Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present

by Max Boot

  Ivy’s daughter, Lorna, was instantly smitten. Orde was thirty-one years old and already engaged, but he, too, fell in love with this winsome schoolgirl. They married two years later shortly after her graduation from high school. His former fiancée was devastated but remained so devoted to Orde that she never married, because she felt no other man could match him. This was evidence of the strong devotion that Wingate could instill to counterbalance the antipathy he so often engendered.84

  IN 1936 CAPTAIN Wingate was dispatched to Palestine, then under British rule, to serve as an intelligence officer in the British force striving to put down an Arab rebellion. Notwithstanding his Arabist background, he became enamored of Zionism—so much so that even dedicated Zionists described him as a “fanatic.” Wingate admired the Jews for making the desert “blossom like the rose,” and he felt that they would be more valuable allies for Britain than the Arabs. This was not a view shared by the rest of the colonial administration, which, Wingate found, was “to a man, anti-Jew and pro-Arab.” “Everyone’s against the Jews,” he said, characteristically, “so I’m for them.”

  At the moment the Jews were facing what would be the biggest Palestinian uprising until the First Intifada in the 1980s. Like the Second Intifada, this revolt was marked by urban terrorism, with bombings and shootings targeting both British authorities and Jewish civilians. By rushing in twenty thousand troops and taking punitive measures such as blowing up suspects’ houses, the British managed to regain control of the cities. This forced the rebels to focus on attacks in the countryside against isolated Jewish settlements and police posts as well as against moderate Arabs.

  At first the Jews responded with havlaga (restraint), but as the violence continued they began fighting back. Wingate was at the forefront of the counterattack. He found that “on the approach of darkness, the virtual control of the country passes to the gangsters.” In 1938 he persuaded British and Zionist leaders to let him organize Special Night Squads to take back the night. They would be made up of British soldiers and Jewish “supernumeraries” who would venture stealthily out of fortified kibbutzim to “bodily assault” Palestinian gangs “with bayonet and bomb” and “thereby put an end to the terrorism.”

  Eventually the Night Squads numbered forty Britons and a hundred Jews who usually operated in squads of ten men. Their practice was to march at night and attack at dawn. Wearing khaki shorts and rubber-soled boots, veterans recalled, they would spend long hours walking single file over “dry, very stony ground, which was generally hilly, often steeply so,” deliberately avoiding “the beaten path” and taking “a zig-zag or snakelike course.” “Complete silence is the rule in all cases,” Wingate instructed. “Members of Squads should try to cut down their smoking with subsequent coughing.” Their goal was to obtain “complete surprise,” and they often succeeded. Their unexpected appearance induced “panic” among the Palestinian rebels whom Wingate dismissed as “feeble,” “ignorant and primitive.”

  In these raids Wingate displayed a flair for navigation in the dark, an “iron constitution,” and an utter disregard for danger. During one battle he was shot five times in a “friendly fire” accident but, although “white as a sheet” and “covered in blood,” he continued “giving orders in English and Hebrew quite calmly.”

  He instructed the Night Squads to treat Arab civilians, “as opposed to the terrorist, with courtesy and respect,” but on one occasion he himself led a rampage through an Arab village to avenge the murder of a Jewish friend. Wingate later claimed that his squads killed at least 140 rebels and wounded 300 more, compiling a record unmatched by any British unit of similar size.

  By the time Wingate left Palestine in 1939, he had earned the first of his three Distinguished Service Orders, Britain’s second-highest decoration, and the lasting gratitude of Palestinian Jews, who called him simply Hayedid (the Friend). Veterans of his Night Squads, including Moshe Dayan and Yigael Yadin, would become leading generals in Israel’s army, which they infused with his disregard of protocol, his insistence on fast-moving offensive operations led by officers from the front, and his emphasis on preempting terrorist attacks. “A dominating personality, he infected us all with his fanaticism and faith,” Dayan later wrote.

