Latest / Generals of WWII: The Art of Command / Field Marshal Bill Slim: the General Who Turned Defeat into Victory (with Robert Lyman) | Ep 10

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Field Marshal Bill Slim: the General Who Turned Defeat into Victory (with Robert Lyman) | Ep 10 · Generals of WWII: The Art of Command

• 0:06
  Welcome to generals of World War 2, the art of command.
• 0:10
  I am your host, John Vescardo, and with me today is the great
• 0:13
  doctor Robert Lyman. Hello, Robert.
• 0:15
  Hello John, it's a real pleasure to be with you today.
• 0:18
  Well, it's my absolute honor. We're going to talk about today
• 0:21
  the great General Slim of the World War 2 Burmese theater.
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  Before we get to that, I want to talk to you about Robert's books
• 0:28
  which he has a number of including Slim Master of War,
• 0:32
  another book called The Generals which covers a number of
• 0:34
  generals from World War 2 and a fantastic book which you can
• 0:37
  also find A War of Empires. You can find out more about
• 0:41
  Robert at his website robertlymanlyman.com.
• 0:46
  Robert, this is fantastic. This General Slim, we were kind
• 0:50
  of talking before he came on the call.
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  I often hear him get compared to the Duke of Wellington or
• 0:56
  General Montgomery. He seems to be one of the
• 0:59
  greatest British commanders of all time, right?
• 1:02
  Yeah, look, it's, it's a really good way to start, which is to
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  say, well, lots of people just don't know anything about Slim,
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  particularly on your side of the pond.
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  But the way to think about Slim is he's one of the three or 4
• 1:13
  greatest British generals of all time, all recent times.
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  So we need to start with Cromwell and then go to more,
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  perhaps more, perhaps in his Danube campaign down the Rhine
• 1:23
  rather. And then Hague.
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  It's a very interesting point about Hague.
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  He wasn't as bad as people think.
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  He was able to engineer some quite extraordinary victories in
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  1918. And then Montgomery and then
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  you've got Slim. But if you're going to compare
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  the recent, you know, last couple 100 years, I've, I've
• 1:41
  forgotten Wellington, of course, that's five generals.
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  He's certainly on the top five. I would place him much higher
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  this century than even on the last 100 years than Montgomery.
• 1:53
  He Montgomery was a a brilliant General Slim was a genius.
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  Yeah, it's interesting just reading up on William Joseph
• 2:00
  Slim, born 1891 in Bristol to a lower class middle family.
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  An uncommon background for future British Field Marshall.
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  What was his upbringing like? His upbringing was tough, I mean
• 2:13
  the family weren't poor but his father was an engineer and ran a
• 2:16
  small engineering business that went bust in Bristol and they
• 2:19
  moved up to the Birmingham N to Birmingham, which was a big
• 2:22
  industrial centre. 4 or five years later, 1800s in order to
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  find work and money was always tight There was only enough
• 2:31
  money. He had a brother Charles,
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  there's only enough money to send his brother to university.
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  He had to leave school early and go and get a job in an
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  engineering business. He then went and did a bit of
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  associate teaching, always a very, very smart man, born with
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  oodles of brains, a very able communicator.
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  So teaching or becoming an assistant teacher was ideal for
• 2:53
  him. But actually the reality is,
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  outside of the onset of war in 1914, that's where he would have
• 2:59
  ended up. He would have been a school
• 3:00
  teacher. Funny how things opportunities
• 3:03
  come up in life that kind of alter your career path.
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  Exactly right. Yeah, he's commissioned during
• 3:09
  War One and serves with distinction in the Gallipoli
• 3:12
  battles where he's badly wounded, and the Mesopotamian
• 3:14
  campaigns. What lessons do you think Slim
• 3:18
  took from his service as a junior officer in World War One?
• 3:21
  Well, it's worth saying before we get to 1914 that he was
• 3:25
  always really interested in military history.
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  He'd spent a lot of his childhood reading stories of
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  daring do from generals and wars of the past.
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  And, you know, he was fixated with it.
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  And he managed to waggle himself into the officer training corps
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  at Birmingham University even though he wasn't entitled to to
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  be there. He, in my view, he pretended to
• 3:48
  be his brother Charles, who was at the university studying
• 3:50
  medicine. And, and that meant that when
• 3:53
  the First World War came, he was automatically commissioned into
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  the Warwickshire Regiment. He's commissioned of the British
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  Army and he fought, as you said, with distinction in Gallipoli.
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  He was very badly wounded. In fact, he was very lucky to
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  survive a severe bullet wound in his chest.
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  He went, came back home to the UK, eventually patched up,
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  managed to wrangle his way back to the regiment where in 1917 or
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  1916 actually he ended up in Mesopotamia, present day Iraq,
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  got another bullet in the chest in 1917, survived that.
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  But he was a very good soldier. And he, do you know what, he
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  knew he was a good soldier and everyone around him regarded him
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  to be a good soldier. When I was doing my PhD 30 years
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  ago, I met quite a number of families of men who knew him and
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  they all talked about him being one of those rare natural
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  soldiers. And as we were saying before we,
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  we came on the pod, you know, these, these individuals are
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  quite rare. They come across, they come up
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  every couple of generations, men who are able to understand the
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  techniques of fighting war and that's everything from battles,
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  the tactics of battled up to campaigns and strategy, but also
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  to coalesce the unwilling around you because not everyone wants
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  to go and fight, even good soldiers.
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  I mean, I was a soldier for 20 years.
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  You there are times when you'd rather not.
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  You know, Slim was one of those characters who was able to bring
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  it all together. And it's quite a rare thing.
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  It's very hard to describe. A natural soldier is definitely
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  one way to describe him in terms of learning lessons.
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  Let's come back to that in a moment because as a young
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  officer, he learnt that the importance was in the little
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  things, getting the little things done.
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  And it might sound a bit perverse, but certainly retired
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  soldiers or anyone who's still 7 will understand what I mean.
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  Making sure your kits ready, cleaning your rifle, making sure
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  you're grenades are primed and you check, you check the
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  detonators before you put them away, ready to go on patrol.
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  You know, all this really, really basic stuff, always being
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  ready, always being been, always been alert, you know, having a
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  sharpened bayonet and not being lazy about your professional
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  approach of soldiering. That's all stuff that he was
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  mother's milk to him. Yeah, I think that's a great
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  point to bring up, because you have those natural leaders like
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  Napoleon or the Duke of Wellington who can come into a
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  room and command it immediately. But then you have people under
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  them, like Marshall de Vue, who want you to focus on the little
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  things. Like you said, keeping your
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  bayonet cleaner, making sure you have enough rations for the
• 6:19
  campaign just to make sure they're effective soldiers.
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  Yeah, exactly right. I mean, there's a thing in the
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  British Army where recruits are always out after a few weeks.
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  They they do they they don't know this, but they're always
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  given the water test, which is between Sergeant goes along and
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  checks their water bottles. Because the first rule of
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  soldiering is always to keep your water bottle topped up.
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  And this is something that Slim insisted on.
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  And and people aren't really aware that actually this is a
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  tradition that began in the British Army with Slim.
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  Always make sure if you're going on patrol, your water bottles
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  topped up because a lot of times he went out into the desert and
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  he didn't and his soldiers didn't.
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  And they all, you know, they suffered from first verse.
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  So it's this, this is the point. It's attention to the little
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  things. And once you pay attention to
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  the little things when you're training, they become second
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  nature. You can then focus on the real,
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  on the things that really matter.
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  Yeah, we're going to come back to that and the jungle campaigns
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  at Burma here in a little bit on the little things after the
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  First World War, he marries Eileen Robertson.
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  What was their marriage like? It was remarkably strong.
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  I mean, I'm, I know the family very well and and everyone who I
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  didn't know her, Aileen spoke incredibly highly of her.
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  The marriage was very strong. I mean, as we were saying before
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  the pod started, he was a remarkable man.
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  He was a very moral man. He wasn't a philanderer.
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  There was no bed hopping of any kind, but certainly not slim.
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  And this wasn't because of he wasn't overly religious.
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  He wore his Roman Catholicism very lightly, but he was a moral
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  man. He understood how societies work
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  on the basis of trust and loyalty.
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  And his his family was very strong.
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  He had two children, John and Una, and I was very privileged
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  to know John very well, but a very strong marriage.
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  She was very, very important to his success both in India in the
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  1920s and 30s and also during the war.
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  Yeah, it seems like he's slowly moving up the ranks.
