing

his Panzers around the British flank.

The gap between the sea and the

depression was only 40 miles wide.

>> [music]

>> Rommel would have to attack head-on,

straight into prepared British defenses.

>> [music]

>> British commanders had identified El

Alamein as a potential defensive

position back in the 1930s. Auchinleck

was the one who finally used it. The

Auch signaled his troops with a message

that captured everything about the man.

He told them he had never been a good

loser, and that he was going to win. He

said the enemy hoped to take Egypt by

bluff, and it was time to show him where

he gets off. Then, he went out into the

desert, slept in the sand alongside his

soldiers, ate their meager rations, and

prepared for the fight of his life.

Rommel attacked on the 1st of July. A

gigantic dust cloud moving across the

Egyptian desert announced the approach

of the 15th and 21st Panzer divisions

bearing down on the British line. They

hit the Ruweisat Ridge, a low rocky

outcrop in the center of the British

position, where a scratch force of field

artillery, anti-tank [music] guns, and

infantry from the 18th Indian Brigade

held on with grim determination. They

knew they were the last line of defense

before Alexandria. Gurkha soldiers from

Nepal, who had been in Iraq just weeks

earlier, and were only at El Alamein

because [music] of Auchinleck's

foresight in repositioning them, fought

at close quarters alongside South

African troops in a fortified position

nicknamed the hot box. The defenders

knocked out 18 German tanks during

[music] that first brutal afternoon,

often firing at point-blank range with

obsolete 2-pounder anti-tank guns that

were useless at any distance [music]

beyond a few hundred yards. The fighting

ground on for nearly 4 weeks across the

burning Egyptian sand. Temperatures

soared past 120°.

Water was rationed. Sand got into

everything, [music] weapons, food,

wounds.

Auchinleck did not just sit behind his

defenses [music] and absorb punishment.

He counterattacked repeatedly, probing

Rommel's lines, targeting the weaker

Italian units [music] to force the

Germans to spread their armor thin. He

committed tank forces and the Desert Air

Force to the defense of the Ruweisat

[music] Ridge. By mid-July, Rommel

finally admitted to himself that he

could not conduct any [music] more major

offensives with the forces at his

disposal.

His advance had been stopped cold. He

had been thrown onto the defensive. The

drive toward the Suez Canal was over.

Pay attention to this next detail

because it explains everything that

happened afterward.

Auchinleck did not just stop Rommel. He

broke the momentum of the entire Axis

offensive in North Africa. He did it

with an army that had been routed

[music] at Gazala, demoralized by the

fall of Tobruk, and chased across

hundreds of miles of desert. [music]

He did it by choosing the right ground,

deploying the right tactics, and staying

at the front where [music] his calm

presence steadied his shaken troops. His

biographer later wrote that Auchinleck

ended the dreary catalog of reverses and

retreats, tactical follies, and

ham-fisted generalship.

This was the rot [music] he stopped.

Even Rommel acknowledged it in a letter

to his wife during the battle,

>> [music]

>> Rommel wrote that Auchinleck was

handling his forces with very

considerable skill. Coming from the

Desert Fox himself, there was no higher

praise. But Auchinleck wanted to wait.

He told Churchill that the Eighth Army

needed time to rest, refit, and receive

reinforcements before launching a

decisive counteroffensive. Churchill,

who was facing votes of no confidence in

Parliament and desperately needed an

unambiguous victory to shore up his

political position,

>> [music]

>> did not want to wait. He flew to Egypt

in early August to see the situation in

person.

On the 8th of August, Churchill sacked

Auchinleck and replaced him.

Harold Alexander took over [music] as

commander-in-chief of the Middle East.

The original choice to command the

Eighth Army was General William Gott, a

popular veteran of the desert fighting.

But Gott was killed when his [music]

transport plane was shot down by German

fighters on its way to Cairo. The job

fell instead to Bernard Montgomery, who

was flown in from Britain.

It was a twist of fate that would

reshape how the entire world remembers

the war in North Africa. Churchill

offered Auchinleck a consolation

command, the newly created Persia and

Iraq theater. Auchinleck refused,

believing it was a poorly organized idea

designed [music] to cushion the blow of

his dismissal. He relinquished command

on the 15th of August [music] and

quietly disappeared from the sphere of

active operations.

In many eyes, he left in disgrace.

And the timing of [music] what happened

next?

Almost too perfect. Montgomery arrived

at El Alamein with every advantage that

Auchinleck had created for him. The Axis

advance was stopped, the defensive

position was established [music] and

fortified, the plan for the defense of

the Alamein line was in place, and

reinforcements were flooding in,

including 300 brand new American built

Sherman tanks with 75 mm guns that

outmatched anything [music] Rommel had.

