CHAPTER SEVEN
WINGATE
The British have a strange talent for producing military 'eccentrics'. The long list includes most notably the Earl of Peterborough, Charles Napier, Gordon of Khartoum, and Lawrence of Arabia. Another appeared in World War Two, possibly the most innovatory of all. This was the brilliant but erratic Major-General Charles Orde Wingate, a 40-year-old Royal Artillery officer. By his extraordinary force of character and powers of persuasion he had made himself the master of a small army complete with its own air force, trained and organized in a revolutionary technique of warfare that was peculiarly his own.
Wingate, born in India on 26th February 1903; and died in northern Burma on 24th March 1944. Between those two dates stands the career of one of Britain's outstanding 'irregular' soldiers; what Lawrence of Arabia was to World War One, so Wingate was his parallel in World War Two. The comparison enraged him, even though, Lawrence of Arabia, was actually a distant relative. Both had piercing blue eyes, hawk like noses, and a devotion to the causes of foreign peoples that disturbed and even frightened their own superiors. They also shared a commitment to irregular warfare carried out by indigenous troops.
In the fall of 1936, Wingate went to Palestine, which was then administered under a British mandate. There he became a passionate advocate of Zionism at a time when Britain, on the whole-was pro-Arab. Wingate’s reputation for conducting unorthodox warfare behind enemy lines began while he was serving as an intelligence officer in Palestine in 1936. Axis-inspired Arab terrorists were sabotaging oil pipelines and attacking Jewish settlements. Captain Wingate set up several small raiding parties which he called Special Night Squads. Using Palestine Jews as guides, he turned the tables on the terrorists, intercepting and pre-empting their attacks so successfully that he was soon accorded the title of 'Lawrence of Judea'. Wingate's patrols were so aggressive in their ambushes and night raids that they made British officials uneasy; at one point his enemies alleged that Wingate had offered to lead the Jews in an uprising against his own government. In early 1939, the Special Night Squads were disbanded and Wingate was abruptly recalled. Back in England he found his loyalty questioned, and though his career survived it was under a cloud.
Wingate was born in the 20th Century but he really belonged to that Victorian era in which British gentlemen adventurers roved the globe, exploring, climbing mountains, bird-watching and waging war. He was often slovenly and unkempt, dressed in sagging socks, ill-fitting uniforms with undone buttons, and an old pith helmet shaped like an inverted coal scuttle. He ate quantities of raw onions, believing them beneficial for health, and carried strapped to his wrist a miniature alarm clock, the clanging of which signalled the end of his interviews and audiences.
He was frequently rude and contentious, and had on occasion struck subordinates when they aroused his wrath. To show his disdain for authority he donned dirty, grease stained uniforms when he met with his orthodox superiors, whom he called ‘military apes’. At times he wore no clothes at all, entertaining his guests or colleagues in the nude; during conversations he rubbed his naked torso with a rubber brush, a method of grooming that he seemed to prefer to bathing. In the field, he strained his tea through his socks and often served it this way to others.
While some of Wingate's associates undoubtedly thought him mad, his madness was not without method, and to some degree his strange behaviour may have been calculated. He once said; "With English of a certain class, the worst crime you can commit is to be different, unorthodox, and unexpected. I am all those things. The only way to get these qualities tolerated, and accepted, is to transform one's 'difference' into eccentricity”. For all of his quirks, Wingate had a fierce, driving ambition and a profound, almost mystical sense of his own destiny. Born into a distinguished Puritan military family, Wingate had a highly erratic career. At times his unorthodox successes brought him notice out of proportion to his rank or station; at other times his behaviour and tendency to insubordination brought him to the verge of court-martial. As a young officer he studied Arabic and became proficient enough in the language to secure a post with the Sudan Defence Force. There, while leading patrols against ivory smugglers and slave traders, he began to store up knowledge about guerrilla warfare.
When World War Two broke out he was in an obscure post in an antiaircraft brigade in England. But General Wavell, who had once been Wingate's commander in Palestine, now came to the rescue. A cautious man himself, Wavell was nevertheless open to unconventional ideas, and after becoming commander in chief in Africa he sent for the strange young major. Soon Wingate was commanding an Ethiopian partisan army, trying to drive vastly superior Italian forces from Ethiopia and restore Emperor Haile Selassie to the throne. It was Wingate's first experience with a sizable command; he made a number of tactical mistakes but he achieved some stunning triumphs, culminating in an operation in which his force of less than one thousand seven hundred bluffed more than fifteen thousand Italian and colonial troops into surrendering.
