William Slim, First Viscount Slim

British military leader

• Born: August 6, 1891
• Birthplace: Bristol, England
• Died: December 14, 1970
• Place of death: London, England

After conducting a fighting retreat from Burma in early 1942, Slim was chosen to command the British Fourteenth Army, which in the succeeding years defeated the Japanese invasion of India, destroyed the main Japanese army of Southeast Asia, and reconquered Burma.

Early Life

In his early years, First Viscount Slim suffered such disadvantages as to make his later career seem virtually impossible. One of these was social standing. He had no connections with the army or with the officer class. While his great contemporary Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery was the son of a bishop, Slim was the son of a self-employed metalworker. When he left school, the only job he could get was as an elementary teacher in a Birmingham slum; from that he went on to be a junior clerk. It was not an impressive background, and even after his greatest victories Slim was exposed to upper-class English snobbery and distrust, shown even by Winston Churchill.

A further and almost literally crippling disadvantage resulted from war wounds. Slim had managed, though not a university student, to join the Birmingham University Officer Training Corps, and with the outbreak of World War I he was gazetted to the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. He was sent to Gallipoli in July, 1915, and during an assault in which every officer of the Ninth Warwicks was killed or wounded, was shot inches from his heart. The final, official diagnosis was that he would lose a lung and be unable ever to use his left arm. Slim, however, refused to have the suggested operation, recovered by himself, and by means still unclear returned to active service in Mesopotamia. There he was wounded again by a shell splinter, causing considerable official disapproval as soon as his records were inspected. While a Brigadier in Eritrea in 1941, he was once again shot (in the buttocks) by an Italian fighter plane: only a flesh wound, perhaps, but inflicted by three bullets, one armor-piercing, one incendiary, and one explosive. At several moments of his life Slim came very close to being “invalided out” of the army.

To complete the list of disadvantages, with the end of World War I, Slim’s chance of staying on in the shrinking British army was zero, his Military Cross won in 1917 being no match for his non-regular-officer background. He transferred accordingly to the Indian army and became an officer in the Gurkha Rifles. “Indian” generals, however, though often more efficient and practical than their British army equivalents, were usually distrusted by British headquarters and politicians; they were believed to be second rate and middle class. This, too, affected Slim’s later career.

Yet in other ways all three disadvantages contributed greatly to Slim’s eventual success. With his own troops he was unquestionably the most popular British commander of the century, known to all as “Uncle Bill.” The reasons for this were obvious. He had not a trace of snobbery; his army chauffeur was under standing orders always to pick up soldier hitchhikers. He had a healthy distrust of bureaucrats, official channels, and rear-echelon planners. He insisted with all the strength of his extremely forceful personality that everything had to be subordinated to the welfare of front-line troops, taking particular interest in hospitals. The men of the Fourteenth Army soon called themselves “the Forgotten Army,” alluding to their low status on equipment priority lists drawn up in Washington or Whitehall. They knew, however, that their army commander remembered them all the time, and so did his staff. Slim’s rule was that if any troops went on half rations as a result of supply shortages, so did he and his headquarters. Very little space was wasted on paper. In the Fourteenth Army, all documents were sorted once a fortnight, and everything not immediately vital was burned.

Slim also benefited enormously from twenty years of “peacetime” service with the Indian army. He saw further active service against the able and dangerous Afghan tribesmen of the Indian Northwest Frontier. He also made many friends among the professional imperial officer corps. Mainly, however, he saw service with an elite volunteer force that in many ways combined the professionalism of a European army with the speed of movement, flexibility, and ruthlessness of what would now be called a guerrilla army. Service with the Gurkhas was excellent training for service against their Mongolian cousins, the Japanese.

Life’s Work

After the outbreak of World War II , Slim was sent first to command the Tenth Indian Brigade against the Italians in Eritrea, and after recovery from his wound, to command the Tenth Indian Division in Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Slim himself described his invasion of Iran as “comic opera,” in that the highly equipped Iranian army (largely equipped, at the expense of the Indian army, by the British government) collapsed immediately under serious threat. Nevertheless, he learned one lesson from these experiences never to break off a successful assault simply because of administrative shortages. On one occasion, he ordered all unnecessary vehicles to have their gasoline siphoned off to supply his spearhead. Defeat for him then would have led to total disaster; his actual success meant that his stranded forces could be refueled quietly and at leisure. Moreover, the determination he showed gave him iqbal, as his Indian and British-Indian soldiers called it: the aura of success. He was to need that desperately.

