Slim, Master of War: Burma and the Birth of Modern Warfare

Contemporary Review, July, 2004

Slim, Master of War: Burma and the Birth of Modern Warfare. Robert Lyman. Constable. [pounds sterling]25.00. xvii 327 pages. ISBN 1-84119-811-0. Lord Mountbatten once wrote that William Slim, later Viscount Slim, was 'the finest general the Second World War produced'. In 1942, Slim was given the command of Burma Corps and later, the 14th Army and assumed the task of reversing the seemingly unstoppable Japanese army.

Within six months he had secured the first British victory and went on to destroy the enemy's forces in Burma. This book is a study of how he achieved his goal by a former officer whose own experiences, combined with wide-spread research, give him a masterful and solid understanding of his subject: 'Slim was' he writes, 'one of the pre-eminent soldiers of his generation'. His aim is to rehabilitate a man now edged aside by Montgomery and Mountbatten and to argue his subject's importance in the creation of modern military tactics. Slim used the 'indirect' approach to battle and laid the foundation for the modern idea of 'manoeuvre' warfare. He did this despite his enemy's numbers and a horrible terrain. Slim stood 'at the heart of modern military strategy' and 'should rightly be regarded as the greatest British general of the Second World War'.