Books: The Lion of Burma

ORDE WINGATE (575 pp.)—Christopher Sykes—World ($6).

In 1933. Orde Wingate was an obscure, 30-year-old British army lieutenant stationed at an obscure post in the Sudan. His future seemed bleak, for most people found him untidy in person and conceited in mind. All his actions tended to infuriate, whether he was receiving visitors naked, or praising Communism to hidebound Tories, or sneering at sports to his athletic fellow officers. It was easy to understand why his schoolboy nickname had been “Stinker.”

Stocky (5 ft. 6 in.), with a simian gait, a large, handsome head and a loud, clear voice that was usually raised in argument, Orde Wingate saw himself eternally at war with “the tyranny of the dull mind,” i.e., nine-tenths of his immediate military superiors and nearly all army regulations. When he was passed over for an appointment to the Staff College, Wingate strode to a Yorkshire hilltop where General Sir Cyril Deverell, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, stood in the midst of his aides, watching maneuvers. Wingate saluted and gave the astounded general a severe talking-to (eventually he won his appointment). Time and again later, Wingate was to go over the heads of his field commanders and appeal successfully to the topmost brass, right up to Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Time for Action. Orde Wingate came into the world violently (his mother was near to death in childbirth), lived violently, died violently. He had an intense feeling of mission, and believed he was fated “to lead a country” to glory; sometimes he would add harshly, “Any country would do.” His first choice was Palestine. Posted to the Holy Land in 1936 as a British intelligence officer, he flung himself with typical passion into the Zionist cause. The Jews, knowing that Wingate was born into an evangelical Protestant sect (the Plymouth Brethren) and was a distant relative of the famed Lawrence of Arabia, at first thought he was a spy, or crazy. He violently urged the raising of a Jewish national army, and personally established the special night squads, mixed patrols of Jewish policemen and British soldiers to combat Arab terrorists. The British army distrusted Wingate even more than the Jews, and he was sent home in disgrace.

Wingate’s influential friends helped him fight back with an Appeal to King George VI, but the issue vanished with the outbreak of World War II. Wingate, as a guerrilla specialist, was ordered to Ethiopia, and he embraced that nation and its exiled Emperor Haile Selassie as fiercely as he had Zionism. He led his small Gideon force of British troops and Ethiopian irregulars in a brilliant campaign against a large but dispirited Italian army. Wearing shorts, and mounted on a white horse, Wingate proudly escorted Haile

Selassie into his capital of Addis Ababa, disobeying army orders and breaking regulations right and left along the way.

Again in disgrace, he was sent back to Cairo and moped around headquarters. His depression was deepened by Atabrine taken to combat malaria. One gloomy afternoon in his hotel room he stabbed himself twice in the throat with a hunting knife. His life was saved by a British colonel next door, who said afterward: “When I hear a feller lock a door, I don’t think anything about it, and if I hear a feller fall down, that’s his affair, but when I hear a feller lock his door and then fall down—it’s time for action.”

Long-Range Penetration. Wingate’s mental recovery was swift. He told his first visitors that his suicide had failed because his campaign had not been as carefully prepared as usual: he should have relaxed first with a hot bath so that his neck muscles would not have become tense, and turned the blade. Influence and nerve got him back into action. Within seven months he was sent to India, where a demoralized British army was still reeling from the loss of Burma. Wearing his accustomed sun helmet and a biblical beard, Wingate developed his theory of “long-range penetration groups” to operate behind the Japanese lines.

Wingate’s air officer was U.S. Colonel Philip Cochran, who had won some fame of his own as the model for “Flip Corkin” in Milton Caniff’s comic strip, Terry and the Pirates. On their first meeting, Cochran thought Wingate was an elaborate hoax, and was so baffled by his British public-school accent (Charterhouse) that he was sure Wingate suffered from an impediment in his speech. But at their second meeting, Cochran found “something very deep” about him and realized he “was beginning to assimilate some of the flame of this guy Wingate.”

Five Memorials. Wingate’s Burma raiders were called the Chindits (a mispronunciation of the Burmese chinthé, lion), and in their first thrust against the Japanese they lost 800 out of 3,000 men. His second Chindit campaign began far more successfully, but no one will ever know how it would have developed. Early in the operation, Wingate was killed in the crash of a U.S. plane. Military men still argue the value of Wingate’s tactical ideas. The U.S. borrowed them for Merrill’s Marauders (TIME, April 30) with equally inconclusive results. In this able but densely written biography. Author Christopher (Four Studies in Loyalty) Sykes insists there can be no doubt of their psychological importance. Wingate proved to a disheartened army that British troops could be as adept at jungle fighting as the Japanese. To beleaguered Britain, his exploits brought a badly needed exhilaration, after the long succession of defeats from Hong Kong to Singapore to Burma.

Wingate died at 41, and may have wanted it that way. “I can’t imagine at all what can happen to a man like me in old age,” he said once. His memorials are a plaque in the chapel at Charterhouse, where he spent a miserable adolescence, a boys’ school named after him in Ethiopia, an Israeli children’s village called Yemin Orde, and the stirring obituary of Winston Churchill, who hailed Wingate as “a man of genius who might well have become also a man of destiny.” Despite the protests of his family and Sir Winston, Orde Wingate is buried in Washington’s Arlington Cemetery with the eight other victims of the U.S. plane crash. Why? Because the bodies could not be distinguished, but it was known that there were more Americans than Britons; hence, according to regulations, all were buried in the U.S.