Books: Uncle Bill at War

UNOFFICIAL HISTORY (242 pp.)—Field Marshal the Viscount Slim—David McKay ($4.95).

DEFEAT INTO VICTORY (468 pp.)—Field Marshal the Viscount Slim—David McKay ($6.50).

When it came to explaining what World War II was really like, the great battlefield commanders proved no match for novelists and "the day that" documentarians. Compared with the fugacious naturalism of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead or the precise tapestry of Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day, the historically important memoirs of Ike or Monty have all the vitality of quartermaster supply reports. One of the war's few Great Captains...