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  He holds the rank of captain, then is transferred to the
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  Indian Army and he eventually rises through the ranks and by
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  1939 he's a Colonel. But I also read that he wrote
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  novels at this time to supplement his income.
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  Is this true? It's absolutely true.
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  Let me just just talk about his transfer to the Indian Army.
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  It's very, very difficult. And people, just to remind
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  people, particularly on your side of the pond, the Indian
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  Army was very different to the British Army.
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  When you were commissioned as a young officer, you're
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  commissioned into either the armies.
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  There's no transferring from one to the other.
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  They weren't the same thing. There is no such thing as the
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  British Indian Army. It was the Indian Army and the
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  British Army and he was he left the British Army in 1919,
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  resigned from the British Army and was given a Commission.
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  A very rare event didn't happen very often, particularly after
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  the First World War into the Indian Army.
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  He joined the 6th Gurkha Rifles and his his progress up the
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  career ladder wasn't wasn't like a rocket at all.
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  It was very, very slow as as indeed all promotion and then
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  between the walls was, was very slow.
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  And as you say, he got to 1939. He was only a Colonel.
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  I mean, he was, he was thinking perhaps, you know, certainly
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  before the war came in 1939 that he was due to be due to retire
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  soon and he would retire to a, an impoverished retirement
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  somewhere in in the South Coast of England as many of his peers
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  did. So it wasn't a spectacular
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  career, even though he was known as one of the best, probably the
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  best talent of his peer group in the Indian Army.
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  He came top of the staff college at Creta.
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  He was then sent as the Indian Army representative to the
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  British Staff College at Camberley.
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  He was then the Indian Army representative at the Imperial
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  Defence College in London. So a top flight man, but there's
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  no promotion actually in the Indian Army at the time.
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  It was outside of a war. This was this was a career that
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  was going nowhere. He also had two children.
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  He sent 2 boarding schools in the UK and they cost a lot of
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  money. He had a natural talent for
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  writing so he wrote a couple of articles in 19281929 and they
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  were picked up by newspapers and published.
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  He he always published under a pseudonym.
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  He didn't want his friends or colleagues in the Indian Army to
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  know that he Bill Slim was writing for money.
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  So he used this pseudonym called John Mills, which is Slim
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  backwards and he was very successful and to the 1930s he
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  wrote in the region. I'm just trying to remember over
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  50 long articles on a variety of subjects, the Indian Army,
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  history, India and, and, and a few whodunits.
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  And I had the great privilege a couple of years ago of going
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  through all of these at the Cambridge Archives, the inside
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  the Slim papers at the Cambridge Archive at Cambridge University.
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  And we published them last year and they're available.
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  They can be, they're available online as well.
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  So, and they're well worth it. If you're interested in Slim and
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  you want to get into his head, these articles are absolutely
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  fascinating. But he earned a lot of money,
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  relatively speaking, from them, sufficient to be able to help
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  pay school fees. Well, I think that speaks to his
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  upbringing. Like this wasn't some
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  aristocratic officer who had money to fall back on.
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  He had to come up with extra income.
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  John, that that's a key point that I'd almost forgotten to
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  start, that people need to realize that he did not come
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  from the traditional stock of British Army officers and had no
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  prospects of getting to senior rank.
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  And one of the reasons he did get to Colonel was he was in the
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  Indian Army, where merit, meritocracy was much more
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  important and much more pertinent and significant than
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  in the British Army. The British Army was a
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  meritocratic organization, certainly in wartime, but less
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  so in peace. The Indian Army is very
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  meritocratic. Normally Slim would not have got
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  any higher than where he got to in peacetime, which is Colonel.
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  Well, let's talk about that experience in India.
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  You know, these are the inner warriors.
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  How did that shape his understanding of empire?
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  Soldiers in command? Because you have to be able to
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  command different nationalities as a cohesive unit.
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  Well, precisely one of the things people forget about the
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  Indian Army is it was an Indian, it was an army of many languages
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  and peoples, and the Indian Army was actually the organization
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  that brought India together because they all are forced to
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  coalesce together. It's one of my greatest
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  arguments. My the argument in my book of
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  War of Empires is that the Second World War, the Indian
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  Army came together to represent the whole of India in a new way
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  and a quite a profound way. Slim.
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  In order to command troops in India, you need to learn
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  earlier, you need to pass the appropriate language
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  qualifications. You need to do that within two
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  years of arriving in India. And a number of British people,
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  Australians and others who went out to join the Indian Army
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  failed to do that because they couldn't pass the language test.
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  So what you did in the first two years is you employed A munchie,
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  a teacher who taught you every day at the end of in the Indian
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  Army, the time you tend to work in the morning and you'd stop
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  after lunch and then in the afternoon was yourself for
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  swing, this sort of stuff, which is learning the languages.
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  And the munchie would teach you and you would learn the language
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  through the with the munchie and with, with your soldiers.
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  Now if you're in a Gurkha regiment, you had to learn the
• 13:27
  do the army's Urdu examination. Urdu was the language that bound
• 13:30
  the army together but it made all made a lot of sense as well
• 13:34
  if you were involved with the Hindu soldiers to learn Hindi as
• 13:39
  well. But if you're a Gurkha, you also
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  then had to learn Gkali which is now called Nepali.
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  So British Army officers at the time, really proficient officers
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  knew Urdu and Gkali. The best ones knew 3 languages
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  in addition to English, which is Hindi as well.
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  So it's quite extraordinary actually.
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  You know, the, the idea that British officers out there were
• 14:00
  real dullards. They didn't, they didn't have
• 14:01
  any brains. They didn't know, you know,
• 14:05
  their backside from their Arbow is, is patent nonsense.
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  Actually, they were some of the best officers that Britain could
• 14:11
  provide and they knew how to bring their soldiers together.
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  So throughout the 1920s and 30s, there was a long period of
• 14:19
  rumbling descent on the northwest frontier with the
• 14:22
  Patan tribes, various Patan tribes.
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  And this gave units in particular both of the Indian
• 14:28
  Army and the British Army, who operated separately, really good
• 14:31
  experience in what is what we then knew as small wars
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  operations against tribespeople, coordinating infantry,
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  artillery, signals, aircraft and so on.
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  And it's a really, I mean, I, I was brought up in a similar
• 14:44
  environment, Northern Ireland. And so that was as an infantry
• 14:46
  officer, that was very important experience for me where it was
• 14:49
  the little things that matter. And you focus on on being a
• 14:54
  first class soldier. And that's what that's what the
• 14:56
  Northwest Frontier did for Slim and for for countless other
• 14:59
  officers like him. So that period of time in India
• 15:03
  in the 1920s and 30s was incredibly important.
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  And essentially, when you look at this, people who took senior
• 15:08
  command in the Second World War, all of them had been through
• 15:11
  that experience with without exception, all the divisional
• 15:13
  corps commanders had spent time in the Northwest Frontier.
• 15:17
  Yeah, and anyone who's trying to learn a second language will
• 15:19
  tell you it's very difficult to but to learn 3 or 4 second
• 15:22
  languages. I was on loan service with a
• 15:24
  foreign country for three years and I had to learn that language
• 15:27
  and goodness gracious me that I found that very difficult.
• 15:30
  Yeah, at the outbreak of World War 2, Slim is commanding Indian
• 15:35
  formations in East Africa and the Middle East.
• 15:39
  In this quote, I found from Slim kind of reminds me of the Duke
• 15:42
  of Wellington quote. I was like other generals before
• 15:46
  me to be saved by the resourcefulness and stubborn
• 15:50
  valor of my troops. And quote.
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  So how did he perform at the beginning of World War 2?
• 15:55
  Was he kind of learning on the job?
• 15:57
  Everyone was learning on the job.
• 15:59
  That particular quote came from Kahima in 1944 and it's
• 16:01
  absolutely fantastic because it points to a significant failure
• 16:04
  that Slim was responsible for, which is the mistake of not
• 16:09
  defending Kahima. We'll come to that in a moment.
• 16:12
  But in in 1940 he was promoted to Brigadier and sent to command
• 16:17
  a brigade in Eritrea, what is what was then Abyssinia, and in
• 16:22
  order to be able to fight the Italians who had occupied the
• 16:25
  Horn of Africa. And this was a clearly a new
• 16:29
  experience to him with having 3 battalions and one a particular
• 16:33
  experience in the Battle of Galibat was on his account a
• 16:36
  disaster That Galibat fought, which was held by the Italians,
• 16:40
  wasn't captured and a whole series of tactical mistakes were
• 16:43
  made. But but the biggest mistake Slim
• 16:45
  learnt from that was that you need to be bold.