In spite of his victories in the field and the successful restoration of the Emperor, Wingate so annoyed his superiors by his refusal to communicate with them or even to obey orders that he was recalled to Cairo. There, depressed because he felt his work was unappreciated, he slashed his throat with a knife. Though the suicide attempt failed, his apparent instability might have ended his military career then and there. But once again Wavell, now commanding in Asia, intervened. In desperate straits as the defence of Burma collapsed, he asked for the audacious Wingate to join him in Delhi. Given the temporary rank of colonel, Wingate was put in charge of guerrilla operations in Burma. Even in a theatre already known for its oddballs and eccentrics, Wingate, who was suddenly propelled to the forefront at this point, was extraordinary.
Wingate soon proposed what he called "long-range penetration" (LRP). His plan called for the insertion of conventional forces far behind enemy lines. There, supplied by air and directed by radio, the LRP force would cut the enemy's lines of communication and cause as much disruption as possible. Pressing his proposal on anyone who would listen, Wingate made something of a nuisance of himself around headquarters in Delhi. As Slim recalled, he “fanatically pursued his own purposes without regard to any other consideration or purpose”. Most officers with conventional ideas about warfare found him tedious and annoying, and nicknamed him ‘Tarzan’ or ‘Robin Hood’. But others found him mesmerizing. Said one officer: "Soon we had fallen under the spell of his almost hypnotic talk; and by and by we, or some of us, had lost the power of distinguishing between the feasible and the fantastic”.
One of those who was persuaded by Wingate's proposal was Wavell. The Allies were still planning to launch the offensive to retake Burma in February 1943, and it appeared to Wavell that Wingate's long-range penetration could disrupt the Japanese reaction. And so he authorised Wingate to prepare the first LRP group, the 77th Indian Infantry Brigade. Ultimately the unit became known as Chindits, a name derived from the mythical lions carved in stone that guard Burmese pagodas.
Wingate threw his three thousand British, Ghurkha and Burmese soldiers into intensive training during the monsoon. The men had to learn not only how to fight in the jungle, but also how to cope with the 1 000 mules that would form their heavy transport on the expedition. (Among the troops were draftees from such urban centres as Liverpool and Manchester, and they liked to joke that the decoration called the DCM, Distinguished Combat Medal, stood for (‘Died Chasing Mules’). At the start of the rigorous training programme a staggering proportion of the men fell out sick or exhausted, in some units as many as 70 per cent were either in the hospital or trying to get in. But Wingate ordered his doctors to root out what he called "the prevailing hypochondria," and pointed out in lectures to his troops that behind the enemy lines there would be no hospitals.
Wingate was almost ready to lead his brigade into Burma when the Allies cancelled their planned operation, code named ‘Anakim’. Without a major operation for the Chindits to support, Wavell felt that Wingate's expedition would be meaningless. As he saw it, the brigade was not strong enough to engage in a major battle, and any damage Wingate's men might inflict on the lines of communication would be temporary. On 5th February 1943, Wavell visited Wingate, intending to cancel the operation. But in a two-hour discussion Wingate put up a barrage of arguments; Wavell finally yielded, and in a speech to Wingate's troops said they were embarking on "a great adventure". This proved to be an understatement. In mid-February the Chindits crossed the Chindwin and plunged into Burma's jungles. While two columns - including an officer masquerading as Wingate, created a diversion to the south, Wingate's main force slipped east toward the Mandalay railway line.
In the jungle Wingate was a stern taskmaster. He had the notion that marching prevented malaria, and he kept his men on the move constantly. He forbade shaving, to save five minutes in the morning, and he set little personal ambushes to check up on the alertness of his officers and men. During the first weeks in the jungle the Chindits' operations matched Wingate's hopes. They cut roads, destroyed bridges, attacked outposts, set ambushes and booby traps, and sabotaged the Mandalay railway in many places. Aerial supply operations worked well, and there were few casualties. The enemy hunted the elusive Chindits in vain, finally committing two divisions to the search. After much deliberation, Wingate decided to cross the mile-wide Irrawaddy and raid even deeper into enemy territory. It was a grave misjudgement. Wingate now found himself trapped in a hot, dry forest, with the broad river at his back. A Japanese reconnaissance plane spotted some of his troops, and it seemed only a matter of time before the Japanese would catch up with the brigade. Airdrops were hard to arrange, and the men were beginning to wilt from hunger, disease and the constant strain.
