Defeat Into Victory

by Field-Marshal Viscount William Slim

  I had first met Wingate in East Africa, when we were both fighting the Italians, he with his Abyssinian partisans, whom in those days we impolitely called Shiftas or brigands, and I with my more orthodox Indian Infantry Brigade. I had already in 1941 and 1942 had several lively discussions with him on the organization and practice of guerrilla warfare. With many of his ideas I was in agreement, but I had doubted if methods based on his Abyssinian experience would succeed equally well against a tougher enemy and in country not so actively friendly. Wingate was a strange, excitable, moody creature, but he had fire in him. He could ignite other men. When he so fiercely advocated some project of his own, you might catch his enthusiasm or you might see palpable flaws in his arguments; you might be angry at his arrogance or outraged at so obvious a belief in the end, his end, justifying any means; but you could not be indifferent. You could not fail to be stimulated either to thought, protest, or action by his sombre vehemence and his unrelenting persistence.

  Just at this time he had returned from his first raid into Burma.

  Passing through the 4 Corps outposts along the Chindwin, his brigade in a number of columns, all supplied by air, had pushed two hundred miles eastwards into Japanese-held Burma. They had blown up bridges and cuttings on the Mandalay–Myitkyina railway that supplied the Japanese northern front, and attempted to reach across the Irrawaddy to cut the Mandalay–Lashio line. Exhaustion, difficulties of air supply, and the reaction of the Japanese, prevented this, and the columns breaking up into small parties made for the shelter of 4 Corps. About a thousand men, a third of the total force, failed to return. As a military operation the raid had been an expensive failure. It gave little tangible return for the losses it had suffered and the resources it had absorbed. The damage it did to Japanese communications was repaired in a few days, the casualties it inflicted were negligible, and it had no immediate effect on Japanese dispositions or plans. The abandonment of a projected enemy offensive through the Hukawng Valley was not due to this raid, but to the fact that the Japanese 55th Division, which was to take part in it, had to be diverted at the end of 1942 to meet the British threat in Arakan. If anything was learnt of air supply or jungle fighting it was a costly schooling.

  These are hard things to say of an effort that required such stark courage and endurance as was demanded of and given by Wingate and his men. The operation was, in effect, the old cavalry raid of military history on the enemy’s communications, which, to be effective against a stout-hearted opponent, must be made in tactical co-ordination with a main attack elsewhere. Originally, Wingate’s raid had been thus planned to coincide with an advance by Chinese forces from Yunnan. Later, although it was clear that this Chinese move would not materialize, General Wavell sent Wingate’s force in alone. It was a bold decision, and as it turned out, it was justified, not on military, but on psychological grounds. It cannot be judged on material results alone. Whilst, like the Arakan offensive, it was a failure, there was a dramatic quality about this raid, which, with the undoubted fact that it had penetrated far behind the Japanese lines and returned, lent itself to presentation as a triumph of British jungle fighting over the Japanese. Skilfully handled, the press of the Allied world took up the tale, and everywhere the story ran that we had beaten the Japanese at their own game. This not only distracted attention from the failure in Arakan, but was important in itself for our own people at home, for our allies, and above all for our troops on the Burma front. Whatever the actual facts, to the troops in Burma it seemed the first ripple showing the turning of the tide. For this reason alone, Wingate’s raid was worth all the hardship and sacrifice his men endured, and by every means in our power we exploited its propaganda value to the full.

  On the 21st May, I heard that General Giffard had replaced General Irwin as Commander-in-Chief, Eastern Army. Except for a brief visit to my headquarters ten days earlier, I had not met him. He called me to Calcutta at the end of the month and we had a very full discussion on the Arakan situation. The new Army Commander had a great effect on me. A tall, good-looking man in the late fifties, who had obviously kept himself physically and mentally in first-class condition, there was nothing dramatic about him in either appearance or speech. He abhorred the theatrical, and was one of the very few generals, indeed men in any position, I have known who really disliked publicity. The first impression he gave was of courtesy and consideration, and this was a lasting impression because it was based on thought for others.

