Defeat Into Victory

by Field-Marshal Viscount William Slim

  (iii) The air evacuation of serious casualties.

  (iv) The raising of morale.

  The prevention of tropical diseases had advanced immensely within the last few years, and one of the first steps of the new Supreme Commander had been to get to South-East Asia some of the most brilliant research workers in this field. Working closely with medical officers who had had experience of practical conditions, they introduced new techniques, drugs, and methods of treatment. Gradually the new remedies became available, although for long we lagged behind in their supply. Sulphona-mide compounds, penicillin, mepacrine, and DDT all appeared later than we liked but still in time to save innumerable lives. Without research and its results we could not survive as an army.

  It was, however, forward treatment that brought the first visible results. Up to now, when a man contracted malaria, he had been transported, while his disease was at its height, in great discomfort hundreds of miles by road, rail, and boat to a hospital in India. Before he reached there he had probably been reinfected several times, and while his first bout would be over he was booked for a relapse. In any case he would not return over the congested line of communication for, on the average, at least five months. Often enough he was employed in India and never returned. To avoid all this we organized M.F.T.U.s, Malaria Forward Treatment Units. They were, in effect, field hospitals, tented or more often in bashas, a few miles behind the fighting lines. A man reached them within twenty-four hours of his attack of malaria and he remained there for the three weeks or so it took to cure him. He was back fit with his unit again in weeks instead of months, the strain on the line of communication was lightened, and he avoided the often terrible discomforts of the long journey. M.F.T.U.s had one other advantage. When morale was not high some men welcomed malaria and took no precautions to avoid it, reasoning that a bout of malaria was a cheap price to pay for getting away from the Burma front. If it only took them half a dozen miles from the front and brought them briskly back it was not so attractive.

  For the wounded, forward surgical teams were introduced on an increasing scale. Working almost in the midst of the battle, specially selected surgeons, including some of the leading professors of our medical schools, performed major operations within a few hours of a man being wounded. Their work was brilliant, but it should be remembered that where the surgeon saved the individual life, the physician, less dramatically, saved hundreds by his preventive measures. We also sent nurses—when we had them—farther into the battle area than had been usual. There were some diseases, like mite typhus, for which we had then no proved treatment, in which the patient’s chance of survival depended more on the nurse than on the doctor. The extra danger and hardship these nurses cheerfully endured were repaid in lives many times over.

  Air evacuation, in the long run, probably made the greatest difference of all to the wounded and sick. Only those who have suffered the interminable anguish of travel over rough ground or tracks by stretcher or ambulance and the long stifling railway journey for days on end, with broken limbs jolting and temperatures soaring, can realize what a difference quick, smooth, cool transport by aircraft can mean. In November 1943 we had for all transport purposes, other than the maintenance of the 81st West African Division in Arakan, only some one hundred and twenty air sorties a month, but the number was rapidly growing and with it our technique of air evacuation. Later, light aeroplanes of the Moth, Auster, or L5 type picked up the casualties on airstrips hurriedly cut out of jungle or rice-field within a mile or two of the fighting. Each little aircraft carried one lying or two sitting patients and flew them to the supply strip, anything from ten to forty miles farther back. Here the casualties were transferred to Dakotas returning empty from the supply run and flown direct to a general hospital. There were, I remember, heated arguments as to where these hospitals should be situated. Roughly, there was the choice between putting them in such hot sticky places in the plains as at Comilla or in the cool of the hills as at Shillong. I plumped for the plains, because there we could have an airstrip almost alongside the hospital; to reach the hills would have meant long and trying road journeys. So our casualties went almost direct from the battlefield to the hospital and later as convalescents by road from the plains to the hills. There was some shaking of heads among the more orthodox, but the results justified it. One such hospital took in during 1944 and 1945 over eleven thousand British casualties straight, in their filthy, blood-soaked battledress, from the front line. The total deaths in that hospital were twenty-three. Air evacuation did more in the Fourteenth Army to save lives than any other agency.

  Good doctors are no use without good discipline. More than half the battle against disease is fought, not by the doctors, but by the regimental officers. It is they who see that the daily dose of mepacrine is taken, that shorts are never worn, that shirts are put on and sleeves turned down before sunset, that minor abrasions are treated before, not after, they go septic, that bodily cleanliness is enforced. When mepacrine was first introduced and turned men a jaundiced yellow, there was the usual whispering campaign among troops that greets every new remedy—the drug would render them impotent—so, often the little tablet was not swallowed. An individual medical test in almost all cases will show whether it has been taken or not, but there are a few exceptions and it is difficult to prove for court-martial purposes. I, therefore, had surprise checks of whole units, every man being examined. If the overall result was less than ninety-five per cent positive I sacked the commanding officer. I only had to sack three; by then the rest had got my meaning.

  Slowly, but with increasing rapidity, as all of us, commanders, doctors, regimental officers, staff officers, and N.C.O.s, united in the drive against sickness, results began to appear. On the chart that hung on my wall the curves of admissions to hospitals and Malaria Forward Treatment Units sank lower and lower, until in 1945 the sickness rate for the whole Fourteenth Army was one per thousand per day. But at the end of 1943 that was a long way off.