For the next several weeks the Chindits kept on the move, living out a nightmare. Water was so scarce they drank the fluid contained in the stems of green bamboo. Unable to bathe, they were crawling with lice, and were tormented by ticks, leeches and vicious red ants. The men became obsessed with thoughts of food and described to each other in loving detail the great meals they would have when they got home. They ate their mules, made soup of their horses, and when all else failed took lessons from their Burmese riflemen in the preparation and consumption of locusts, rats, monkeys and the shoots of jungle plants. Dysentery, malaria and Japanese patrols took an increasing toll. There was no way of evacuating the wounded. Some who could not go on were left in villages in the hope that the Burmese would not turn them over to the Japanese; others were simply left in the jungle to meet their fate alone.
On 24th March 1943, Wingate was ordered to return to India before the enemy and disease could annihilate the brigade. Getting out proved much harder than getting in. Wingate told his men; "Just put yourself in the position of the Jap commander; your one aim will be to prevent anyone from getting out alive. We can take it for granted that from now on the Jap commander is going to do everything in his power to wipe us out. And the first thing he'll do is to make a strong effort to prevent us re-crossing the Irrawaddy”.
The brigade split up into small groups with Wingate leading a force of two hundred and twenty. At the river, Wingate's men came under fire from the Japanese. Wingate stalked the riverbank, looking "like some minor prophet with his huge beard and blanket wrapped around his shoulders", according to one of his subordinates. He decided that, rather than attempt a crossing, he would break his force into five small groups and infiltrate back through the enemy lines.
Wingate himself led a group of forty three men. Instead of crossing the river under fire, Wingate and his tiny command remained in a secluded patch of jungle. There, the men spent a week resting and feeding on their remaining pack mules and horses, which they slaughtered by cutting their throats to avoid alerting the Japanese with gunfire. After a week of rest during which the chief enemies were leeches and the ever-present mosquitoes, Wingate led his men back to the Irrawaddy, which they now crossed without difficulty. For another couple of weeks they marched on through the jungle. They ran out of rations, and the Burmese soldiers killed pythons for them and made soup of roots. One of the officers grew so weak from dysentery that he could not continue; Wingate camped beside the man for 48 hours hoping that he would regain his strength, but in the end he was left to die in the jungle. When another soldier, a lance corporal crippled by sores on his legs, saw that he was holding up the column, he simply walked off into the jungle and disappeared.
At last, the party neared the Chindwin. Across the river lay safety, but the Japanese had taken all the available boats and their patrols were everywhere along the east bank. Wingate and a few others who felt strong enough decided to swim the big, fast-flowing river, then contact the British, and send boats for those left behind. To avoid disclosing themselves to enemy patrols, Wingate and his swimmers spent seven hours hacking through dense elephant grass to reach the river. When they finally set off for the far bank, it turned out to be a near thing for all of them. Wingate probably survived only because he rested in midstream by floating on his back with his head cradled in his buoyant old pith helmet. But they made it, and the following night most of the others came across in boats under Japanese fire.
Wingate brought out thirty four of the forty three men he had started with. Other Chindit groups took heavier losses. One column or one hundred and fifty men headed east and marched all the way to China. Of the three thousand who had gone into the jungle, fewer than two thousand two hundred returned, and the majority of the survivors were so debilitated by their experience that they could never serve in combat again. Theirs had been an incredible ordeal: they had operated for three months behind enemy lines, had marched 1 500 miles through difficult country and had been forced to leave many of their comrades behind, dead or dying in the jungle. But they had achieved what other British forces had failed to: before crossing the Irrawaddy, they had carried the war to the Japanese, operating far behind their lines, attacking outposts, setting up ambushes and wreaking havoc on communications.
