The Swordbearers: Studies in Supreme Command in the First World War

BARNETT, Correlli

Published by Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1963

About this Item

386pp, [2]. With numerous photographic illustrations. Original publisher's black cloth, lettered in gilt. Without dustwrapper. Lightly rubbed. Later gilt supralibros of Windsor Grammar School to upper board. Internally clean and crisp. Armorial bookplate of Field Marshal Slim to FEP beneath the inked calligraphic inscription: 'FIELD-MARSHAL THE VISCOUNT SLIM, K.G. / WINDSOR GRAMMAR SCHOOL FOR BOYS / 22 APRIL 1964'. The first edition of military historian Correlli Barnett's (b. 1927) study of the British supreme commanders of the First World War. Field Marshal William 'Bill' Slim, first Viscount Slim (1891-1970), British Army officer. Slim joined the army at the outbreak of the First World War and fought in the Dardanelles, France, and Iraq. In 1920 he received a regular commission and joined the Indian army, in which he served throughout the interwar period. At the beginning of the Second World War, he participated in the British conquest of Italian East Africa (1940). In 1942 he was appointed to command the 1st Burma Corps, conducting the retreat from superior Japanese forces that had overrun Burma. In 1943 he was given command of the 14th Army, with which he stabilised the front of the first Arakan campaign (February 1944), arguably up to then the worst-managed British offensive operation of the war. In consequence Slim devised new tactics adapted to jungle warfare, using aerial resupply and guerrilla warfare to assist his efforts in pushing the Japanese out of Burma. Rangoon (Yangon) fell on May 3, 1945, and in June Slim was made supreme Allied commander of ground forces in Southeast Asia. Following the war, in 1946, Slim was appointed commandant of the Imperial Defence College, and in 1948 became chief of the Imperial General Staff with a promotion to field marshal. He served as governor-general of Australia from 1953 to 1960. His memoirs, a personal narrative of the Burma campaign entitled Defeat into Victory (London, 1956) are a classic of the genre and amongst the best thought of campaign histories of the Second World War. Size: 8vo.

Seller Inventory # AQ25840

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Swordbearers: Studies in Supreme Command in the First World War
• Publisher: Eyre & Spottiswoode, London
• Publication Date: 1963
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First edition.