Orde Wingate

Crazy Orde

DSO and two Bars

In my last Blog  about Colonel Jan Breytenbach, I mentioned that Major General Orde Wingate had  founded the “Chindits” (airborne deep-penetration troops trained to work behind enemy lines in the Far East campaigns against the Japanese during World War II.)  I  decided I would look into his life, and it would seem that he was involved in setting up at least two other irregular units. Orde Wingate or Crazy Orde as he was sometimes called was a Born Warrior, a Soldier in the Shadows, so I decided to do a little piece on him for the Blog……………………Enjoy.

Born in India 26 February 1903  in Naini Ta near Almora in Kumaon India to an Army Officer and a very religious mom “praise the lord and pass the ammunition”. Wingate spent most of his childhood in England where he received a very religious upbringing. It was not uncommon for him to be subjected to long days of reading and memorizing the  Old Testament and he was also subjected, by his father, to a harsh and Spartan regimen. He and his siblings were kept away from outside influences and until he was 12 years old he hardly mixed with other children.

In 1916, his family having moved to  Goldaming, Orde attended Charterhouse school as a day boy. Because he did not board at the school and took no part in sports, he became increasingly isolated, so that he missed out on many of the aspects of a public school education of the period. At home lazing about and idling were forbidden, and the children were always given challenging objectives to encourage independent thought, initiative and self-reliance.

After four years Wingate left Charterhouse and in 1921 he was accepted into the  Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, the Royal Artillery’s officers training school to become a artillery officer. Being neither an outgoing man or a good student, he barely managed to graduate from the academy as a junior officer.. In 1923 Orde received his gunnery officers commission in 1923 and was posted to the 5^th Medium Brigade  at larkhill on Salisbury Plain. It was here that he was able to exercise his passion and interest in both horse riding and fox hunting and due to his reputation for being able to find suitable crossings of rivers while hunting foxes he earned the nickname “Otter”

Due to his riding skills he was posted to the Military School of Equitation and excelled, much to the disappointment of the majority of Cavalry officers who found him insufferable as he frequently challenged the instructors, something they were not accustomed to.

Orde wanted to get posted overseas and he was persuaded by his cousin, Sir Reginald Wingate to study Arabic, the reason was that Sir Reginald was the Commander of all British forces in Anglo – Egyptian Sudan. Orde managed to swing a trandfer to the Sudan where he was given command of a company of Sudanese irregulars and his duties it would see was to arrest Ethiopian smugglers, slavers and poachers.

Orde was a serious individual and prone to bouts of depression, between these bouts he would go out into the  desert and learn to navigate the desolate landscape by using either a compass or the stars. He also learned how best to set up ambushes in the desert and this skill assisted him to capture many criminals. Once Orde took a leave of absence to investigate the lost army of Cambyses and  to try and find a lost Oasis of Zerzuza in the Libyan desert, the expedition was not successful but Orde Learned some harsh lessons about survival in an extremely hostile environment and used the expedition to test both his endurance as well as his organisational skills.

On his return to the UK in 1933, Wingate was posted to Bulford on Salisbury plain and was heavily involved in retraining, as British artillery units were being mechanised. On the sea journey home from Egypt he met Lorna Moncrieff Patterson, who was 16 years old and travelling with her mother. They were married two years later, on 24 January 1935.     

 

In 1936 he was assigned to the British Mandate of Palestine as a staff officer in the intelligence unit, Orde arrived as the Jewish state was being created as a separate state to Palestine, Orde saw this as a fullfilmrnt of a Christian prophecy and he immeadiatly put himself into a alliance with Jewish political leaders

Palestinian guerrillas had at the time of his arrival begun a campaign of attacks against both British mandate officials and Jewish communities, which were part of the Arab revolt of 1936 - 1939. Orde became politically involved with a number of Zionist leaders, and became an ardent Zionist, despite not being Jewish. He always returned to Kibbutz  En Harod — because he felt familiar with the biblical judge Gideon, who fought in this area, and used it himself as a military base.

He formulated the idea of raising small assault units of British-led Jewish commandos, armed with grenades and light infantry small arms, to combat the Arab revolt. Wingate took his idea personally to  Archibald Wavell, who was then the commander of British forces in Palestine. After Wavell gave his permission, Wingate convinced the Zionist Jewish Agency and the leadership of  Haganah, the Jewish armed group.

In June 1938 the new British commander, General Haining, gave his permission to create the  Special Night Squads, armed groups formed of British and Haganah volunteers. The Jewish Agency helped pay salaries and other costs of the Haganah personnel.

Wingate  not only  trained and  commanded the unit he also accompanied them on their patrols. The units frequently ambushed Arab saboteurs who attacked oil pipelines of the  Iraq petroleum company, raiding border villages the attackers had used as bases. In these raids Wingate's men sometimes imposed severe  collective punishments on the village inhabitants that were criticized by Zionist leaders as well as Wingate's British superiors.

Wingate disliked Arabs, once shouting at Hagana fighters after a June 1938 attack on a village on the border between Mandatory Palestine and Lebanon, "I think you are all totally ignorant in your Ramat Yochanan [the training base for the Hagana] since you do not even know the elementary use of bayonets when attacking dirty Arabs: how can you put your left foot in front?"  But the brutal tactics proved effective in quelling the uprising, and Wingate was awarded the DSO in 1938.

