Mark Fuller

The best general of WW2 might be a man most people have never heard of: William Slim. No famous pistols. No riding crop. No glamorous desert duels. Just a stocky, square-jawed Englishman his troops called "Uncle Bill." And he pulled off what might be the greatest turnaround of the entire war. Slim wasn't supposed to be a general at all. He grew up in a family that had fallen on hard times. He worked as a clerk and a schoolteacher. He got into the army through a university officer training corps he wasn't even enrolled at. He was badly wounded at Gallipoli in WW1, then worked his way up the Indian Army with no money and no connections. In 1942, he was handed a disaster. The Japanese were steamrolling through Burma. Slim took command of the British forces there and led them on the longest retreat in British military history. Around 900 miles, through jungle and mountains, all the way back to India. They arrived starving, sick, beaten, and with almost nothing left. Slim later wrote openly about his own mistakes in that campaign. Generals almost never do that. In 1943, he was given command of the new 14th Army. On paper, it was a mess. It was the most diverse army Britain fielded in the war. Indians, Gurkhas, Britons, East and West Africans, Burmese. Dozens of languages. It got the worst equipment and the lowest priority, because Europe came first. Its men called it "the Forgotten Army." And it was being destroyed by disease. At one point, for every man wounded in battle, about 120 were falling sick, mostly from malaria. Slim's fix was simple and ruthless. Anti-malaria pills became an order, not a suggestion. Officers were held personally responsible. If too many men in a unit got sick, the commander got sacked. Sickness rates collapsed. Then he fixed the fear. The Japanese had won in 1942 by slipping around British units in the jungle and cutting them off, which caused panic and retreat. Slim's new rule: if you're surrounded, you don't run. You dig in, form a defensive "box," and the air force will supply you from the sky. In February 1944, it worked. At the "Admin Box" in Arakan, a Japanese attack surrounded a British-Indian force. The force held. Planes dropped supplies. The Japanese ran out of food and broke. It was the first major Japanese defeat on land in Burma. A month later, the Japanese launched their big gamble: an invasion of India itself, aimed at Imphal and Kohima. Slim did something that terrified London. He pulled his forces back onto the Imphal plain and let the Japanese come to him. They had brought only a few weeks of supplies, betting they could capture British stockpiles. They never did. At Kohima, the two sides fought across a tennis court at a few yards' distance. At Imphal, the British held for months while being supplied by air. The Japanese army starved in the hills. Out of roughly 85,000 men, tens of thousands died, many from hunger and disease. It was the worst defeat the Japanese army had ever suffered up to that point. Then Slim went on the offensive. In early 1945, he crossed the Irrawaddy River and made the Japanese believe his main attack was aimed at Mandalay. They rushed their forces there to defend it. Meanwhile, he had quietly sent an entire corps south through jungle trails, under radio silence, using fake signals traffic to hide the move. It burst out and seized Meiktila, the Japanese supply and communications hub, far behind their lines. The Japanese army in Burma was cut in two and collapsed. By May 1945, Rangoon was back in Allied hands. The army that had fled 900 miles in defeat had marched all the way back. And even then, Slim almost got fired. That same month, his superior tried to push him out. When word got around, the backlash was so severe that the superior was the one who ended up being replaced. Slim later became a field marshal, head of the British Army, and Governor-General of Australia. He called his memoir "Defeat into Victory." No title has ever been more honest.