Slim Sahib

SLIM SAHIB

On the 13 March 1942 there was a General WJ Slim had flown in from India to take over historic and uniquely 6th Gurkha command of the Corps. The exceptional coincidence moment during the withdrawal from of his appointment was that his two principal division Burma. It happened at Prome, the commanders would therefore be – Bruce Scott and ancient Burmese city on the banks of the Irrawaddy. Punch Cowan. In Slim’s words: The military situation for the British was dire. Japanese forces had already taken Rangoon and “by a trick of fate (we) all came from the 1st their columns were now streaming towards the Battalion 6th Gurkhas. We had served together for eastern borders of Assam. Only the remnants of the twenty-odd years; we – and our wives – were the Burma Corps stood between them and their ultimate closest friends; our children had been brought up prize – India. Its two divisions were exhausted by a together in the happiest of regiments. long and demoralizing withdrawal in which they had been continuously beaten back by the Japanese. They I could not have found two men in whom I had were almost a defeated force, physically and in spirit. more confidence.” It was on the morning of the 13 March that Major

1st Battalion officers and wives Christmas Day 1923 Rear: Lt TN Smith, Lt WK Phillips, Capt WJ Slim MC, Lt IN Macleod, Capt HRK Gibbs Standing: Jem Janaksing Pun, Jem Maniraj Gurung, Jem Gul Hussain, Sub Indrabahadur Gurung, Sub Kharakbahadur Rana, Sub Nandasing Gurung, Jem Pirthabahadur Gurung, Sub Dhanbahadur Gurung. Sitting: Capt JB Scott, Mrs Hackett, Mrs Glynton, Lt Col GM Glynton DSO, Mrs Scott, Maj HMM Hackett

British academics have skated over these “twentyodd” years as if they were a blank chapter in the great man’s life. Their routine omission has ignored the importance of Slim’s Indian Army background and the fact that from 1920 up to the 6th Gurkha moment on the banks of the Irrawaddy he was Slim Sahib, not “Uncle Bill”, and that serving in India gave him an experience and friends that were hugely significant to his later success.

During 1919 Slim had been in limbo between two different career possibilities. Having ended his service in Mesopotamia with the 9th Battalion Royal Warwickshire Regiment, he had been evacuated to India for an extended recuperation. At 28 he had already absorbed a lifetime’s experience of mass warfare in an infantry battalion. Wounded twice and awarded the Military Cross during the advance towards Kut, he understood the strengths and frailties of the British soldier. Initially he wanted to transfer to the Indian Army for financial reasons, however by doing so he was also escaping from a peacetime British army that would go into recession both intellectually and materially. Whereas the Indian Army was in the ascent and recognised as much more than a colonial gendarmerie, especially after Gallipoli and Mesopotamia.

In May 1920 Slim was eventually posted to the 1st Battalion 6th Gurkha Rifles at Abbottabad. God was watching over him, for he could not have come to a better place. Laying aside the obvious prejudices of this writer, there were substantive reasons why any regiment at Abbottabad would have been a top choice. For successive years Slim’s reporting officers had remarked that a “spell of regimental work would do him more good than anything”. Slim had a developed knowledge of fighting in a rapidly conscripted battalion, now he needed to understand the working parts of a regular unit and become part of a professional body. Throughout the 1914-18 War his experience of an officer’s mess was eating from the back of a truck or the rat-infested transit camps in the Southern Counties. Express, Slim reached the 6th Gurkhas in May 1920. In a letter to Philip Pratt he wrote:

“I got here without incident and am leading a strenuous but unexciting life in command of a company They are topping little fellows and awfully keen. Of course I’m rather stuck on the language question and I seem to have forgotten most of the regimental soldiering I ever knew. Still it’s coming back slowly.”

At 4,000 feet in the foothills of the North West Frontier, Abbottabad was something different from Slim’s wartime experience. Quartered in peace-time comfort lived three of the most fabulous regiments of the Indian Army: the 5th Royal Gurkha Rifles (Frontier Force), the 6th Gurkha Rifles and the 13th Frontier Force Rifles, supported by the splendid batteries of the Indian Mountain Regiment. In Gibbo’s (aka Lieutenant Colonel HRK Gibbs 6 GR) estimate we had the best officers mess. It was a fine stone building known as the Dovecot with oak panelled ante rooms and a huge fireplace like a London club. The walls were hung with tiger and leopard skins and unique to the Dovecot, the dining room floor had been sprung for dancing. Living-in members hosted dances on an occasional basis to repay the married officers for their hospitality, and girlfriends from distant stations would stay over (but alas, not in the mess). 6 GR’s style was functional but elegant. There were rules – mess kit for dinner, unless you were going out afterwards in which case white tie was permitted, but definitely not in field order; if you had to eat in field order you would get supper on a tray in the card room.

