It has become fashionable inside the business community to laud the efforts of certain military leaders and their emulation as a route towards supposed success. And so we have biographies on Patton and Schwartzkof purporting certain lessons that "business people" can learn from the greats --- though in the case above, the one a prima donna, and the latter achieving the military equivalant of a heavywieght prizefighter beating up a toddler, one wonders what we are learning.
Slim will probably never figure in a business seminar, but he certainly should. He was a person schooled in utter defeat and the lessons it teaches people. These lessons expressed in Slim's downhome, honest self-effacing style are really things that one can imbibe -- and learn a great chunk of military history to boot.
Slim was wary of theory over experience. Even in defeat he tried things first to see if they would work after making plans to implement then. During his retreat from Burma in 1942, he ran a test convoy up the roads with exactly the same wieght vehicles as he would withdraw in the future. This allowed him to see what would happen when he eventually had to retreat down the same road -- the importance of the dry run.
For Wingate fans you will find no blind adulation. Slim rightly recognised from a aerial perpective the waste of inserting men 100s of mile behind Japanese lines, rightfully insisting that they be better used and less expensively equipped as a regular fighting division. In the end he was proved right. A lesson in efficiency planning --- getting the best bang for you buck.
Slim kept a lean chain of command and did away with several levels inside his Army HQ, he refused to have a Chief-of-Staff as had recently been adopted by the British from the Americans. He was able to also cobble together chains of command that may have looked wierd on paper, but worked. His relationship with "Vinegar Joe" Stillwell the ascerbic American General who hated "limeys." Makes great reading. Slim alone in the entire British Command could handle him.
Personal courage was also not found wanting. He was frequently near the front and made it his duty to make sure that he had strong intelligence of the Japanese and a personal respect for them as fighting "insects." Noticably disturbed by Japanese attrocities against prisoners and wounded, he continually uses words of respect when describing Japanese resistance which was fantatical, yet "magnificent." Others, such a Wingate would learn this later in hard lessons.
Besides the fighting, Stillwell had to supply an Army spread over 800 miles of Jungle at the end of supply lines thousands of miles long, with virtually no roads, in some cases only jungle tracks operating as the lines of communication. He did this a large part with American help and British self-sufficiency. But is was Slim's decisions that allowed those best suited for the positions to get on with the business of supply. And where he could not purchase such equipment, they improvised, such as in rivercraft and jute parachutes.
Most importantly he recognised that one can never insist on 100% perfection in battle (nor business),both are adaptive to the situation and one perpares as best as one can, but it is more important to plan for imperfection and dealing with situations, rather than to insist on everything going to plan. Slim knew that the Japanese in Arakan and Imphal would cut off the forward British/Indian Army elements. He made no plan to hold at all places. He realised however that if British troops could pull into tough defensive positions supplied by air that mobile forces striking from the rear would eventually exhaust the Japanese offensive as they outstretched their lines of communication.
Slim has probably the ultimate recipe to maintain espirit de corps: it is well laid out and easy to understand. He identifies it as a common goal that everyone can buy into. He states that the material needs of troops for good morale are "last, important, but clearly last." He realised that fancy weapons, or fantastic incentive programmes can only supplement morale, the cannot built it.
There is also the combat story between the covers and Slim's personal confrontation with his inner being, failure has a way of stripping away a man's defences and forcing him to look at what he really is... and Slim was obviously on the edge at least once. But then he pulls it together and soldiers on... one is enlightened by his honesty and the plain humanity of the man, a trait almost never found in the overt ego-feeding extravaganzas of business and military biographies stocking the shelves of bookstore "Business Sections".
A great biography that entertains with majesty and adventure and teaches us something about the rigours of command and how good leaders lead, without the theory, without the ego -- just Bill Slim, simple teacher from Northern England who found himself a soldier and, through Defeat turned his forgotten Army and forgotten campaign into the western allies greatest Victory....but if the US could come close to producing leaders half as great.
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Bartholomis Tirkey
Good book to buy if willing go for it you would not regret
Reviewed in India on August 16, 2022
Bartholomis Tirkey
Reviewed in India on August 16, 2022
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