Every schoolchild knew the name Montgomery, the victor of El Alamein, the face of British military command honored in books, films, and bronze statues. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery once dismissed a rival as nothing more than a colonial general, a soldier unworthy of his attention. But among the men who fought the Second World War on its harshest fronts, in the forests and mountains at the far ends of the earth, one commander stood above them all. His soldiers did not fear him.
They loved him, and called him simply “Uncle Bill. ” Field Marshal William Slim took command of the longest retreat in British military history and turned it into the greatest land defeat the Japanese army ever suffered. Yet history nearly forgot his name entirely. What set him apart from the other generals of his era came down to three tactical strokes during the Burma campaign.
Two years earlier, in 1942, Slim had led a broken army in a fighting withdrawal of nine hundred miles out of Burma, the longest retreat in British military history. He never forgot the lessons of that defeat. He rebuilt his shattered men, restored their dignity, and taught them a new way to fight. By the winter of 1943, that army was advancing back through the coastal Arakan forests of western Burma.
The Japanese were waiting. In February 1944, they struck in an operation they called Ha-Go. For two years, the Japanese had won nearly every jungle battle the same way: infiltrate through the trees, encircle the enemy, cut his supply lines, then wait for the trapped British to lose their nerve, collapse, and flee. The plan had never failed.
Lieutenant General Tadashi Hanaya expected the same result again. But Slim had studied that trap for two long years and prepared the answer. His standing order inverted Japanese combat doctrine completely. Encircled units were forbidden to retreat.
Instead, they would form a defensive box, like a hedgehog bristling with guns in every direction, hold their positions, and be supplied entirely from the air. Let the enemy surround them. The men inside would not starve. They would be fed from the sky.
On February 6, the Japanese overran the headquarters of the 7th Indian Division and closed their rings around a patch of dry paddy fields at Sinzweya, barely twelve hundred yards across. Inside were squeezed seven thousand men: cooks, clerks, drivers, and gunners. History would remember the position as the Admin Box. The fighting was face to face and merciless.
On that first night, the Japanese seized the main aid station and killed the wounded where they lay. Thirty-one helpless patients and four doctors were bayoneted on their stretchers. When the West Yorkshire soldiers fought back into the position, they found only a handful of survivors. But the atrocity did not break the defenders’ resolve.
It hardened them. Every man in the Box knew exactly what surrender meant. If the Box collapsed, the entire Arakan front would collapse with it. A fragile new belief took root: the Japanese really could be stopped.
Twice the enemy set fire to the ammunition dumps. Twice the fires were put out. But the Japanese found no answer to the Lee tanks prowling the perimeter. As the days passed, it was they, not the British, who began to go hungry.
They had staked everything on seizing the supplies inside the Box, but the Box refused to give them up. On February 22, the 5th Indian Division fought its way through the Ngakyedauk Pass and shattered the siege. One Japanese regiment entered the battle more than two thousand strong and came out with no more than four hundred men. In eighteen days of fighting, the Japanese lost over five thousand soldiers, nearly three hundred killed and wounded for every day of the siege.
As Slim himself said, for the first time a British force had met a major Japanese attack, withstood it, and smashed it in decisive defeat. The legend of the invincible Japanese army, the legend that had haunted every British soldier since the fall of Singapore, died in the dust of the Admin Box. But the Box did more than break a legend. It proved one revolutionary truth: an encircled force that kept its nerve and received supplies by air could turn encirclement itself from a death sentence into a killing ground.
Slim had not chosen that battle. The Japanese had forced it on him, and he had simply refused to lose it. Now he knew the method worked. He had found the one weapon capable of defeating the Japanese army, hunger, and had stumbled on it almost by accident in a single rice field.
The question was what a commander could do with that weapon when he used it deliberately. The Box had been forced on him. Next time, Slim would choose it himself. In March 1944, the blow fell.
Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi believed his destiny was to decide the decisive battle of the war in Japan’s favor. His plan, code-named U-Go, was stunning in its ambition. Three divisions were to cross the rugged mountain frontier, seize the bases of Imphal and Kohima, and burst into the plains of India. But Mutaguchi carried almost no supplies.
