Britain's Greatest General
My case for Bill Slim
One of the highlights of last weekend’s ‘Kohima 80’ celebrations at the National Army Museum was the opportunity I had to interview Mark and Mary Anne Slim about their illustrious parents and grand-parents. Some fascinating stories emerged, not least those relating to John Slim’s time as Commanding Officer of 22 SAS.
During the day I was able to reprise my effort to present, in 2011, Bill Slim as Britain’s Greatest General in a debate at the NAM. I tied with Peter Snow, who was presenting Wellington. What follows below is the text of my argument.
Its an absolute pleasure to be at the NAM today to talk to you about Field Marshal Bill Slim. In fact, today I’m going to talk to you about his command primarily of the great 14 Army in India and Burma between August 1943 (when in fact 14 Army was still Eastern Army) and the end of the war in Asia exactly two years later. What I want to do is to give you ten reasons for suggesting that Slim was Britain’s greatest general.
Lance Corporal George Fraser of the Border Regiment was resting after hard fighting in Burma in early 1945 when occurred one of the defining moments in his young life. The battalion had crossed the Chindwin, and had been fighting against a tenacious and skilful enemy on its way towards the mighty Irrawaddy. His battalion had a visitor, none other than the Army Commander, Lieutenant General Sir William Slim, known to all as Uncle Bill. For the vast majority of soldiers at any time in history the visit of a senior officer is rarely a cause for celebration, as it usually involves things that make a soldier's life more rather than less burdensome. But this occasion was very different: Slim's visit had an effect on him and his comrades that the young, cynical Lance Corporal was not expecting. Let me read to you what happened as he described it:
The biggest boost to morale he wrote, was the burly man who came to talk to the assembled battalion by the lake shore – I’m not sure when, but it was unforgettable. Slim was like that: the only man I’ve ever seen who had a force that came out of him, a strength of personality that I’ve puzzled over since... His appearance was plain enough: large, heavily built, grim-faced with that hard mouth and bulldog chin; the rakish Gurkha hat was at odds with the slung carbine and untidy trouser bottoms... Nor was he an orator... His delivery was blunt, matter-of-fact, without gestures or mannerisms, only a lack of them. He knew how to make an entrance – or rather, he probably didn’t, and it came naturally... Slim emerged from under the trees by the lake shore, there was no nonsense of “gather round” or jumping on boxes; he just stood with his thumb hooked in his carbine sling and talked about how we had caught Jap off-balance and were going to annihilate him in the open; there was no exhortation or ringing clichés, no jokes or self-conscious use of barrack-room slang – when he called the Japs “bastards” it was casual and without heat. He was telling us informally what would be, in the reflective way of intimate conversation. And we believed every word – and it all came true. I think it was that sense of being close to us, as though he were chatting offhand to an understanding nephew that was his great gift... You knew, when he talked of smashing the Jap, that to him it meant not only arrows on a map but clearing bunkers and going in under shell-fire; that he had the head of a general with the heart of a private soldier.’
George Macdonald Fraser saw in Bill Slim that hot day in February 1945 many of the characteristics of exceptional leadership that make me believe, unequivocally, that Slim was Britain's greatest ever general. Indeed, I would suggest that there are at least six reasons for so thinking.
The FIRST REASON was that he was, first and foremost, a born leader of soldiers. He inspired confidence because he instinctively knew that the strength of an army lay not in its equipment, traditions or even doctrine, but in the training and morale of its soldiers and the personal competence and leadership of its officers. During the retreat from Burma in 1942 he had gone to visit a unit that he had been told was in a bad way. He soon found out why, observing that the officers were looking after themselves, rather than their men. This was, to him, entirely unacceptable: officers existed to lead, and the interests of their men came well ahead of their own. ‘I tell you, therefore, as officers’ Slim told an audience of officers joining 14 Army in 1944, ‘that you will neither eat, nor drink, nor sleep, nor smoke, nor even sit down until you have personally seen that your men have done those things. If you will do this for them, they will follow you to the end of the world. And, if you do not, I will break you.’