  In his own army Wingate was looked upon as a cantankerous wild man. He was accused of having “forfeited our general reputation for fair fighting” and seen as a potential “security risk” who “puts the interests of the Jews before those of his own country.” (Wingate shared confidential documents with Zionist leaders.) The British commander in Palestine, General Robert Haining, thought he “played for his own ends and likings instead of playing for the side,” and dismissed his service as “nugatory and embarrassing.”

  But even his detractors had to admit that he had a gift for unconventional warfare that was reminiscent of his distant kinsman T. E. Lawrence, who was of equally diminutive stature. The Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, who knew both men, said that Wingate’s “intenseness,” “whimsicality,” and “originality” all reminded him of T.E.: “I thought of Lawrence more than once when Wingate sat opposite me, arguing fiercely, and boring me through with his eyes.” The pro-Zionist Wingate bridled at the comparison with his pro-Arab relative, whose reputation he thought was exaggerated by “a great amount of romantic dust.” But the comparisons only grew stronger after Wingate’s involvement in the reconquest of Abyssinia, as Ethiopia was then called.85

  IN AN ACT of unprovoked aggression that alarmed much of the Western world, Benito Mussolini had invaded Abyssinia in 1935. Britain had given refuge to Emperor Haile Selassie but had provided no real help until Italy declared war on Britain in June 1940. Thereupon the emperor was whisked to Khartoum, capital of the Sudan, and the task of returning him to power was entrusted to the Special Operations Executive. Detailed for this assignment was Orde Wingate. He would have preferred to lead an army of Jewish soldiers to fight with the Allies in North Africa. As a consolation he applied his “ruthless energy” to the cause of Haile Selassie, a Coptic Christian who styled himself as the Lion of Judah and claimed descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. An acting lieutenant colonel on loan to SOE, Wingate was to lead a band of irregulars that he called Gideon Force after the ancient Israelite fighters.

  On January 20, 1941, Wingate crossed from western Sudan into Abyssinia with the emperor, 1,600 Sudanese and Abyssinian fighters, 70 Britons, and 20,000 camels. Two conventional columns with a total of 60,000 troops, mainly Indians and Africans, marched at roughly the same time, one from northern Sudan, the other from Kenya to the south. As Gideon Force advanced, it left a trail of dying camels; the warm-weather dromedaries turned out to be ill-suited for Abyssinia’s chilly highlands. But while the number of camels shrank, the ranks of fighters grew as tribesmen were recruited to the “patriot” cause. These guerrillas, in turn, were directed by SOE “operational centers,” consisting of one British officer and four NCOs. The campaign, Wingate later noted, could not “have succeeded without the patriot support.”

  The Italian army of occupation numbered 300,000 men. Thirty-five thousand of them were deployed against Gideon Force, and they had armored vehicles, artillery, and air support—all of which Wingate lacked. He did not even have a proper logistics service, having to rely on “captured Italian rations or local produce.” Making maximal use of his puny numbers, Wingate staged numerous assaults on Italian forts, usually at night, telling his men to move fast and “goading everyone to superhuman effort.” By the time the Italians had assembled for a counterattack, the attackers were gone.

  Wingate also skillfully employed bluff. He entered one newly liberated Italian fort to find the telephone ringing. An officer at another fort was calling to ask where the British were. Wingate instructed an Italian-speaking American war correspondent to “tell them that a British division ten thousand strong is on its way up the road” and “advising them to clear off.” This the panicked Italians did posthaste.

  Addis Ababa, already aban
doned by the Italian army, was taken by South African troops on April 5, 1941, after a slog through what a contemporary magazine described as “misty rain and quagmires of red mud.” A month later Wingate had the privilege of leading Haile Selassie into the capital. The emperor eschewed a white horse procured for the occasion, preferring the comfort of a car, so Wingate himself rode at the head of the victory parade. “I hope when we meet my subjects they will know which of us is Emperor,” Haile Selassie commented wryly. The unofficial “emperor” had not won the campaign single-handedly, but he had played an important role; his tiny force had captured more than 15,000 enemy troops and killed 1,500 more.

