Defeat into Victory

A memoir of the war in Burma and India by the XIVth Army’s commander, who led British and Indian forces from early defeats at Japanese hands through to the final victorious advances of 1945 and the re-conquest of Rangoon. Slim hoped, in part, to ‘give, to those who have not experienced it, some impression of what it feels like to shoulder a commander’s responsibilities in war’. His modest and deeply human memoirs succeed in this admirably, and it remains one of the best books about the challenges and pressures of command in modern war to emerge from the Second World War.