Abbottabad was too far from the the metropolitan centres of the Raj and operationally too busy to become cliquish or pretentiously fashionable. Newly arrived officers were not excluded or degraded by initiation rituals. Mess members ate at the Dovecot but slept in bungalows which they sometimes shared with another officer. Slim shared with Bruce Scott. Each member would have to hire his furniture including thunder-box and bathtub from the regimental contractor, whose tailors would have

sown Slim’s summer mess kit and his 6 GR pattern khaki-drill tunics.

For a young officer in search of a “good spell of regimental soldiering”, Abbottabad was the right place. Twenty years previously it was where the 42nd Gurkha Rifles had become the 6th Gurkhas and therefore deeply embedded in 6 GR’s DNA. Long after it was abandoned in 1947, British and Gurkhas alike spoke of it with glowing affection. When Slim arrived both 1st and 2nd Battalions were quartered side by side and the mess was overflowing with war-time officers returning to India as well as new arrivals. Gibbos who had joined in 1917 remembers the heroes from Gallipoli: J G Bruce the mountaineer from 5 RGR, who commanded the 1st Battalion during the Helles campaign; Cecil Allanson of Sari Bair fame, now commanding the Second Battalion, Phipson the RMO who had manned the rear link phones and Gambirsing Pun, the Gurkha Major who famously organised the withdrawal from Sari Bair and was awarded an MC to add to his IOM. There were also several DSOs: Cornish, Ryan, Abbott, Hackett and many other decorated officers who had played a significant part in the war. It was an extraordinary period, especially with the hindsight that some of the young men now arriving in that same mess would become gigantic figures in the coming struggle in Burma.

Life in Abbottabad in the 1920s however was not all polo and dancing. In stark contrast to British regiments in the UK, the Indian Army needed to be in top form at all times. Emergencies were frequent and troops could be rushed from IS duties on the Indian plains to picketing up on the Frontier. On the border out of reach of the heliograph, field commanders got used to acting on their own initiative and taking a chance on the bolder option. Newly-arrived British regiments used to the steady regime of a UK garrison were sometimes shocked by the change of style and tempo.

When Slim joined 1/6 GR he was not a sano Sahib, he had survived mass warfare in two different theatres, he had experienced mutiny in his platoon, he had learned materially what kept them going, spiritually what motivated them, what they distrusted and, most important, how to inspire them. But above all, he now knew that at the critical point when they stood to face the enemy – success hung on their individual resolve to fight.

In many ways the North West Frontier was the antithesis of his previous war; he was now pitched into a new environment, a multi-ethnic garrison, a wild landscape and a fiercely independent people. For more than a hundred years regiments and individuals that succeeded on the frontier became brand names and the ones that failed – perished or sank disgracefully out of sight. This bare and magnificent territory was all things to the army. Professionally it demanded that everyman had to be superbly fit, junior commanders had to be tactically remarkable and C.O.s to have the subterfuge and grit to get their men onto an objective and back again without being surprised by an ever-vigilant adversary. And on the hill tops when the red flag went up to abandon the picket, God help the man who fell as they ran helter-skelter down the scree into the cover below.

Politically the border was a minefield of shifting tribal loyalties. The land was defined by its clans; Masters describes them as men with eagle faces who approached in slow motion with long slow lifting strides, and as they passed stared arrogantly from pale green kohl-rimmed eyes. Across the hills every stitch of land was tribally owned and without the chief’s permission a battalion moving through their area would be resisted by snipers from distant hills, and worst of all an isolated picket could be rushed by tribesmen rising suddenly from a nearby fold in the ground. This is how Kipling’s character Kamal warned the subaltern of the Guides who has just crossed his territory:

“T’was only by favour of mine,” quoth he, “ye rode so long alive: There was not a rock for twenty mile, there was not a clump of tree, But covered a man of my own men with his rifle cocked on his knee.

In 1920 6 GR was operationally busy. Captain Slim was immediately appointed to command A Company and very soon the 1st Battalion moved out to Darsamand, a fortified camp in Waziristan. Slim’s rather diffident letter to Pratt plays down the physical intensity of his experiences:

“I’m off back to jolly old Darsamand in about ten days. Can’t say I want to go a bit – it will be getting hot and fly blown again soon. Besides the war is still going on. Our friends the Wazirs have taken advantage of the reduction of the Darsamand force to two battalions to get up-pish. They scuppered the escort to the surveying party that is drawing maps of the de-lightful district last week. Only one wounded man got away-the bodies of the rest were recovered that night having been subjected to what we call “the usual Eastern indignities’: Luckily our battalion was not on escort duty when it happened or we should have been for it. The blighters tried a raid on us just afterwards but beyond the loss of one great coat, a pair of boots and the sides of our new tennis court the affair was merely a huroosh and some shooting. I hope they’ll calm before I go back… For the first time in my life I managed to hit something with a revolver.”