From February, 1942, the British Empire in the East was to face far more serious enemies. The Japanese had overwhelmed Singapore and the Royal Navy. In February, 1942, they broke into Burma, where with their combination of high morale, jungle tactics, and modern equipment, they showed every sign of destroying the static and unprepared British forces. Slim was moved to Burma and after strange delays and confusion, caused partly by the fact that Slim was an “unknown” to Whitehall was placed in command of the First Burma Corps.

The situation was, however, already irretrievable. The Japanese had, or would soon gain, total command of the air, total command of the jungle, and strong support from the native Burmese population, who viewed them (for a while) as liberators. Slim’s corps was in effect bundled out of Burma, losing men and equipment all the way, completing the final stages of its retreat in atrocious weather, across appalling country, with no food, ammunition, gasoline, transport, or protection from malaria, typhus, and other endemic diseases. Simply holding his men together was a major achievement for Slim.

The real difficulties, however, were still to be faced during the period from mid-1942 to late 1943. At this stage, Slim had still to expect a probable invasion of India by an army thought to be invincible, with total command of sea and air. He had to do it with troops who had 120 cases of disease for every battle casualty; without material support; in what has been called the most unforgiving terrain in the world, where men without packs cannot average one mile per hour; and at the end of a supply line consisting of mud tracks and a single-line, narrow-gauge, incomplete railway. He also had the specter of rebellion at his back. Many Indians believed that the Japanese would also “liberate” them. Many British doubted the loyalty even of the Indian army. No retreat was possible for British women and children in India, since the Japanese controlled the sea-lanes. It was also well-known to everyone what the experience had been of European and Australian soldiers and civilians captured in the countries already overrun. Slim’s forces in fact faced a fight to the death, with no prospect of retreat or surrender. Their defeat would lead to collapse and massacre on an appalling scale.

Slim’s greatest achievement was perhaps to remotivate and retrain his forces during this period. He received little help from above, where grandiose plans abounded for defeating the Japanese without effort by persuading Chinese armies to attack them from the north, by landing airborne forces in their rear to make them panic, by organizing amphibious invasions. All these plans were to founder on the fact that the Japanese did not panic and could beat almost any army brought against them. Instead, Slim organized massive self-help schemes. The Fourteenth Army which he commanded from October, 1943 eventually ran its own duck and fish farms for protein, maintained its own front-line kitchen gardens for vitamins, made its own parachutes from jute (since silk was unobtainable), commissioned its own navy, ran its own rafts and railways, and fought its own battles, usually without or even against superior orders. At the same time, the whole army became jungle-wise. Slim’s orders were quite simple: There were to be no noncombatants, all units were to protect and patrol their own areas (and this included headquarters staff and hospitals), the Japanese were to be beaten on foot, in the jungle, man to man. The difficulty, initially, was in having these orders obeyed.

One more failure was still to take place. Slim’s predecessor as army commander, Lieutenant General Noel Irwin, ordered a counterattack in Arakan in early 1943. Slim was not given operational command until too late, and the attack was a failure. Irwin tried to dismiss Slim in May but was dismissed himself, eventually (after some months of indecision) for Slim to take over. Slim then waited, with his retrained army, for the Japanese “March on Delhi.”

This confrontation came in early 1944. In the Second Battle of Arakan, a Japanese assault was for the first time held and destroyed. Undeterred by the failure of Ha-Go, the Japanese launched the U-Go offensive on Slim’s forces, meaning to seize his tiny railhead at Dimapur and destroy his army as it tried to flee. In the twin battles of Imphal and Kohima, it was instead the Japanese army that was destroyed. Slim counted on several new factors. First, his own troops were now untroubled by attacks from the rear. They knew that in jungle fighting there was no rear, and that either side could consider the other “surrounded.” Second, the Japanese were overconfident. The high command relied on capturing stores from the British. If this plan failed, troops would then be left to starve in the jungle or to make increasingly suicidal assaults. Third, and most important, the British and Indian soldiers of the Fourteenth Army were now as anxious to fight things out as the Japanese, their morale perversely heightened by the many war crimes committed against them.