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  What you always need to consider when you're developing a plan
• 16:52
  for a campaign, then executing it, is what the enemy might be
• 16:56
  thinking or doing as well. And that's probably a more
• 16:59
  important thing for you than actually your knowledge of your
• 17:03
  own troops now, because you know that you know what your troops
• 17:06
  can do and how they do it. But it's important.
• 17:08
  If you're a war gamer, you spend all your time, most of your
• 17:11
  time, you need to be sitting in the mind of the the other guy,
• 17:14
  playing on their affairs, working on their prejudices,
• 17:17
  trying to discombobulate them mentally so that you reduce the
• 17:21
  impact on your own troops in terms of combat.
• 17:24
  That's a really important thing. Just going into battle all the
• 17:27
  time might make you feel good, but you're going to lose troops.
• 17:29
  Attrition only goes one way. Mathematics attrition is any
• 17:33
  goes one way and you want to be able to work out ways of
• 17:36
  defeating the enemy outside of battle or by using your forces
• 17:39
  to scare them and so on. That was his big lesson.
• 17:42
  In 1940 he was promoted to the divisional commander of the 10th
• 17:47
  Indian Division. Really because the divisional
• 17:49
  commander at the time had lost the confidence of his troops,
• 17:52
  the brigade commanders. Slim was promoted to Major
• 17:55
  General, took over command in Iraq and was then immediately
• 17:58
  responsible for launching a campaign against the Vichy
• 18:01
  French in Syria at Deir Ezzor. Slim had to come up with a
• 18:05
  campaign plan to attack Deir Ezzor and he had none of the
• 18:09
  resources that the French had. The French army in in Syria was
• 18:12
  particularly well equipped with large numbers of troops, so Slim
• 18:16
  had to work out a way of putting his very sharp knife into the
• 18:21
  body of this enemy and and being decisive about it.
• 18:25
  He decided that he'd do it by threatening the front of Derozoe
• 18:30
  and then attacked from the rear. It was a very high risk move
• 18:33
  because the attack from the rear involved a long advance March
• 18:37
  through the desert with very little fuel.
• 18:39
  I mean, there are lots of things that could have gone wrong if
• 18:41
  you had balanced this out and said these are the things that
• 18:43
  could go wrong and should I do it or not.
• 18:46
  Most normal people would say, no, you shouldn't do it.
• 18:48
  You should actually just attack at the front and see whether you
• 18:51
  can get away with it. It sounds, it sounds a little
• 18:55
  Lawrence of Arabia to me. There's a little bit of Lawrence
• 18:58
  Arabia, the same sort of approach.
• 19:01
  Slim, always. He had no natural predilection
• 19:04
  for vainglorious assaults. So let me just talk you through
• 19:10
  this. Most soldiers when confronted
• 19:13
  with a military problem will say I can solve this with force.
• 19:17
  So if I've got an enemy out there with 100 tanks and 10
• 19:19
  aircraft, what you then say to yourself is, well, I need 200
• 19:22
  tanks and 20 aircraft. If I've got force, if I've got a
• 19:25
  preponderance of power, I can defeat the enemy.
• 19:29
  And you will defeat the enemy, all things being equal, because
• 19:32
  you've got the extra force, although it will cause damage to
• 19:35
  your side, you will lose blood and treasure as a consequence.
• 19:38
  Slim never looked at it like that.
• 19:40
  Slim, when he was presented with this question of 100 tanks, he
• 19:42
  would say, what I will do is I will destroy all of the fuel
• 19:46
  belzers, feeding the tanks. If I can destroy the fuel
• 19:49
  belzers by going behind them or attacking them by air or using
• 19:52
  mortars, artillery or doing something else, I'm not going to
• 19:54
  threaten the meat of my resources.
• 19:57
  I'm going to do something that destroys the enemy's strength.
• 20:00
  So. So the the idea that Slim always
• 20:03
  had right from the beginning was attack the enemy's
• 20:06
  vulnerabilities, not necessarily weaknesses, but where is the
• 20:09
  enemy vulnerable. And he did this in Deir Ezzor
• 20:12
  and he did it spectacularly. The enemy were not expecting,
• 20:15
  the enemy commander was expecting Slim to come out of
• 20:18
  the desert on the Euphrates side and and he would just they would
• 20:21
  have a conventional battle. Part sounds that part sounds,
• 20:26
  Napoleon. That's, you know, attack them
• 20:27
  where they don't think I'm going to attack.
• 20:29
  Line of communication supply lines go after that.
• 20:31
  Well, some of your listeners will know the Boyd Loop.
• 20:34
  It's a fantastic theory. I think it works very well.
• 20:36
  It's the came from a Sabre pilot, I think in the American
• 20:42
  Air Force in Korea, who always realized that when getting into
• 20:46
  a into a dogfight with a Mig, if you were able to predict what
• 20:50
  the enemy was going to do and you you went first, then you
• 20:54
  would discombobulate the enemy and you could get into his
• 20:57
  decision making cycle called the Boyd Loop.
• 20:59
  And Slim was was an exponent of this long before Boyd existence,
• 21:03
  certainly long before he was flying in Korea, which is try to
• 21:06
  use this unsettling of the enemy, try to identify what
• 21:11
  they're going to do and then pre empt them or do something to
• 21:14
  deny them the fruits of that opportunity.
• 21:17
  And this was really the story of, without leaving your head
• 21:20
  too far, what he did in Burma. I mean, he really did show his
• 21:23
  spectacular strategic conception of war in Burma in a way that
• 21:30
  really embarrassed the Japanese every time, every time they came
• 21:33
  up against each other. Well, it didn't start off that
• 21:36
  way. It it, it is interesting because
• 21:39
  you know, we talk about the catastrophic British retreat in
• 21:41
  1942, but we need to remember, John, that the British Army was
• 21:46
  safely gathered up by Slim and marched out of Burma in a
• 21:52
  fighting retreat and it wasn't broken up by the Japanese.
• 21:56
  And in that process of that hundred day retreat, over 900
• 22:00
  miles, quite an extraordinary feet and itself a fighting
• 22:04
  withdrawal, the Japanese were unable to destroy the Burma
• 22:08
  Corps, which Slim was commanding.
• 22:09
  And they were able to push the Allies out of Burma, yes.
• 22:13
  So there was a really strategic success for the Japanese General
• 22:17
  Aida, absolutely no doubt. But they weren't able to defeat
• 22:20
  them in every battle after the 1st 2 battles, which was the
• 22:23
  Setang Bridge and and Rangoon. They, they, they won skirmishes.
• 22:28
  They didn't. They didn't.
• 22:29
  So even places like Yananjiang, which is a significant battle on
• 22:34
  the Irrawadi with the Chinese army, the Japanese very nearly
• 22:37
  won that battle, but Slim was able to extricate his men.
• 22:40
  And the point I'm making here is that Slim knew that his purpose
• 22:45
  was to keep his force in being a little bit like Jutland and the
• 22:50
  Royal Navy. You know, it's really, really
• 22:51
  important. That didn't matter how many
• 22:53
  ships were sunk, but the Royal Navy had to remain a foursome
• 22:56
  being because the most important thing strategically Jutland was
• 22:59
  ensuring the success of the blockade of Germany.
• 23:02
  It's the same with Slim. Slim knew that he had to keep us
• 23:04
  forced together. There's no point throwing his
• 23:07
  men into fruitless battles against the Japanese where they
• 23:10
  all get slaughtered. Because he knew there was a
• 23:13
  second chapter in this book when when he got out of Burma in
• 23:16
  1942, March 1942, I had to say that it was the longest retreat
• 23:21
  in the British Army's history, 900 miles in 100 days.
• 23:24
  But he got out and he got, they got into Infal capital of
• 23:27
  Manipur, the Indian princely state.
• 23:29
  And he looked at himself and his men and he said we can beat
• 23:32
  these chaps, we've done it before and the couple of battles
• 23:34
  in Burma. All I need is time.
• 23:36
  Give me time, give me the men and we will rebuild the army.
• 23:40
  And you know what? John is exactly what he went and
• 23:42
  did. Yeah.
• 23:43
  You know, and please, audience, forgive me.
• 23:45
  Another analogy that it kind of reminds me of is George
• 23:47
  Washington, who lost a lot to the British, but he knew that he
• 23:51
  traded space for time and as long as he kept his army out
• 23:54
  there, it was a problem for the British.
