The Burma Campaign

by Frank McLynn

  In 1923 Wingate received his commission as a gunnery officer. Posted to Salisbury Plain, he soon established a reputation as a skilled horseman, particularly keen on fox-hunting and point-to-point. But already observers noted a dark side: the contempt for rules and conventions extended to a Skimpole-like insouciance about paying his mess bills. The personality flaws became more overt:when posted to the Military School of Equitation in 1926, he alienated his peers and superiors by a brash and arrogant insubordination. But Wingate always enjoyed powerful patronage, and at this juncture he was rescued from a career cul-de-sac by his father’s first cousin Sir Reginald Wingate, former Governor-General of the Sudan and High Commissioner in Egypt. ‘Cousin Rex’, as he was known, nudged Wingate into a future as an Orientalist. Obtaining leave, Orde studied Arabic at the London School of Oriental and African Studies and then served in Sudan and Ethiopia.4 During leave periods in Britain, he carried on a five-year affair with a young woman named Enid ‘Peggy’ Jelley, to whom he was secretly engaged. Wingate seems to have been ambivalent about Peggy, valuing her for ‘maternal’ qualities but fobbing off her desire for marriage with vague mumblings about the hardship of garrison life. However, as the sixth year of the affair approached, he evidently felt he could stall no longer, and a public notice of the engagement appeared in the London press. Then fate lent a hand. Shortly after boarding the P & O liner Cathay at Port Said, returning to England for his marriage, Wingate met and fell heavily in love with a 16-year-old named Lorna Paterson, who was travelling home from Australia with her mother. This time it was not a case of a mother substitute but a genuine coup de foudre. As soon as he got to London, Wingate told Peggy he was in love with another. His official biographer claimed that the jilted Peggy took the news in her stride and bore up stoically. But later research has revealed that she was devastated, to the point where she never married.5 To her family’s disgust, she remained loyal to Wingate. He repaid her self-denying fortitude by rationalisation, in effect blaming her for his early traumas by a weird psychological process of transference whereby she was conflated with his mother and thus accused of unacceptable weakness and inadequacy. It was arranged that Wingate would marry Lorna when she was 18. Instead of thanking the stars for this happy outcome to a knotty emotional crisis, Wingate rounded on his future mother-in-law, writing her a quite outrageously rude, hectoring and domineering nine-page letter, staggering for the vehemence of its language and its breathtaking, insulting contempt.6

  Still, Wingate got his way, as he usually did, and, whatever his in-laws’ opinion, he married Lorna in 1935. It is a curious example of a kind of family repetition compulsion that he married a woman 13 years younger than himself while his father had been 14 years older than his mother. Next year he became an intelligence officer with the British Mandate in Palestine and very soon became an ardent Zionist, in many ways plus royaliste que le roi since he was not himself Jewish. Palestine was at this point seething with unrest. There had been only 55,000 Jews in Palestine at the end of the First World War, but following the famous Balfour Declaration and, particularly, the Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany, a further 135,000 had arrived, and were perceived (rightly) by the indigenous Arabs as a threat to their future. In 1936 the Arabs declared a general strike, holy war was proclaimed by Haj Amin, the Grand Mufti, and there were attacks on Jewish settlements.7 Arab guerrilla groups were ubiquitous. Supported by Wavell, the newly arrived commander-in-chief in Palestine, Wingate formed the so-called Special Night Squads (SNS) to combat Arab terrorism. Wingate was an early exponent of ‘shock and awe’, believing that paramilitary activity at night induced a unique and singular terror in an enemy. He spiced the SNS up with the use of slavering dogs, a calculated piece of cruelty since the animal was regarded as unclean by Muslims. This was another controversial episode in his career. The Special Night Squads were simply a legitimation of Zionist counter-terrorism, with Jewish thugs striking back at Arab ones. Mainly formed of Haganah members led by British officers, the squads appealed mightily to Wingate’s Old Testament belief in the efficacy of ‘smiting’. He was essentially retreading the tactics of the infamous ‘Black and Tans’ in Ireland in 1919–20, unleashing a private army to mete out random killings, beatings and other atrocities. Many of the unsavoury methods later adopted by the state of Israel were pioneered by Wingate, including the apparatus of collective punishment.8 He set up phoney ‘courts’ and ‘trials’ followed by executions; he liked to raid villages, line up the inhabitants and order every tenth man executed.9 Sometimes he would punish Arabs by smearing mud in their faces, and sometimes he would shoot them out of hand. On one occasion he exhorted his Jewish soldiers to dress up as Arabs, enter the Arab market at Haifa and begin shooting.10 On another, after killing four Arabs in a raid on a suspect village, Wingate took five prisoners and grilled them about an alleged arms cache in the village. When the men pleaded ignorance, he took some sand and pushed it down the throat of one of the men until he choked and puked. When he still protested ignorance, Wingate ordered him shot and ordered a Jewish squad member to carry out the execution.11