From March to July, 1944, desperate fighting took place at Imphal and Kohima, between forces of approximately the same size (perhaps 100,000 men each, all that could be supplied). First both sides had to get their forces into position. Then the Japanese strained every nerve to destroy the Fourteenth Army, in point-blank fighting their high point at Kohima, for example, being the deputy commissioner’s tennis court, where they held one baseline and the British the other. Then the British and Indians began to counterattack their weakening enemies. Finally, even Japanese determination failed, and they attempted to withdraw though, since they had gone on too long, they suffered appalling casualties in retreat. It has been estimated that not one man in ten of the Japanese involved in Ha-Go and U-Go survived to return to Japan.

The Japanese army in Burma was in fact broken at Imphal and Kohima. As it retreated, the Fourteenth Army followed, to force its way across the Irrawaddy River and win further battles at Meiktila and Mandalay, and to continue unrelenting pressure until Rangoon was reached in May, 1945. The Japanese continued to fight fanatically, and Slim was faced with immense problems of supply (losing seventy-five precious Dakotas in December, 1944, for example, drawn off to another “sideshow” with no warning given to him other than the sight of the planes passing overhead). After mid-1944, however, there was no chance of serious reverse. The war in Southeast Asia was won in a thousand close-range infantry encounters at Imphal and Kohima, by men who until then had known nothing but defeat.

Significance

Slim was in most ways an orthodox commander, with no great respect for “special forces” or unconventional tactics. He did the basics well. Like other Allied commanders, he had to beat a fanatically courageous enemy. Unlike them, he had to do so with no advantage in numbers or matériel. He fought an Asiatic war against an Asiatic enemy, with a largely Asiatic army. His experiences and published conclusions are of striking relevance to the American experience in Vietnam.

After the capture of Rangoon, Slim was, typically, replaced as army commander for no clear reason, though the order caused such general fury that it was reversed. On retirement he remained immensely popular with the general public, the British overseas, and the royal family, and was correspondingly out of favor with politicians. He was made a viscount, became governor-general of Australia, constable of Windsor Castle, and eventually governor of the Order of the Garter: though with his three corps commanders he had been knighted already, for valor, on the field of battle at Imphal. Slim died in London on December 14, 1970.

Bibliography

Allen, Louis. Burma: The Longest War, 1941-1945. London: J. W. Dent and Sons, 1984. A recent and thorough single-volume account of fighting on all the Indo-Burmese fronts, including those not controlled by Slim.

Connelly, Owen. On War and Leadership: The Words of Combat Commanders from Frederick the Great to Norman Schwarzkopf. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. Slim’s remarks about war and military leadership are featured in chapter 12 of this compendium of quotations from combat commanders.

Evans, Sir Geoffrey. Slim as Military Commander. London: B. T. Batsford, 1969. An attempt at a technical evaluation of Slim, written by the commander of the Seventh Indian Division.

Evans, Sir Geoffrey, and Anthony Brett-James. Imphal. London: Macmillan, 1962. Close study of an almost unsummarizable battle, authored once more by a major participant.

Lewin, Ronald. Slim: The Standard Bearer. London: Leo Cooper, 1976. The standard biography, covering Slim’s early and late years as well as his short period of critical command.

Lyman, Robert. Slim, Master of War: Burma and the Birth of Modern Warfare. London: Constable and Robinson, 2004. Chronicles Slim’s Burma campaign during World War II. Lyman portrays Slim as an intelligent and compassionate military commander, whose greatest strength was his unconventionality.

Masters, John. The Road Past Mandalay. London: Michael Joseph, 1961. Before becoming a best-selling novelist, Masters was a long-service officer of the Gurkha Rifles. This autobiography includes the best firsthand account of Fourteenth Army fighting, with many interesting sidelights on Slim’s style of leadership, and on the difficulties he faced.

Slim, Sir William. Defeat into Victory. London: Cassell, 1956. The most modest, and also the best written, volume of memoirs produced by any Allied general. Slim’s amusement at the “strategic direction” of his superiors is rarely concealed.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Unofficial History. London: Cassell, 1959. A collection of stories written for money under a pseudonym during the between-war years. Largely autobiographical, they convey vividly the Indian army ethos, and form an excellent antidote to “official history.”