• 23:57
  And the British never understood this.
• 23:59
  They, they, they thought at the time that this was an army of
• 24:02
  this was a war of battles. Look, look, no, no, war is a war
• 24:07
  of battles. You can win every battle and
• 24:09
  lose the war. In fact, John, this is the story
• 24:12
  of the Japanese in the Second World War.
• 24:14
  I would say that they were good at battles.
• 24:15
  In fact, they were very good at battles, but they were bad at
• 24:17
  war because they didn't understand that war has a
• 24:21
  prescribed outcome. What are you fighting for?
• 24:23
  You're fighting to topple the Japanese imperial and and topple
• 24:27
  Japanese imperial ambitions or whatever.
• 24:29
  And you might lose battles that that's insignificant if you then
• 24:32
  win the war. And if Aida in 1942 was able to
• 24:38
  capture Burma but not defeat the British, all he had done was
• 24:42
  created a problem. He now had to occupy Burma.
• 24:45
  He now had to defend Burma and he didn't have the troops to do
• 24:48
  it. And actually, although Anita had
• 24:51
  a lot of vision thereafter, 1942 was the high point of Japanese
• 24:55
  military success. Thereafter, everything about
• 24:57
  Japanese operations in the Far East became suboptimal.
• 25:01
  They lost their ability to think strategically.
• 25:04
  They thought that if they simply fought another battle, they
• 25:07
  would be successful when things would go their way.
• 25:09
  And it's, I mean, it's quite embarrassing.
• 25:11
  I mean, I'm writing another book now on the big battle of Kahim
• 25:13
  in 1944. And it's embarrassing to see and
• 25:16
  to unravel the Japanese mistakes.
• 25:18
  Or we didn't have time for that now, maybe another occasion.
• 25:21
  Yeah, yeah, another occasion. So yeah, we talk about the
• 25:25
  British. They did have to retreat out of
• 25:26
  Burma. And Slim takes over the 14th
• 25:29
  Army and begins rebuilding morale, discipline and
• 25:32
  confidence. How does he do this?
• 25:34
  He does it really scientifically.
• 25:36
  He says, what do I need to have a successful army?
• 25:38
  And he came up with three building blocks of a successful
• 25:41
  army. He needed an army that believed
• 25:43
  in itself. So it had a spiritual purpose.
• 25:45
  It needed an intellectual purpose as well.
• 25:49
  It needed to understand how to defeat the enemy.
• 25:51
  And one of the big challenges in 1942 is that for 20 years the
• 25:55
  British and the Indian armies and indeed the Burma Army,
• 25:58
  because they're all separate, had not prepared to fight the
• 26:00
  Japanese. And the Japanese came storming
• 26:02
  in in between December 1941 and May 1942 and completely shocked
• 26:07
  everyone. The idea developed very quickly
• 26:09
  that the Japanese soldier was a Superman, Slim said.
• 26:13
  I need to remove the Superman myth.
• 26:15
  I need to persuade my soldiers that they can fight in the
• 26:17
  jungle, they can fight against the Japanese and they can be
• 26:21
  successful. And the third one was material.
• 26:24
  We need to have the proper equipment to do the job.
• 26:27
  I need artillery, I need automatic weapons.
• 26:29
  Just to give you an example, a British battalion in 194142 had
• 26:36
  between 6:00 and 9:00 Lewis guns in the Far East.
• 26:40
  Lewis Gunn has 49 round magazine.
• 26:43
  They were old First World War weapons.
• 26:45
  Every single Japanese section had a automatic weapon, had a
• 26:49
  light machine gun. And there were many Indian
• 26:51
  soldiers in 1942 who came across the Japanese army for the first
• 26:54
  time also came across automatic weapons for the first time.
• 26:57
  They'd never even heard an automatic weapon before they
• 27:01
  ended up engaging the Japanese in battle.
• 27:02
  Now all of that need to be solved.
• 27:04
  So moral, spiritual, intellectual material, the moral
• 27:08
  and the spiritual one. And Slim built up a really
• 27:10
  scientific foundation for this very well detailed in his
• 27:14
  account of the war called Defeat and a Victory.
• 27:16
  And, and it's very, very impressive.
• 27:18
  Now in order to be able to achieve all of that, just give
• 27:21
  you some examples of the things he did.
• 27:22
  The the 14th Army was the bottom of British priorities and
• 27:27
  American priorities as being a coalition war after December
• 27:31
  1941, right at the bottom of all the priorities, which were of
• 27:34
  course going to fight Germany 1st and indeed fighting the
• 27:36
  Pacific. So they had to make do with what
• 27:38
  they could Scrabble around and create themselves.
• 27:42
  But in the 1st place for soldiers, a very, very rigorous
• 27:48
  training process program was put in place.
• 27:50
  So just if I told you now that Indian soldiers were recruited,
• 27:55
  it was the largest volunteer army in the history of humanity,
• 27:58
  two and a half million Indians and decided to volunteer and
• 28:02
  join up mainly to fight the Japanese.
• 28:04
  Quite an extraordinary testament to their determination.
• 28:08
  Whilst they were part of the British Empire, they also knew
• 28:10
  that the British Empire was going to end soon and they
• 28:13
  didn't want the Japanese ruining their futures.
• 28:15
  So they that's why they joined up in the main.
• 28:17
  But they, an infantry soldier would undertake nine months of
• 28:21
  basic training. Just think about that nine
• 28:23
  months. When I joined the Army in 1981,
• 28:24
  I did six months of basic infantry training and I thought
• 28:27
  at the end of it that I was I was the warrior to beat all
• 28:31
  warriors. These these Indian soldiers did
• 28:33
  nine months. They then went home to the
• 28:34
  villages for a month, met the families, wore the uniforms and
• 28:38
  all that sort of stuff. A really important way of
• 28:40
  linking the army to the families right across India.
• 28:44
  And by the way, there are these are soldiers recruited right
• 28:47
  across India. Before then, Indian soldiers
• 28:49
  tend to be recruited from the northwest, from the Punjab and
• 28:51
  so on. They were known as the Marshall
• 28:53
  races. Not anymore, Slim.
• 28:55
  And the commander in chief, India, Orkin leg broke all that
• 28:57
  down at the end of that nine months and the month away home
• 29:00
  they came back. They then did two final months
• 29:02
  of jungle training. So think about that.
• 29:05
  All those Indian soldiers recruited in 42 and 43 who went
• 29:08
  on to fight in 44 and 45 and fight magnificently, by the way,
• 29:11
  quite extraordinary. He had undertaken 11 months of
• 29:15
  training many years ago. When I was doing my PhD in 1999,
• 29:18
  I was in a little town called Guwahati on the Brahmaputra
• 29:20
  Valley and I was interviewing this old guy who had served in
• 29:24
  the Indian Army. And I said, what was it like?
• 29:26
  You know, it's a typical naive question.
• 29:28
  What was it like? He said he looked at me and he
• 29:30
  said it was easy. He said, well, we've done all
• 29:32
  this jolly training. We were desperate to get to
• 29:34
  finish the training and go and do the job.
• 29:36
  He said we were lying in the trenches in the Shen and Saddle,
• 29:39
  which is a big Ridge of mountains going between the
• 29:42
  Chinwen and Manapore. And he said we would see the
• 29:45
  Japanese and Miles and they would get out of their trenches
• 29:47
  and make a big din and then they would come rushing across the
• 29:50
  open ground before us and we would pick them all off.
• 29:54
  And he said we never lost a position.
• 29:55
  This is through the the monsoon in 1944 because we were
• 30:00
  confident in our training. Just as an aside, the Indian
• 30:02
  Army introduced the idea of battlefield inoculation.
• 30:05
  Now, anyone who's been through recruit training in the American
• 30:07
  Army will know this for the Marines.
• 30:09
  We do it in the British Army as well, which is you inoculate
• 30:11
  people to the sound and noise of battle.
• 30:14
  You crawl under machine guns firing above your head.
• 30:16
  So you, you threw live grenades, you know what it's like before
• 30:20
  you even get to it, because when you do get to the real thing,
• 30:23
  you can you, you realise it's just battle, it's just noise.