  It is beyond any doubt that Wingate was guilty of war crimes, and his actions were particularly outrageous given that Britain was in Palestine simply as a trustee for the indigenous people according to a League of Nations mandate. There could be no question here of compelling necessity or the defence of vital national interests. It is yet another strike against the record of Archibald Wavell that he should have allowed Wingate such a free hand.12 Moreover, war crimes apart, Wingate allowed his Zionism to override his loyalty to his own country and his oath as an officer. He leaked confidential information from British army files to his Jewish friends, and in any conflict between the interests of the British Empire and those of Zion, he always opted for the latter.13 Although the accusation that he later advised Haganah leaders to take up arms against the British and blow up the Haifa oil refinery have never been proved in a sense that would satisfy the legal definition of proof, it would be entirely in character for him to have done so, and many good witnesses allege that he did just that.14 Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the Zionist movement, adopted him as a ‘son’; his own two natural sons had renounced the faith.15 Wingate’s head of intelligence in Palestine, Wing Commander A.P. Ritchie, said that his attachment to the Zionists made him worse than useless to the intelligence service.16 It is amazing that he was not court-martialled for some of his activities, but he always had powerful protectors at court and in this instance he had the purblind Wavell as his patron. Nonetheless, by 1938 his almost blatant attachment even to the anti-British wing of the Zionist movement was becoming an open scandal and led to his recall. The obvious question arises: what animated his Zionist fanaticism? The usual answer is that his dark and gloomy background among the Plymouth Brethren is to blame, allied with his fervent belief in certain eschatological doctrines: in short, he believed he was doing God’s work.17 Others say that he became a Zionist because he identified the Jews with himself, as joint victims of bullying. Still others assert that Wingate was a contrarian, that because his brother officers were pro-Arab, he automatically had to be pro-Jew.18

  Wingate was recalled because of his overidentification with one side in a conflict where he was supposed to be ringmaster. For many men it might have meant the end of an army career, and it is true that for two years Wingate was in the doldrums. In this interim period both Wavell and a new champion, Sir Edmund Ironside, kept his name before the high command and made interminable excuses for him, even when he recklessly criticised superior officers and deliberately went outside the chain of command. Ironside, who became Chief of the Imperial Staff, was initially attracted to him because he seemed to be a genuine version of the T.E. Lawrence legend; Ironside detested Lawrence, thought him a charlatan and wanted to raise up a true example of the guerrilla leader as a counterpoise.19 Wavell, too, was irresistibly drawn to the Lawrence comparison. He pointed out that both Wingate and Lawrence had intellectual interests, were widely read
and had retentive memories. In military terms, as regards supply, logistics, etc., Wingate the professional soldier had the edge over Lawrence the amateur, but Lawrence had the advantage of being both restful and humorous, whereas Wingate had no real sense of humour at all.20

  It was the support of Wavell and Ironside that saw Wingate back in the martial saddle in early 1941. Wavell was waging his very successful campaign against the Italians in Ethiopia, and Wingate, once again with his commander’s backing, attempted a rerun of the Special Night Squads. This time his band of irregulars was to be called Gideon Force and was a motley assemblage of British, Sudanese and Ethiopians and even some ex-Haganah men. Gideon was the Old Testament patriarch (featuring in the book of Judges) who led 300 men against superior numbers and defeated the enemy by discomfiting them with trumpets. Wingate’s methods proved spectacularly successful, and this time there was no controversy, because he was fighting an accredited foe in wartime.21 Yet by his tactlessness and insubordination, he engineered a situation where the high command whisked him out of Ethiopia at the end of hostilities with what even his critics thought was unseemly haste. Even without his alienation of his colleagues, Wingate had managed to be controversial. The psychologist C.G. Jung remarks that a fanatic, deprived of his initial outlet, will soon find another, even a glaringly contradictory one. Removed from the ambit of Zionism, Wingate conceived an equally irrational obsession with the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie and became, in effect, a kind of Rastafarian. For him the unkindest aspect of his sudden expulsion from the country was that he could not say goodbye to his adored and revered potentate.22

