PRAISE FOR
DEFEAT INTO VICTORY
“Here is a great book worthy to set beside Churchill’s War Memoirs.” —Evening News (London)
“Slim’s lessons are valuable: They teach the leadership of men.” —The New Yorker
“A dramatic story, a well-knit and exciting narrative with a sound, strong plot. . . . The boundless scope of this man shines from every page of this book.” —New York Times
“The best general’s book of World War II. Nobody who reads [Slim’s] account of the war, meticulously honest yet deeply moving, will doubt that here is a soldier of stature and a man amongst men.” —London Standard
“[Defeat into Victory] is something rare—an autobiography of command and revelation at the same time of as decent and attractive a man as one could meet. . . . Slim writes with grace, humor and verve.” —New York Herald Tribune Books
“A vivid and deeply moving story of endurance and heroism.” —Observer
“Of all the world’s greatest records of war and military adventure, this story must surely take its place among the greatest. It is told with a wealth of human understanding, a gift of vivid description, and a revelation of the indomitable spirit of the fighting man that can seldom have been equaled—let along surpassed—in military history.” —The Field
Defeat into Victory
Battling Japan in Burma and India,
1942–1945
Field-Marshal Viscount William Slim
KG, GCB, GCMG, GCVO, GBE, DSO, MC
With a New Introduction by David W. Hogan Jr.
Copyright © 1956 by Viscount William Slim
Copyright renewed © 1972 by Aileen, Viscountess Slim
New introduction copyright © 2000 by David W. Hogan Jr.
First Cooper Square Press edition 2000
This Cooper Square Press paperback edition of Defeat into Victory: Battling Japan in Burma and India, 1942–1945 is an unabridged republication of the edition originally titled Defeat into Victory first published in London in 1956, with the addition of a new introduction by David W. Hogan Jr. It is reprinted by arrangement with the author’s estate.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
Published by Cooper Square Press,
An Imprint of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
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New York, New York 10011
Distributed by National Book Network
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Slim, William Joseph Slim, Viscount, 1891–1970.
Defeat into victory : battling Japan in Burma and India, 1942–1945 / William Slim.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-8154-1022-5
1. World War, 1939-1945— Campaigns— Burma. 2. World War, 1939-1945— Campaigns— India. I. Title.
D767.6 .S55 2000
940.54'25— dc21 99–05596.
™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
To
AILEEN
a soldier’s wife who followed the drum
and
from mud–walled hut or Government House
made a home
INTRODUCTION
Today, Field Marshal Sir William Slim is almost unknown in the United States and only slighdy more renowned in Great Britain. The British general who rebounded from the Burma catastrophe of 1942 to form and lead the multinational army that won overwhelming victory over the Japanese in 1944 and 1945 usually receives a few obscure paragraphs in most World War II histories and almost no recognition among the Anglo-American public. Among those who study the war in Burma, however, Slim has earned acclaim as one of the great generals of World War II, and his memoir, Defeat into Victory, has gained plaudits as one of the classics of its genre—possibly, as one reviewer put it, “the best general’s book of World War II.”
Why has Slim received so litde notice? To be sure, Burma’s status as a “forgotten theater” has been a bit overplayed, given the attention devoted to the region in Allied councils and the American media’s fascination with Lt. Gen. Joseph W. “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell and “Merrill’s Marauders.” But much of this attention began to decline after early 1944, as the Allies advanced in Europe and the Pacific and prospects for an enhanced Chinese contribution to the common effort faded. Also, when Americans have looked at the theater, they have tended to focus their attention on the campaign in North Burma, where the vast majority of their troops were and where they were trying to build a new supply route to China, and not on Slim’s offensive in Central and South Burma, which they viewed as a drive to regain Britain’s Asiatic colonies. Then too, Slim has often been eclipsed by other more arresting figures. The campaigns and personality of Field Marshal Sir Bernard L. Montgomery, the British general Americans love to hate, has left almost every other British military figure of World War II in his shadow. With regard to Burma, the colorful Stilwell has similarly dwarfed all other contenders, especially in American accounts. Of British generals in Burma, the eccentric Maj. Gen. Orde C. Wingate, leader of the Chindit raiders, has been the only individual to receive anywhere near the attention lavished on Stilwell.
As of early 1944, about the time the Burma theater began to recede in the consciousness of the Allied public, Slim’s career gave litde promise of great success. Born to a lower middle-class family in Bristol in 1891, he was a schoolteacher and later a junior clerk in Birmingham before receiving a commission at the start of World War I. He was badly wounded at Gallipoli and again in Mesopotamia, and then was invalided to India. Facing litde opportunity in the postwar British Army, he transferred to the Indian Army, where he commanded Gurkha units, saw combat on the Northwest Frontier, served as a staff officer, and attended and taught at various staff colleges. He displayed a capacity for analysis in these assignments but gained no special notoriety. At the outbreak of World War II, he was promoted to brigadier and command of the 10th Indian Brigade along the Ethiopia-Sudan border. He badly mishandled the brigade’s attack on the Italian fortress at Metema, but, through good fortune, ended up commanding the 10th Indian Division, where he fared better. In March 1942 he arrived in Burma, in time to lead the Burma Corps in its disastrous defeat and debilitating withdrawal to India. By 1943, Slim was associated with a long string of defeats. Perhaps Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill was recalling those events when he remarked in 1944, “I cannot believe that a man with a name like Slim can be much good.”
