The Jungle, the Japanese and the British Commonwealth Armies at War 1941-1945: Fighting Methods, Doctrine and Training for Jungle Warfare (review)

Changing an army is difficult; doing so in wartime even harder. There have been few more dramatic examples of such a change than the remaking of Britain's Indian Army in 1943–44. A force comprehensively beaten in Malaya, driven out of Burma and then routed in its first offensive attempt (the 1942–43 Arakan campaign) became Bill Slim's great Fourteenth Army of 1944–45. Slim himself in his readable 1956 memoir history, Defeat into Victory, outlined how the army was rebuilt; the official historians filled in some more of the story. Now we finally have a full account and analysis. The 200,000-strong Indian Army of 1939 had expanded fivefold and was still growing in 1941. Massive dilution of its regular core and a sharp drop in quality were the inevitable results. There were shortages of everything—two armored divisions were being formed, even though there was not a single modern tank in the entire subcontinent. Organization, training, and equipment (what there was of it) were all designed solely with the Mediterranean and Middle East in mind. Then Japan attacked. Eighteen months of disaster—punctuated by Gandhi's August 1942 "Quit India" revolt—followed. It is, in retrospect, astonishing that the Indian Army did not disintegrate. Instead a renaissance began, at first slowly and haltingly, and then gathering strength in 1943 when Claude Auchinleck returned to the Indian Army's helm, Reginald Savory became its Director of Infantry, and Slim took over Fourteenth Army.

Moreman, whose research has clearly been painstaking, meticulously details the rebuilding effort. Training was massively overhauled to see that no troops ever again went into action ill-prepared. Doctrine was rapidly rewritten to focus on Burma, and a continuous feed-back loop connected those at the "sharp end" with the doctrine writers and trainers. Furthermore, doctrine was centralized in a way the War Office in London never managed to do for the British Army. While none of this is pulse-quickening stuff, it is the basic raw material of battlefield success. Moreman relates the accelerating improvement of the Indian Army to Slim's successes by including enough tactical and operational detail to illustrate how the unglamorous grind of preparation in India became the 1944–45 victories in Burma. Slim believed that well-trained, well-led infantry could rise to any challenge. Auchinleck, Savory, and hundreds of anonymous officers in training establishments across India provided the former; Slim the latter in abundance. There are other aspects to the Indian Army's remarkable turnaround—better welfare arrangements for the troops, a major medical victory over malaria, and the commissioning of Indian officers by the thousands. While these lie outside Moreman's study, his fine monograph can be read together with Daniel Marston's Phoenix from the Ashes: The Indian Army in the Burma Campaign (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004) to get, finally, a rounded picture of one of the most astonishing military transformations of the Second World War. Moreman has made a major contribution to the history of both the Indian Army and the war in Burma with this book.