• 30:26
  It's to love your head and it's going to hurt the other guy, not
• 30:28
  you. You just get on with what you
• 30:30
  need to do. And that was introduced in Army
• 30:33
  and they, they loved it. It was an incredibly important,
• 30:36
  I mean, one of the big challenges in 42 is if you're a
• 30:38
  young Indian soldier and you're, you know, you've had nine weeks
• 30:42
  training and then you're exposed to automatic weapons, how do you
• 30:45
  deal with it? So you solve all those problems
• 30:48
  in training. If I had 11 months of training,
• 30:50
  I'd feel like Achilles or Hector.
• 30:52
  I'd be like, let's go. Exactly right.
• 30:54
  And and that was the case. That was the case.
• 30:55
  And then the the phrase of the time was they went into battle
• 30:58
  with their tails up because they knew they could defeat the
• 31:02
  Japanese. A very, very interesting aside
• 31:04
  here. Slim sort of almost
• 31:06
  choreographed some of the early battles.
• 31:08
  February 1944, there's a series of battles in a place called
• 31:12
  Northern Arakan and a place called Sinjweya.
• 31:16
  And Slim would would arrange for company attacks to take place on
• 31:21
  section position. So you'd have a hundred 150 men
• 31:24
  attacking a position that might have a handful of Japanese, and
• 31:28
  you'd have a battalion attacking a platoon position, and you'd
• 31:31
  have a brigade attacking a company position.
• 31:33
  And this was all deliberately done in order to be able to give
• 31:36
  the soldiers a sense of superiority.
• 31:39
  Yeah. There's another example that
• 31:42
  shows, in my opinion, his focus on the little things to make the
• 31:45
  big things easier. He revolutionized jungle warfare
• 31:49
  by emphasizing training, health, logistics and air supply.
• 31:53
  Slim also noted 70% malarial rates among his troops, largely
• 31:57
  because they refused to take the foul tasting anti malarial
• 32:00
  medicine. Slim placed the responsibility
• 32:03
  on his officers, he wrote. Quote, good doctors are no use
• 32:08
  without good discipline. More than half the battle
• 32:10
  against diseases fought not by the doctors but by the
• 32:14
  regimental officers. And quote, and he would dismiss
• 32:17
  officers that had high unit malaria rates.
• 32:21
  The others realized he was serious and the malaria
• 32:23
  treatment was enforced, dropping the rate to less than 5%.
• 32:28
  This is fantastic. It is fantastic and it worked
• 32:31
  really well. In fact, Slim sacked, so he's
• 32:33
  the army commander, so he's the Lieutenant Germany, he's got an
• 32:36
  army, he's got 2 calls under him with six or 8 divisions and he
• 32:40
  sacks commanding officers of battalions, which is this is
• 32:44
  really extraordinary. And he does it to to send a
• 32:46
  message, which is the point that I made right at the start.
• 32:49
  Military discipline, the little things are the things that will
• 32:52
  save you. And you're absolutely right.
• 32:54
  In 1940, two 75% of all troops operating in this theatre caught
• 32:59
  malaria. Now at the time the mepocrene,
• 33:03
  the drug designed fantastically to to kill the malaria in your
• 33:09
  bloodstream. It it only came in about 1943 I
• 33:13
  think. And in order to be effective you
• 33:15
  had to take it every day. But it turned your skin yellow.
• 33:17
  You looked a little bit jaundiced and A and a myth.
• 33:22
  A rumour went around the 14th Army that it caused infertility,
• 33:27
  so the boys refused to take it. You know what boys are like?
• 33:29
  They're the song. Yeah, the song.
• 33:32
  I'm not going to risk my chance of not, not a firing blanks.
• 33:35
  So I so they didn't take it. And Slim said every day you need
• 33:38
  a malaria parade. The whole battalion needs
• 33:40
  together. Officers need to supervise the
• 33:43
  consumption of the malarone, which means that, you know,
• 33:48
  you'd put it in your mouth and then you obviously just
• 33:50
  certified the soldier had taken a swig of water and swallowed
• 33:54
  the drug and not put it under their tongue and took it out
• 33:57
  afterwards, which happened all the time.
• 33:59
  And you could spot this because units that took malarone, the
• 34:04
  the malaria rates dropped dramatically.
• 34:06
  But in addition to all of that, there are a whole series of
• 34:08
  basic military preventative measures like rolling down your
• 34:12
  sleeves in the evening and also introducing DDT for the first
• 34:16
  time. This part of the world was is
• 34:19
  probably one of the most malarious in the world.
• 34:20
  There's a part called the Kabul Valley, which is where much of
• 34:23
  the fighter took place in 42 and also part in 43 as well.
• 34:26
  It's certainly in 44 and the place was in 1944 was covered in
• 34:30
  DDT. So which killed the malaria, I
• 34:32
  mean might have killed a few other things as well, but it
• 34:35
  definitely got rid of of malaria.
• 34:37
  So there's a whole series of additional things.
• 34:39
  But actually military discipline was the 1st and most important
• 34:43
  thing that actually solved this problem.
• 34:45
  Bearing in mind that for the Indian soldier, it's not so
• 34:48
  difficult. You're a volunteer.
• 34:50
  If you're a British soldier, you're not a volunteer.
• 34:52
  Most British soldiers weren't volunteers.
• 34:54
  They'd been conscripted by this time.
• 34:56
  And so they're a bit arsy about it frankly.
• 35:00
  And and didn't didn't take to being told what to do.
• 35:04
  And one of the other things that units did, if you've got
• 35:06
  cerebral malaria, it meant that the the mosquito was laying eggs
• 35:14
  in your brain and, and you, you could be dead in a couple of
• 35:16
  hours. And a number of regimental
• 35:19
  medical officers when they came across some of the cerebral who
• 35:22
  died of cerebral malaria, would take the top of the skull off
• 35:24
  and show the boys what this did to to your brain.
• 35:28
  And people immediately started doing as they were told.
• 35:31
  I've read of a couple of occasions where the commanding
• 35:33
  officer said the the medical officer in file, for instance,
• 35:37
  went to the commanding officer and said I've got a a cerebral
• 35:40
  malarial death. And the commanding officer said,
• 35:43
  well, show me. And he said I want all my
• 35:45
  soldiers to see this. The precautions that you need to
• 35:48
  take are tiny compared to the threat of dying of cerebral
• 35:52
  malaria. I think the other thing I just
• 35:54
  need to say, John, is people need to remember the monsoon
• 35:57
  because between May and October in this part of the world, the
• 36:00
  monsoon comes and the monsoon drops between 300 and 500
• 36:05
  inches. Just as a comparison, in the UK
• 36:07
  we get something like 30 inches of rain a year.
• 36:10
  This is 300 to 500, so 10 to 20 times as much.
• 36:14
  And it all comes in that five month period between May and
• 36:17
  October. So when you're fighting, I mean,
• 36:20
  one of the biggest challenges Slim came up with was do we
• 36:23
  continue fighting in the monsoon?
• 36:24
  Because in the old days campaigning stopped.
• 36:26
  And Slim said, no, we will keep on fighting through the monsoon.
• 36:30
  And people laughed at him and said that's not possible.
• 36:32
  But of course he did. And, and it's like most things,
• 36:35
  if you've got a, a way, a mechanism for delivering and
• 36:39
  doing things, it gets easy. And you just need to have
• 36:43
  effectively what we call on the the British Army, a wet weather
• 36:46
  programme. You need to know how to manage
• 36:48
  your wet weather. And it works, yeah.
• 36:53
  Another thing you touched on was the theory of Japanese forces
• 36:56
  being invincible, superhuman. So Slim had a counter this
• 37:00
  widespread psychological fear. He insisted on offensive
• 37:05
  patrolling a night train to encourage his soldiers to lose
• 37:07
  their fear of the jungle. And I thought this was
• 37:10
  interesting. He would bypass smaller isolated
• 37:14
  units of Japanese because he knew they would fight to their
• 37:16
  death and he didn't want to grind down his army.
• 37:19
  Correct. Yeah, that's exactly right.
• 37:20
  So this goes back to my point about thinking strategically.
• 37:23
  If you go into a campaign and you know that what you want to
• 37:26
  do is build a bridge over the Chinwen.
• 37:28
  Because building a bridge over the Chinwen is going to enable a
• 37:31
  whole division to cross and go into the heart of the enemy.
• 37:34
  What you don't want to do is engage every little Japanese
• 37:38
  position all the way to the Chin room, because you're going to
• 37:40
  end up in the Chin room with nowhere to nowhere to build the
• 37:42
  bridge. So this is about thinking
• 37:45
  sensibly and strategically as a commander, what battles do I
• 37:50
  need to fight and what battles do I not need to fight?