  In Cairo, Wingate composed an angry 9,000-word report on the campaign in Ethiopia, criticising almost every aspect of it: the calibre of British army officers, the NCOs, signals officers and technicians, the equipment and rations, the weapons and armaments, the disdain shown for the native Abyssinians and, most bruisingly, the attitude of the general staff. Alarmed by the state of mind evinced by the report, Wavell went to the trouble of interviewing his turbulent junior. Initially sympathetic, he was gradually repelled by Wingate’s almost pathological egotism. Both men went away angry. Shortly afterwards Wingate was informed that his report was impertinent in tone and unwarranted in its charges. Not only was it rejected, it was actually burned.23 All that early summer Wingate had been sinking deeper and deeper into depression, possibly aggravated by malaria and the drug (atrabine) he took to combat it. The rejection of the report seems to have been the last straw, convincing Wingate that he was in a battle against Satan and that the Evil One had prevailed. Early in July 1941, he checked into the Continental Hotel in Cairo and attempted suicide. Lacking his Biretta revolver, which had been left behind in Addis Ababa when he was bundled out of Ethiopia, he had as his sole instrument of self-slaughter a rusty Ethiopian knife (a kind of variant on the bowie), with which he tried to cut his throat. He botched the job of severing the carotid artery, and the man in the adjoining room heard the sound of a body slumping heavily to the floor. Left alone, Wingate would have died within the hour, but he was rushed to hospital and operated on. For 24 hours he hovered between life and death but finally recovered.24 Wingate was always subject to bipolar disorder or cyclothymia – there had been another acute episode in the Sudan – and it seems that it was a severe downswing in the manic-depressive cycle that led him to try to take his life. Both the syndrome and its particular manifestation in Wingate’s case can be convincingly traced to the obsession with hell inculcated in his childhood.25 His many enemies delighted in his supposed downfall, thinking he would either be court-martialled or sent to a lunatic asylum. But the army had enough problems without a cause célèbre of this kind, and anyway Wingate had many powerful backers. Either through ignorance or because he was leaned on, the army psychiatrist attributed the suicide attempt almost entirely to malaria and the unsupervised use of atrabine. The most bizarre aspect of the incident was that Wingate’s wife and his friends tried to explain it away as ‘justifiable self-homicide’, the action of a man spurned by envious and inferior spirits. Wingate was often compared to Clive of India, and Lorna reminded him that Clive attempted suicide three times and finally succeeded.26

  A general assessment of Wingate’s character and attributes is essential if his career in Burma is to make any sense. Unfortunately, his biography is peculiarly problematical since he has become the object of a cult, a hero who, in the eyes of his admirers, did no wrong. As with many other cults of personality, where the subject is in effect deified, true believers will not tolerate any criticism of their totem; the case of C.G. Jung comes to mind. The historian, though, has to deal with incontestable facts, however unpalatable, and Wingate’s career is full of pointers to a very dark personality indeed. He was rude, pushy, opinionated, bad-tempered, egotistical and self-promoting, an ‘all or nothing’ personality whose motto was ‘Either you are for me or against me.’27 His admirers have also compared him to Stonewall Jackson, Lawrence of Arabia and Gordon of Khartoum, though the only Gordon comparison that really works is that with Stilwell, for both were Westerners who commanded Chinese armies. Even more hyperbolically, the comparison has sometimes been extended to Cromwell and Napoleon.28 Most emphatically not a team player – a serious drawback in a professional army officer – Wingate had a contempt for rank and authority, or at least for those superior to him in the hierarchy. When it came to those lower in the pecking order, he was a ferocious martinet who would brook no questioning of his orders and insisted they be carried out to the letter. But there was usually some ‘compelling reason’ why he could not be so meticulous about orders issued to him from above. To make matters worse, he frequently cheated by going outside the chain of command and appealing to powerful protectors several rungs above his ‘line manager’ in the hierarchy. Inevitably, words like ‘humbug’ and ‘hypocrite’ were frequently used about Wingate. There can be few more unsavoury spectacles than the habitual insubordinate who is also a ferocious disciplinarian.29 Not surprisingly, most of his colleagues tended to lose their temper with him, which Wingate then used as self-validating proof that he was an object of envy for his superior talents. Even Wilfred Thesiger, himself a pitiless egotist, dedicated to violence and primitivism, fell foul of Wingate in Ethiopia and referred to him as ‘ruthless and uncompromising, an Old Testament figure, brutal, arrogant and assertive.30 The only colleague who seemed capable of handling him was Captain Douglas Dodds-Parker, his assistant in Ethiopia, later an SOE executive and a distinguished post-war Tory politician. Two of Dodds-Parker’s bons mots are worth citing. Once, when Wingate had been delivering one of his interminable jeremiads about Haile Selassie as David with the Italians in Ethiopia as Goliath, Dodds-Parker interjected: ‘I can’t help thinking, Orde, that you are making a sob-story out of necessity. I am all for human courage and David versus Goliath, but I wish we could get just enough elastic to provide David with a sling.’ Dodds-Parker also remarked that he had lived too close to Wingate to take him entirely seriously, and on another occasion brought him down to earth as follows: ‘Come on, Orde, you are not Napoleon yet, nor even T.E. Lawrence.31

