WINGATE, O.C.

Major-General Orde Charles Wingate (February 26, 1903-March 24, 1944) was a British officer who played a notable role in the Ethiopian liberation campaign of 1940-41, and was also prominent as a supporter of the Zionists in Palestine, and as organiser of the “Chin-dits,” a guerrilla force which fought from 1943-45 in Burma during World War II.

PHOTO CAPTION: Major-General Ore Charles Wingate. SOURCE: EA Library

Born in Naini Tal, in the foothills of the Himalayas, in the United Provinces of India, he was the son of a British Indian Army colonel who was a fervent member of the Plymouth Brethren, a Christian community founded in Plymouth, England, in 1831 which stressed Biblical prophecy.

Orde was educated at Charterhouse, a British public school, and trained at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, England. Influenced by the example of his cousin, Sir Reginald Wingate (1861-1953), the main founder of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, of which he was governor-general from 1899-1916, he studied at the School of Oriental Studies in London. He later travelled widely in Egypt, the Sudan, and Libya, and served in the Sudan Defense Force from 1929 to 1933.

Later, while serving on special duty (1936-39) in Palestine, though not himself a Jew, he became an enthusiastic Zionist, and a friend of Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), for long the moving spirit behind the World Zionist Organisation. In Palestine, he developed guerrilla tactics against Arabs seeking to cut the Haifa pipeline and organised Jewish squads to defend Jewish settlements then threatened by Arab raiders. He learned Hebrew, and hoped one day to lead a regular Jewish army. The possibility of his acting against British policy by seeking to promote Jewish independence led, however, to his transfer to Britain on the outbreak of World War II in 1939, where he was assigned to an anti-aircraft unit.

After the Italian Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, (in power 1922-43), declared war on Britain and France on June 10, 1940, the British government arranged for Emperor Haile Selassie  [reigned 1930-74] to fly to the Sudan, and appointed Wingate, then a major, as the British liaison officer with the exiled sovereign. Wingate at once promised the emperor his whole-hearted devotion and did not fail him.

PHOTO CAPTION: Wingate with Emperor Haile Selassie. SOURCE: Digland

On November 20, he had himself flown into Italian-occupied Ethiopia for a brief meeting with Colonel (later Brigadier) D. A. Sandford, another British officer who had made contact with the Ethiopian patriots. On January 20, 1941, Wingate crossed the Ethiopian frontier with the emperor, and a small group of British and Ethiopian troops he termed the “Gideon Force.” He served as the emperor’s commander-in-chief throughout the ensuing liberation campaign, which freed Gojam from Italian rule.

When the British, jealous of Ethiopian progress, and fearful of possible reprisals against the Italian civilian population, attempted to delay Haile Selassie’s advance on Addis Ababa, Wingate insisted that the emperor should press on to the capital. The British accepted the situation, and Wingate duly led the emperor’s army into Addis Ababa on May 5, 1941, exactly five years to the day after its capture by the Italians.

Official British displeasure at Wingate’s loyalty to the Ethiopian cause, which was regarded as akin to insubordination, led to his premature withdrawal from the country, and to his transfer to a minor post in the British Home Guard, a local defense auxiliary. But, always a very political officer, he succeeded in rehabilitating himself.

On February 24, 1942, he was promoted to brigadier, and entrusted by his old commander General (later Field-Marshall) Archibald Wavell, commander-in-chief of British forces in South-East Asia, with the task of organising a guerrilla force of British, Indians, and Burmese to fight against the Japanese in Burma. Wingate called this force the “Chindits.”

He was later made a major-general, and taken by the British wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, (in office 1940-45), to explain his ideas on guerrilla warfare to U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt (in office 1933-45) at a meeting in Quebec. While visiting one of his Chindit units, however, he was killed in a plane crash on March 24, 1944. He was buried in the United States in the military cemetery at Arlington, Virginia. Winston Churchill, in his tribute, called him “a man of genius who might well have also become a man of destiny.”

RICHARD PANKHURST