He bet everything on speed, confident he could capture the vast British depots before the monsoon turned the jungle trails to mud. The Japanese even had a name for the enemy rations they intended to live on. They called them “Churchill supplies. ” Mutaguchi was so certain British logistics would collapse that he gambled three whole divisions on it.
Slim saw the gamble for what it was and decided to frustrate it. At the Admin Box, survival had been forced upon him. Now, for the first time, he would do the same thing deliberately, not to escape a siege but to build one. Instead of meeting the Japanese in the forward hills, where his own supply lines would be stretched thin, he did something that looked to many like a retreat.
He pulled his forward divisions, the 17th and 20th Indian Divisions, deliberately out of the mountains onto the Imphal plain. There, on ground of his choosing, his supplies arrived by good roads and by air, while every mile the Japanese advanced dragged their supply lines through the valleys behind them. He was not defending a line. He was setting a trap the size of a country and inviting an entire army to walk into it.
Then came the masterstroke of logistics. When the road to Kohima was cut and his reserves were drained, Slim and his superior Louis Mountbatten pulled transport aircraft off the great supply route over the Himalayas and lifted an entire division, the 5th Indian Division, directly from Arakan to the battlefield by air. Men fighting in a coastal jungle in the morning found themselves at the heart of the fight at Imphal three days later. The fiercest fighting of all took place at the small hill station of Kohima.
There, fifteen thousand Japanese soldiers of the 31st Division attacked a garrison of barely fifteen hundred men. The two sides fought across the tennis court of the deputy commissioner’s bungalow, so close they exchanged grenades over the width of the court. Their commander, Lieutenant General Kotoku Sato, had toasted his officers with champagne before the attack and told them the stark truth: most of them would likely lose their lives in the operation, and they must be prepared to starve in those mountain strongholds. If Kohima fell, the road would open to the vast supply base at Dimapur and the plains of Bengal beyond.
The gate to India would swing wide. But the garrison held. Reinforcements fought their way through, the siege was broken, and on June 22 the road between Imphal and Kohima was reopened. In the mountains, Mutaguchi’s grand design was collapsing.
His starving men could not be fed from captured food that never arrived. Sato, his best subordinate, mutinied against his orders outright, broke communications, and led his depleted division in retreat rather than watch it die pointlessly. Mutaguchi, driven to madness by failure, ordered his men to fight with their bare hands, and even with their ghosts if their bodies failed them. The retreat path became known as the Road of Bones, strewn with the corpses of men who starved.
The numbers were staggering. Out of an army of eighty-five thousand, roughly fifty-three thousand were killed or missing. For every British or Indian soldier who fell, three or four Japanese perished, and most never died in battle at all. They starved.
It was, and remains, the greatest defeat the Japanese army ever suffered in the field, and Mutaguchi had marched into it exactly as Slim had intended. At the Admin Box, the enemy had encircled a single division by accident. Here, Slim had done the encircling himself, deliberately, on a scale a hundred times larger. What had been a desperate reaction in one rice field became a coldly planned campaign.
Survival had become annihilation. But defense was never Slim’s ambition. As the monsoon washed the last remnants of Mutaguchi’s beaten army into the hills, Slim turned to the offensive and to the boldest deception of his career, one that would lead his army across one of the greatest rivers on earth. In the first weeks of 1945, Slim’s Fourteenth Army was pushing the defeated Japanese toward central Burma and the barrier of the great Irrawaddy River.
Before the crossing, a young corporal named George MacDonald Fraser stood in the ranks as Slim came to speak to his battalion beside a lake. Fraser never forgot it. Slim was a huge, plain man with a strong jaw and an unkempt uniform, and he did not speak of glory but of the hard, ordinary work of killing the enemy in the open. Even so, Fraser wrote, this was a man with the mind of a general and the heart of a simple soldier.
Slim’s original plan was to surround and destroy the Japanese in the open Shwebo plain north of the Irrawaddy. But the new Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Heitaro Kimura, was no fool. He pulled his entire army behind the river, a full mile of open water, and waited. He would let the British exhaust themselves in the crossing, then annihilate them at the water’s edge.