By means of this attitude Slim helped to create the widespread feeling amongst troops of all nationalities in India and Burma that 14 Army was a family. It has been observed that Slim ‘inspired such affection among the men of the 14th Army... that they always spoke of fighting with, not under, him’. By 1944 the epithet ‘Forgotten Army’ was no longer an excuse but a source of pride.
Slim made tremendous efforts to communicate to his men, travelling vast distances to talk with them, simply and honestly, as man to man. He never engaged in histrionics or tricks of oratory and through these events his strong and attractive personality, as Fraser was able to attest, shone through. His firm view was that the most important attribute of a leader was his effect on morale, and he did everything he could to ensure that he was seen and trusted by his men. He inspired confidence because he related to the men as men, not as subordinates. He was the antithesis of the 'châteaux general' who never ventured far from the comfort of his headquarters, far to the rear of the action. He brought his men into his confidence in a way that was very unusual at the time, the result of the complete absence in his personal makeup of any social pretention.
Slim knew his men and could communicate with them because he was one of them, and from the bloody days in Gallipoli and Mesopotamia during the First World War, and in the inter year wars on the North West Frontier, had experienced their bitterest trials. Not for him the aristocratic or privileged middle class upbringing of many of his peers, but an early life in industrial Birmingham, relieved only by the opportunities presented by the upheavals of the First World War. Born in 1891 Slim had left school at 16 due to the impoverishment of his family. He spent two years teaching some of the most hardened youngsters to be found in Birmingham, before going to work on the shop floor of an engineering company. These experiences meant that when he became Chief of the Imperial General Staff on 1 January 1949 it could be said of him, 'that he had never forgotten the smell of soldier's feet.' 'He understood men' wrote the Australian journalist Ronald McKie, who met him in Burma. 'He spoke their language as he moved among them, from forward positions to training bases. He had the richest of common-sense, a dour soldier's humour and a simple earthy wisdom. Wherever he moved he lifted morale. He was the finest of Englishmen.' Frank Owen, the Fleet Street editor who watched him closely in India and Burma for two years, observed: 'Slim does not court popularity, and he hates publicity. But he inspires trust. The man cares deeply for his troops, and they are well aware that their well-being is his permanent priority.'
As a result the men of 14 Army – British, Indian, African and Gurkha – gave him their loyalty in a way rarely seen in the annals of command. It would be inconceivable to think of Field Marshal Montgomery as ‘Uncle Bernard’, but it was to ‘Uncle Bill’ that soldiers in Burma, from the dark days of 1942 and 1943, through to the great victories over the Japanese in 1944 and 1945, put their confidence. Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten declared that the entire 14 Army became ‘his devoted slaves’. He was surely right. His soldiers followed him willingly, and joined the Burma Star Association which he established after the war in their many tens of thousands, and which remains alive and thriving today as the Burma Star Memorial Fund. No other veterans organisation from the Second World War can boast the same longevity.
My SECOND REASON was that he able to cope with defeat, and learn from it. Slim first came to the attention of the British Army in a significant way between March and May 1942 when he ensured that the one hundred day, one thousand mile retreat from Burma to India, the longest in the long history of the British Army was, whilst a bitter humiliation, nevertheless not a rout. He managed the withdrawal through dust bowl, jungle and mountain alike so deftly that the Japanese, though undoubtedly victorious, were utterly exhausted and unable to mount offensive operations into India for a further year. As Slim said farewell to his troops in the days before his departure from Imphal on 20 May he received an accolade reserved only for the likes of a Napoleon or a Wellington: his troops cheered him. To be cheered by troops whom you have led to victory is grand and exhilarating’ he commented. ‘To be cheered by the gaunt remnants of those whom you have led only in defeat, withdrawal and disaster, is infinitely moving – and humbling.’
The defeat in Burma in 1942 identified a side to Slim that would perhaps not otherwise have become apparent. It marked him out as a commander of considerable mental stamina, a man who was tough and tenacious in the face of almost overwhelming adversity, who refused to give up when all the facts seemed to indicate that there was no hope for his bedraggled and defeated forces. ‘He was not afraid of anything,’ recorded the American General 'Vinegar Joe' Stilwell, ‘and he looked it.’ He remained calm and level-headed in public, controlling his emotions with iron discipline.
