by Field Marshal Viscount Slim Whenever the comparative lists of The Greatest Generals Ever or The Greatest Military Books Ever pop up on Consimworld they always include William Slim or his war memoir Defeat Into Victory. For no good reason I had not read Slim's book but after playing The Gamers' BURMA became interested in the CBI (China-Burma-India) campaign and so finally ordered it from Amazon. And I'm mighty glad that I did. I normally don't read generals' war memoirs since they usually show them at their worst aspompous, self-righteous jerks whose victories were solely due to their brilliance while their defeats were really the fault of everybody else. Defeat Into Victory is so unlike that stereotype that it takes the reader off-guard at first. Slim's transparent honesty and humility are such that you can't help but warm to him while you read (lest his honesty and humility be cynically dismissed as a facade, as I was prepared to do, everything else that I've read about the man agrees that Slim was indeed unusually honest and humble). He was given command of the defense of Burma in March, 1942, when the situation there was bleak and about to get a whole lot worse; you get an idea from the titles of the opening chapters-- Into Burma, A Chapter of Misfortunes, Disaster, Evacuation, Aftermath. By war's end Slim had been promoted to army command while driving the Japanese out of Burma, a campaign that culminated in the final triumphant capture of Rangoon that he describes in a chapter titled The Last Battle. In the pages between Disaster and The Last Battle you learn many lessons about what it takes to build a victorious army in a backwater theatre. Supply issues were paramount for the Allies in Burma. A combination of poor road net, heavy mountain and jungle terrain, and the looming monsoon meant that the motorized British & American divisions seen in France could not exist. Instead Slim had to wean his troops onto a mix of air, river, animal, and human transport that taxed his army's slender resources to the limit. At times it appears that he had more difficulty in keeping his front-line troops supplied than in defeating the Japanese in battle. Interestingly, he notes that once the frontline moved from Kohima/Imphal and back into Burma his light Indian and West African divisions were more useful than his heavier (meaning more motorised) British divisions-- when was the last time you saw that in a wargame? To compound his difficulties, the CBI theatre was at the bottom of the Allied priority list. Slim constantly saw troops, aircraft, landing craft, and good officers transferred out to reinforce a myriad of other operations- the Americans were particularly obsessed with keeping the Burma Road open- and soon learned to stop complaining and rely on his own resources. Capturing a few operational Japanese trucks or stumbling on a dock full of river craft became a windfall of joyous proportions. Once again I find evidence to refute the commonly held belief that the Allies in WW2 didn't outfight the Axis, but instead out-materialed them. To which I reply, bollocks, the Allies won by good generalship and hard-fighting, by driving through their supply problems while the Axis hung up on theirs. And I would give Defeat Into Victory as an example. What made the supply problems fix-able, and allowed Slim to run the army on such a shoestring, was outstanding staff work. Wargamers (like myself, I must admit) look down our long noses at staffers and their boring old supply and administrative functions, yet he remembers them all by name and gives them no end of credit. His headquarters had to be mobile and agile, so he quickly ditched the normal HQ impedimenta in favour of a few mouldy tents, some battered typewriters, and a couple of boxes worth of files; he credits teaching his staff to be able to build or tear down Army HQ in under an hour as one of his greatest accomplishments of the campaign ! Throughout the book Slim tries so hard to say something good about everybody. Including "Vinegar Joe" Stillwell, the prickly American commander of the Northern Combat Area Command which included most of the Chinese troops in Burma. It is when he says that Stillwell was the only general that he ever met who could actually make the Chinese fight that you realise the depth of animosity that lay between Slim and Orde Wingate, creator of the Chindit glider-borne commando forces and a general thorn in Slim's side until Wingate's death in April, 1944. Wingate believed that his commando drops behind Japanese lines could be decisive in the theatre and soon gained Winston Churchill's ear, a resource that he was not shy about using whenever Slim shot down his more grandiose schemes. Slim felt that the Chindits were of only moderate usefulness since they couldn't be dropped in much force, were always easily contained by Japanese rear area troops, wasted highly trained jungle fighters and did only minor damage that even the resource-strapped Japanese easily repaired. (In retrospect, although Wingate got himself a lot of good publicity, it looks like Slim was correct). Slim relates their showdowns with some satisfaction (since he usually won) and you still note the hostility that Slim felt towards Wingate even 11 years after his rival's death. Slim's opinions of the Japanese are interesting. He praises their fighting skill highly, particularly their ability to live on the lightest of rations and operate in the most challenging of conditions, yet disdains them as a people. Slim's reference to the Japanese as "the most formidable fighting insect in history" is striking to the modern eye. He seems honestly baffled at their fanatical attitude of fighting on even when clearly defeated, of coming into captured Japanese field hospitals to find that they have killed their own wounded. Slim has a very low opinion of their generalship, particularly Japanese generals' inflexible tendency to develop unworkable attack plans and stick with them doggedly, refusing to retreat until cut off and destroyed, as happened at Kohima/Imphal. This is an informed view of the Japanese from somebody who learned how to beat them that makes me question the unreasonably high ratings given them in games like Burma and ASL. The allure of wondering how Slim would have performed in another theatre is hard to resist (so I shan't). Could he have outgeneraled Montgomery or Alexander? It's hard to say no. He believed in simple plans (so out goes Market Garden), co-operating with your Allies, the importance of supplies (so the Scheldt is cleared faster), and always thinking of how to regain the initiative and go back on the offensive (so we get a better counter-attack in the Ardennes). Anybody who could handle prima donnas like Wingate and Stillwell could easily have handled George Patton, and he sure would have saved Eisenhower a lot of heartburn. But American wargamers would lose Montgomery as one of the great villains of World War 2, and where would we be then? Back to Perfidious Albion #104 Table of Contents Back to Perfidious Albion List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by Charles and Teresa Vasey. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com