Defeat Into Victory

by Field-Marshal Viscount William Slim

  (i) The Germans in Europe had to be beaten first. The Germans had a much higher scale of equipment than the Japanese. In fairness and common sense, therefore, the armies fighting them, however hard it was on us, should have first call on new equipment.

  (ii) Within this limit every responsible commander would do his utmost to get what we needed.

  (iii) If we could not get everything we wanted issued to us, we would either improvise it ourselves or do without.

  (iv) We should be short of many things but I would not ask the troops to do anything unless there was at least the minimum of equipment needed for the task.

  These things were frankly put to the men by their commanders at all levels and, whatever their race, they responded. In my experience it is not so much asking men to fight or work with inadequate or obsolete equipment that lowers morale but the belief that those responsible are accepting such a state of affairs. If men realize that everyone above them and behind them is flat out to get the things required for them, they will do wonders, as my men did, with the meagre resources they have instead of sitting down moaning for better.

  I do not say that the men of the Fourteenth Army welcomed difficulties, but they grew to take a fierce pride in overcoming them by determination and ingenuity. From start to finish they had only two items of equipment that were never in short supply: their brains and their courage. They lived up to the unofficial motto I gave them, ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ Anybody could do an easy job, we told them. It would take real men to overcome the shortages and difficulties we should be up against—the tough chap for the tough job! We had no corp d’élite which got preferential treatment; the only units who got that were the ones in front. Often, of course, they went short owing to the difficulties of transportation, but, if we had the stuff and could by hook or crook get it to them, they had it in preference to those farther back. One of the most convincing evidences of morale was how those behind—staffs and units—accepted this, and deprived themselves to ensure it. I indulged in a little bit of theatricality in this myself. When any of the forward formations had to go on half rations, as throughout the campaign they often did, I used to put my headquarters on half rations too. It had little practical effect, but as a gesture it was rather valuable, and it did remind the young staff officers with healthy appetites that it was urgent to get the forward formations back to full rations as soon as possible.

  The fair deal meant, too, no distinction between races or castes in treatment. The wants and needs of the Indian, African, and Gurkha soldier had to be looked after as keenly as those of his British comrade. This was not always easy as many of our staff officers, having come straight from home, were, with the best will in the world, ignorant of what these wants were. There were a few, too, who thought that all Indian or African troops required was a bush to lie under and a handful of rice to eat. The Indian soldier’s needs are not so numerous or elaborate as the Britisher’s, but his morale can be affected just as severely by lack of them.

  In another respect we had no favourites. I was frequently asked as the campaign went on, ‘Which is your crack division?’ I always replied, ‘All my divisions are crack divisions!’ This was true in the sense that at some time or other every division I ever had in the Fourteenth Army achieved some outstanding feat of arms, and it might be any division that at any given period was leading the pack. The men of each division believed that their division was the best in the whole army, and it was right they should, but it is very unwise to let any formation, however good, be publicly recognized as better than the others. The same thing applies to units, and this was especially important where we had fighting together battalions with tremendous names handed down from the past, newly raised ones with their traditions yet to make, men of recognized martial races and others drawn from sources that had up to now no military record. They all got the same treatment and they were all judged by results. Sometimes the results were by no means in accordance with accepted tables of precedence.

  The individual, we took pains to ensure, too, was judged on his merits without any undue prejudice in favour of race, caste, or class. This is not always as easy as it sounds or as it ought to be, but, I think, promotion, for instance, went by merit whether the officer was British or Indian, Regular or emergency commissioned. In an army of hundreds of thousands many injustices to individuals were bound to occur but, thanks mainly to officers commanding units, most of the Fourteenth Army would, I believe, say that on the whole they had, as individuals, a reasonably fair deal. At any rate we did our best to give it them.

  In these and in many other ways we translated my rough notes on the foundations of morale, spiritual, intellectual, and material, into a fighting spirit for our men and a confidence in themselves and their leaders that was to impress our friends and surprise our enemies.

  BOOK III

  The Weapon is Tested

  CHAPTER X

  THE BEST-LAID PLANS

  HAVING set things in motion to deal with the three great internal problems of supply, health, and morale, I next turned my attention to the location of my own headquarters. As a place, I intensely disliked Barrackpore. Its sordid slums depressed me, as did the faded splendours of the pre-Mutiny buildings in which we worked and lived. The distractions of Calcutta were on our doorstep and were not good for us or for our work; worst of all, it was too far from the fighting areas. Air travel, the only practicable way of getting round the fronts, reduced time, but it by no means annihilated distance. By air, Barrackpore to Imphal was about four hundred miles, the fighting was from a hundred to a hundred and fifty miles beyond that, and the northern Chinese front farther still. It was as if I were controlling from London a seven hundred mile battle front in the Italian Alps, only the roads and railways of Europe did not exist and the telegraphic and wireless communications were comparatively rudimentary. It was obviously necessary from every point of view to get my headquarters moved forward and, if possible, more centrally placed.