Montgomery walked into a position of

strength and then took two full months

to prepare his offensive, building up a

force [music] of 190,000

men against Rommel's 104,000,

which was exactly the kind of methodical

build-up [music] that Auchinleck had

been sacked for wanting to do.

Montgomery's first act was to declare

that he had burned all plans for retreat

and that there would be no withdrawal

from El Alamein. It made for a brilliant

[music] headline. There was just one

problem. Auchinleck had never planned to

retreat from El Alamein, either. The

strong defensive position was his

choice. The stand was his decision.

There were no retreat plans to burn

because Auchinleck had already decided

this was where the Eighth Army [music]

would hold.

Montgomery was taking credit for a

resolve that was already in place before

he ever set foot in the desert. When

Montgomery finally attacked in late

October 1942 at the Second Battle of El

Alamein, he won a decisive victory. It

was bloody, grinding, and costly.

[music]

Australian, New Zealand, South African,

Indian, and British [music] troops

fought through dense minefields and

brutal close-quarters combat for 12 days

before punching through the Axis lines.

The Africa Corps was broken and Rommel's

forces began their long retreat westward

across North Africa. It would take

another six months, but the Axis would

eventually be [music] driven out of

Africa entirely by May of 1943.

El Alamein

>> [music]

>> was genuinely a turning point of the

war. Churchill himself said that before

El Alamein, the Allies never had a

victory and after it, they never had a

defeat. But the version you have heard,

that is not the full picture. Montgomery

was a master of self-promotion with a

genius for managing his public image. He

was bold, quotable, and photogenic in

his trademark beret. He told the press

that before his arrival, there had been

no plans, no preparation, and no

fighting spirit.

He told audiences he alone had

transformed the Eighth Army from a

beaten rabble into a victorious [music]

force. He cultivated war correspondents,

posed for photographs, gave memorable

quotes, and built a personal brand that

Auchinleck, a modest [music] and private

man who would rather eat field rations

with his soldiers than talk to a

journalist, could never compete with.

Over time, the Second Battle of El

Alamein became the Battle of El [music]

Alamein in popular memory. The First

Battle, the one Auchinleck fought and

won, the one that actually stopped

Rommel and made everything afterward

possible, simply faded away. As one

museum summary put it, El Alamein

established the reputation of

Montgomery, who used his talent for

self-publicity to claim all the credit

for the victory. That assessment was not

written by [music] Auchinleck's

supporters. It was written by a British

military museum. If you are finding

value in this story, hit subscribe.

>> [music]

>> I cover forgotten history like this

every week. By June of 1943,

Auchinleck was quietly reappointed

[music] as Commander-in-Chief of India.

It was not a glamorous role. It

generated no headlines, no newsreel

footage, no dramatic [music] quotes for

the papers. But the work Auchinleck did

in India was critical to the Allied war

effort in ways that rarely [music] get

discussed. He built the logistical

infrastructure, the supply chains,

training programs,

>> [music]

>> and maintenance systems that made

General William Slim's Fourteenth Army

one of the most effective fighting

forces of the entire war. The Fourteenth

Army was sometimes called the Forgotten

Army because it received so little

attention [music] from London. It fought

some of the most brutal campaigns of

World War II [music] in the jungles and

mountains of Burma against the Japanese.

The critical victories at Imphal and

Kohima in 1944,

which broke the Japanese advance into

India and turned the war in Southeast

Asia, were possible because Auchinleck's

organization kept Slim's men supplied,

trained, and moving forward through

[music] some of the most difficult

terrain on earth. Once again, the Auk

did the vital, unglamorous work that

made another commander's battlefield

triumph possible. And then came the

personal devastation. In 1944, while

Auchinleck was managing the vast

machinery of India's war effort, his

wife, Jessie, left him for Air Chief

Marshal Sir Richard Peirse, one of

Auchinleck's own friends. The divorce

was finalized in 1946.

Auchinleck never spoke publicly [music]

about it. He absorbed the blow in

silence, the same way he had absorbed

being sacked, with no self-pity and no

public complaint. He was promoted to

field marshal in June of 1946,

the highest rank in the British Army.

But the honor came wrapped in the most

painful assignment of his career.

Auchinleck was tasked with overseeing

the partition of the Indian Army,

dividing the force he had spent his

entire adult life building into separate

armies for [music] the new nations of

India and Pakistan. Around 260,000

men, mainly Hindus and [music] Sikhs,

went to India. About 140,000,

mainly Muslims, went to Pakistan.

Individual units that had served

together for generations, regiments

where Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim soldiers

[music] had fought side by side across

North Africa, Italy, and Burma were torn

apart along religious lines. The 19th

Lancers in Pakistan exchanged their Jat

and Sikh troopers for Muslim soldiers

from Skinner's Horse in India. Officers

who had led mixed units through years of

combat now had to watch their regiments

dissolve. The Brigade of Gurkhas, those

legendary Nepalese soldiers [music] who

had fought at Ruweisat Ridge and across

every theater of the war,

was split between India and Britain.