  Wingate thought his Abyssinian campaign could be a model for other occupied lands, “wherever there is a patriot population” that could be roused “by men of integrity and personality.” He believed that employing a “corps d’elite” on a long-range “penetration” mission to galvanize local forces, as he had done, would be far more effective than what he wrongly denigrated as Lawrence’s “wasteful and ineffectual” approach of providing “war materiel and cash” to local leaders. He claimed, “Given a population favorable to penetration, a thousand resolute and well-armed men can paralyze, for an indefinite period, the operations of a hundred thousand.”

  But despite what the official British military history rightly labeled a “remarkable achievement,” Wingate was peremptorily sent back to Cairo and reduced to his regular rank of major because, as usual, he had offended his superior officers with his “rude and dictatorial and insistent” ways. One senior general was heard to grumble, “The curse of this war is Lawrence in the last,” although in fact T.E. had shown far more tact in his dealings with General Allenby and his staff than Wingate ever displayed with anyone.86

  WINGATE HAD LONG battled depression. “I’m not happy,” he said, with typical modesty, “but I don’t think any great man ever is.”87 During the Abyssinian campaign he had also contracted cerebral malaria. Despondent at the lack of another assignment, he plunged a rusty knife into his throat while alone in a Cairo hotel room. An alert officer next door heard him fall and rushed him to the hospital, saving his life. Supposedly one of his colleagues from Abyssinia, exasperated by Wingate’s incessant abuse, visited him at the hospital to demand, “You bloody fool, why didn’t you use a revolver?”88

  Attempted suicide might have ended Wingate’s career, but he was fortunate that General Sir Archibald Wavell, who had previously made use of his services in Palestine and Abyssinia, still had faith in him. Wavell had been appointed commander in India, and he summoned Wingate to see what he could do to make life uncomfortable for the Japanese armies sweeping through Burma.

  WINGATE ARRIVED IN India in March 1942, a few weeks after the fall of Rangoon. The Japanese were firmly in control, and there was no hope of a conventional counteroffensive in the short term. Nor was there a serious prospect of utilizing indigenous forces as he had done in Palestine and Abyssinia. Some hill tribes remained loyal to the British (Wingate would employ them as guides and guerrillas), but the majority of Burmese had no desire to fight for their former colonial masters. Wingate nevertheless believed the Japanese would be vulnerable to attack by “long range penetration” troops such as Gideon Force. “In the back area are his unprotected kidneys, his midriff, his throat, and other vulnerable points,” he wrote. “The targets for troops of deep penetration may be regarded therefore as the more vital and tender points of the enemy’s anatomy.” The key to such action was “to maintain forces by air and direct them by wireless,” both common practices today but novel ideas at the time.

  To implement his ideas, Wingate was elevated to brigadier and given command of the Seventy-Seventh Indian Infantry Brigade, the foundation of what later became known as the Chindits (a corruption of “chinthe,” a lionlike creature that guards Burmese temples). Although they would be sent on a mission far more arduous than an ordinary military operation, the Chindits were hardly picked troops. The largest elements were a British battalion made up mostly of married men in their thirties who had been performing garrison duty and a Gurkha battalion of peach-fuzzed young recruits. As Wingate noted, they “never dreamt they would serve as shock troops.” After subjecting these “ordinary” men to a tough training regimen designed to teach them “to imitate Tarzan,” Wingate divided them into seven columns of roughly four hundred men each, with fifteen horses and one hundred mules for transport. Each column was accompanied by a two-man Royal Air Force team equipped with powerful radios to coordinate air support, thus anticipating the military practices of later decades.

  Originally their expedition, known as Longcloth, was supposed to coincide with a larger offensive into northern Burma, but Wavell decided to let the Chindits proceed on their own after the offensive was called off. All concerned knew they were running the risk that the full fury of the Japanese army could descend on this lone brigade.