The reaction at British headquarters to Wingate's operation was mixed. To many senior officers it was an unmitigated disaster. Wrote Slim later: "As a military operation the raid had been an expensive failure. It gave little tangible return for the losses it had suffered and the resources it had absorbed. The damage it did to Japanese communications was repaired in a few days, the casualties it inflicted were negligible, and it had no immediate effect on Japanese dispositions or plans. If anything was learned of air supply or jungle fighting it was a costly schooling”.
The response in other quarters was quite different. Back home in Britain, where the events that had occurred in the Burmese jungle were only dimly perceived, the fact that the British had gone over to the offensive and had penetrated far behind Japanese lines was regarded as a great achievement. In sore need of a victory, the British now had something that could be interpreted as one, and the propaganda mills began churning. Newspapers hailed Wingate as ‘the Clive of Burma’ and the Chindits became overnight heroes.
Among those most impressed was Winston Churchill. After months of what seemed to him indifferent performance by British commanders in Asia, here was a man of daring and imagination who seemed able to win battles. Churchill wrote at the time; "All the Commanders on the spot seem to be competing with one another to magnify their demands and the obstacles they have to overcome. I consider Wingate should command the army against Burma. He is a man of genius and audacity and no mere question of seniority must obstruct the advance of real personalities to their proper stations in war".
Churchill's proposal to place the unorthodox and rather peculiar junior brigadier in charge of the Burma campaign stunned senior officers. They succeeded in dissuading the Prime Minister from making such a move. But now a relationship began that paralleled the one existing between Chennault and Roosevelt, in which a daring general formed a personal alliance with his Commander in Chief, much to the discomfiture of his direct superiors. Churchill had Wingate come to England for discussions, and he found Wingate's ideas about long-range penetration, much to his liking.
Wingate held that long-range penetration groups could establish strongholds and airstrips deep in the jungles and defend them against concerted attacks, thus forming a permanent rather than a temporary presence in the enemy's rear. He also argued that LRPs should: not be considered mere supplements to conventional troops; they should be the main force. Given a few well-trained brigades, he felt he could turn the tide of war. Churchill found great appeal in the relatively minor effort envisaged by Wingate. Before the Trident Conference, Churchill had expressed his misgivings about the Burma campaign by saying that "going into swampy jungles to fight the Japanese is like going into the water to fight a shark. It is better to entice him into a trap or catch him on a hook and then demolish him with axes after hauling him out on to dry land”. While the Americans were agitating for the recapture of Burma so that a land supply route to China could be reopened, Churchill wanted the main thrust in Asia to be toward Sumatra instead and then on toward Singapore. Wingate's proposal seemed to offer a way of satisfying U.S. demands for action, and perhaps a cheap victory over the Japanese as well.
Churchill immediately asked Wingate to accompany him to the Allied Quadrant Conference in Quebec in August 1943. Newly promoted Major-General Wingate joined the Chiefs-of-Staff and Prime Minister Churchill, where Allied strategy in the China-Burma-India theatre was top of the agenda. Churchill introduced Wingate as the successor to Lawrence of Arabia. President Roosevelt was so impressed with Wingate's proposals to assist US theatre commander General Joseph 'Vinegar Joe' Stilwell in reopening a land supply route from India to China that he promptly instructed his air force chief, General 'Hap' Arnold, to provide Wingate with his own direct air support.
There Wingate presented a plan to insert eight long range penetration brigades behind enemy lines during the forthcoming dry season. While the plan brought howls of protest from most of the command in India because of the resources it would require, Wingate found substantial support for his proposal at the conference. Churchill liked the idea, as did some of his general staff; the Americans were also impressed. At the conference, Marshall became a great admirer of Wingate, and General ‘Hap’ Arnold, Chief of Staff of the US Air Forces, wrote of the strange Englishman: "You took one look at that face, like the face of a pale Indian chieftain, topping the uniform still smelling of jungle and sweat and war, and you thought: Hell, this man is serious”. Indeed the American chiefs were so taken with Wingate that they promised an American brigade for his force, as well as air craft and gliders to support his operation.
At the Quadrant Conference, in addition to approving the new Wingate campaign, the Allies agreed that there would be an attempt to seize northern Burma in the 1943-1944 dry season. A joint operation was envisaged involving Slim's regular forces; Wingate's Chindits and Stilwell's Chinese troops. The British also decided to alter their own command structure, in accordance with Churchill's feeling that some life had to be pumped into the sluggish India command. Wavell had already been made Viceroy of India and replaced by General Sir Claude Auchinleck, the former commander in chief of British forces in the Middle East. Now the command function was to be split; Auchinleck would take on the responsibility of training and equipping the Indian Army and developing India as a base for operations. The actual campaign against the Japanese would be conducted by a new organization, the Southeast Asia Command. As Supreme Allied Commander for SEAC the British chose Acting Vice-Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten. A cousin of King George VI.
