Massimo DiMambro @13thBlueKnight

Joined October 2012

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The penguins welcomed her as one of them

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Ask most people to name the best British general of World War Two and they will say Montgomery. Ask the historians who study it closely and a lot of them will quietly tell you the real answer is a man most people have never heard of. His name was William Slim, and his soldiers just called him Uncle Bill. Slim was not born into any of it. No fortune, no famous family, no smooth path through the elite schools that produced most British generals. He was a working class kid who had been a teacher and a clerk, and he only slipped into the army through a technicality before the First World War. He got shot up at Gallipoli, wounded again in the Middle East, and clawed his way up the ranks the hard way, on merit, one rung at a time. By 1942 he was handed one of the worst jobs in the entire war. The Japanese had smashed the British in Burma, and Slim was put in charge of the retreat. It became the longest fighting withdrawal in British military history, close to a thousand miles back to the border of India, through jungle and mountains, hounded the whole way. Most commanders are remembered for the battles they win. Slim first had to prove himself by saving a beaten army from being wiped out, and he brought it home still fighting. Then he did the thing that should make him a household name. He took that broken, sick, forgotten army, an incredible mix of British, Indian, African, and Gurkha soldiers, and he rebuilt it from the ground up. He got a grip on the malaria that was dropping more men than bullets. He fixed the food, the training, the supply, and above all the morale. He walked among the troops constantly, talked to them like human beings, and made them believe again. They started calling themselves the Forgotten Army, half proud and half bitter, because the war in Europe got all the headlines while they bled in the jungle. In 1944 the Japanese threw everything into a massive invasion of India, aimed at Imphal and Kohima. Slim let them come, stretched their supply lines to breaking, and then broke them. The fighting at Kohima was so brutal it has been called the Stalingrad of the East, with men grenading each other across a district commissioner's tennis court. When it was over, the Japanese had suffered the single greatest defeat their army had ever endured on land. Tens of thousands of them never went home. And Slim was not finished. In 1945 he pulled off a masterpiece of deception, faked out the Japanese about where he would cross the Irrawaddy river, seized the town of Meiktila and cut the enemy in half, then drove all the way to Rangoon and finished the reconquest of Burma. He had taken the most humiliating defeat in British Far Eastern history and turned it completely inside out. He literally titled his memoir Defeat into Victory, and it is still considered one of the finest books a soldier has ever written. What his men remembered was not the strategy. It was that he never lied to them, never wasted them, and never forgot they were people. In a war full of commanders who spent lives cheaply and hungered for glory, Uncle Bill did the opposite, and they loved him for it. He ended his life as a viscount and the Governor General of Australia, but the title that mattered was the one his soldiers gave him. Montgomery got the fame. Slim got the respect of the people who actually knew.