Books: Uncle Bill at War

UNOFFICIAL HISTORY (242 pp.)—Field Marshal the Viscount Slim—David McKay ($4.95).

DEFEAT INTO VICTORY (468 pp.)—Field Marshal the Viscount Slim—David McKay ($6.50).

When it came to explaining what World War II was really like, the great battlefield commanders proved no match for novelists and “the day that” documentarians. Compared with the fugacious naturalism of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead or the precise tapestry of Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day, the historically important memoirs of Ike or Monty have all the vitality of quartermaster supply reports. One of the war’s few Great Captains who can hold his own with the professional writers is Viscount William Slim, commander of Britain’s “forgotten” Fourteenth Army in Burma.

Slim’s vivid, modest account of the Burma campaign, Defeat into Victory, is already reckoned a minor masterpiece of war reporting. His new Unofficial History of assorted lesser campaigns in a 48-year army career boosts his reputation as a soldier who can reconstruct battles as brilliantly as he fought them.

Likable Enemies. An amiable blend of Colonel Blimp, Pukka Sahib and strategic genius, onetime Schoolmaster “Uncle Bill” Slim rose from the ranks to officer status during World War I. One of his first commands, as he recalls it with humor and affection in Unofficial History, was as head of two companies of infantry, pursuing the rear guard of a Turkish army across the Tigris River in 1917.

Like most members of the professional military freemasonry, Slim came to admire “all the soldiers of different races who have fought with me and most of those who have fought against me.” Among the most likable of his enemies were the Wazirs of India’s Northwest Frontier. In 1920, between bouts of study for the Indian army’s exams in advanced Urdu, Slim took part in a retaliatory raid on an obscure village of these wild mountaineers. It was an unusually easy victory over the canny Wazirs, whom the British took by surprise and escaped from with scant loss after burning their village to the ground. Afterwards, in the casual frontier way, the British sent a message to the Wazirs, expressing surprise at the enemy’s unusually poor shooting. The Wazirs replied in courtly fashion that their rifles were Short Magazine Lee-Enfields captured in previous fights with the British—”a shrewd cut that,” Slim notes—and that they had failed to sight the guns to accord with a new stock of ammunition. Now, having calculated the adjustment, they would be delighted to demonstrate their bull’s-eye accuracy any time the British wanted. “One cannot help feeling,” Slim says, “that the fellows who wrote that ought to be on our side.” Bright Chapter. Slim genuinely enjoyed his virtually blood-free skirmishes with such foes as the Turks, the Wazirs and the Italians in 1940 Ethiopia. His encounter with the Japanese in Burma, recounted in Defeat into Victory, was no such lark. Fought with little air support in jungles with few roads, it remains one of the brightest Allied chapters in World War II history. In 1942, after service in the Middle East, Slim was ordered to the command of the First Burma Corps in Prome. Neither he nor his army stayed there long. Armed with World War I weapons and saddled with trench-war concepts of strategy, the corps proved no match for the Japanese, who steadily and easily pushed the British back to the Indian border. By the spring of 1942, Slim admits, “we, the Allies, had been outmanoeuvred, outfought, and outgeneralled.” Slim, as commander of the XV Corps and then of the Fourteenth Army, planned carefully for revenge. He gradually built up the shattered confidence of his troops—who regarded the Japanese as invincible in jungle fighting—by refusing at first to engage in battle unless he had an overwhelming superiority in numbers, and could make sure of victory. Since the Burmese theater stood low on the priority list for supplies and troop replacements, Slim turned poverty to good advantage.

His support forces learned to improvise, devising jute parachutes for supply drops when silk ones were unavailable, arming yachts and tugboats with Bren guns to replace unavailable gunboats. His armies discovered that full field equipment hindered mobility, and often went to battle as lightly armed as guerrillas.

By August 1945, Slim’s polyglot army of Indians, Nepalese, British and Africans, aided somewhat by General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell’s Chinese and U.S. forces —had driven the Japanese back across the Sittang River and had retaken Rangoon.

To the Resourceful, Victory. Slim gallantly—and refreshingly—admits his own strategic errors in Burma, and gives plentiful credit to subordinates. The Burmese war, he argues, was an ideal training ground for future battles of a nuclear age.

Nuclear war will inevitably disrupt communications and force armies to disperse to thinly populated areas; survival will demand near-perfect discipline and quick adaptation to new surroundings. “After the first shock of mutual devastation had been survived,” insists Slim, “victory would go, as it did in our other jungle, to the tougher, more resourceful infantryman. The easier and more gadget-filled our daily life becomes, the harder will it be to produce him. It took us some time to do so in Burma. It can be done in peace; in war, there will no longer be so much time.”