Field Marshal William Slim
Field Marshal William Slim was one of the most brilliant commanders of the Second World War. He gets little press and there are not a lot of books written about him. Slim was one of those unique officers who served on the periphery of the British Empire as an office in the British Indian Army. He was a clerk in a factory who attended the University of Birmingham and commissioned as a reserve officer through its reserve officer training course; he did not attend Sandhurst, the British equivalent of the U.S. Military Academy. He was commissioned in 1914 and assigned to the Indian Army. He served at Gallipoli and Mesopotamia in the First World War and at Gallipoli saw the immense waste of human life which led him in his future commands never to sacrifice his men in senseless operations. Between the wars he served in India with the Gurkhas and also spent a significant time as a student and an instructor. He did was not promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and given command of a battalion at the age of 46. However during the war he rose from Battalion to Brigade and then Division command and achieved his Generalship through wartime promotions remaining a Colonel on the regular list while serving in the British campaign against the Italians in the Sudan and the invasion of Iraq. When the war was at its lowest point and British forces were collapsing against the relentless Japanese advance in Burma he was assigned to command Burma Corps which eventually became the British 14th Army, sometimes better known as the “Forgotten Army.” He took command and had to conduct a 900 mile withdraw under desperate conditions. His Army was emaciated, poorly equipped and beaten, but his leadership during that retreat saved his army and kept their spirit alive. However it was his leadership that turned the Army around restored it and then conducted an amazing campaign to drive the Japanese out of Burma.
Slim has some of the most brilliant insights into leadership and I am just going to throw out one here.
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.
This is something that is really important and something that I think that we have lost all sense of in the West and why we struggle against insurgents who are inferior to us in every military aspect. We focus on the material first, technology has become our God, and it is our answer to everything. Next we do emphasize the intellectual but often what we emphasize is formulas, templates or the learning of abstract principles that that are hard to apply in the real world. We often study things that don’t necessarily apply to the war that we are currently engaged and try to make the reality fit our templates rather than taking the time to really learn. With all our technology we have also lost much of the sense of personal leadership where leaders actually know their soldiers.
Slim understood these principles and they were not abstract, they were real because he took the time to know his soldiers and they knew that in spite of the incredible hardships of the war in Burma that Slim understood them and would not sacrifice them needlessly. He trained his men hard in the tactics that would be needed to drive the Japanese from Burma and his leadership would pay off. His ability to hold leaders accountable for the welfare of their soldiers and his ability to relate to all kinds of soldiers made him one of the most unique and successful commanders of the war. After the war he retired but was called out of retirement to replace Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery as the Chief of the Imperial General Staff indeed a rare feat for a man who began his career as a clerk in a factory.
I am going to come back to Slim in later writings. This is just a taste of Slim’s thought and my interpretation of it.
Peace
Padre Steve+
The Inglorius Padre Steve's World 