William Joseph Slim, 1st Viscount Slim of Yarralumla

We are four episodes in.

We started with Herman Wouk's World War II novel, "The Caine Mutiny," and then we tackled "Defeat into Victory," Field Marshal William Slim's famous memoirs of his command in the Burma theater, also in World War II.

Next, we jumped into science fiction, reading Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War," and then we chose a novel by Leo Tolstoy, "Hadji Murat," set in the 19th century during Czarist Russia's counterinsurgency campaigns in the Caucasus.

Episodes release monthly on the first of every month.

It's not all making decisions about whether or not the cat can stay on the boat.

Or whether or not the soldiers that are making essentially homemade bootleg liquor can continue to do so, because the same dynamic plays out there, right? Mandella knows that this is against the regulations, but he ultimately decides, "Okay, I'm gonna allow this, but nobody's, nobody can be, you know, inebriated when they're on duty." He's finds himself between, you know, weighing between disciplinarian enforcement of regulations and, hey, what's actually good for morale.

That actually brought me back also to the last episode that we talked about, um, William Slim's, uh, "Defeat into Victory," where I think I made the comment that I've met a lot of people who believe that morale matters.

I don't think I've ever encountered somebody who believes it matters as much as William Slim did.

As you move up, your, you must broaden your perspective.

I recall that Sir William Slim, chief of the British Imperial General Staff, was the Kermit Roosevelt lecturer when I was at the Command and General Staff College in 1947.

He talked about the art of high command.

He had commanded the 14th Army in Burma, and he reduced his hour lecture to three points dealing with the art of high command.

There's been an awful lot of learning, tactical innovation.

We can't not mention General William Slim, and obviously Bill Slim is a name that I hope some of your listeners are familiar with and the work that he did along with Mountbatten to develop not just the tactics and the strategy in Burma, but also the morale so that these guys really thought, "We can win this," because previously they'd been told or rumors were around that the Japanese were these supermen, you know, these terrifying jungle fighters and they didn't have a hope in hell.

So we'd kind of been through all of this.

By '44 and by the time of the Third Arakan Campaign, the tide is really starting to turn.

Of course, my favorite British general is Slim, but I don't know that we're talking generalship.

I mean, we seem to be talking about like combat figures or something, but Bill Slim is just, he's just such a good quality commander.

He just understands people and what makes them tick.

He understands exactly the strategy, what's going to matter for his army, why you should do this or that.