  But there was much more to General Giffard than good taste, good manners, and unselfishness. He understood the fundamentals of war—that soldiers must be trained before they can fight, fed before they can march, and relieved before they are worn out. He understood that front-line commanders should be spared responsibilities in rear, and that soundness of organization and administration is worth more than specious short-cuts to victory. Having chosen his subordinates and given them their tasks, he knew how to leave them without interference, but with the knowledge that, if they needed it, his support was behind them. I returned to Calcutta—with some difficulty, as the weather forced back my aircraft twice—feeling that the new Army Commander was a man I could work with, and for, wholeheartedly.

  Within a few days General Giffard came with me on an Arakan tour. He visited the forward troops, my own headquarters, and the rear areas. He met officers and men and spoke to them. He was at his best talking to individuals. As a speech-maker he was neither eloquent nor picturesque, but he had two things that impressed soldiers—he knew his stuff and he was dead honest. The quality that showed through him was integrity, and that was the quality which, as much as any other, we wanted in our Army Commander. Without any shouting from the house-tops or organized publicity stunts, belief in the new Army Commander spread, and with it spirits began to revive. Those who, like myself, commanded under him, built on the foundations he laid in morale and organization, and later, when we succeeded him, often received credit that should justly have been his.

  After a few weeks tidying up Arakan, getting tired formations out, building up supplies, and doing the hundred and one things necessary to give the troops in their sodden trenches and leaky bashas as much comfort as possible, Corps Headquarters, leaving Lomax and his 26th Division to hold the front, returned to Ranchi. General Giffard’s instructions to me were to have the divisions already at Ranchi, and those he would send me later, fit for a real offensive immediately after the monsoon.

  With him I discussed the forthcoming Arakan offensive, which he was entrusting to 15 Corps. For it, I was to have the 5th and 7th Divisions. The 20th Division was to go to 4 Corps at Imphal; the 70th Division would remain in Army Reserve. The 26th Division, when relieved by either 5th or 7th, would remain in Arakan, as reserve for that front. The old Sunderbans flotilla had by now largely reverted to transport duties, and though we had hoped for landing craft and naval forces for a minor landing, they were not yet available. We should thus again be reduced to a straightforward advance overland with only amphibious feints. I was anxious to avoid the old move on a narrow front, and I asked for an additional formation to send down the Kaladan River on the left flank, always the dangerous spot in Arakan. This would be independent of the main advance, and would have to be supplied entirely by air. General Giffard accordingly made available for me the 81st West African Division, less one brigade, and provided enough air transport from our growing resources to supply it.

  This was the first time a normal formation such as a division was to be committed to complete air maintenance. General Giffard’s staff with mine worked out the organization required. We very soon realized that if we were going to make the best use of this great new weapon of air supply we must, with our limited resources in aircraft, provide a simple, flexible organization of control and operation, that would suit any normal formation without elaborate preparation. We approached the problem from the starting-point that transportation by air was no more extraordinary than movement by road, rail, or boat; it was merely one method of mov
ing things and men. There is indeed only one test of airmindedness, and that is not whether you can fly an aeroplane, but whether you regard it as a vehicle. If you do, you are airminded; if you regard it as anything else—a weapon, a sporting adjunct, or a bag of tricks—you can be an air marshal, but you are not airminded.