Auchinleck hated every moment of it. He

believed partition was fundamentally

dishonorable, [music]

his word, and he refused to accept a

peerage, the traditional honor [music]

given to retiring senior officers,

because he did not want his name

associated with a policy he considered a

betrayal. [music]

He clashed bitterly with Lord

Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India,

[music] over how the process was

handled. And from London, Montgomery,

still working to sideline the Auk even

now, tried twice to have Auchinleck

replaced with General Slim. The rivalry

[music] followed him to the very end of

his service. He left India on the 1st of

December, 1947.

The army he had loved, the country he

had called home, the soldiers who had

trusted him with their [music] lives,

all gone. Auchinleck returned to Britain

and lived quietly in a modest flat in

Mayfair.

He held a few minor administrative

positions. Nothing that matched what he

had been. In 1968, at 84 years old, he

moved to Marrakech, Morocco. He lived

there for the final 13 years of his

life, cared for by a small circle of

local friends and a British corporal

named Malcolm Millwood, [music]

who had been assigned to look after him.

A Moroccan woman named Malika also

helped care [music] for him, taking him

on picnics, having him to her house for

Christmas. Small kindnesses from people

who knew nothing about El Alamein.

[music]

Philip Warner titled his biography

Auchinleck, The Lonely Soldier. The name

fit perfectly. Here was a man who had

stopped Rommel when nobody [music] else

could. Who had modernized the Indian

army from a colonial relic into a force

of [music] millions.

Who had built the logistics that made

the Burma campaign possible.

Who had overseen the agonizing partition

of a military family he loved. And he

died in a rented house in Marrakech on

the 23rd of March, 1981 at 96 years old.

While the general who inherited his

victory remained one of the most famous

military figures of the 20th century.

Today, if you visit the Imperial War

Museum in London or read any serious

academic history of the Desert War,

>> [music]

>> you will find a very different story

from the one Montgomery told. Military

historians have spent decades correcting

the record. Books like Philip Warner's

biography, Niall Barr's Pendulum of War,

and the work of Corelli Barnett [music]

have all restored Auchinleck to his

rightful place in the story. The

National World War II Museum [music] in

New Orleans has published articles

specifically about how the defenders at

Ruweisat Ridge under Auchinleck's

command saved the [music] entire North

African campaign. But popular memory

moves slowly.

Ask most people who won at El Alamein

[music]

and they will still say Montgomery.

Ask who stopped Rommel and they will

still say Montgomery. Academic truth and

public memory are two very different

things. The real question is not whether

Claude Auchinleck was a great general.

Even his harshest critics grant him

that. Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial

General Staff, wrote that [music]

Auchinleck had most of the

qualifications to make him one of the

finest of commanders. Rommel considered

him among the greatest opponents he ever

faced. Churchill himself, despite

sacking the man, never denied his

ability.

The real question is why being right,

being brave, and being competent was not

enough. Auchinleck was not a man who

could play the game. He did not

understand the new reality of media

warfare that the Second World War had

created. A world where the camera and

the headline mattered almost as much as

[music] the battle itself. He could not

charm reporters, craft a personal

mythology, or turn tactical decisions

[music]

into sound bites. He chose his

subordinates poorly, a flaw that his

critics [music] correctly and repeatedly

point out. Alan Brooke himself said that

Auchinleck's inability to pick the right

men [music]

was the greatest single cause of his

downfall. He was too loyal to officers

like General [music] Ritchie and his

chief of staff General Corbett, men who

were not up to the enormous demands of

the desert war. And when he was

replaced, he did not fight back. He

wrote no bitter memoirs. He gave no

score-settling interviews. He simply

walked away and let history be written

by someone else. That someone else wrote

himself as the hero. Montgomery took the

title First Viscount Montgomery of

Alamein. He named himself after the

battle that Auchinleck had set up for

him. He lived as a celebrated public

figure until his death in 1976,

5 years before Auchinleck. And the man

who actually saved the day, he spent his

last years watching the sun set over the

Atlas Mountains in Marrakech, thousands

of miles from the Egyptian desert where

he had changed the course of a war. He

had no title, no memoir, no score to

settle, just a quiet room and the

knowledge, shared by historians but not

by the general public, [music]

of what he had done when it mattered

most. Without the Auk, there would have

been no El Alamein for Montgomery to

win. Without his choice of ground, his

defensive plan, his refusal to break

under Rommel's assault, the Suez Canal

might have fallen. The Persian oil

fields [music] might have been lost, and

the entire Allied strategy in the

Mediterranean would have collapsed. That

is the part [music] of the story that

almost got lost forever. If this story

surprised you, drop a comment and let me

know. And if you want [music] more

forgotten history like this, subscribe

so you do not miss the next one.