It was a cunning plan, built on one assumption: that Kimura knew where Slim’s army was. He did not. Within days, Slim redesigned his entire campaign. He kept his XXXIII Corps advancing noisily toward Mandalay in the north, drawing all Japanese attention to the obvious crossing points.
In complete secrecy, he detached an entire corps, his IV Corps, and sent it on a march of more than three hundred miles through a hidden valley to the south in total radio silence. Then came the detail that made the whole plan work. To conceal the disappearance of an entire corps, Slim left a ghost in its place. A dummy corps headquarters remained in the north, broadcasting the same volume of radio traffic as before, so Japanese eavesdroppers heard IV Corps in its usual position long after its soldiers had slipped south.
Kimura was guarding a ghost. The real objective was not Mandalay at all. It was a dusty road and rail town far to the south called Meiktila, the beating heart of the entire Japanese supply system, the hub through which nearly every ton of food and ammunition to the front passed. Here was the final touch of Slim’s art.
He had won two previous battles by staying still and letting the enemy starve himself against a wall. Now he would use the same weapon, the enemy’s need for food, and instead of waiting patiently for hunger to do its work, he would reach out and cut the artery in a single stroke. Once Meiktila fell, the lifeline of every Japanese army in Burma would be severed in a single day. Slim called it a vital blow.
On the night of February 13, 1945, the 7th Indian Division began crossing the Irrawaddy at Myingyan, where the river was nearly two thousand yards wide. Slim described it as the longest river crossing under enemy fire in any theater of the entire war. The point he chose lay exactly on the boundary between two Japanese armies, the weakest point in the whole line. Then Slim unleashed his armor.
The 17th Indian Division with its Sherman tanks broke out of the bridgehead and drove hard for Meiktila. When word finally reached a Japanese staff officer that the British were already ninety miles behind the front, he could only stammer in disbelief that there must be some mistake. There was no mistake. On March 1, the attack began.
By the evening of March 3, Meiktila had fallen. Now Kimura realized, too late, what had been done to him. The loss of Meiktila had cut the lifeline of his entire army in Burma. In his fury, he threw division after division at the town to retake it.
But the British commander there did not dig in and wait for a siege. He held the town flexibly and sent his tanks out in every direction, smashing the Japanese attacks to pieces. On one occasion, the enemy attacked using a captured British tank. That too was destroyed.
The counterattacks broke against the armor, and the best Japanese formations were drained to the last man. Meanwhile, to the north, the 19th Indian Division stormed the heights of Mandalay Hill and surrounded Fort Dufferin, the great fortified citadel in the heart of the city. Its walls were so massive that direct fire from bombs and heavy guns could not breach them. In the end, the Japanese garrison simply slipped away through the sewers under cover of night.
On March 20, Mandalay fell. In the Battle of Central Burma, the Japanese lost around thirteen thousand men, nearly three killed for every one of Slim’s soldiers. But the real loss was Japanese Burma itself. Cut off from supplies, Kimura’s armies disintegrated, and the road to Rangoon lay wide open.
Within a few weeks, Slim had crossed a river a mile wide, deceived an entire army with a ghost, and destroyed the Japanese force in Burma forever. Three battles, and in each, the same single weapon, the enemy’s own hunger, used in three different ways. At the Admin Box, he turned the enemy’s encirclement into his grave. At Imphal, he set a trap the size of a country and let an entire army march into it.
On the Irrawaddy, he reached deep behind the enemy front and cut the lifeline before the enemy realized the blade had fallen. Historian Frank McLynn would later rank Slim’s siege of the Irrawaddy among the greatest military achievements in history, alongside Hannibal at Cannae and Napoleon at Austerlitz. Slim fought with fewer men, worse supplies, and harsher terrain than any other British commander in the war, yet achieved the greatest land victory among them all. Montgomery captured the headlines.
But Louis Mountbatten, who observed both men closely, called William Slim the best general the Second World War produced. Perhaps the only real mistake Uncle Bill ever made was his very modesty, which kept him from saying so himself.