  My third great anxiety, intimately involved with health as with every aspect of efficiency, was morale. There was no doubt that the disasters in Arakan, following an unbroken record of defeat, had brought morale in large sections of the army to a dangerously low ebb. Morale was better in the forward combat formations, as most of the shaken units from Arakan had been withdrawn. 4 Corps in the centre, and, I flattered myself, 15 Corps in the south were staunch enough. It was in the rear areas, on the lines of communication, in the reinforcement camps, amid the conglomeration of administrative units that covered the vast area behind the front, that morale was really low. Through this filter all units, drafts, and individuals for the forward formations had to percolate, and many became contaminated with the virus of despondency. In the summer of 1943 there was a depressingly high incidence of desertion from drafts moving up the line of communication. Right back into India rumours were assiduously spread picturing the Japanese as the super bogy-men of the jungle, harping on their savagery, their superior equipment and training, the hardships our men suffered, the lack of everything, the faults in our leadership, and the general hopelessness of expecting ever to defeat the enemy. Such stories were brought even by drafts from England. It was an insidious gangrene that could easily spread. Whether morale went up or down, and with it hope of victory, was an issue that swayed in the balance.

  On our side we had the somewhat phoney propaganda that followed Wingate’s raid and the more solid influence of General Giffard’s character. Against us was that record of defeat, the lack of even elementary amenities, the discomfort of life in the jungle, and worst of all the feeling of isolation, with all the heart sickness of long separation from home. The British soldier, especially, suffered from what he felt was the lack of appreciation by his own people and at times of their forgetfulness of his very existence. The men were calling themselves a ‘Forgotten Army’ long before some newspaper correspondent seized on the phrase. It was an understandable one. After all, the people of Britain had perils and exci
tements enough on their own doorsteps and Burma was far away. Its place in the general strategy was not clear, nor did what happened there seem vital. Much more stirring news was coming out of Africa. It was no use belly-aching because the Fourteenth Army was not in the headlines of the home papers; so far, we had not done anything to put us there. When we had won a victory or two we should be in a better position to complain. All the same, this feeling of neglect, of being at the bottom of all priority lists, had sunk deep. There was a good deal of bitterness in the army, and much too much being sorry for ourselves.

  So when I took command, I sat quietly down to work out this business of morale. I came to certain conclusions, based not on any theory that I had studied, but on some experience and a good deal of hard thinking. It was on these conclusions that I set out consciously to raise the fighting spirit of my army.

  Morale is a state of mind. It is that intangible force which will move a whole group of men to give their last ounce to achieve something, without counting the cost to themselves; that makes them feel they are part of something greater than themselves. If they are to feel that, their morale must, if it is to endure—and the essence of morale is that it should endure—have certain foundations. These foundations are spiritual, intellectual, and material, and that is the order of their importance. Spiritual first, because only spiritual foundations can stand real strain. Next intellectual, because men are swayed by reason as well as feeling. Material last—important, but last—because the very highest kinds of morale are often met when material conditions are lowest.

  I remember sitting in my office and tabulating these foundations of morale something like this:

  1. Spiritual

  (a) There must be a great and noble object.

  (b) Its achievement must be vital.

  (c) The method of achievement must be active, aggressive.

  (d) The man must feel that what he is and what he does matters directly towards the attainment of the object.

  2. Intellectual

  (a) He must be convinced that the object can be attained; that it is not out of reach.

  (b) He must see, too, that the organization to which he belongs and which is striving to attain the object is an efficient one.

  (c) He must have confidence in his leaders and know that whatever dangers and hardships he is called upon to suffer, his life will not be lightly flung away.

  3. Material

  (a) The man must feel that he will get a fair deal from his commanders and from the army generally.

  (b) He must, as far as humanly possible, be given the best weapons and equipment for his task.

  (c) His living and working conditions must be made as good as they can be.

  It was one thing thus neatly to marshal my principles but quite another to develop them, apply them, and get them recognized by the whole army.

  At any rate our spiritual foundation was a firm one. I use the word spiritual, not in its strictly religious meaning, but as belief in a cause. Religion has always been and still is one of the greatest foundations of morale, especially of military morale. Saints and soldiers have much in common. The religion of the Mohammedan, of the Sikh, of the Gurkha, and of die fighting Hindu—and we had them all in the Fourteenth Army—can rouse in men a blaze of contempt for death. The Christian religion is above all others a source of that enduring courage which is the most valuable of all the components of morale. Yet religion, as we understand it, is not essential to high morale. Anyone who has fought with or against Nazi paratroops, Japanese suicide squads, or Russian Commissars, will have found this; but a spiritual foundation, belief in a cause, there must be.

