Percy Hobart. He served for an additional four years at
the army headquarters in India before being sent to the
Staff College at Camberley, England, where he served
as the Indian army instructor from 1934 to 1936. He
was later sent to the Imperial Defence College in Lon-
don and promoted to lieutenant colonel. Although he
was now highly thought of and extremely well qualified,
there seemed little opportunity for advancement, and
Slim later wrote that it was at this time that he consid-
ered retirement from the military. However, he returned
to India, and after attending the Senior Officers School
in Belgaum, he was given command of the 2nd Bat-
talion, 7th Gurkha Rifles, in 1937. He then returned to
Belgaum as the commandant, serving until the start of
the Second World War.
When the war broke out in September 1939, Slim
was named as commander of the 10th Indian Infantry
Brigade, which was stationed at Jhansi, India. His first
major assignment was to train the troops in this brigade
to invade Sudan and to assault the Italian forces holed
up in what is now Eritrea. In November 1940, after a
full year of training, Slim’s contingent was ordered to in-
vade and take the city of Gallabat. Although the troops
took the city with ease, they were not prepared for the
bombardment from the Italian air force, which inflicted
heavy casualties. Slim ultimately decided to abandon the
hard-won target; he later wrote of the decision, “When
two courses of action were open to me, I had not chosen,
as a good commander should, the bolder. I had taken
counsel of my fears.” Nonetheless, in 1941 he was pro-
moted to major general and given command of the 10th
Indian Division. His division was sent to Syria and Iraq,
where Slim helped to put down an insurrection by Iraqis
in Baghdad and then participated in the British invasion
of Syria.
The Japanese invasion of Burma on 16 January
1942 changed Slim from the commander of a division
to the leader of the British fight against the Japanese at-
tack in Southeast Asia. The British War Office selected
him to be commander of the Burma Corps, the British
military force formed to fight the Japanese. This force
consisted of the 1st Burma Division and the 17th In-
dian Division. Slim’s first objective was to secure Ran-
goon, the main access for supplies being sent to China
to fight the Japanese there. However, by the time he
reached Burma, Rangoon had fallen to the Japanese,
and he was forced to oversee the retreat and withdrawal
of British forces into India. In June 1942, based on his
skill in conducting this move, Slim was named as com-
mander of the newly formed XV Corps, whose first goal
was to secure the area of Burma known as the Arakan,
near the Bay of Bengal. The campaign to take this small
coastal area became mired down in March 1943, and
he was forced to a stalemate. In February 1944, he tried
once again, beginning with a two-front offensive: one to
take Arakan, the second to halt any Japanese invasion of
India. By June 1944, the India operation had succeeded,
and this part of the Fourteenth Army, to which Slim had
been named as commander in October 1943, moved on
to Burma and retook it in a long, bitter struggle known
as Operation Capital. The Japanese, under Lieutenant
General Mutagachi Renya, suffered some 55,000 casual-
ties out of an army of 80,000. Slim wrote about this vic-
tory in his diaries: “Some of what we owed we had paid
back.... Now we were going on to pay back the rest
with interest.” He was knighted by the viceroy of India
in December 1944.
On 10 August 1945, near the end of the war, Slim
was named as commander in chief of the Allied land
forces, Southeast Asia (ALFSEA), succeeding Sir Oliver
Leese. He stayed in this post for a year following the
end of the war, and in 1946 he returned to England,
where he served as commandant of the Imperial Defence
College for two years. He retired from active duty in
late 1947 but returned to service in November 1948
when Prime Minister Clement Atlee promoted him to
field marshal and selected him to succeed Bernard Law
montgomery as chief of the Imperial General Staff, a
post Slim held until 1952. He was then asked to take the
position of governor-general of Australia, and he served
in that post for eight years. During this period, he wrote
two volumes of war memoirs, Defeat into Victory (1956)
and Unofficial History (1959), the latter work a collec-
tion of papers on military science. In 1960, he was raised
to the peerage as Viscount Slim.
William Slim died in London on 14 December
1970 at the age of 79. Given an official funeral at St.
George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, he was cremated, and
his son John succeeded him as viscount. The author
George Macdonald Fraser writes: “Slim was... the only
man I’ve ever seen who had a force that came out of him.
British soldiers don’t love their commanders. [The] Four-
teenth Army trusted Slim and thought of him as one of
themselves, and perhaps his real secret was that the feel-
ing was mutual.” Slim biographer Harold E. Raugh, Jr.,
reinforces this positive view: “One of the most charis- Slim, williAm JoSeph, viScount Slim