Bill Slim
General William Slim
British army general and commander of the Fourteenth Army in India and Burma. Born on 6 August 1891 in Bristol, Slim came from humble stock. He joined the Officer Training Corps, and in August 1914, he was commissioned a second lieutenant. At Gallipoli in 1915, he received a serious wound, but he made a full recovery. He deployed to Mesopotamia in 1916, earning the Military Cross for valor before being wounded again and sent to India to convalesce.
Between the wars, Slim served with the Indian army, honed his writing doing part-time journalism, and distinguished himself as an instructor at the Staff College at Camberley and as a student at the Imperial Defence College. By 1940, he was a brigadier general commanding the 10th Indian Infantry Brigade. At Gallabat in the Sudan, his brigade retreated in the face of inferior Italian forces. After this error in judgment, he adopted a marked preference for offensive boldness. The next year, he rose to major general and command of the 10th Indian Division in Iraq and Syria.
With the Japanese invasion of Burma, Slim returned to the China-Burma-India Theater in March 1942 to command the Burma Corps. Overwhelmed by the superior skill and mobility of attacking Japanese forces, Slim oversaw a 1,000-mile retreat, the longest in British army history. Throughout, he kept his demoralized and seriously outclassed corps together, preserving 12,000 men to fight another day.
Promoted to lieutenant general and given command of XV Corps in April 1942, Slim worked to instill in his soldiers resilience and an aggressive attitude. By emphasizing fitness, night and jungle training, small-unit tactics, and self-reliance, he restored the confidence of a badly shaken army. As with the more famous Bernard Montgomery, Slim had the advantage of being not quite a gentleman. He spoke to his troops using their language (he knew Urdu and Gurkhali), and he shared their sacrifices. A solid physique and strong, lantern-jawed mien lent authority to his tough talk. As he mingled with his men, he transmitted the forcefulness of his own personality to the units under his command. Slim continued his personalized brand of leadership when he assumed command of the Fourteenth Army in May 1943.
Slim’s Fourteenth Army faced its sternest challenge with the Japanese HA-GÙ and U-GÙ offensives in March 1944, the latter aiming for Imphal and Kohima. Initially caught off balance, Slim’s army fought doggedly, forcing the Japanese to expend their momentum and limited supplies in costly attacks. Counterattacking, Fourteenth Army pursued the Japanese across the malarial mountains of Burma during the monsoon season. In its headlong retreat, the Japanese Fifteenth Army lost nearly half of its initial force of 150,000 men. Fighting a unified Japanese army with an aura of invincibility about it, Slim’s multiethnic and religiously diverse army inflicted the largest land defeat on Japan up to that time. Slim then led the reconquest of Burma until war’s end.
After the war, Slim served as chief of the Imperial General Staff, and in 1949 he earned promotion to field marshal. From 1953 to 1960, he was governor-general of Australia, becoming in 1960 the First Viscount Slim. His memoir, Defeat into Victory (1956), is regarded as a classic. Slim died in London on 14 December 1970.
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Bill Slim, but from what I have read he seems to have done pretty well in the Middle East. In East Africa he led an assault that he didn't agree with until he got shot (in the ass,). The attack baulked at that point.
In Syria he led a long-range penetration that was successful in dislocating Vichy positions and contributed to the success of the operation - one of the few successful British feats of arms to that point. He led from the front, too. Rather in front of the front. There is a story about the lead recon unit of his force advancing along a winding mountain road in Syria. They heard a vehicle approaching and set up an ambush. The vehicle they stopped was Slim's staff car, coming from in FRONT of them. Slim said, "By the way, there's an AT gun on the third bend ahead of you." He then drove off, leaving the Recon officer gaping at a rather large hole in the back of the General's staff car.
As 14th Army CO, he took a ragtag bunch of people who had been 'abandoned' by Higher Authority and turned them into a winning force. OK, the Japenese were outgunned and starving; such did not keep them from inflicting approximately equal casualties in any other campaign (the difference is the Allied casualties included dead and wounded, the Japanese were almost all DEAD). 14th Army did better than any other force facing Japanese opposition, and did it while "Sucking Hind Teat" on the supply chain even worse than SWPA and SoPac were. I mean, who else conducted successful mobile warfare using Grants?
PS: When Slim succeeded Montgomery as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Monty gave him a detailed gripe session about the many things wrong with the British Army.
Slim's response was, "And what have YOU done about it?" He then proceeded to straighten things out during his term as CIGS (insofar as anyone can straighten out an organization dominated by the bureaucrats of MoD).
References
Calvert, Michael. Slim. New York: Ballantine Books, 1973.
Evans, Geoffrey C. Slim as Military Commander. London: B. T. Batsford, 1969.
Lewin, Ronald. Slim the Standardbearer: A Biography of Field- Marshal the Viscount Slim. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1976.
Slim, Sir William. Defeat into Victory. London: Cassell, 1956 (rev. ed. 1961).
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