  Few public figures have ever been more overtly and blatantly arrogant than Wingate. He assigned himself the status of ‘great soldier’ on the basis of his work in Ethiopia; he habitually used the word ‘shall’ in his orders, implying that the command came from a godlike figure; when he could not get from the Indian army 100 per cent of what he had demanded, he wrote back: ‘Inability is a sign of incapability.’32 Part of this stemmed from a genuine belief that he was doing God’s work and engaged in a daily battle against Satan. Wingate exhibited most of the classic signs of paranoia, from delusions of grandeur to a feeling that there was a general conspiracy to do him down and minimise his talents. If he did not get the promotion he sought and thought he deserved, he never reflected that this might be because of some personal shortcoming or because he was not yet ready for higher office or rank; it was always because he was being victimised by envious none
ntities of superior rank. If he was officially reprimanded or otherwise visited with official disapproval, the paranoia would reach storm force.33 Another classic sign of religious mania, apart from paranoia, is a relish for violence, in line with the activities of the ‘smiting’ Yahweh of the Old Testament. Here as in other other areas Wingate aligned more properly with the explorer H.M. Stanley than with Gordon or Lawrence. Like his colleague in Ethiopia Wilfred Thesiger, Wingate thought human life had no intrinsic value, and would have guffawed at those who spoke of it as ‘sacred’. Not content with reducing officers who disagreed with him to the ranks, he would sometimes physically assault them. In this regard he made no distinction between officers and enlisted men, lashing out at all who annoyed him. The most notorious assault on a brother officer was that on Captain Brian Franks, of a cavalry regiment, who happened to make a derogatory, though entirely justifiable, remark about Zionists.34 The religious mania, paranoia, propensity to violence and underlying cyclothymia unquestionably made Wingate a suitable case for treatment. As Churchill’s personal physician Lord Moran wrote in his diary: ‘Wingate seemed to be hardly sane … in medical jargon a borderline case.’35

  As if all this was not enough, Wingate was both an exhibitionist and a sartorial eccentric. Careless of dress, unkempt, slatternly and slovenly, he evinced disrespect for military convention and hierarchy while expecting his superiors to satisfy his every whim. During his period of deep gloom just before the suicide attempt in Cairo in July 1941, he asked for an interview with General Auchinleck, who had just succeeded Wavell as commander-in-chief in the Middle East. Auchinleck was appalled to find a slovenly figure in his office, looking both swarthy and sallow, with wrinkled thighs visible below his shorts, wearing a dirty solar topi and a greasy bush jacket. Auchinleck, a stickler for proper dress, roared at him to get out and return only when he was properly dressed.36 Curiously for one who set so much store by physical prowess, Wingate was a weedy physical specimen and not very practical; by common consent he was a hopeless driver.37 He seems to have ‘compensated’ for this with deliberate exhibitionism, often going around camp naked, or appearing out of a shower, nude, to bark an order at his men, still wearing a shower cap and scrubbing himself with a shower brush as he spoke. He liked to wear an alarm clock around his wrist that would go off on odd occasions for no particular reason that any onlooker could discern. He was rarely seen without his trademark Wolseley helmet and fly whisk, and carried on a string around his neck a raw onion on which he would occasionally munch as a snack.38 He would dictate letters while parading around naked, and even experimented with the method later made famous by Lyndon Baines Johnson, carrying on conversations while sitting on the lavatory. Notoriously absent-minded about practical matters, he often went on trips without basic necessities like soap or shaving kit, rarely cleaned his teeth and was careless about hygiene, for example using a bidet as a urinal. There were frequent food fads too, which he imposed on his men and his staff: he tinkered with vegetarianism and, like many men of a monomaniacal bent, believed in the virtues of copious mugs of hot tea. He also saw no point in unnecessary laundry and rarely changed his clothes.39 Eccentricity is a mild word to use.