• 37:53
  Now the Japanese by contrast, were very bad at this.
• 37:56
  And this was partly due to the Japanese concept of Pishido,
• 38:00
  their their warrior myth. And and the idea of the warrior
• 38:03
  myth was that in order to exhibit your valor as a samurai,
• 38:09
  as an inheritor of the samurai tradition, you needed to fight
• 38:12
  battles to get blood on your sword, you know, on your
• 38:14
  Cortana, and particularly as an officer.
• 38:16
  So a Japanese officer would never go into battle with
• 38:19
  anything other than his sword. And it would be dishonourable to
• 38:22
  an extent not to come out of battle without at least some
• 38:25
  blood on it. So if you come out of a battle
• 38:28
  without some blood, then you, you, you need to find a way of
• 38:32
  putting blood on your sword, which is why so many prisoners
• 38:34
  were killed and so many bodies were had bandit slashes on them
• 38:38
  because soldiers would come up and slash their bayonets.
• 38:41
  So if you're a soldier and you don't have a Cortana, you have a
• 38:44
  sword at the end of your rifle, you're bayonet.
• 38:47
  And that's why many Japanese soldiers saw the bayonet to be
• 38:51
  there, expression of their physical fact that they were
• 38:55
  samurai. And when they came across a
• 38:57
  British or an Indian or a Burmese position, they would
• 39:00
  often, more often than not fight that battle.
• 39:03
  And this is particularly the case in a famous battle called
• 39:05
  Jasami, which started on the 28th of March 1944.
• 39:09
  Japanese division and the invasion of India was going to
• 39:13
  Kahima. Its role was to get to Kahima as
• 39:15
  quickly as it could, because once it got to Kahima, it closed
• 39:19
  the main road from the Brahmaputra Valley into Manipur.
• 39:22
  Really, really critical strategic task that was given to
• 39:24
  Sato here. They made their way through the
• 39:28
  the jungled mountains of a place called the Somber Trax over the
• 39:31
  Chinwen, crossing W east to West, and then came across a
• 39:35
  number of British outposts, quite small British outposts.
• 39:38
  And one of them was that place called Jasami.
• 39:41
  And the Japanese stopped to fight them.
• 39:43
  What a very stupid thing to do. You, you should mask Jasami,
• 39:47
  ignore them. Just leave them alone.
• 39:49
  Get to Kahima as quickly as you can.
• 39:50
  No, no, no. They spent five days trying to
• 39:54
  reduce Jasami, and just as Jasamu is going to fall, the
• 39:58
  fantastic commanding officer of the battalion there, the first
• 40:00
  battalion, the Sam Regiment, withdrew.
• 40:02
  Jack or Bruno Brown withdrew his men through the jungles at
• 40:05
  night. They managed to give back to
• 40:07
  Kahima and were there in Kahima before the Japanese even managed
• 40:10
  to get there. Completely stupid tactics, all
• 40:13
  driven by this need to fight battles.
• 40:16
  Now Slim wasn't that stupid. Do not fight unnecessary
• 40:19
  battles. It's one of the things that
• 40:21
  needs to be drum. I mean, I've taught this for
• 40:23
  many years to soldiers and so on.
• 40:25
  And I experienced this when I was a soldier myself.
• 40:28
  You need to learn when to fight battles and when to bypass and
• 40:32
  ignore them. And masking is actually quite a
• 40:34
  relatively simple thing to do. You could leave a couple of
• 40:37
  snipers there to keep the enemy's heads down.
• 40:39
  Don't fight a battle if it's not necessary.
• 40:41
  Yeah, and that's always a question.
• 40:43
  It's like which battles did you really go all in on and which
• 40:46
  ones do you kind of mask and bypass?
• 40:47
  So I think that's a great point. Exactly.
• 40:50
  Exactly what? Under Slim's leadership, allied
• 40:53
  forces won decisive victories at.
• 40:55
  Kahima and infall, yes. Kahima is considered the
• 40:58
  Stalingrad of the East. What happened here?
• 41:02
  Well, the Japanese decided to invade India in 1944, an
• 41:07
  operation called Operation Hugo under the 15th Army Chad called
• 41:11
  Mutaguchi Renia. I don't don't have time to tell
• 41:13
  you the whole story. It is an absolutely fascinating
• 41:15
  1. Mutaguchi Renia had a brilliant
• 41:17
  strategic brain. And Mutaguchi said we need not
• 41:21
  to defend Burma, but to drive, send a big pincer into the
• 41:24
  Brahma Putra Valley, because if we are able to do this very
• 41:28
  quickly, we'll be able to disable, destabilise rather the
• 41:34
  allies in the Brahmaputra Valley.
• 41:35
  In the Brahmaputra Valley we had the Hump airlift.
• 41:39
  This is a massive, massive American airlift to China.
• 41:42
  If I can destroy the airfields, then China is no longer in the
• 41:46
  war and I've achieved a great victory.
• 41:49
  And if I, if I strike at the British and Indian supply depot
• 41:54
  at Dimaport is 58 square miles, it's 37,000 acres of stores all
• 42:00
  ready to support a core advancing into Burma, then they
• 42:04
  won't be able to go into Burma. And I would have won my battle
• 42:08
  without a fight, say Mutaguchi, brilliant general.
• 42:10
  I mean, he since since the war, a lot of people have had a doubt
• 42:14
  on Mutaguchi for losing the battle of Infal.
• 42:17
  But his conception was extraordinarily brilliant, and
• 42:20
  it would have worked in my view. But the Japanese high command by
• 42:24
  that stage had lost all sense of vision.
• 42:26
  His boss, a Jack called Kawabe, based in Rangoon, and Kawabe's
• 42:30
  boss, Count Tarachi, based first in Singapore, then Saigon and
• 42:34
  Tojo, who of course was the Prime Minister and actually
• 42:37
  actually minister of war at the same time, all wanted to
• 42:41
  restrict Mutaguchi's vision. So they gave him a consolation
• 42:44
  prize, which is effectively attacking Imphal.
• 42:47
  Now Imphal is the capital of the princely state of Manipur.
• 42:50
  It's just on the western side of the Chinwen.
• 42:53
  So the whole concept was let's move from defending Burma on the
• 42:57
  east side of the Chinwen to attacking Manipur.
• 43:01
  We'll capture Manipur easily and we'll hold that that will be our
• 43:04
  future defence line. A very, very stupid concept
• 43:08
  because it just stretched the Japanese out unnecessarily.
• 43:12
  It was an unnecessary campaign and as I am, I'm writing and
• 43:16
  trying to demonstrate my current book.
• 43:18
  It was basically brought about by hubris.
• 43:20
  It was brought about by trying to placate Mutaguchi, who was
• 43:22
  desperate to achieve his great strategic faint into the Brahma
• 43:26
  Puta Valley. Anyway, it failed. 100,000
• 43:29
  Japanese crossed into Manipur. Slim withdrew his troops all the
• 43:33
  way back into Manipur itself and to infall and fought the
• 43:37
  Japanese brilliantly. One of the other mistakes that
• 43:40
  Mutaguchi made, because he just assumed the British would
• 43:42
  collapse, was he divided his army.
• 43:45
  He had three primary manoeuvre divisions.
• 43:47
  He divided them to six columns so he didn't concentrate as
• 43:50
  force. Big mistake.
• 43:51
  As a general, concentrate your force at the point of the
• 43:55
  enemy's greatest vulnerability. Very Napoleonic concept.
• 43:59
  But he absolutely messed up. Which meant each of those six
• 44:03
  columns had to fight their own battles, unsupported or
• 44:07
  unsustained by each other, and were and they were bitter
• 44:10
  battles. And then look, the Japanese knew
• 44:11
  how to fight. They fought to the death, but
• 44:14
  ultimately they were defeated. The Stalingrad of the East is a
• 44:17
  is a really apartment phrase, actually, because Kahima is the
• 44:20
  little not a village that sits on the road 134 miles between
• 44:24
  Imphal and and Dimapore and sits on the top of the pass.
• 44:28
  It's the only place you can get into India.
• 44:30
  And a very small group of 1500 men held that pass for three
• 44:35
  weeks. Those 1500 men included 446 men
• 44:40
  of a British territorial battalion called the Royal West
• 44:42
  Kents, but it also included 1000 men of the Assam Regiment and
• 44:48
  the Assam Rifles, Indian soldiers.
• 44:50
  And they fought from the 4th of April to the 20th of April
• 44:55
  against 20,000 Japanese and refused to give in.