Restoring the Viceroy’s writ was complicated and at times a life-threatening activity. A Company was attached to a local force, the Kurram Militia, and immediately Captain Slim needed three languages (Nepali, Urdu and Pushtu) which he did not have, and for the moment got by with survival Urdu (“fire support? – ham top-khana ko bhandabast hai!”). Each day rifle companies took turns to secure the supply routes into Darsamand and beyond to units in the field. A punitive raid on Char Khan village tested the Battalion’s tactical skills with a night march through un-secured tribal territory. The Wazirs were duly surprised for a short time and the objective, a fortified tower, was blown by the engineers. Then as the Wazirs organised a counterattack in strength, the rifle companies beat a swift retreat, leap frogging past each other as they picketed back to a distant base camp. After a year Captain Slim became adjutant or battle adjutant when the battalion deployed in the field. In his short story Student’s Interlude the fictitious raid on “Panch Pir” is a distillation of his experiences observed from the battle adjutant’s saddle. For the Abbottabad Garrison this was the routine, sometimes marching out as a battalion to Malakand in the north, sometimes south to the bases in Waziristan. Fortunately, the border was visually stunning with swift rivers, dark and dangerous passes and at the Durand line dominated by huge mountains – Sikaram (15,000 ft) and Tirich Mir (25,000ft) in North Chitral.

“As I expect you know I am perched up on a hill just 10,000 feet high, which I suppose sounds a lot but isn’t really. The last of the snow is disappearing and we can no longer rely on melted snow for water but have to trek down into a nullah about 700 feet down to a spring. Its rather a good spot really because the only communication with headquarters is by helio, and up to now six days out of seven we haven’t been able to see Abbottabad. It’s about twenty miles away. The great thing about coming to a place like this is that one gets away from the blasted office for a bit.”

In the 1920s a company commander in the Gurkhas was very visible. To do the job well he had to stand up before his men regularly and speak convincingly in Nepali and Urdu. When the battalions marched to the frontier from Abbottabad, laughter and repartee were useful instruments to stiffen the collective resolve. And because this all took place before the eyes of the battalion, to be good – a British officer had to be fluent and metaphorically speaking had to understand which buttons to press when they were on parade so often. The 20th century British soldiers that Slim had commanded during the previous war were different; they were urban dwellers from an industrial society, whereas the Indian Army was recruited from remote rural areas. The Indian jawan responded to a different humour and there was a different officer-soldier relationship, their regiments were family affairs and the officers exercised a parental authority.

Subadar (out of uniform) of the Kurram Militia, 1908 (c). Watercolour by Major Alfred Crowdy Lovett ©National Army Museum

with a Gurkha officer to welcome a newly arrived British battalion, which was making heavy weather of setting up camp next to 1/6 GR. After watching them for a while the Gurkha remarked “Sahib, these are fine fighting soldiers but given a (live) sheep and a maund of wood they would die of starvation.” The significance of Slim’s Indian Army experience was that it equipped him to inspire soldiers from very different backgrounds, who responded to very different references. As a schoolteacher in a Birmingham steel community and as a young officer in the Warwicks, Slim knew how to motivate the urban British soldier. As a Gurkha officer and a commander of Indian army forces in Sudan and Iraq he also knew how to stand up and command the attention of a large crowd of jawans.

Twenty years later as Army Commander, General Slim grappled with the huge task of rebuilding the confidence of a force which had been beaten by the Japanese – beaten, but not completely defeated. At soldier level he had to restore each man’s

Captain Slim as Adjutant with 6 GR Buglers, 1927

determination to stand and fight an advancing enemy. And by now he understood with absolute clarity what he needed – materially and spiritually to do this. More than that he had developed a communicating style which succeeded for the British soldiers and also for the jawans. As a confidence-restoring instrument it was very powerful in both cultures, prompting cheers of support from the assembled troops as testified by John Masters for the 4th Gurkhas and George Macdonald Fraser for the soldiers of the Border Regiment. Therefore, to the British he was Uncle Bill and to the Indian Army he was Slim Sahib, and he learned to be Slim Sahib – in the 1st Battalion 6th Gurkha Rifles.

John Mackinlay

Ranchi 18 Nov. 1942

My dear old Gibbos,

It was nice of you to write about the

C.B.E. The chaps who got it for me were Punch, Bruce, Jonah, Cameron and a few more – the old Abbottabad Bde being well to the fore. There was no doubt about it the old Gurkha showed up better than most. There were times when I didn’t feel too good in Burma but the old 6th Gurkha party always held me up and I was very, very sorry when it was broken up.