  Choice was limited. Army Headquarters needed a considerable amount of accommodation, preferably in buildings, with good communications and at a site equally suitable for the air forces. I was determined that, wherever we went, my headquarters and that of the air forces working with me should be together. They, indeed, were already pressing for a move to Comilla, a largish town some two hundred miles east of Calcutta. For Bengal, its rail and road communications were good; it was capable of development into an air centre, as the capital of a district, it had a number of large administrative buildings, and it was at least no more unhealthy than Barrackpore. So to Comilla we decided to go. The Sappers and Signallers were soon at work, and preparations to receive both Army and Air Headquarters were now pressed on most vigorously.

  At the end of October, with Bill Williams, the A.O.C., I made a final reconnaissance to allot accommodation between us. I should have liked to build a new Army Headquarters on slightly higher ground a few miles out of the town, but that would have taken too long, so we reserved this high ground for hospitals and wireless transmitters and went into the town itself. A Bengali town, its walls mildewed and stained by past monsoons, is invariably depressing, but Comilla had a sideline in melancholy all its own—its most noticeable features were the memorials erected to British civil and police officers, who, with monotonous frequency, had been murdered in the town by Bengali terrorists. My office windows would give me a good view of one such monument.

  My next task was to get round my front. Arakan could wait. I was well acquainted with it and with what was going on there, but the main front in Assam I had not visited since June 1942, so I went there first. A lot had happened since the Retreat, not so much in the way of fighting as in administrative development. I found Lieut.-General Geoffry Scoones, who commanded on that front, a little worried about the dispersion of his corps on a two-hundred-mile stretch. However, I felt that if the local situation on the Japanese side remained much as it was, if our intentions continued offensive, and, above al
l, if plans for a major amphibious operation were going to be realized, we need not be unduly anxious about the rather scattered dispositions of 4 Corps.

  From the Assam front I was called to Supreme Headquarters to attend conferences on the forthcoming general offensive. It was a sudden change from the jungle bashas, bivouacs, and worn green battledress of 4 Corps to die decorative interiors of New Delhi, thronged by all known, and some unknown, types of Allied uniform, male and female. New Delhi, the most beautiful and romantic official capital in the world, spacious as it is, was overcrowded. Apart from the wartime expansion of the Civil government, there were three great military headquarters competing there for space—General Headquarters India, Supreme Headquarters South-East Asia, and 11th Army Group Headquarters. I could sympathize with Admiral Mountbatten’s desire to move his headquarters to some less congested spot and one within his own command.

  The conferences themselves were impressive affairs. They took place in the red sandstone secretariat building, where, as a junior staff officer, I had worked fifteen years before. The room in which they were held was large, and it was full. I had never seen so many people at a planning conference, but then, I reminded myself, I had never before seen a planning conference on this level. At the head of a very long table flanked by big windows sat the Supreme Commander, Admiral Mountbatten; down each side were ranged his commanders-in-chief and his principal staff officers, while at the foot a scurry of secretaries of two nations and six Services ran a note-taking marathon. On ranks of chairs filling the rest of the room were American generals, Chinese admirals, British air marshals, Dutchmen, Indians, and what seemed to me a very large number of officers of all ranks and kinds.

  The men who impressed me most in these gatherings were General Wheeler, the American Chief Administrative Officer, obviously a man of great ability, and, what was even more important, experienced common sense, and my own Commander-in-Chief, General Giffard, who, although not at his best in debate of this sort, kept to the fore the element of practical soldiering. I was surprised to find that the conference often occupied itself with minor matters of equipment, moves of units, and a dozen things that might have been thrown to staff officers to handle. A good many hares were put up and enthusiastically chased. At times we seemed to be thinking more of the effects of our proposed action on Whitehall and Washington than on Tokyo. The truth was I had not been accustomed to the large staffs that had become popular in Europe and Africa, nor did I make allowances for the inevitable teething troubles of a great headquarters.

  This was the first conference I had sat through at S.E.A.C. Headquarters, and I found it a little bewildering. I attended many in the next two years, and it was interesting to see how rapidly they became more business-like and effective as Admiral Mountbatten learnt the job of Supreme Commander. Because he had to learn it. No Englishman ever got much opportunity to practise high command in peace, and none to be a supreme commander. Admiral Mountbatten’s career as a naval officer, his command of a destroyer flotilla, and later an aircraft carrier with the quick-thinking, instant decisions and direct control of men that such tasks call for, were the finest possible training for tactical command. His period as Chief of Combined Operations gave him an insight into the organization and working of the other two Services that was of tremendous value to him; but the tactical planning of combined operations involves, more than any other, attention to and concentration on detail, in contrast to the broader, long-term considerations that are the province of a supreme commander. It was as a member of the Chiefs of Staffs Committee for Combined Operations, where he came into contact with the wider direction of the war as a whole, that he served his apprenticeship for supreme command.