  We had this; and we had the advantage over our enemies that ours was based on real, not false, spiritual values. If ever an army fought in a just cause we did. We coveted no man’s country; we wished to impose no form of government on any nation. We fought for the clean, the decent, the free things of life, for the right to live our lives in our own way, as others could live theirs, to worship God in what faith we chose, to be free in body and mind, and for our children to be free. We fought only because the powers of evil had attacked these things. No matter what the religion or race of any man in the Fourteenth Army, he must feel this, feel that he had indeed a worthy cause, and that if he did not defend it life would not be worth living for him or for his children. Nor was it enough to have a worthy cause. It must be positive, aggressive, not a mere passive, defensive, anti-something feeling. So our object became not to defend India, to stop the Japanese advance, or even to occupy Burma, but to destroy the Japanese Army, to smash it as an evil thing.

  The fighting soldier facing the enemy can see that what he does, whether he is brave or craven, matters to his comrades and directly influences the result of the battle. It is harder for the man working on the road far behind, the clerk checking stores in a dump, the headquarters telephone operator monotonously plugging through his calls, the sweeper carrying out his menial tasks, the quartermaster’s orderly issuing bootlaces in a reinforcement camp—it is hard for these and a thousand others to see that they too matter. Yet every one of the half-million in the army—and it was many more later—had to be made to see where his task fitted into the whole, to realize what depended on it, and to feel pride and satisfaction in doing it well.

  Now these things, while the very basis of morale, because they were purely matters of feeling and emotion, were the most difficult to put over, especially to the British portion of the army. The problem was how to instil or revive their beliefs in the men of many races who made up the Fourteenth Army. I felt there was only one way to do it, by a direct approach to the individual men themselves. Not by written exhortations, by wireless speeches, but by informal talks and contacts between troops and commanders. There was nothing new in this; my corps and divisional commanders and others right down the scale were already doing it. It was the way we had held the troops together in the worst days of the 1942 retreat; we remained an army then only because the men saw and knew their commanders. All I did now was to encourage my commanders to increase these activities, unite them in a common approach to the problem, in the points that they would stress, and in the action they would take to see that principles became action not merely words.

  Yet they began, as most things do, as words. We, my commanders and I, talked to units, to collections of officers, to headquarters, to little groups of men, to individual soldiers casually met as we moved around. And we all talked the same stuff with the same object. Whenever I could get away from my headquarters, and that throughout the campaign was about a third of the time, I was in these first few months more like a parliamentary candidate than a general—except that I never made a promise. One of the most successful of British commanders once told me that you could make an appeal to these higher things successfully to officers, but not directly to the rank and file. He underestimated his countrymen, and he had forgotten history. His dictum was not true of the England of the Crusades, of Cromwell, of Pitt, nor of Churchill. It was not true of my army, of either the British, Indian, Gurkha, or African soldier. I made a point of speaking myself to every combatant unit or at least to its officers and N.C.O.s. My platform was usually the bonnet of my jeep with the men collected anyhow round it. I often did three or four of these stump speeches in a day. I learnt, or perhaps I had already learnt in 15 Corps, the various responses one got from the different nationalities. Even the British differed. A cockney battalion saw the point of a joke almost before it came, a north country unit did not laugh so easily but when it did the roar was good to hear. All responded at once to some reference to their pride in the part of Britain they came from or in their regiment. A lot more could be made of this local pride; it is a fine thing. All the British were shy of talk of the spiritual things. This was most marked in the English; the Welsh and Irish had fewer inhibitions on these subjects, and the Scots, who are reared more on the romance of their history, least of any. While Indian races differed in almost everything, they all were
more ready than the British to respond openly to direct appeals on these more abstract grounds. They had not only a greater feeling for personal leadership, but their military traditions, their local patriotisms, and their religions were much more part of the everyday fabric of their lives than such things are with us. Their reaction was immediate and often intense. The Gurkha, bless him, made the most stolid of all audiences. He had a tendency to stand or sit to attention and his poker face never changed its expression until it broke into the most attractive grin in Asia at a rather broad jest. With the African I was handicapped by language but, speaking without deep knowledge, I should say that, allowing for his greater lack of sophistication, he responded much as an Indian.

  Language was a difficulty. The Indian Army now contained many recruits who had not had time to learn Urdu and some units such as the Madras ones had hardly any Hindustani speakers. However, I managed somehow, though it was only the innate good manners of the Indian soldier that on many an occasion prevented laughter at some gaffe I made. I remember one day I spoke to a Gurkha battalion, drove a mile or so, and addressed an Indian one. My talk in substance was the same to both of them. When I had finished what I thought was a particularly eloquent Urdu harangue to the Indians, I turned to my A.D.C. and said with some pride, ‘That was a pretty good effort, wasn’t it?’ ‘Quite, sir,’ he replied crushingly, ‘but I suppose you know that after the first two sentences you relapsed entirely into Gurkhali!’

  I learnt, too, that one did not need to be an orator to be effective. Two things only were necessary: first to know what you were talking about, and, second and most important, to believe it yourself. I found that if one kept the bulk of one’s talk to the material things the men were interested in, food, pay, leave, beer, mails, and the progress of operations, it was safe to end on a higher note—the spiritual foundations—and I always did.