- Born
- Died
- Birth nameWilliam Joseph Slim
- William Slim was born near Bristol, England in 1891. In 1903, he and his family moved to Birmingham where he was educated in a Roman Catholic school. Silm's craving for a life in the army persisted in which he entered the Birmingham Unversity Officer Training Center in 1912. At the start of World War I, he was commissioned to the Royal Warwickshire Regiment which he saw action at Gallipoli where he was wounded in August 1915. After nearly a year in a army hospital, Slim also served in France and in Mesopotamia where he participated in the capture of Baghdad in 1917 where he won a Military Cross medal. In May 1919, Slim became a captain in the Indian Army and was posted to the 6th Gurkha Rifles. From 1926 onward, he held various staff appointments until he was given command of the 10th Indian Brigade at the start of World War II which he fought in the Sudan, and Italian-held Eritrea, and led the capture of Vichy French held Syria and Iran in 1941. In March 1942 Slim was given command of the 1st Burma Corps which he extricated from Burma in the face of the Japanese advance. In 1943, he fought major conflicts against the Japanese in India and the border region of Burma until he was appointed commander of the 14th Army in Burma where he won the Second Battle of Arakan (February 4-24, 1944) and the campaign of Kohima and Imphal (March 7-June 22, 1944). Revitalizing the British-Indian army he led it to the victorius Battle of Meiktila/Mandalay (January 14-March 28, 1945) which smashed the Japanese Area Army in Burma which led to the recapture of the Burmese capital of Rangoon in May and the reconquest of Burma until the formal Japanese surrender in September that same year. Slim's achievement in welding a smaller, defeated, demoralized army into a united confident fighting instrument was matched during World War II only by Montgomery with the 8th Army in North Africa. At the end of the war, Slim was appointed Chief of the Imperial General Staff and Governor-General of Australia in 1953. Slim retired from politics in 1960 and retired to his home in London where he died in 1970.
- IMDb mini biography by: pataygs@voicenet.com
- Despite their contrasting personalities, was very good friends with his American counterpart, the controversial General Joseph Stilwell.
- Apart from his native english, he was fluent in Hindi and Urdu, which he attributed was the decisive factor for maintaining cohesion in his 14th Army comprised mostly of Indian soldiers from diverse social and religious backgrounds.
- Was bought out of retirement in 1948, promoted to Field Marshall and appointed as Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery's successor as Chief Of Imperial General Staff, the first officer from the British Indian Army to hold the rank.
- His autobiography From Retreat Into Victory is still considered a much sought after field operations manual in military academies the world over.
- Widely considered by most neutral historians as the greatest combat commander from either sides of World War 2 for his feats as the commanding general of the British 14th Army in Burma which he reshaped from a retreated beaten formation into a formidable combat force and despite being supplied only from airborne drops throughout the Burma Campaign defeated the much accustomed to jungle warfare Japanese army, indirectly paving the path for the liberation of Southeast Asia.
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