The man who was to become Field Marshal Sir William Slim was not born for military grandeur or the acclaim of the battlefield. He found it, nevertheless, through the vicissitudes of two great wars. We know much about his triumph over the Japanese in India in 1944 and Burma in 1945, the two great triumphs that he so ably described in his book Defeat Into Victory, first published in 1956 and never out of print since. These victories were dramatic and placed him, in the words of Dr Duncan Anderson, the historian and head of war studies at Sandhurst, “in the same class as Guderian, Manstein and Patton as an offensive commander”.
Slim at Gallipoli
If he wasn’t born into uniform, what were the factors that allowed him to reach the highest rank – field marshal – and undertake the highest role – chief of the Imperial General Staff – in the British Army? The simple answer is that he liked soldiering and he was good at it. He was also a fast learner and was humble enough to know when he got things wrong.
He had always wanted to be a soldier, but it was the First World War that made it a reality. Slim had wrangled his way into the Birmingham University Officers’ Training Corps in 1912 (even though he was not at the university), and was able to be commissioned as a temporary second lieutenant in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment on 22 August 1914. It was with the 9th Warwicks that, on 8 August 1915, he was
