The Very Model of a Modern Manoeuvrist General: William Slim and the Exercise of High Command in Burma

Abstract

In the bar of the old Army Staff College at Camberley the portraits of Britain’s two greatest army commanders of the Second World War once hung directly opposite each other: Montgomery in his black beret faced Slim in his bush hat. Neither commander would have considered the honour at all appropriate. Montgomery was British Army and Slim was Indian Army; Montgomery was the son of a bishop and Slim the son of a failed Birmingham ironmonger. Montgomery had gone to Sandhurst and Slim, in 1914 a clerk in a metal tubing factory had been commissioned only because of service in the Territorial Force. And, as Slim himself was only too aware, when in 1947 Montgomery relinquished the post of Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), he did all in his power to prevent Slim becoming his successor.