Mountbatten Wanted to Sack the Man Who Built the Army That Won Burma

In May 1945, the British Army tried to fire the general who had just won them the greatest land victory of the entire war. Not for losing. For winning. William Slim had spent three years rebuilding a shattered army from the wreckage of the longest retreat in British military history. He had destroyed eighty-five thousand Japanese troops at Imphal and Kohima in the largest defeat in Japanese military history to that point. He had driven the Japanese out of Burma in what military historians now call the most brilliant land campaign by a British general in the twentieth century. And the moment Rangoon fell, the man sitting in a tropical garden fifteen hundred miles from the fighting decided he was no longer needed. Sources: William Slim — Defeat into Victory (Cassell, 1956) Ronald Lewin — Slim: The Standardbearer (Leo Cooper, 1976) Robert Lyman — Slim, Master of War (Constable, 2004) George MacDonald Fraser — Quartered Safe Out Here (Harvill Press, 1992) Philip Ziegler — Mountbatten: The Official Biography (Collins, 1985) #WorldWar2 #BritishArmy #WWII #MilitaryHistory #WW2History