  The 81st West African Division was training in the jungle near Bombay, and I flew down to spend a few days with them. Their discipline and smartness were impressive, and they were more obviously at home in the jungle than any troops I had yet seen. They had neither animals nor vehicles with their fighting units, but were organized on a man-pack basis. In order to see what this meant, I did what I have often found very enlightening with a new organization. I had a formal parade. A battalion and a battery at war establishment were drawn up for inspection, with every man in his place. I was at once struck by two diings. First, by the horde of unarmed porters who were needed to carry supplies, ammunition, baggage, and the heavier weapons, and secondly by the large number of white men in a unit, fifty or sixty to a battalion. Accustomed as I was to Indian battalions in the field with usually only seven or eight Europeans, it struck me as an unnecessarily generous supply. I never changed that view and later experience confirmed it. This I know is rank heresy to many very experienced ‘coasters’. I was constantly told that, far from being too many, with the rapidly expanded African forces, more British officers and N.C.O.s were needed. But these large British establishments in African units had great drawbacks. The only way to fill them was to draft officers and N.C.O.s willy-nilly to them, and this did not always give the right kind. The European who serves with native troops should be, not only much above average in efficiency and character, as he must accept greater responsibility, but he should serve with them because he wants to, because he likes them. Another effect of so many British was to stifle the initiative of the Africans. All commanders, even down to seconds-in-command of platoons, were British; the African N.C.O. thus had, at least during training, a white man always at his elbow to whom he could turn for orders. Naturally he did so, and when in battle the Britisher became a casualty or for some other reason the African was left on his own, he was lost. The Sudan Defence Force units, the only other African troops I had, up to then, commanded, seemed to me even after their expansion to have got a better answer, with their few but picked British officers and their Sudanese officers and N.C.O.s, temperamental perhaps, but trained to be full of initiative.

  As the monsoon drew to a close, our divisions slipped quietly away from Ranchi. The 5th and 7th went to Arakan, where they took over the front from the 26th Division, which went into Corps Reserve at Chittagong. The 81st West African Division was already collecting for its move down the Kaladan, when early in October, 15 Corps Headquarters was established in the jungle a few miles south of Bawli. On 6th October I left Ranchi, and, after a day with the Army Commander, flew to my new headquarters and took command of the Arakan front. Our plans for the offensive had been made, and all that was required at the moment were the usual final checks.

  I had hardly had time to make a tour of the front by air, launch, and jeep, when I was summoned to Calcutta to act for General Giffard as Commander-in-Chief, Eastern Command. Lieut.-General Sir Philip Christison, whom I knew very well, having been a fellow instructor at Camberley Staff College, was to replace me at Corps. I left with many regrets, not only at parting from my staff, who had served me so very well and for all of whom I had, and still have, a real affection, and from the troops, but at not having had the chance of wielding with my own hand the weapon I had seen forged.

  I flew to Calcutta on 15th October 1943, without even an A.D.C. Nigel Bruce, who held that thankless post, had broken his leg immediately on arrival in Arakan, and I missed him badly. My aircraft, piloted by Air Commodore Gray, who had insisted on paying me this compliment, made an unexpectedly quick trip, and I arrived considerably ahead of time. No one was at Dum Dum airfield to meet me—I never did have much luck there—and so I wandered off rather forlornly to try and find a car. Eventually I forced a protesting Indian driver, who said he was waiting for a brigadier, to take me. A mile or so outside the airfield I met Brigadier Steve Irwin, the Chief of Staff of Eastern Command, coming to meet me at the correct time, and changed cars. I hope the other brigadier was not kept waiting too long.

  As we drove out to Barrackpore, I watched an army commander’s black-and-red flag fluttering over the bonnet of the car, and wondered where I was really going.

  CHAPTER IX

  THE FOUNDATIONS

  IT was strange to find myself back at Barrackpore as an army commander, in the same room, at the same desk, I had left a few months before as a corps commander. The scene was little altered, except that the rooms were more congested with staff officers and clerks, there were now huts all over die grounds, and more despatch riders noisily came and went under the windows. Yet great changes were in progress.

