Defeat into Victory

"Bill Slim was, arguably, Britain’s greatest commander of forces in the Second World War. He was a soldier’s general, really in touch with his troops. I think in the past his name was overshadowed by the likes of Montgomery but nowadays—thanks to people like Rob Lyman—most people in military history will know his name, and hopefully a lot of the general public as well. I would say that Defeat into Victory is the finest military memoir written by a commander in the English language. It’s a fantastic book. He’s very honest about his failings and his failures, which is rare. He’s generous to his troops, and he’s analytical. Don’t mistake his generosity for a lack of skill or nous in terms of understanding the military situation. In the book, he discusses the campaign, what went wrong, things that he managed to fix, and things he wished he’d done better. If somebody only reads one book on leadership and what it takes to rebuild an army—which had broken down in terms of their morale and what they thought they could achieve—this is the book to do that. The title says it all: Defeat into Victory. That’s what he had to do. When the 14th Army was created, and he was given command, it was an army that had been beaten out of Burma. It was an army which had been involved in a terrible initial escapade into Burma, the first Arakan campaign, which went disastrously wrong, with huge numbers of casualties. They did not have the training to fight in the jungle. They did not have the tactics. They did not have the imagination to fight this enemy, the Japanese, who were fighting in a way that the British Army had not dreamt could be possible. Slim was the man who came in and said, ‘No, these guys are not unbeatable. We’ve just got to change what we’re doing and the way we’re looking at things. We’ve got to understand the landscape. We’ve got to respect it and use it to our advantage. The Japanese are not unbeatable, but the tactics we’re using, these big advances with a huge number of troops, are not going to work. The Japanese are very mobile; they move around us, they cut us off and then we’re stuffed. What we need to do is take a leaf out of their book. We need to work in smaller numbers. We need to not be afraid of being cut off .’ Slim famously developed the use of the ‘box’ tactic, which is that if British troops were cut off and surrounded—a tactic favoured by the Japanese—that rather than panicking, the British and Indian forces were to stand strong. They were to defend their perimeter and wait for help to arrive, which it would. They were not to panic about being surrounded. That’s what they did at the Battle of the Admin Box in early 1944, which was really a turning point for the troops’ morale. They waited out the Japanese who had surrounded them. The Japanese ran out of rations because they relied on these very quick manoeuvres and scaring the British and Indian troops to retreat. They waited them out, and the Japanese were starving and had to retreat themselves. Slim was really the architect of this. It’s not all down to him. There were many other people involved, but he was the commander who grabbed the bull by the horns and made it work. It just takes you through the campaign and this idea of what you do when you take command of a situation. For me, it’s a book that goes beyond military history, because it’s about being in a situation where the odds are against you, taking the time not to panic, and breaking it down and saying, ‘No, these are the ways that we can fix it’—and how he made that happen. We tend to forget that the British Army and the Indian Army won in Burma. It was a victory. It’s about the evolution that the Allies went through to get there. Yes, originally the book was just going to be about 3 Commando Brigade, which my granddad was in. Then, I quickly realized that what they did wouldn’t have been possible without the Indian and West African divisions. That’s the other big, important point to take away about the war in Burma. The 14th Army was one of the most culturally and racially diverse groups of men fighting together and alongside one another that has ever been. The Indians were the biggest group, but there were also British, West African, and Nepalese men in the 14th Army fighting alongside Chinese and Americans. People forget that. Again, the conversation comes back to imperialism and British India, and what was right and what was wrong, though I think the idea of Indian nationalism at the time and its impact in the Burma campaign has been overblown. The fact that the Indian Army which was mobilised to fight in Burma was the largest volunteer army in history says it all. These men weren’t corralled into it: they wanted to fight against the Japanese."