  His comparative youth—he was ten years younger than I and twenty years younger than Stilwell—was something of a stimulant to most of us, and certainly to our troops. There may have been a few in the Navy, where they are more stripe conscious, who found it hard to forget that they were admirals when he was a commander, but in the Army we are more tolerant in these matters. We are too accustomed to the vagaries of acting and temporary rank. My substantive rank when I became Army Commander was still Colonel, but I do not think that bothered anyone very much. From the very start, no one could fail to like the Supreme Commander—even Stilwell, in a picturesque phrase, once admitted that to me—and his quick brain, backed by a remarkable memory and tireless vitality, enabled him to grasp the intricacies of the whole vast organization of which he was the head. He came more and more to concentrate on essentials and to look farther ahead, until he was in every sense a real supreme commander.

  I found Supreme Headquarters a fascinating place to wander through. It was full of interesting people, not least persuasive young men interested in selling short cuts to victory, of which they held the rights of way. These ‘racketeers’, as I called them, were of two kinds, those whose acquaintance with war was confined to large non-fighting staffs where they had had time and opportunity to develop their theories, and tough, cheerful fellows who might be first-class landed on a beach at night with orders to scupper a sentry-post, but whose experience was about the range of a tommy-gun. I liked talking to them and they were very willing to oblige me. Few of them had anything really new to say, and the few that had, usually forgot that a new idea should have something to recommend it besides just breaking up normal organization.

  While the new headquarters was quickly getting into its stride, there arose in Delhi one disturbing feature—a growing danger of serious friction between Supreme Headquarters, South-East Asia, and General Headquarters, India. Many of the newly arrived staff had no knowledge of India, its limitations or its capabilities, and sometimes they showed the arrogance of ignorance. The old hands at Indian Headquarters in their turn were too ready to resent their displacement in control of operations and to be sensitive to criticism of their past efforts. It was only the admirable good sense of the commanders themselves that avoided the catastrophe of a split into two factions, the pro-Mountbatten and the pro-Auchinleck. They set their faces firmly against any encouragement of this rivalry, and, in spite of the many real difficulties, co-operated fully and unselfishly. Had they not, success in South-East Asia would have been longer delayed.

  All this time, planning was proceeding at high pressure, and in what might justly be termed two camps—the ‘Sac’ and the ‘Cic’, the Supreme Allied Commander’s planners and the Commanders-in-Chief’s planners. It was rather like a game of tennis. One set of planners tossed up a plan and served it to the others, who amended it and sent it back over the net. These returns went on for quite a time, until Sac or Cic eventually ended the rally by a triumphant smash that bounced the unfortunate plan right out of court. Early in the proceedings the Supreme Commander himself became aware of this, and it was not long before he organized a machine that really worked, by the simple expedient of placing the Cs.-in-C.’s planners and his own in one joint body under the chairmanship of his senior planner.

  The first directive from the Combined British and American Chiefs of Staff laid down two tasks for the Allied Forces in South-East Asia. First, they were to engage the Japanese as closely as possible so as to divert enemy formations from the Pacific theatre, where the Americans were staging an offensive, and, second, they were to expand our contacts with China by developing the air route and by building a road through North Burma to connect with the old China–Burma route. Full advantage was to be taken of our increasing superiority at sea and in the air to seize some area which would induce a powerful reaction from the enemy. Mr. Churchill had for this purpose strongly urged an amphibious operation against Sumatra, and the first task of the planners had been to consider this. It was, however, decided that, with the resources available, it could not be undertaken. This was reported to the Chiefs of Staff, who replied that no more could be sent to Burma at this stage of the war. There was then no alternative but to abandon the Sumatra project.

  Nothing daunted, the planning teams set to work to discov
er something less ambitious in the way of an amphibious operation. The Andaman Islands were obviously a second choice, but the best within the scope of the forces available. The capture of these islands, combined with operations in Burma itself, would, it was hoped, fulfil the directive. By the end of November these plans had crystallized into a series of connected offensives which were to take place in 1944. They were:

  (i) The capture of the Andaman Islands by 33 Corps in an amphibious operation.

  (ii) The occupation of the Mayu Peninsula in Arakan by 15 Corps, as a preliminary to an amphibious assault on Akyab.

  (iii) An advance across the Chindwin by 4 Corps on the Central front, with the object of drawing off the main Japanese forces from (iv).

  (iv) An advance by General Stilwell’s Chinese from Ledo to Myitkyina to cover the building of a road to China.

  (v) To help Stilwell’s advance, a long-range penetration operation behind the Japanese opposing him, by Wingate’s Special Force.

  (vi) An airborne operation by the Indian Parachute Brigade and an Indian division to seize the Rail Indaw area, first to help Stilwell’s advance and, second, to co-operate with (vii).

  (vii) An offensive by the Chinese Yunnan armies into the Lashio-Bhamo area.

  This programme, in addition to the Andamans assault, entailed a widespread offensive over the whole of the Burma front. The operations proposed were within the compass of the land forces and strategically well integrated. Obviously, however, as they included one major and one lesser amphibious operation, and at least two large airborne or air-supplied campaigns, to say nothing of other air transport commitments, the whole plan depended for its practicability on large numbers of naval landing craft and considerable air transport formations being available. Everyone at S.E.A.C. Headquarters appeared confident that these forces would be forthcoming from those already in or firmly allotted to the theatre. I had the pleasant feeling that now we really were on the map in Whitehall and Washington.