  The army of which I took command was still the old Eastern Army of India, and I was thus, at the moment, under General Auchinleck, who had recently succeeded General Wavell as Commander-in-Chief, India. However, in August 1943, the British and United States Governments had formed a new South-East Asia Allied Command to control all forces in Burma, Ceylon, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, Siam, and Indo-China. Admiral Mountbatten was appointed Supreme Commander, with, under him, three Commanders-in-Chief, for Sea, Land, and Air. General Sir George Giffard was to be the land C.-in-C. at 11th Army Group, and I, as Commander of the newly formed Fourteenth Army, should serve under him. This reorganization dividing South-East Asia Command from India was carried out during the next two months. It entailed splitting my headquarters between the new Fourteenth Army and the revived Indian Eastern Command, and it gave me one immediate advantage—it relieved me of all responsibility for Bihar, Orissa, and most of Bengal, an immense weight off my shoulders.

  I do not believe in the system, so popular in the war, of commanders when promoted taking with them from the formations they leave, the cream of their staffs. These travelling circuses, grouped round particular generals, cause a great deal of heartburning and confusion. Not only is the subordinate headquarters skimmed of its best officers, but in the higher, a number of efficient and worthy officers are abruptly thrown out to make room for newcomers. I am not at all sure either that the practice is good for the generals concerned themselves. So, as usual, I arrived at Eastern Army without a following, and took over the complete staff as I found it.

  Again, through no merit of my own, I was lucky. I soon found that Steve Irwin, who had recently been appointed Brigadier General Staff was an outstanding staff officer, with a first-class brain that grasped, and what was more important held to, the essentials of any plan or organization. Unruffled by crisis, he had a dry, keen wit in the summing-up of people and affairs that I found refreshing. The transfers to other headquarters that now had to be made, did, however, give me an opportunity to introduce some officers of my own choosing. Chief among these was ‘Alf’ Snelling, to whom I had said good-bye in the sandstorm on Lake Habbaniyeh eighteen months before. He came to me now as my Major-General in charge of Administration. I knew that the campaign in Burma would above all be a supply and transport problem, and I was determined to get the best possible man to take charge of that side of it for me. I think I did.

  Immediately on taking over I found myself confronted by three major anxieties—supply, health, and morale.

  Supply was, of course, largely a matter of communications. The Fourteenth Army was deployed on a seven-hundred-mile front, from the Chinese frontier beyond Fort Hertz to the Bay of Bengal. Along the Indo-Burmese border, in a shallow curve, sweeps the wide belt of jungle-clad, precipitous hills, railless, roadless and, for six months of the year during the monsoon rains, almost trackless. Sparsely populated by wild tribes, disease-infested, and even unmapped in places, much of this great area had been penetrated only by occasional Europeans and then only in the dry season. It could fairly be described as some
of the world’s worst country, breeding the world’s worst diseases, and having for half the year at least the world’s worst climate. To move even small pack caravans by the few dry-weather tracks from Burma to India was so difficult that no proper trading route existed. To supply, move, and fight great armies in or through the mass of jumbled hills had for so long been regarded as impossible that no serious defence measures had ever been taken on India’s eastern frontier. Nor had any effective communications either for trade or war been built. Such roads, railways, and navigable rivers as there were stopped abruptly each side of the mountain barrier, a couple of hundred miles apart.

  From the Indian side, the fighting areas could be reached—but only circuitously—by railway and river; there were no through roads. From Calcutta the broad-gauge railway, for about half of the distance a single track, ran for 235 miles to Parbatipur. Here, hordes of coolies unloaded the wagons and noisily transferred the contents to the ramshackle metre-gauge train that, if all had gone well, would be waiting. This then wandered up the Brahmaputra Valley to the ferry at Pandu, 450 miles from Calcutta. The coaches and wagons were uncoupled and pushed, with much clanking and banging, on to barges. A slow river crossing and the laborious process was repeated in reverse on the opposite bank. Over at last and reassembled, the train rattled monotonously on to Dimapur, the terminus for the Central front, over 600 miles from Calcutta. If bound for the Northern front, it continued its journey, even more slowly, to Ledo, more than 800 miles from Calcutta.