Less than four months after his depleted force stumbled out of the Burmese jungle, Wingate was plotting another expedition against the Japanese. He said confidently; "The first was the experiment, now comes the full dress show”. Helping Wingate to orchestrate this new operation was an innovative young American fighter pilot named Philip J. Cochran, whose Air Commandos were to bring a new dimension to jungle fighting. Under Cochran's direction, gliders would be used for the first time in this theatre; they would transport more than four hundred men and ground-clearing equipment behind enemy lines.
The take-off was set for Sunday, 5th March 1944. Meanwhile, B-25s and P-51s softened up enemy positions with more than 335 sorties. Tow planes practiced getting off the ground with heavily laden gliders attached to them by ropes, while the Chindits themselves practised getting in and out of mock-glider interiors thrown together out of bamboo.
At 18 12 hours on the evening of 5th March, a C-47 towing two Waco gliders roared down the runway of the Lalaghat airfield in eastern India. The second Chindit foray into Burma was under way. Within two hours, waves of gliders slammed down on an obstacle-ridden jungle clearing dubbed "Broadway". Most of them landed safely, but some somersaulted over ditches, smashed into trees or hurtled into other wrecked aircraft. Seventeen had snapped loose from their tow lines while in the air, and nine of them had come down in Japanese territory. Confused Chindits in one downed glider fought a pitched battle with a rescue team of British troops.
Within a week after the landing at Broadway, Wingate had nearly twelve thousand troops in Burma, three quarters of whom had arrived by air. Other strips were quickly established, each protected by its own stronghold. The Chindits dug bunkers, laid telephone lines, aligned their heavy weapons and strung miles of barbed wire not only around entire positions, but around individual platoons, companies and battalions as well. The stronghold at Broadway eventually included a hospital, cultivated fields, a chicken farm and shops.
From these fortresses in the jungle, Wingate's raiders slashed out time and again at enemy lines of communication, tearing up railroad tracks and destroying supplies. And when the Japanese moved to eject the invaders from their bases, the Chindits fought back fiercely in hand-to-hand combat. Chindit Major John Masters, in his book ‘The Road Past Mandalay’, described the terrible aftermath of the fighting in vivid wasteland terms: "blasted trees, feet and twisted hands sticking up out of the earth, bloody shirts, ammunition clips, holes half-full of water, and over all the heavy, sweet stench of death, from our own bodies and entrails lying unknown in the shattered ground, from Japanese corpses on the wire, or fastened, dead and rotting, in the trees".
By 12th March 1944, a force of nine battalions with heavy weapons had been flown to areas 100 miles east of the string of Japanese posts along the Chindwin River which mark the 'front', between the British Fourteenth Army and the Japanese. The initial fly-in was nine thousand men, 1 300 pack-animals (mules) and 223 tons of stores and ammunition; a terrific feat of airmanship and staff-work. This was only the beginning. Before March was over another brigade had arrived, having marched successfully through the Japanese outposts and another was being flown in. Defended bases complete with landing grounds had been established deep in Japanese held Burma.
At the period of its greatest expansion Wingate's army was giving the Japanese blow for blow and were harrying the supply routes of their two fronts; one facing the British in the west and the other General Joseph 'Vinegar Joe' Stilwell's Chinese to the north. By then, the long-expected Japanese offensive against the British Fourteenth Army had begun. Stilwell with his Chinese army was struggling through the forests and mountains of far northern Burma, and not making much progress.