His composure made a dramatic and decisive impact on his men. Major Michael Calvert, recalled watching Slim during the hot, dusty days of the withdrawal, the Corps Commander presenting ‘an indomitable and unshaken front in the face of these disasters, and his rather ponderous jokes cheered his staff and commanders when they were at their lowest ebb…’ When the 26-year old Major Ian Lyall Grant met him during the second week of April 1942 with only six weeks of the retreat from Burma left to run, he was, despite the otherwise apparent hopelessness of the situation, buoyed up by Slim’s calm reassurance that the situation, although bleak, was under control. After listening to Slim brief them, he and his fellows felt for the first time that they ‘now had a leader who realised that new methods were required to counter Japanese tactics and was prepared to think them out.’
My THIRD REASON is that Slim demonstrated how to rebuild an army conditioned to defeat. Then, in 1943 Slim was given the opportunity no British soldier has been given since the days of Wellington: the chance to train an army from scratch and single-handedly mould it into something of his own making, an army of extraordinary spirit and power against which nothing could stand and which would sweep to victory against the Japanese in 1944 and 1945. By 1945 Slim’s 14th Army, at 606,000 men the largest ever assembled by Britain, had decisively and successively defeated two formidable Japanese armies, the first at Imphal and Kohima in India in 1944 and the second on the banks of the mighty Irrawaddy along the infamous ‘Road to Mandalay’ in Burma in 1945.
Everything he did as a commander was designed to equip his men for the trials of battle, and their interests were always at the forefront of his plans. He believed that soldiers needed to be fed before they could march, trained before they could fight, and relieved before they were worn out. In addition to giving them the mental and practical wherewithal to fight the Japanese, one of the most fearsome armies the British have ever had to face, Slim took many practical steps to improve his men's health and welfare. His approach to the building up of the fighting power of an army – from a situation of profound defeat and in the face of crippling resource constraints – was built on the twin platforms of rigorous training and development of each individual’s will to win. To achieve the latter he developed single-handedly a deeply thought-out programme of support designed to meet the physical, intellectual and spiritual needs of each fighting man. By the ‘spiritual’ principle he meant that there must be a great and noble object, its achievement must be vital, the method of achievement must be active and aggressive and each man must feel that what he is and what he does matters directly towards the attainment of the object. It was critical, he argued, that all troops, of whatever rank, background and nationality, believed in the cause they were fighting for. The cause itself had to be just. In Burma, Slim wrote, ‘We fought for the clean, the decent, the free things of life.... We fought only because the powers of evil had attacked these things.’
Second, by the ‘intellectual’ principle he meant that soldiers had to be convinced that the object could be attained. The principal task was to destroy the notion that the Japanese soldier was invincible. Equally, each soldier had also to know that the organisation to which he belonged was an efficient one. Slim knew that the physical care of a soldier in the field has a direct bearing on his performance in battle: lack of food, water, medical support or contact with home works to weaken the resolve, over time, of even the stoutest man. And by the ‘material’ foundation Slim meant that each man had to feel that he would get a fair deal from his commanders and from the army generally, that he would, as far as humanly possible, be given the best weapons and equipment for his task and that his living and working conditions would be made as good as they could be.
This leads me to the FOURTH REASON. Slim was phenomenally successful in battle. First, he prevented, by his dogged command of the withdrawal from Burma the invasion of India proper in 1942 by a Japanese Army exulting in its omnipotence after the collapse of the rest of East Asia and the Pacific rim. Next, he removed forever any further Japanese ambitions to invade India proper by his destruction of the Japanese invasion of India in the Naga Hills around Kohima and the Manipur Plain around Imphal in the spring and early summer of 1944, and in so doing he decisively shattered the myth of Japanese invincibility that had for so long crippled the Allied cause. Then, despite the worries of many in Delhi and London, and subtly influencing Mountbatten to conform to his own strategy, Slim drove his armoured, foot and mule-borne and air-transported troops deep into Burma in late 1944 and 1945, across two of the world’s mightiest rivers, to outwit and outfight the 250,000 strong Burma Area Army of General Kimura and in so doing engineer the complete collapse of the Japanese. Given the pattern of British misfortune in 1942 and in 1943 it is not fanciful to argue that without Slim neither the safety of India (in 1942 as well as in 1944), nor indeed the recovery of Burma in 1945, would ever have been possible. Slim’s leadership and drive came to dominate the 14th Army to such a degree that it became, in Jack Master’s phrase, ‘an extension of his own personality.’