Orde’s deepening direct political involvement with the Zionist cause and an incident where he spoke publicly in favour of the formation of a Jewish state during his leave in Britain, caused his superiors in Palestine to remove him from command. He was so deeply associated with political causes in Palestine that his superiors considered him compromised as an intelligence officer in the country. He was promoting his own agenda rather than that of the army or the government. In May 1939, he was transferred back to Britain. Orde became a hero of the Yishuv (the Jewish Community), and was loved by leaders such as Zvi Brenner and Moshe Dayan who had trained under him, and who claimed that Wingate had "taught us everything we know."

It’s interesting to note that after the Second World War a number of men that Orde has trained and commanded in the Chindits would themselves be fighting against the Jewish men that had Orde had trained and fought with against the Palestinian guerrillas. They would form the Police Special squads and later they would conduct Pseupo - ops with the army against the Irgun, Lechi or Stern groups who were fighting against the British Mandate authority in Palestine      

On the outbreak of the Second World War Wingate was sent to Khartoum where he formed the Gideon Force  that included  kibbutz volunteers that he had trained in Palestine  and had been allowed to join him at his request (via General Archibald Wavell ). Orde organized raids against Italian units on the Abyssinian border. With only a few hundred men Wingate bluffed 12,000 Italians into surrender. Wingate then joined up with General William Platt and the Sudan Defence Force and on 4th May 1941 they entered Addis Ababa. Apparently Wingate had already predicted to one of his sisters that one day he would restore Haile Selassie to his Throne in Ethiopia. He also apparently told the same thing during their courtship to his future wife Lorna -- whom he married in 1936, the same year he was posted to Palestine.

By May 5th, 1941 after a series of engagements fought by mixed British, Palestinian, and native forces in Northern Ethiopia, Wingate mounted on a white charger was escorting Haile Selessie who, frazzled and weary, preferred riding in a Ford convertible into Addis Ababa six years after his discomfiture.

Now the events that led to Wingate's greatest fame and demise were about to unfold. First of all, it was in Ethiopia that Wingate had his first encounter with then Colonel, later Field Marshall, William Slim who had command of a small mechanized unit, which had suffered many reverses coming up from the South with a mixed group of Kenyans, British, and Indian Army units, which had also been badly mauled. Wingate's extraordinary success doubtlessly did not sit very well with these groups or these commanders. Once back in Cairo, Wingate's report of the Ethiopian Campaign (Wavell now having departed) was flatly rejected at GHQ and all those he recommended for DSO's denied. In turn, Wingate considered that his extraordinary success there entitled him, once more, to return to Palestine and raise an Army of Jewish Volunteers (this did eventually transpire, but much smaller and later than Wingate envisioned -- called, as everyone now knows, "the Jewish Brigade").

Then in despair, all his hopes having been dashed; on July 4th, 1941 Wingate did the unthinkable for a British Officer -- he tried to commit suicide, plunging a bayonet into his throat in his room at Shepheard's Hotel and only being saved from cutting both his carotid artery and jugular vein (he had stabbed himself from both sides -- he was later determined to have been suffering from severe cerebral malaria) by the involuntary tightening of his neck muscles. By September, he was on a Hospital ship on his way back to England which docked in his family's native Northern Scotland in mid-November.

After his recovery, Wingate was sent to Burma  in May 1942 where he formed 'Wingate's Raiders' - though they are better known as the Chindits, named after the Burmese word 'chinthe' meaning lions; after the lion statues that guarded the temples in Burma. Wingate arrived as a major but was quickly promoted to colonel.

The Chindits were to cause chaos to the Japanese behind their lines. They used classic hit-and-run tactics against the Japanese who up to 1942, had only really experienced military success. Now they had to fight an enemy they could not see. The Chindits were especially successful along the Irrawaddy River where they caused a great deal of damage to Japanese supply lines. The Chindits also sent information back to the Royal Air Force to assist their operations. This unit did a great deal to weaken the Japanese force that was in Burma and its work continued even after Orde Wingate was killed in a plane crash in April 1944.

In February 1943, Wingate and 3,000 Chindits entered Burma. Their task was to disrupt Japanese communications, attack outposts and destroy bridges. The operation was very costly and of the 2,000 who returned, 600 never recovered to be able to fight again. Wingate met Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt in August 1943 and explained his theory of Long Range Penetration. Churchill was impressed and agreed to expand the size of the Chindits and Wingate was promoted to major general and given six brigades (3rd Indian Division).

Roosevelt also decided to create a similar group led by the  American officer, Frank Merrill who where known as Merrill’s Marauders. Wingate returned to India in September 1943 and began to plan Operation Thursday. The plan was aimed at destroying Japanese communications from southern Burma to the those fighting General  Joseph Stilwell in the north and William Slim in Imphal and Kohima.

Operation Thursday was launched by Wingate in Burma on 5 March 1944. The Chindits established Broadway, a jungle clearing 200 miles behind Japanese lines. This included an airstrip that enabled supplies and reinforcements to be flown in and the wounded flown out. Over the next few months the Chindits destroyed Japanese roads, railways, bridges and convoys. Once again the Chindits suffered heavy losses. Orde Wingate was himself killed when his plane crashed into a hillside near Imphal during a storm on 14th March 1944

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The crash was so violent as to dig a pit eighteen feet into the ground. No identifications of the crew or passengers were possible and only the remains of Wingate's telltale sun helmet was found, which is why the whole crew with Wingate are buried in a mass grave at Arlington National Cemetery in the U.S.A.

Sources :

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk

Wikipedia:

Soldiers in the Shadows  - William Weir

Selous Scouts (the men speak)  - Jonathan Pittaway