Orde Charles Wingate (26 February 1903 – 24 March 1944, DSO and 2 Bars - 1938, 1941, 1943) was a general in the British Army.
Captain Orde Charles Wingate (35). "A young and brilliant British officer with eccentric behavior (...) brought up in an extremely puritanical family with a literalist reading of the Bible and a permanent anguish for his salvation, [he] immediately converted to Zionism"
Wingate comes from a colonial military family in India, he was a Zionist, Christian by conviction under the influence of his mother, intellectual by taste and eccentric English by tendency against the rigorous formalism of a conformist society, especially in a family of military tradition. and Protestant, guardian of law and order. In 1921 he entered the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. Appointed Second Lieutenant of Fortress Artillery on August 23, 1923, he began to learn Arabic and was eventually posted to Sudan by his cousin, Sir Reginald Wingate, Governor General of Sudan.
Arriving in Sudan, he joined the Sudan Defense Force in 1928 to patrol along the Abyssinian border and catch slave traffickers and ivory poachers. There he changed the conventional methods of patrolling to lay ambushes. At the end of his service in 1933, he led a short unsuccessful expedition in search of the lost oasis of Zerzura in the Libyan desert, and he married in 1935, at age 32, Lorna Moncrieff who had 16 years old.
Assignment in Palestine
In 1936, Wingate was assigned to Palestine under British mandate at the General Staff as an intelligence officer. There, he sees the creation of the Jewish state as a religious duty and the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. He allied with Jewish political leaders when Arab guerrilla warfare began with attacks on both British Mandate officials and installations and Jewish communities, known as the "Great Arab Revolt".
Wingate engages politically with Jewish leaders and puts forward the idea of forming Jewish commandos led by British officers with military experience and training. He personally submitted this idea to General Archibald Wavell, commander of the British forces in Palestine.
With Wavell's agreement, Wingate convinced the Jewish Agency and the Haganah command, the Jewish Self-Defense Force and General Haining, the new British commander in Palestine, to allow the creation in June 1938 of the Special Night Squads (special night squads). Made up of British and Jewish Haganah volunteers, these squads ambushed Arabs who attacked British Petroleum pipelines and isolated kibbutzim.
Wingate trains and leads these patrols in punitive operations against villages that have aided or harbored saboteurs. These methods are seriously frowned upon by the British authorities and even arouse the disapproval of some Zionists.
His political and military commitment to the creation of a Jewish state was considered by his superiors to be incompatible with his position as a British intelligence officer in that country, and in May 1939 he was transferred to Great Britain. /P>
Thus, Wingate became a hero of the Jewish communities of Palestine and appreciated by Moshe Dayan, trained by him and who declared to have learned everything from him.
Second World War
We find Wingate in January 1941 in Ethiopia. Under the orders of General Archibald Wavell, he will mount the Ethiopian insurrection against Italy and bring Emperor Haile Selassie back to Addis Ababa on May 5.
In 1942, Wavell, then stationed in India, requested him for guerrilla operations in Burma.
The 77th Independent Mobile Brigade, made up of British reservists, Burmese riflemen and Gurkhas, would become , after a very hard training, the Chindits.
In February 1943, they carried out a first operation behind Japanese lines in Burma, which was a particularly costly failure, but whose adventure was hailed by propaganda.
In March 1944, they carried out a second campaign in the Myitkyina region in order to support the advance of General Stilwell's Chinese troops.
On March 24, 1944, promoted to general, he died in a plane crash during an inspection.
Wingate certainly owes his notoriety to having organized and led the Chindits into battle. His ideas, implemented by others, proved to be fruitful, whether in Egypt on deep penetration patrols which gave birth to the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), or, more generally, on special operations , permeated the creation of the Special Air Service (SAS).
Rank Major-General (Major General)
Years of service 1921 – 1944
Conflicts Great Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 in Palestine
World War II
East African Campaign
Burma Campaign
Force Command Gideon Chindits
Awards
DSO (Sept. 13, 1938)
DSO (Dec. 30, 1941)
DSO (August 5, 1943)
Quote (1 April 1941) to the order of the army