My FIFTH REASON was that Slim was a remarkable coalition commander. The Army that defeated the might of the Japanese in both India and Burma during 1944 and 1945 was a thoroughly imperial one, 90% Indian, Gurkha and African. Even in the British Empire of the time it was not self-evident that a British officer would secure the commitment of the various diverse nationalities he commanded: indeed, many did not. In his fascinating study of military command the psychiatrist Professor Norman Dixon considered Slim’s quite obvious ability to join many of these diverse national groups to fight together in a single cause to be nothing less than remarkable, and the antithesis of the norm. That Slim did so at a time of social and political unrest in India with the anti-colonial ‘Quit India’ campaign, and in the face of some early desertions to the Japanese-sponsored ‘Indian National Army, makes his achievements even the more remarkable. Dixon concluded that the affection shown to him by British, Indian, Nepalese, African, Chinese and American troops led to Slim being loved by his polyglot army I quote ‘perhaps more than any other commander has been loved by his men since Nelson.’ The British soldier was also suspicious of officers of the Indian Army, of whom of course, Slim was, but Slim succeeded effortlessly in winning them over, too. He ‘was the only Indian Army general of my acquaintance that ever got himself across to British troops’ recalled Bernard Fergusson, himself a Chindit column commander. ‘Monosyllables do not usually carry a cadence; but to thousands of British troops, as well as to Indians and to his own beloved Gurkhas, there will always be a special magic in the words “Bill Slim.”
My SIXTH and final reason for ascribing to Slim the title of Britain's greatest general was his approach to warfare, which at the time was very different to received wisdom across the British armed forces and which is his abiding legacy. Indeed, his approach to fighting forms the underpinning of modern British military doctrine. He was not a theoretician of war, although after the war he became for a short time Commandant of the Royal College of Defence Studies. Rather, he was an intensely practical strategist. At his heart he was a proponent of the maxim taught to him when he was a young officer by a hoary old Sergeant Major: 'Hit the other fellow as quick as you can and as hard as you can, where it hurts him most, when he ain't looking.' Slim's entire approach to strategy was to exploit his enemy's weaknesses and so undermine his will to win. He did this successfully in Syria in 1941, and India and Burma in 1944 and 1945. By so doing he attempted to achieve moral dominance over his enemy, to make him believe that he could not ultimately prevail and that the battle, and indeed the campaign, was lost. It was an approach to war that sat in stark contrast to the idea of matching strength with strength, and force with force, where the goal of strategy was simply to slog it out with an enemy in an attritional confrontation, of the sort expounded by less imaginative commanders (British and others) elsewhere during the war and, indeed, throughout history. Slim prized above all the virtues of cunning and guile, and he sought opportunities at every turn to trick and deceive his enemy. In the fighting in India and Burma this required realistic, physically demanding training; the use of air power to supply forward troops; new tactics to fight the Japanese; the delegation of command to the lowest levels; a self-help approach to logistical deficiencies and a relentless exploitation of the pursuit, to ensure that an enemy caught off guard had limited opportunities to recover its equilibrium. The campaigns in India and Burma in 1944 and 1945 were to reward Slim's approach to warfare with a victory that few if any in 1942 or 1943 foresaw. In 1944 he allowed General Mutaguchi’s 100,000 strong 15 Army to extend itself deep into India, there to be met by a ruthlessly determined 4 Corps, supplied by air and attacking at every opportunity the tenuous Japanese lines of communication back to the Chindwin. It was high risk, and more than one senior officer in Delhi and London despaired of success. Slim, however, knew otherwise, and in the process of the climatic battles of Imphal and Kohima he succeeded in shattering the cohesion of a whole Japanese army and destroying its will to fight, a situation as yet unheard of for a fully formed Japanese army in the field. There were a number of close calls, and Slim was always the first to admit to his mistakes, but his steady nerve never failed. He moulded the Japanese offensive to suit his own plans, and step-by-step, he decisively broke it in the hills of eastern Assam and the Imphal plain.
