Charles Orde Wingate
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Major General Charles Orde Wingate, (February 26 1903 – March 24 1944), was a British major general and creator of two special military units during the World War II.
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Beginnings
Charles Orde Wingate was born February 23 1903 in India to a military family. Because his mother came from a missionary family, he received a very religious education.
In 1921 Wingate was accepted into the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich and received his gunnery officer's commission in 1923. He also began to learn Arabic and eventually got himself an assignment to Sudan through a family friend, Sir Reginald Wingate, Governor General of Sudan.
When Wingate arrived in Sudan to join the Sudan Defence Forces in 1928, he was assigned to patrol the Abyssinian border where he was to catch slave traders and ivory poachers. He changed the method of regular patrolling to ambushes. At the end of his tour, he led a short expedition to search for Zerzura, but did not find it. His tour ended in 1933. In 1935 he married Lorna Moncrieff Paterson.
Palestine and the Special Night Squads
In 1936 Wingate was assigned to Palestine to a staff office position and became an intelligence officer. At the time, Arabic guerrillas had begun a campaign of attacks against both British mandate officials and Jewish settlers. Wingate got acquainted with and befriended a number of Zionist leaders. He formulated an idea of armed groups of mixed British-Jewish members and took his idea personally to Archibald Wavell, who was then a 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. Wingate trained and commanded them and accompanied them in their patrols. They ambushed Arab saboteurs who attacked oil pipelines of the Iraqi Petroleum Company and raided border villages the attackers had used as bases. However, when he spoke publicly in favour of formation of a Jewish state during his leave in Britain, his superiors in Palestine removed him from command. In May 1939, he was transferred back to Britain.
Abyssinia and the Gideon Force
At the outbreak of World War II, Wingate was the commander of an anti-aircraft unit. Wavell, now Commander-in-Chief of the Middle East Command which was based in Cairo, invited him to Sudan to begin operations against Italian occupation forces in Ethiopia. He created the Gideon Force, a guerrilla troop composed of British, Sudanese and Ethiopian soldiers. With the blessing of Haile Selassie, the group began to operate in February 1941. Wingate was temporarily promoted to lieutenant colonel and put in command. He again insisted on leading from the front and accompanied his troops. The Gideon Force, with the aid of local resistance fighters, harassed Italian forts and their supply lines. At the end of the fighting, Wingate and the men of the Gideon Force accompanied the emperor when he returned to Addis Ababa.
On June 4 1941 Wingate was removed from command of the now-dismantled Gideon Force and his rank was reduced to that of major. He left for Cairo the next day. He complained to Wavell, contracted malaria and attempted suicide by stabbing himself in the neck. He was sent to Britain to recuperate. An expurgated version of his report reached Winston Churchill, who contacted Wavell, now Commander-in-Chief in India commanding the South-East Asian Theatre. Wavell had Wingate transferred to India.
Burma and the Chindits
Wingate departed for the Far East on February 27 1942. He was promoted to colonel and set to organize a new guerrilla unit. Instead, he created a long-range penetration unit he eventually named Chindits. Again, he insisted on leading from the front.
Meanwhile, his somewhat direct manner of dealing with his immediate superiors and increasingly eccentric habits won him few friends among the officer corps; he would consume raw onions because he thought they were healthy and scrub himself with a rubber brush instead of bathing. On the other hand, he had support of luminaries like Winston Churchill and Lord Mountbatten.
Wingate set out with the Chindits on February 12 1943. After an arduous journey and numerous encounters with the Japanese forces, his troops struggled back in April. Although army response was mixed, publicity praised him and his men. Promoted to brigadier general, Wingate visited Britain and met Churchill who took him and his wife along to the Quebec Conference.
Back in India, Wingate was promoted to acting major general and he begun to plan the next mission. He had contracted typhoid and it hindered his training of the next batch of the Chindits and fighting against official inertia. On March 6 1943, new Chindits parachuted to resist a newly begun Japanese offensive.
On March 24, Wingate flew to assess the situations in three Chindit-held bases in Burma. On his way back to India, the US B-25 Mitchell plane he was flying in crashed and he died alongside nine others.
Eccentricities
A beloved commander, Wingate was nevertheless known for various eccentricities. For instance, he often wore an alarm clock around his wrist, which would go off at the appropriate times, and a raw onion on a string around his neck, which he would occasionally bite into as a snack. In Palestine, Jewish recruits were used to having him come out of the shower to give them orders, wearing nothing but a shower cap, and continuing to scrub himself with a shower brush. In most instances, this actually endeared him to his men.
Memorials
The remains of Orde Wingate are buried in the USA, in the Arlington National Cemetery alongside the American crewmembers of the plane he perished in. His tomb in Britain is just a memorial.
Family
Orde Wingate's son, also Orde Wingate, joined the Honourable Artillery Company and rose through the ranks to become the regiments CO and later Regimental Colonel.
External links
- Charles Orde Wingate 1903-1944 (http://members.aol.com/ordewingate/menu.html)
- The Chindits (http://www.chindits.info/index.html)
- Office of the US Surgeon General: Office of Medical History: Book 4, With Wingate's Chindits (http://history.amedd.army.mil/booksdocs/wwii/CrisisFleeting/bookfour.htm) index (http://history.amedd.army.mil/booksdocs/wwii/CrisisFleeting/frameindex.html)he:אורד וינגייט