Getting Things Done The Slim Way

“His encounter with the Japanese in Burma, recounted in Defeat into Victory, was no such lark. Fought with little air support in jungles with few roads, it remains one of the brightest Allied chapters in World War II history. In 1942, after service in the Middle East, Slim was ordered to the command of the First Burma Corps in Prome. Neither he nor his army stayed there long.

Armed with World War I weapons and saddled with trench-war concepts of strategy, the corps proved no match for the Japanese, who steadily and easily pushed the British back to the Indian border. By the spring of 1942, Slim admits, "we, the Allies, had been outmanoeuvred, outfought, and outgeneralled." Slim, as commander of the XV Corps and then of the Fourteenth Army, planned carefully for revenge.

He gradually built up the shattered confidence of his troops—who regarded the Japanese as invincible in jungle fighting—by refusing at first to engage in battle unless he had an overwhelming superiority in numbers, and could make sure of victory. Since the Burmese theater stood low on the priority list for supplies and troop replacements, Slim turned poverty to good advantage.

His support forces learned to improvise, devising jute parachutes for supply drops when silk ones were unavailable, arming yachts and tugboats with Bren guns to replace unavailable gunboats. His armies discovered that full field equipment hindered mobility, and often went to battle as lightly armed as guerrillas.” - Time Magazine, Aug. 24, 1962

Getting Things Done The Zhukov Way

"In 1939 he commanded the Red Banner army in Outer Mongolia, where the Russians were engaged in a frontier struggle with the Japanese. Zhukov applied classic cavalry tactics to armored warfare: he massed his tanks, smashed a hole through the center of the Japanese Sixth Army, and bloodily crushed its flanks between his fanning-out Panzers and advancing infantry. This little-known action helped deter the Japanese from attacking the Soviet rear in 1941, leaving Stalin free to bring his Siberian troops westward to the defense of Moscow'.

Zhukov was the man in charge of Moscow's defense. He administered the first major defeat the Wehrmacht suffered. Assigned to Stalingrad, he transformed a threatened Russian disaster into a German catastrophe. Then it was Leningrad's turn, and again Zhukov—ruthless and imperturbable, yet strangely capable of inspiring his peasant soldiers—broke a German siege. From defense he turned to offense, flaming westward across the Ukraine in 1943, into Poland in 1944." - Time Magazine - Feb. 21, 1955

Getting Things Done The Zhukov Way

"When Zhukov broke through the Bug line a month ago, the whole German line began to fall back. Zhukov knew he could not encircle a force retreating twelve to 18 miles a day, decided to outrace it.

The German units changed their route again & again, wasted men and precious time. Zhukov began to push them off the roads, compel them to accept battle in swamps. The orderly retreat had been turned into flight. Heavy equipment was left behind. Supply trains clogged up the roads. He seized its roads, rail centers, by quick penetrations, straddled the few good retreat routes across a muddy, wooded flatland.

Said Moscow: in four weeks of March, Zhukov's army alone killed 183,000 men, captured 25,000, seized or destroyed 2,100 tanks, 4,600 guns, 54,000 trucks. Last week, at two railway junctions, Red units captured 1,600 railroad cars loaded with food, ammunition, loot, wounded Germans." - Time Magazine, April 17, 1944

Posted by Suvorov