Critical and Popular Reception
Defeat into Victory received positive reviews on its publications, being praised for its insight and the quality of writing. In a review in Military Affairs Frank Trager describes it as 'extraordinary' and making 'a most valuable contribution to our understanding' and thought it instructive in the light of contemporary American involvement in Vietnam. Louis Morton, writing in The Journal of Modern History considered it a work of 'wisdom, modesty, grace, and deep understanding', and 'an outstanding example of the best of British military memoirs'. In the New York Times, the writer John Masters called it 'a dramatic story with one principal character and several hundred subordinate characters,' and said that it showed that Field Marshal Slim was "an expert soldier and an expert writer." Defeat into Victory was also a considerable commercial success with the first edition of 20,000 selling out almost immediately, being quickly followed by a second run. The book has been reissued several times since.
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