Bernard Law Montgomery was a name every schoolchild knew: victor of El Alamein, the decorated face of British military leadership, immortalized in books, films, and bronze statues. Once, he 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 ends of the earth, one commander stood above them all. His men did not fear him.
They loved him. They called him 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 almost forgot his name entirely.
What set him apart from every other general of his age can be seen in three of his greatest tactical moves during the Burma campaign. Two years earlier, in 1942, Slim had led a shattered army in a fighting withdrawal of 900 miles out of Burma, the longest retreat in British military history. He never forgot the lessons of that defeat. He rebuilt his broken men, restored their pride, and taught them a new way to fight.
By the winter of 1943, that army was advancing back through the coastal jungles of Arakan in western Burma. The Japanese were waiting. In February 1944, they struck with an operation they called Ha-Go. For two years, the Japanese had won nearly every jungle battle the same way: infiltration through the trees, envelopment of the enemy, cutting their supply lines, then waiting for the trapped British to lose their nerve, collapse, and run.
The plan had never failed. Lieutenant General Tadashi Hanaya expected the same result again. But Slim had studied this trap for two long years and had prepared the answer. His standing order turned Japanese combat doctrine upside down.
Surrounded units were forbidden to retreat. Instead, they formed a defensive box, a hedgehog bristling with guns in every direction, holding their ground and supplied entirely from the air. They were to let the enemy envelop 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, no more than 1,200 yards across. Inside were squeezed 7,000 men: cooks, clerks, drivers, and gunners. History would remember the position as the Admin Box.
The fighting was face-to-face and merciless. On the first night, the Japanese captured the main field hospital and butchered the wounded where they lay. Thirty-one helpless patients and four doctors were bayoneted on their stretchers. When the West Yorkshires fought their way back into the position, they found only a handful of survivors.
But the atrocity did not break the defenders. 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 could actually be stopped. Twice the enemy set fire to the ammunition dumps. Twice the fires were extinguished. The Japanese found no answer to the Lee tanks that prowled the perimeter.
As the days passed, it was they, not the British, who began to starve. They had gambled 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 broke the siege. One Japanese regiment entered the battle with more than 2,000 men and came out with no more than 400.
In 18 days of fighting, the Japanese lost more than 5,000 soldiers, nearly 300 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, held it, and smashed it to 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 a 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. He now knew the method worked.
He had found the only weapon capable of defeating the Japanese army: hunger. And he had found it almost by accident in a single rice field. The question was what he would do with that weapon when he wielded it deliberately. The Box had been forced on him.
Next time, he 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, known as Operation U-Go, was staggering in ambition.
Three divisions were to cross the rugged border mountains, seize the bases at Imphal and Kohima, and burst into the plains of India. But Mutaguchi carried almost no supplies. He staked everything on speed, certain he could capture the vast British depots before the monsoon began and drowned the jungle roads. The Japanese even had a name for the enemy rations they intended to live on.
They called them Churchill supplies. Mutaguchi was so confident British logistics would collapse that he bet three entire divisions on it. Slim saw the gamble for what it was and set out to frustrate it. In the Admin Box, survival had been forced on him.
Here, 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 to breaking, he did something that looked to many like retreat. He deliberately pulled his advanced divisions, the 17th and 20th Indian Divisions, back from the mountains onto the Imphal plain. There, on ground of his choosing, his supplies arrived over good roads and by air, while every mile the Japanese advanced stretched their own lines through the valleys.
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 logistical masterstroke. When the road to Kohima was cut and his reserves were stretched thin, Slim and his superior, Louis Mountbatten, pulled transport aircraft off the great supply route over the Himalayas and flew an entire division, the 5th Indian Division, directly from Arakan to the battlefield.
Men who had been fighting in a coastal jungle in the morning found themselves in the heart of the battle at Imphal three days later. An entire division moved by air. The fiercest fighting of all took place at the small hill station of Kohima. There, 15,000 Japanese soldiers of the 31st Division attacked a garrison of barely 1,500 men.