• 44:59
  I mean they were ultimately reduced to a small area of 300
• 45:02
  by 350 yards on the tennis court at Kahima.
• 45:07
  This is the great tennis court battle before they were relieved
• 45:10
  by men of the British Second division coming up who then had
• 45:12
  to fight until the 3rd of June to push the Japanese off.
• 45:15
  But this is the point. Sato who commanded that division
• 45:19
  at Kohima didn't need to fight the battle.
• 45:23
  He could have masked Kohima and gone on to Dimapore, these 58
• 45:27
  square miles, massive dumps of food and fuel and ammunition
• 45:31
  unprotected, and he would have secured the greatest victory of
• 45:37
  the war. And it would have pushed the
• 45:39
  British and the Americans out of the Far Eastern campaign at a
• 45:43
  stroke. Just look at the strategic
• 45:45
  opportunity. But no one had the vision in the
• 45:48
  Japanese army to actually pick this up and run with it and make
• 45:52
  make a success of it. And as a consequence they gave
• 45:55
  Witiguchi a sub optimal task, a task that he was only going to
• 45:59
  fail at. And the Japanese did fail.
• 46:01
  The Japanese were then pushed back into Burma.
• 46:04
  They lost about 90% of their men, many of them starving.
• 46:08
  The Japanese called the retreat back from Kahima the road of
• 46:12
  bones. Yeah, and I think this stat
• 46:14
  pretty much sums it up well. In March 1944 they had 150,000
• 46:19
  soldiers available to invade India.
• 46:21
  It was said that they were all dead by July 1944.
• 46:25
  So basically four months later and slim and inflicted the
• 46:28
  largest defeat on the Japanese to that point.
• 46:32
  It's absolutely right. And I think the really
• 46:34
  interesting thing about this is that if you look at all the
• 46:36
  armies, the formed up armies in the field that the Allies had to
• 46:39
  fight, the most successful defeats of armies in the field
• 46:46
  were probably in Falan Kahima in 1944, a year later, which we'll
• 46:51
  we'll come onto at Mctela and Mandalay.
• 46:53
  Quite an extraordinary, quite an astonishing victory that Slim
• 46:56
  achieved over the Japanese. You, we must also remember
• 47:00
  General Zhukov's fantastic defeat of the Japanese in August
• 47:03
  1945 in Manchuria, because that particular campaign was a
• 47:07
  really, really extraordinary one.
• 47:10
  And the Japanese actually in battle has formed up armies.
• 47:13
  They have this formidable reputation of staying and dying.
• 47:17
  That doesn't mean you're good at fighting.
• 47:19
  It doesn't mean you're good at at manoeuvre.
• 47:21
  One of the things that I've become convicted by is the
• 47:24
  reality that, you know, Japanese soldiers died because of the
• 47:27
  failure of their commanders. Command didn't work, so Japanese
• 47:30
  soldiers were just sent in under the veil of Bushido to die, and
• 47:36
  that to no avail. Yeah, you know, Slim's army
• 47:40
  then, after stopping them in India, launches a successful
• 47:43
  offensive that reconquers Burma 1945.
• 47:47
  So how did he accomplish this Herculean task?
• 47:50
  Because I was reading about it, you know, he had a supply line
• 47:52
  of elephants, used combined arms, offensives with tanks and
• 47:56
  artillery working together. It seems, very General
• 47:59
  MacArthur, like you lost the territory, Now you're
• 48:01
  reconquering. Well, I mean, the extraordinary
• 48:04
  thing I said at the start, I mean, he had to make do in Mend.
• 48:07
  He had, he had no resources. So when Slim in June 1944, at
• 48:11
  the height of the Battle of Kahima and Infar was looking at
• 48:13
  the prospect of defeating the Japanese in Burma, he said,
• 48:17
  well, how do I get across the Chinwen and how do I get across
• 48:19
  the Irrawaddy? These are two of the greatest,
• 48:21
  largest rivers in the world. I mean, I've been on both and
• 48:23
  many times they're shockingly big.
• 48:26
  And Slim didn't have any boats. So he said, OK, we're going to
• 48:29
  build our own boats. So at a place called Kaliwa on
• 48:33
  the Chinwin in December 1944, the 14th Army's army built the
• 48:37
  Kaliwa Boat Factory. They created sawmills.
• 48:40
  They chopped antique forests. They built.
• 48:43
  Listen to this, John 550 ten ton barges coated them with pitch,
• 48:49
  which is bubbling up through the ground.
• 48:50
  And there's this part of the world, lots of oil.
• 48:52
  When I first went to Burma in 1997, I was on a boat on the
• 48:56
  Irrawaddy and the guy who was looking after me said, oh, Rob,
• 48:59
  see those teak barges coming down the Irrawaddy?
• 49:01
  I said, yes. He said they were built by Bill
• 49:03
  Slim in 1944. So 550, So they just, and now
• 49:07
  I've got to give you another example is Slim's great mask
• 49:11
  stroke into Burma effectively was not to send his whole army
• 49:14
  against Mandalay, but to divide his army.
• 49:18
  But pretend that he was attacking Mandalay.
• 49:20
  Whereas what he was doing is he was taking a whole armoured
• 49:23
  corps, the 4th Indian Armoured Corps, and shoving it up the
• 49:26
  Japanese backside of the place called Mektila, crossing the
• 49:29
  Irrawadi and striking at Mektila with a whole armoured corps.
• 49:33
  It's really, really quite difficult.
• 49:34
  How do you get an armoured corps?
• 49:36
  We're talking about 250 tanks from a place called Tamu.
• 49:41
  It's 300 miles through the jungle without a Rd.
• 49:44
  December 923rd December 1944. He decided to build a road
• 49:48
  behind bulldozers. So all of tank transporters and
• 49:50
  everything followed these bulldozers through the jungle
• 49:53
  under the canopy of trees for 300 miles till they come.
• 49:56
  They came out at a place called Nyangu and then stormed across
• 49:59
  the Irrawaddy. Unbelievable chutzpah.
• 50:02
  I mean it really is. But he knew his army could do
• 50:04
  it. They knew that.
• 50:06
  And all the boys going on the 4th, the 4th Indian armour cause
• 50:10
  trek through the jungle. They all knew this was a a bit
• 50:12
  of a wheeze. They actually were.
• 50:13
  They would laugh about it. They think if we can pull this
• 50:16
  off, we're really going to show you the Japanese, who the master
• 50:19
  of strategy is. And it's not them.
• 50:21
  Actually, to cut a Long story short, the Battle of Mctealer
• 50:24
  was astonishingly effective. Yes, combined arms tactics,
• 50:28
  Sherman tanks by this stage, fantastic fighter ground attack,
• 50:31
  all coordinated mobile artillery using American priest guns, 105
• 50:36
  millimetre guns and infantry and kangaroo carriers as well.
• 50:41
  So it's all of a sudden over this period of 1943, early 1944,
• 50:46
  the Indian Army, because it's primarily an Indian army, has
• 50:49
  been trained to deliver combined arms manoeuvre against the
• 50:53
  Japanese, which is still fighting the way it had fought
• 50:55
  in 1942. Really, really quite astonishing
• 50:57
  stuff. That is, that is, And obviously
• 51:01
  the Allies went World War 2 and Slim has promoted a Fear
• 51:05
  Marshall in 1949 in recognition of his wartime achievements.
• 51:09
  And I want to ask you about this.
• 51:11
  What were his relations like with his rank and file soldiers?
• 51:17
  Absolute superb. His soldiers loved him.
• 51:19
  In fact, right from the beginning they called him Uncle
• 51:21
  Bill. In fact, the Indian soldiers
• 51:23
  called him Uncle Bill Cha Cha Slim Saab saying Hindi for Uncle
• 51:28
  Cha Cha Cha Cha Slim and and the English soldiers then copied it
• 51:32
  and called him Uncle Bill. You know, he was, he was very
• 51:35
  approachable. He wasn't matey.
• 51:37
  Don't get me wrong, he wasn't matey, but he was very
• 51:39
  approachable. There's a very funny occasion
• 51:41
  when he was standing giving a talk to some soldiers and one of
• 51:43
  the British soldiers yelled out and said we're right behind you
• 51:46
  general. When Slim looked at him and said
• 51:47
  no, you won't be, I'll be 300 miles behind you.
• 51:49
  There's none of the silliness about leading from the front in
• 51:53
  charge. But the boys loved him.
