Raymond Callahan

Generals Auchinleck, Slim and Savory and their role in the campaigns in Northeast India and Burma (Myanmar) have been largely forgotten in the historiography of the Second World War. Prime Minister Winston Churchill sacked General Claude Auchinleck as Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) in the Mediterranean and Middle East theatre after the First Battle of Alamein. However, Auchinleck became C-in-C India for the remainder of the Second World War. In this role, he was essential in making sure the Indian Army was geared towards jungle warfare, but also improved the lot of both Indian officers and men not least by improving pay and conditions.General William Slim is perhaps better known as the successful commander of the 14th Army who also wrote one of the best books on the war: Defeat into Victory, an apt description of the campaign in Burma. He was a popular commander and referred to as General 'Bill' Slim by the British and Indian soldiers who served under him. Auchinleck and Slim both became Field Marshals after the war. Major General Reginald Savory played an essential role as the Director of Infantry from 1943 until the end of the war. He made sure that all infantry battalions and training establishments across India were trained for jungle warfare. His was a forgotten role that until now has not been documented. He retired as a Lieutenant General having been Adjutant General until the Independence of India and Pakistan in 1947.The appointments of Auchinleck, Slim and Savory in 1943 were an important factor in the eventual defeat of the Imperial Japanese Army in Burma. It helped that the key figures in Indian military affairs were, for the first time in the war, all drawn from the Indian Army and thus understood the traditions and ways of the Indian Army.

In 1945, the Indian British XIV Army inflicted on the Imperial Japanese Army in Burma the worst defeat in its history. That campaign, the most brilliant and original operational maneuver conducted by any British general in the twentieth century, largely forgotten until now, is a full and fresh account utilizing a full range of materials, from personal accounts to archival holdings-including the bits the official historians left out, such as the attempt by a jealous British Guards officer to have Slim sacked at the conclusion of the campaign.After the retreat from Burma in 1942, Lieutenant General Sir William Slim, commander of the British XIV Army, played a crucial role in the remarkable military renaissance that transformed the Indian Army and then, with that reborn army, won two defensive battles in 1944, and in the 1945 campaign shredded his Japanese opponents. Behind this dramatic story was another: the war marked the effective end of the Raj. This great transformation was, of course, brought about by many factors but not the least of them was the 'Indianization' of the Indian Army's officer corps under the pressure of war. As Slim's great victory signposted the change from the army Kipling knew to a modern army with a growing number of Indian officers, the praetorian guard of the Raj evaporated. 'Every Indian officer worth his salt is a nationalist,' the Indian Army's commander-in-chief, Claude Auchinleck, said as the XIV Army took Rangoon.The Burma campaign may not have contributed in a major fashion to the final defeat of Japan, but it was of first-rate importance in the transformation of South Asia, as well as underlining the continuing importance of inspired leadership in complex human endeavors.

In the spring of 1944, on the eastern front of India near the Burmese border, the seemingly unstoppable Imperial Japanese Army suffered the worst defeat in its history at the hands of Lieutenant General William Slim’s British XIV Army, most of whose units were drawn from the little-esteemed Indian Army. Triumph at Imphal-Kohima tells the largely unknown story of how an army that Winston Churchill had once dismissed as “a welter of lassitude and inefficiency” came to achieve such an unlikely, unprecedented, and critical victory for the Allied forces in World War II.

On the eve of World War II, the British army was more an international police force than a true combat-ready fighting machine. Raymond Callahan chronicles its trial-by-fire transformation in a new and unflinching look at Great Britain's top commanders in the field. Callahan reexamines the much-maligned performance of the British army in that war by reevaluating its commanders' victories and defeats, their leadership abilities and flaws, and their often rocky relationships with Prime Minister Winston Churchill, whose powerful presence looms over every page. Revisiting wartime theaters stretching from Southeast Asia across India through the Middle East, into North Africa, and across Europe, Callahan revises and expands our understanding of how British commanders - both the best and worst - led their troops and executed their strategies. Callahan explores the way Churchill, with his own ideas about the army's goals and concerned about the precariousness of his political fortunes, dealt with his generals, who often held views different from his own. He probes the relationship between Churchill's political goals and war aims, the army's capabilities, and its generals' battlefield performance, while assessing the roles of such leaders as Alan Brooke, Bernard Montgomery, Archibald Wavell, Claude Auchinleck, and Harold Alexander. He also reveals why William Slim should be regarded as the outstanding British commander of the war and Britain's best field commander since Wellington - and how other generals such as Neil Richie, Henry Wilson, and Oliver Leese exemplify the role of chance in history. Past criticism has tended to ignore both the obstacles confronting the army and its dramatic improvement by war's end. Callahan sets that record straight while offering insight into the evolution of the British wartime army within the contexts of coalition warfare, the constraints of a far-flung Empire, and Churchill's political concerns and desire to retain a British presence on the world stage. He considers problems posed by manpower, training, doctrine, equipment, and new military technologies and strategies as the army faced a multifront global war that pushed an already overextended fighting force nearly to the breaking point. ""Churchill and His Generals"" is the most comprehensive analysis of this wartime relationship, an account of institutional transformation under extreme stress that balances Churchill's own self-serving memoirs. It clearly demonstrates that what political leaders demand from their armies is less important than what those armies are designed to do - and that this oft-recurring disconnect lies at the root of much wartime civil-military tension.