Such adversity forged the essential humanity that so many have noted in Slim’s memoir. As Duncan Anderson stated, “The reader looked in vain for a ‘Great Captain’ striding across the stage of history, deploying his divisions in accordance with some brilliandy conceived and implemented masterplan.” Instead, Slim freely admits his frequent mistakes in the first Burma campaign: his damaging delay in ordering the withdrawal to the Imphal plain, his near-fatal underestimation of the enemy’s ability to infiltrate to Kohima, and the success of the Mandalay offensive in spite of seeing every assumption with which he had started the campaign proved wrong. He repeatedly attributes his successes to others, notably the support of his superiors, the hard work of his staff, and the “resourcefulness of my subordinate commanders and the stubborn valour of my troops.” He finds num
erous opportunities to laugh at himself, from his account of a Gurkha sergeant guffawing over his futile efforts to look brave when caught under enemy fire, to his efforts to cheer his staff after a defeat with the remark, “It might be worse—it might be raining,” only to have the skies open two hours later. Slim is even willing to concede that, in the grand picture, other theaters might have had greater claims to scarce manpower and resources. The contrasts with Montgomery and General of the Army Douglas MacArthur cannot be more striking.
Slim also could admit frequent struggles with self doubt, as his justifiably famous retrospective on the 1942 defeat shows.
The only test of generalship is success, and I had succeeded in nothing I had attempted. . . . The soldier may comfort himself with the thought that, whatever the result, he has done his duty faithfully and steadfasdy, but the commander has failed in his duty if he has not won victory—for that is his duty. He has no other comparable to it. He will go over in his mind the events of the campaign. ‘Here,’ he will think, ‘I went wrong; here I took counsel of my fears when I should have been bold; there I should have waited to gather strength, not struck piecemeal; at such a moment I failed to grasp opportunity when it was presented to me.’ He will remember the soldiers whom he sent into the attack that failed and who did not come back. He will recall the look in the eyes of men who trusted him. ‘I have failed them,’ he will say to himself, ‘and failed my country!’ He will see himself for what he is—a defeated general. In a dark hour, he will turn in upon himself and question the very foundations of his leadership and his manhood.
And then he must stop! For, if he is ever to command in batde again, he must shake off these regrets, and stamp on them, as they claw at his will and self-confidence. He must beat off these attacks he delivers against himself, and cast out the doubts bom of failure. Forget them, and remember only the lessons to be learnt from defeat—they are more than from victory.
Few memoirs by notable leaders have ever reached such a level of honesty and self-revelation as Slim achieved in this passage. At the same time, one finds none of the self-indulgence or self-pity characteristic of so many reminiscences. Through the self-evaluation, moral courage, and mental discipline shown in this extraordinary section, Slim managed to ward off the demons that beset a defeated general and prepared himself for the challenges facing his successful return to Burma.
Those challenges were real enough. As described by Slim, the Fourteenth Army’s area of operations consisted of “some of the world’s worst country, breeding the world’s worst diseases, and having for half the year at least the world’s worst climate.” The theater lay at the end of long lines of communication extending halfway around the world from Britain and the United States. That, and strategic priorities, resulted in shortages of nearly every item of supply. Within the theater, operations were hampered by inadequate railroads, poor roads, and a shortage of rolling stock and motor transport. Slim’s army would encounter steep, densely wooded mountain ranges cut by streams and, crossing their line of advance, the Chindwin and Irrawaddy, two of the world’s great river systems. Planners had to take into account the monsoon season, torrential rains that began in May and lasted two to three months, as well as the problem of disease, including malaria, dysentery, and typhus. Most of the population in Burma was indifferent or hostile to the Allied armies. Finally, the Allies themselves were divided by suspicion and diverging interests. The Nationalist Chinese were distrustful of Westerners and eager to preserve their forces for the postwar showdown with the Communists. The British were concerned about the defense of India and recovery of their colonies from the Japanese, while the Americans were suspicious of British imperial designs and eager to build China into a major factor in the war against Japan.
In Defeat into Victory, Slim cites as the “foundations of victory” building up the theater’s logistical infrastructure and supply reserves, maintaining the army’s health, and rebuilding the army’s morale. None of these would sound especially unusual to the military professional, but in the Burma context, they each assumed special importance. With regard to logistics and health, Slim, of course, faced obstacles common to Western armies operating on the Asian mainland in the mechanized age. He was well aware of the importance of administration and logistics to his success, notably in the case of the decisive batde for Imphal, where he could rely on good lines of communication while the Japanese suffered from elongated and exposed lines of supply. His conscientious attention to logistics and health issues paid dividends to the Fourteenth Army throughout the campaign.