Many commanders would then have sat on their laurels. Not so Slim. He was convinced that real victory against the Japanese required an aggressive pursuit, not just to the Chindwin but into the heart of Burma itself. Single-handedly he worked to put in place all the ingredients of a bold offensive to seize Mandalay at a time when every inclination in London and Washington was to seek an amphibious solution to the problem of Burma and thus avoid the entanglements of a land offensive. Slim believed, however, that it could be done. Virtually alone he drove his plans forward, winning agreement and acceptance to his ideas as he went, particularly with Mountbatten, the Supreme Allied Commander in the Far East, and went on to execute in Burma in 1945 one of the most brilliant expositions of the strategic art that warfare has ever seen. He did this in the face of difficulties of every sort and degree. Employing his abundant strategic initiative to the full, he succeeded in outwitting and destroying an even larger army under General Kimura along the Irrawaddy between Meiktila and Mandalay in the spring of 1945, Kimura himself describing Slim’s operation as the ‘masterstroke of allied strategy’.
What has history had to say about Slim? Every analysis of Slim's achievements in Burma provide evidence of a remarkable military talent. Most are effusive in their praise for him as a military commander. Dr Duncan Anderson, the historian and Head of War Studies at Sandhurst, places Slim 'in the same class as Guderian, Manstein and Patton as an offensive commander.' Michael Calvert, author and Chindit column commander, described the capture of Meiktila in 1945 as bearing 'the mark of genius.' Louis Allen, the first historian of the Burma Campaign, described the attack on Mandalay-Meiktila as 'one of the most underestimated strategic master-strokes in the history of the Second World War.' The historian Correlli ‘Bill’ Barnett likewise painted Slim's success at Meiktila as 'the cleverest, boldest, and most brilliant single British victory in World War II.' Likewise, the historian Bryan Perrett asserts that Slim ‘had a gift of instinctively recognizing the strategic potential of a situation while it was actually developing, and this places him in the foremost rank of Blitzkrieg commanders.’ Lieutenant General Sir Geoffrey Evans, who served under Slim both as both a Brigade and Divisional commander, concludes of the struggle for Burma in 1945: ‘What Slim had... done was to initiate at short notice the most subtle, audacious and complex operation of his whole career. Its execution revealed...that Slim was a complete general, since every element of the military art was required if it were not to fail. Deception and surprise, flexibility, concentration on the objective, calculated risks, the solution of grave administrative problems, imagination, sang-froid, invigorating leadership - all the clichés of the military textbooks were simultaneously and harmoniously brought to life as Slim, with an absolute assurance, conceived and accomplished his masterpiece.’ Who am I to disagree?.
Finally, in a masterful summary of the higher command of the Burma Campaign, the historian Frank McLynn argues that: 'There are solid grounds for asserting that when due allowances have been made... Slim's encirclement of the Japanese on the Irrawaddy deserves to rank with the great military achievements of all time - Alexander at Gaugamela..., Hannibal at Cannae... Julius Caesar at Alesia... or Napoleon at Austerlitz (1805). The often made - but actually ludicrous - comparison between Montgomery and Slim is relevant here... there is no Montgomery equivalent of the Irrawaddy campaign. His one attempt to prove himself a master of the war of movement - Operation MARKET GARDEN against Arnhem - was a signal and embarrassing failure. Montgomery was a military talent; Slim was a military genius.'
As I finish the final word should be left to one who served under him. ‘“Bill” Slim was to us, said Antony Brett-James, ‘a homely sort of general: on his jaw was carved the resolution of an army, in his stern eyes and tight mouth reside all the determination and unremitting courage of a great force. His manner held much of the bulldog, gruff and to the point, believing in every one of us, and as proud of the “Forgotten Army” as we were. I believe that his name will descend into history as a badge of honour as great as that of the “Old Contemptibles.”
Lord Mountbatten claimed that despite the reputation of others, such as the renowned self-publicist, Montgomery of Alamein, it was Slim who should rightly be regarded as the greatest British general of the Second World War. I would go further, and describe him as Britain's greatest ever general. I hope that you also agree.
Thank you.
Very well written. Now I really have to get and read the book!
Sold.
Can you recommend a book on his campaigns?