  On February 13, 1943, “Wingate’s Circus,” as the three thousand Chindits called themselves, began crossing the Chindwin, the “strangely beautiful” river separating Burma from India, using inflatable boats and rafts. Two of the columns ran into heavy resistance and turned back, but the rest kept advancing, blowing up bridges and railroads and ambushing Japanese patrols. The air drops worked well aside from the occasional “death by flying fruit,” as some of the men referred to “injuries caused by dropped supplies.” The RAF even dropped spare kilts, false teeth, and monocles as needed. More than two thousand Chindits then crossed the “swiftly flowing,” mile-wide Irrawaddy River. They were now at least two hundred miles inside Burma, and enemy attacks, the intense heat, and various tropical diseases were taking their toll. As one of Wingate’s aides noted, “malaria, scrub typhus, dysentery, and even cholera are endemic.”

  Wingate decided to turn back on March 26, 1943. The Chindits were now nearly surrounded by three crack Japanese divisions, so he told his men to break up into smaller parties and find their own way home. (He claimed that this “dispersal” had been inspired by Robert the Bruce’s tactics.) This was when the expedition turned truly “horrid.” Small groups of Chindits, generally twenty to forty strong, had to traverse hundreds of miles of “incredibly thick” jungle and “fiendishly steep and rocky” hills and then cross two major rivers with the enemy on their heels. Rations had been “grossly inadequate” to begin with; they were designed to sustain paratroopers for only a few days in the field. Now, as supply drops grew less frequent, the “food problem” became “acute.” “Everyone was weak from lack of food,” wrote Major Bernard Fergusson, a column commander who was tormented by “visions of chocolate éclairs and birthday cakes,” “and morale depends more on food than on anything else.”

  Of the 3,000 Chindits, only 2,182 “emaciated” survivors returned, the last on June 6, 1943, their “stomachs caved inward,” ribs sticking out, muscles transformed into “stringy tendons.” Most would be judged unfit for future service. Some had marched fifteen hundred miles carrying, initially at least, more than seventy pounds of equipment.

  Fergusson later conceded that the first Chindit expedition had few “tangible” achievements: “We blew up bits of a railway, which did not take long to repair; we gathered some useful intelligence; we distracted the Japanese from some minor operations, and possibly from some bigger ones; we killed a few hundred of an enemy which numbers eighty millions; we proved that it was feasible to maintain a force by supply dropping alone.”

  The biggest impact of Operation Longcloth was not apparent until Japanese generals were interrogated after the war: They said that the difficulty of defending against Wingate’s raid led them to mount an offensive against India in 1944 in order to prevent future incursions. That attack failed and left them too weak to prevent the British recapture of Burma the following year. Against this indirect impact must be weighed the expedition’s staggering cost.

  General William Slim, commander of the Fourteenth Army, which ultimately retook Burma, judged the raid an “expensive failure” on
purely military grounds but a public-relations triumph: “Skillfully handled, the press of the Allied world took up the tale, and everywhere the story ran that we had beaten the Japanese at their own game.” This psychological fillip was important to soldiers and civilians alike at a time when Japan still reigned supreme in Asia.89

  AMONG THOSE IMPRESSED by the Chindits’ achievement was Winston Churchill, who began to wonder whether Wingate “was another Lawrence of Arabia.”90 He took Wingate, by then a national hero, to his meeting in August 1943 with President Roosevelt and the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Quebec. Though only a junior general, Wingate so impressed the senior brass that they agreed to vastly expand his long-range penetration force and to provide him with his own air force. Thus was born No. 1 Air Commando, which would consist of almost four hundred transport aircraft, gliders, light aircraft, fighters, and bombers, all provided by the U.S. Army Air Forces. Their motto was “anyplace, anytime, anywhere,” and they would prove as good as their word, not only dropping supplies and providing fire support as “flying artillery” but also evacuating casualties.