To meet the logistical challenge, Slim preached frugality and self-reliance, reminding his troops that “God helps those who help themselves.” His resourceful logisticians improvised material for all-weather road surfaces and assembled a flimsy but effective collection of vessels for reconnaissance and support of river and seacoast operations. Air supply in particular made his operations possible, as the Allies developed a highly efficient system of air drops, transport, and evacuation to maintain the Fourteenth Army in the field. Indeed, so great was the demand for parachutes for air drops that his supply officers, lacking enough silk, used jute, common in the Bengal region, to manufacture serviceable chutes. In his memoir Slim acknowledges the crucial role of air transport in his operations but is also careful to point out air supply’s dependence on air supremacy, the key role of the Army as well as the Air Force in arranging deliveries, and air supply’s limitations in sustaining an encircled force over long periods of time.
In Defeat into Victory Slim also remarks, “The most important thing about a commander is his effect on morale.” Again, this is one of those shibboleths familiar to those steeped in military affairs, but its application is not always so easy. What impresses the reader about Slim is the methodical yet insightful way in which he approaches the subject. He notes the psychological ascendancy that the Japanese held after the 1942 campaign, exacerbated by the hardships of the theater, the sense of distance from home, and, in the case of Commonwealth troops, the lack of enthusiasm to die for the British Empire. Developing a program aimed at the spiritual, intellectual, and material foundations of morale, Slim managed to convince his troops that they were part of a larger team whose mission was to destroy the embodiment of evil, the Japanese Army. Through thorough training, tactical adjustments, and carefully planned operations, his troops became convinced that they could maneuver in the jungle and defeat the Japanese.
Slim’s personality was crucial to the rebuilding of morale. He displayed a natural talent as a manager of men, choosing the right people and providing steadfast support while allowing them the leeway to do their jobs. Although the reader cannot get the full sense of his personal impact from the memoir, plenty of accounts exist of Slim’s common touch in his frequent personal visits to the troops—the way in which his physical presence and bulldog jaw inspired confidence, and, not least, the effect of his ability to speak English, Gurkhali, or whichever other dialect the occasion demanded. Raymond Callahan describes an astonished British soldier near Meiktila who encountered the army commander, “virtually unaccompanied, carbine slung on his shoulder,” telling him and his companions, without Montgomery’s stagecraft or Lt. Gen. George S. Patton’s histrionics, that the sooner they took Rangoon, the sooner they would be on the “big ships” home. He quickly won the affection and admiration of his men, who called him “Uncle Bill.”
In his comments about his allies outside his own army, Slim is surprisingly more guarded in his comments on the Americans than on the Chinese, although he praises individuals of all nationalities. While noting the Chinese disregard for time, their bent for theft, and their obsession with “face,” he effusively extols the courage, endurance, and eye for terrain of the Chinese soldier. In contrast, even though he pays tribute to the American logistical effort in constructing the Ledo Road, he points out that “the Americans had available a quantity of machinery that made our mouths water.” One senses, in his account, irritation at the extrava
gant claims of American ingenuity in the construction of the road at a time when his own troops were building roads in terrain as difficult with much less equipment. Part of his irritation, too, may be attributed to the American focus on building the road through northern Burma at the expense of support for a southern offensive that, in the British view, would have opened a really effective link with China. Slim condemns as a distortion the American suspicion that the British hoped to regain their empire with American lives, but he must have recognized how plausible such a suspicion would be to Americans.
Notwithstanding his disagreements with Stilwell on many points of strategy, Slim actually appears to like the acerbic American. To be sure, he clearly finds Stilwell to be a bit of a caricature with his stubbornness, his unnecessary prejudices, and his efforts to maintain for press and public the image of a rugged foot soldier, uninterested in the trappings of command. But Slim was impressed with Stilwell’s mental and physical toughness, determination, sincerity, and courage. He evaluates Stilwell as “not a great soldier in the highest sense, but he was a real leader in the field; no one else I know could have made his Chinese do what they did.” Obviously, Slim was flattered that Stilwell, after making a long and tenacious argument against coming under the British general who served as Commander-in-Chief of Allied Land Forces for Southeast Asia, suddenly offered to place himself under Slim, his junior and a mere army commander. Stilwell’s action revealed the high regard in which he held Slim as a fighter, a regard he displayed for few other British officers. As early as March 1942, during the disastrous first Burma campaign, Stilwell had written in his diary, “Good old Slim. Maybe he’s all right after all.”
Slim’s reaction to Wingate was nowhere near as positive as his reaction to Stilwell. While acknowledging the great moral benefits of the Chindits’ first mission and the courage and endurance of the raiders, he denounces the raid as an expensive failure. His regard for Wingate slipped even further during the opening phases of the second great Chindit raid in March 1944, when Wingate, overwrought by reports of obstacles on one of the three crucial Chindit landing zones, became fearful that his troops would be ambushed and thrust on Slim the responsibility for continuing the operation. Part of Slim’s dislike might have come from a discomfort with strongly egotistical, missionary personalities like Wingate and Mac-Arthur, both of whom receive little praise in the memoir. Looking back on the Chindit operations, Slim concludes that special forces are wasteful, taking men and resources that would find better service in more orthodox formations. He insists that he was not opposed to Wingate and indeed agreed with many of the man’s ideas, but most of his discussion gives precisely the opposite impression.
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