• 51:55
  And I, I've interviewed hundreds of Burma Star veterans and
• 51:58
  goodness gracious people. I put a notice in the 14th Army
• 52:02
  organization called the Burma Star magazine many years ago
• 52:05
  saying I was doing a PhD in Bill Slim.
• 52:07
  And if anyone would like to write to me and tell me their
• 52:10
  experiences of, of Bill, please do so.
• 52:13
  I, I had well over 1200 letters. I mean, that's unbelievable,
• 52:18
  unbelievable. And they all said we worshipped
• 52:20
  him. We worshipped the ground he
• 52:21
  walked on. Well, I think this next part is
• 52:24
  interesting. Most generals don't accept their
• 52:27
  mistakes and what they've learned from them.
• 52:29
  And we're going to talk about that in his memoirs.
• 52:31
  He serves as Governor General later in life of Australia and
• 52:35
  wrote a book that's regarded as a classic military memoir,
• 52:38
  defeat in Into Victory, because he candidly talks about his
• 52:42
  mistakes and lessons he learned. Most generals don't like.
• 52:46
  Even Wellington didn't like to accept any kind of errors on his
• 52:50
  part. It was usually subordinates.
• 52:52
  Particularly Wellington Wellington's a really good
• 52:55
  example of someone who would never talk to someone if they
• 52:58
  ever accused him of making a mistake.
• 53:00
  Slim was a very, as I said at the outside, a very unusual man
• 53:04
  and defeating the victory was one of the extraordinary.
• 53:06
  I mean, I, it is definitely the the best generals book of the
• 53:09
  Second World War because he acknowledges his mistakes and
• 53:13
  when he makes a mistake, and he wrote this in 1956, he pointed
• 53:17
  out that it was his soldiers and their their professionalism and
• 53:22
  their perseverance that rescued him from his errors.
• 53:24
  And he made a number of significant errors.
• 53:27
  The first and foremost was failing to defend Kohima.
• 53:29
  He mean he really was caught out by Kohima.
• 53:32
  He didn't take the Japanese attack seriously.
• 53:35
  And by the time the Japanese had arrived, he'd very, very nearly
• 53:39
  lost. And he won that battle because
• 53:42
  of the remarkable sacrifice of these 1500 Indian and Brits who
• 53:46
  just stood there like Rorksdrift and refused to be moved.
• 53:49
  They absolutely refused to move, dead and dying, piling up around
• 53:53
  them, but they stayed firm and and Slim pays testament to that
• 53:57
  courage and that sacrifice in this book.
• 54:00
  But he then when he came home, he then retired, retired or
• 54:04
  resigned from the army and joined an organization called
• 54:07
  British Rail and was the was the deputy chairman of British Rail
• 54:11
  for a few years until 1949, the Prime Minister of Britain, a
• 54:15
  Great Britain chack called Clement Attlee.
• 54:17
  Well, it was time to replace the chief of the Imperial General
• 54:19
  Staff. So the head of the British Army,
• 54:21
  who at the time was General Montgomery and Montgomery went
• 54:25
  to Clement Attlee and said I've my replacement needs to be
• 54:30
  appointed. I've decided who it should be
• 54:32
  and and it's General Crocker and Clement Attlee said.
• 54:36
  No, it's not going to be Crocker, it's going to be Slim.
• 54:39
  And Monty didn't really know Slim very well said.
• 54:42
  But I've told Crocker and Clement Attlee looked at him and
• 54:45
  said, Aunt, tell him. Slim then became chief of the
• 54:48
  Imperial General Staff, sort of first of General early January
• 54:51
  1950 and remained so for a very, very important period of time,
• 54:55
  not least of all during the Korean War now and, and quite a
• 54:59
  remarkable man because I one thing I wanted to get across in
• 55:01
  this, in this chat, John, is how strategically he thought about
• 55:05
  everything. And you need a strategic thing.
• 55:08
  You don't want a tactician as the head of the army.
• 55:10
  You want a strategist who can understand what the political
• 55:13
  imperatives of the time are and who can then imply employ his
• 55:17
  skills and talent as a, as a leader of the army to achieve
• 55:20
  them. And he did that remarkably well.
• 55:23
  Yeah, yeah. Passes in 1970.
• 55:25
  And I wanted final question to ask you about his legacy,
• 55:29
  because he doesn't get the notoriety of Patton or Monte or
• 55:33
  Eisenhower. What do you think his legacy is?
• 55:38
  Well, I'll just say that when I was doing the PHDI was I was at
• 55:41
  Staff College in the British Army when I decided I was going
• 55:43
  to do this PhD because no one at Staff College knew anything
• 55:46
  about Slim. And I thought this is a bizarre.
• 55:48
  I'd actually ended up a few years before going to staff
• 55:51
  college and teaching a course on the Bomer campaign.
• 55:54
  And and I thought this is quite extraordinary that we as a
• 55:57
  British Army has completely forgotten this great man and
• 56:00
  what he managed to achieve and went away and did the PhD.
• 56:03
  And I think one of the reasons, and I thought about this for all
• 56:07
  all years since why was why is Slim not better known?
• 56:11
  It's because he's he was not a self publicist.
• 56:13
  Oh Monty would bang on about how great he was from every soapbox
• 56:17
  he could climb onto. And everyone knew who Monty was,
• 56:21
  the good or bad because he told them not so Slim.
• 56:25
  Slim was self deprecating. He was retiring.
• 56:27
  He wasn't shy, but he wasn't retiring.
• 56:29
  He would never be a politician. He was not there to bang a drum
• 56:33
  and he he had this phrase. He said victory is all the music
• 56:36
  I need. And that might sound, and it is
• 56:39
  true, but the sound doesn't continue through history.
• 56:44
  You need something more than that.
• 56:46
  He was one of the last century's greatest generals in Britain and
• 56:50
  the Empire, and he achieved extraordinary success in Burma
• 56:54
  when no one in London ever expected victory to be achieved.
• 56:58
  Slim Churchill never regarded victory to be possible.
• 57:01
  He described going into Burma as akin to jumping into the sea to
• 57:04
  wrestle with a shark. Only stupid people did it.
• 57:07
  Slim went in and defeated the Japanese.
• 57:09
  He unstitched them perfectly. You make a good point, he wasn't
• 57:14
  a self promoter like Monty or Patton but also was it the
• 57:17
  theatre he was operating in? Like that's not Europe.
• 57:19
  Yes, you're right, You're right. The, the, the, the boys in the
• 57:23
  14th Army called themselves the Forgotten Army because they were
• 57:27
  a long way from home. When they get newspapers, six
• 57:29
  weeks after the event, they would read the newspapers and
• 57:31
  all they'd hear about was Italy and and Northern Europe and
• 57:34
  nothing about them. So they, they regard themselves
• 57:37
  as forgotten. Slim did a lot of work to
• 57:38
  actually remedy this, but it's very interesting to see how they
• 57:44
  out of sight out of mind. I mean, I've described him as
• 57:47
  the Forgotten General of the Forgotten Army in the Forgotten
• 57:49
  War, and that probably encapsulates it all.
• 57:52
  Yeah, no, I appreciate the overview of him.
• 57:54
  It sounds like a fascinating man.
• 57:56
  Again, if you want to learn more about Slim, please check out
• 57:59
  Robert's book, Slim Master of War, or his website,
• 58:02
  robertlyman.com. And yeah, this is great.
• 58:05
  We appreciate your time. I've absolutely loved it.
• 58:09
  I always loved talking about Slim.
• 58:11
  I mean, the final thing I'll say, if I can, is that, I mean,
• 58:13
  the British Army's doctrine of combat is called manoeuvre
• 58:16
  warfare. It's the same as the Americans,
• 58:18
  exactly the same same idea. Slim was the master of it.
• 58:21
  Slim actually came up with many of the basic tenets of manoeuvre
• 58:24
  warfare long before anyone else did in the British Army.
• 58:27
  And if you want to try to understand what this really
• 58:30
  encapsulates, it's all about using your mostest to attack the
• 58:34
  enemy's leastest. Yep.
• 58:37
  Yeah, that's a great point. And that's what we should end
• 58:40
  on. So, yeah, thank you always.
• 58:41
  Robert. This is a brilliant talk.
• 58:44
  Yeah. If my listeners would like to
• 58:46
  learn more, please check out his website or his books on Amazon.
• 58:49
  We we thank you for your time, Sir.
• 58:53
  John, it's been an amazing pleasure.
• 58:54
  Thank you very much.