After much debate, the Chindits, were ordered north to assist Stilwell directly, their agreed strategic mission all along. Some Chindit senior officers opposed the whole scheme from the beginning. They pointed out sourly, but not without military sense, that this vast force had achieved little of value in relation to its cost. The upshot was that some twenty four battalions, almost three divisions, were out of the war crippled by malnutrition, exhaustion and tropical illness. Moreover, they had been absent from the scene of the decisive battle on the borders of India around Kohima-Imphal. As for the main aim, in spite of the Chindits' great effort, a handful of Japanese had held Stilwell up for over two months. The debate has gone on ever since at great length and with no little bitterness. Much of it has centred on Wingate's personality and relations with fellow generals
The Chindits fought on valiantly in Burma until they were finally withdrawn in August. With the help of close air support, they had defeated eleven Japanese battalions and tied up troops the enemy desperately needed elsewhere. But their inspiring, eccentric leader was not on hand to share their success. On the evening of 24th March 1944, Wingate was returning from a visit to his troops when the B-25 he was in suddenly plunged into the rugged hills west of Imphal. So violent was the crash and the ensuing fire that little more than Wingate's battered pith helmet and some charred letters from home remained with which to make positive identification.
Long Range Penetration, as advocated by Wingate, rested on three pillars. The first was airpower. The Chindits were to reach their objectives by air, and they were to be supplied by air, while their heavy fire support was to come from the air as well. This freed them from all conventional worries about front or flanks, and dependence on artillery and road bound supply columns. The second foundation was radio control. Radio communications freed the columns from a rigid command and staff HQ structure. They were to be manoeuvred from a single HQ far away, like ships at sea. Thirdly, the Chindits were an elite fighting force. It is often said that they were not specialists like commandos or paratroops but ordinary regiments trained according to Wingate's unique methods. This is not altogether correct. There was extensive and ruthless reform of ordinary line units transferred to Wingate; everyone over 40 years of age was excluded and there were army-wide appeals for volunteers, and many came forward. These last were the best, for they were drawn from a large number of eager young men stranded in boring, static duties all over India, remote from any kind of action.
Wingate's doctrine was largely derived from his guerrilla experience in Palestine, Ethiopia, and on the first Chindit Raid of February-April 1943. His specially designed units were designed to exert the maximum leverage by emerging from the jungle cover of Burma to raid, ambush and cut communications. But formal operations were not precluded; far from it. The Chindits were prepared to hold positions, with mobile columns. They could march on a key position, sending some columns to isolate it, and capture it in formal assault. Wingate's strongholds, the fortified camps where his troops could rest and refit were sited deep in the jungle and only accessible on foot or by air. Supply in the field was by air-drop and the wounded were flown out by light aircraft from the actual battlefield direct to hospitals in India.
The detailed strategic picture of the South-East Asia theatre was extremely complex and continually changing. Basically it was dominated by the United States, which saw that Japan could most effectively be defeated nearer Japan. The US planners were realists; to them, India and Burma were secondary theatres, even irrelevant. China was far more important. Given aid, her land forces could soak up enormous Japanese resources. And better still, if the Japanese could be cleared from parts of Eastern China, US bomber bases could be established near the coast and Japan attacked from close range. But China was cut off by land and sea, all war materials' having to be flown in, and of course, of all bulk supply methods the air is the most wasteful and costliest. General Stilwell (Chinese expert, former, chief instructor at Fort Benning, the US infantry school, fire-eater and Anglophobe) with two, later three, US equipped Chinese divisions, trained by Stilwell himself, was given the mission of clearing the extreme north of Burma. This would open up a land route for road and a petrol pipeline to be driven from Assam to China.
What the Americans were prepared to listen to was any plan designed to help Stilwell forward. This was where Wingate came in. The US planners saw that a descent on occupied north Burma could cut off Stilwell's opponents from supply and reinforcement. The British tend to look at any new idea to see what's wrong with it and then find reasons for rejecting it. The Americans are quite the reverse, they see if they can make it work better. At the Quebec conference in July 1943 they gave Wingate their enthusiastic blessing. He was given No 1 Air Commando, a pocket air force, to enable him to put his doctrine into practice and an American infantry regiment to train according to his peculiar methods. It was later transferred to Stilwell and became the so-called 'Merrill’s’ Marauders'.
Wingate thus had his foot in the door, but with lofty strategic vision he looked far beyond the prosaic task of cutting supply lines for some other commander to reap the victory and glory. His official mission could be accomplished by raiding operations and something more ambitious against the road-rail focus in the Indaw area. But Indaw had two airfields. One of the many plans made, and discarded, for the SE Asia theatre was Operation Capital, in which an airborne descent was to be followed up by the fly-in of two conventio