The two sides fought across the tennis court of the deputy commissioner’s house, 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 blunt truth. He said it was likely that every one of them would lose his life in the operation. They had to be prepared to die of starvation 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 gateway 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 rations that never arrived. Sato, his best subordinate, openly mutinied against his orders, cut communications, and led his wasted division in retreat rather than see it die in vain. Mutaguchi, driven mad by failure, ordered his men to fight with their bare hands, and even with their ghosts if their bodies failed them.
The path of that retreat became known as the Road of Bones, littered with the corpses of men who had starved to death. The numbers were staggering. Out of an army of 85,000, roughly 53,000 were killed or missing. For every British or Indian soldier who fell, three or four Japanese perished, and most of them never died in battle at all.
They starved. It was and remains the greatest defeat ever inflicted on the Japanese army, and Mutaguchi had marched into it exactly as Slim intended. In the Admin Box, the enemy had hemmed himself in around a single division by accident. Here, Slim had done the hemming himself, deliberately, on a scale a hundred times larger.
The desperate reaction in a single rice field had become the cold plan of an entire campaign. What had been survival had become annihilation. But defence was never Slim’s ambition. As the monsoon washed away the last remnants of Mutaguchi’s broken army, Slim turned to the offensive and to the boldest deception of his career, one that would take his army across one of the greatest rivers on earth.
By the first weeks of 1945, Slim’s Fourteenth Army was pushing the defeated Japanese toward central Burma and the great barrier of the Irrawaddy River. Before the crossing, a young corporal named George MacDonald Fraser stood in the ranks while Slim came to speak to his battalion beside a lake. Fraser never forgot it. Slim was a huge, simple man with a strong jaw and an unmilitary uniform, and he spoke not of glory but of the hard, ordinary business of killing the enemy in the open.
Yet, 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 encircle 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. Kimura 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 a single 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 on 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 300 miles through a hidden valley to the south under total wireless silence. Then came the detail that made the whole plan work. To hide 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 wireless traffic as before, so Japanese eavesdroppers heard IV Corps exactly where it had always been long after its troops had slipped south.
Kimura was guarding a ghost. The true objective was never 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 bound for the front passed. Here was Slim’s final touch.
He had won two previous battles by standing firm and letting the enemy starve himself against a wall. Now he would use the same weapon, the enemy’s need for food, but instead of waiting patiently for hunger to do its work, he would reach out and cut the artery with a single stroke. Once Meiktila fell, the lifeline of every Japanese army in Burma would be severed in a single day. Slim called it the vital blow.
On the night of February 13, 1945, the 7th Indian Division began crossing the Irrawaddy at Mingyan, where the river was some 2,000 yards wide. Slim described it as the longest river crossing under enemy fire in any theatre 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 armour.
The 17th Indian Division with its Sherman tanks broke out of the bridgehead and drove hard for Meiktila. When news finally reached a Japanese staff officer that the British were already 90 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, and 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 flung division after division at the town to retake it. But Slim’s commander there did not dig in and wait out 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. It too was destroyed. The counterattacks broke against the armour, and Japan’s best 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 bombs and heavy artillery could not breach them. Eventually, 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 13,000 men, nearly three dead for every one of Slim’s soldiers, but the real loss was Japanese Burma itself. With supplies cut off, Kimura’s armies disintegrated, and the road to Rangoon lay wide open. Within a few weeks, Slim had crossed a mile-wide river, deceived an entire army with a ghost, and destroyed the Japanese force in Burma for good. Three battles, and in each one the same single weapon, the enemy’s own hunger, used in three different ways.
In the Admin Box, he turned the enemy’s encirclement into its own 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. The historian Frank McLynn would later rank Slim’s siege on the Irrawaddy among the greatest military achievements in history, alongside Hannibal at Cannae and Napoleon at Austerlitz.
He fought with fewer men, worse supplies, and on harsher terrain than any other British commander of the war, and yet achieved the greatest land victory of them all. Montgomery captured the headlines, but Louis Mountbatten, who watched both men closely, called William Slim the finest general the Second World War produced. Perhaps Uncle Bill’s only real fault was a modesty too deep to let him say so himself.