I was never aware of any ‘Wingate way in war’, nor did I ever hear him talk about one

Orde Wingate presented a body of military thought which evolved organically throughout his career. This began in the Sudan Defence Force, with his patrols against the Shifta, which informed the techniques he applied with the Special Night Squads in Palestine. From this, he began to argue that specially organised, selected and trained military units, penetrating areas which the enemy thought ‘safe’ to attack key enemy vulnerabilities, were the ideal means of imposing British ‘will’ upon enemy commanders and shaping the situation to British advantage, a theme running through his papers and correspondence to the latter days of his career, in Burma in 1944.

He developed this idea further in Ethiopia in 1941, where, although inheriting an operation devised by G(R), a covert warfare organisation hoping to use local irregulars for this role, his experiences brought him to the view that such irregulars were, at best, of limited effectiveness and, at worst, totally unreliable and driven by their own agenda. Consequently, guerrilla warfare in the enemy’s rear should centre upon units of purpose-trained regular troops with local partisans assisting them. This argument was presented in two key papers – his ‘Appreciation of the Ethiopia Campaign’ and his official report on the operation, and he designated this method Long Range Penetration. He hoped to apply this model in Burma in 1942-43, but was precluded from this by the situation there, in particular the large-scale collaboration between the Burmese majority and the occupying Japanese. Instead, he devised his penultimate model for operations, which centred upon all-arms columns of wholly regular troops, ‘Chindits’, penetrating through the jungle at least 100 miles to the Japanese rear to attack critical nodes in their logistical infrastructure and, in doing so, disrupt their planning and preparation and create a strategic situation the Allied main armies in Southeast Asia could exploit. The Chindits themselves would rely upon air supply for their own logistics and close air support, in lieu of artillery, for their heavy firepower. Operation Longcloth, the first Chindit ‘expedition’ of 1943, was intended to demonstrate the efficacy of this method, and taught the British Army a number of valuable lessons in jungle warfare, the most important being that air supply of units engaged in mobile offensive operations in jungle country was possible; this was to become common practice in British forces in Southeast Asia in 1943-45. It was also successful enough to bring Wingate to the attention of the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who took him to the Quebec conference in August 1943, where he met, and equally impressed, President Roosevelt and the American Chiefs of Staff. On the strength of these meetings, not only did Wingate’s Chindit forces expand in size tenfold, with their own organic air support, courtesy of the USAAF, but Long Range Penetration became an important element in Allied strategy in Southeast Asia, which, in 1943-44, centred upon an offensive in northern Burma to re-open the Burma Road and land communications with China; indeed, it emerges from contemporary documents that, had certain proposals made by other senior officers been enacted, Wingate’s forces would not only have been even larger than they eventually were, but would have included LRP units from many Allied nations also.

The addition of an aviation element led Wingate to become more ambitious, and to advocate air-landing Chindit columns in the enemy rear to establish permanent bases not only from which they would carry out an extended campaign of harassment of Japanese communications with generous close air support, but which would induce the Japanese into battles of destruction by forcing them to attack these bases. Operation Thursday, the second Chindit operation of 1944, was intended by Wingate not only to demonstrate this model of operations, but prove to the world that this was a new, and potentially decisive form of warfare which could inflict a theatre-level defeat upon the Japanese on its own. Hence, Wingate’s different interpretation of the aims of the operation from his peers – they envisaged a supportive operation, intended to help the ‘conventional’ forces of General Stilwell forward onto their objectives, while his aim was to force the Japanese to ‘rout’ from northern Burma due to the destruction of their communications. At the time of his death, Wingate was envisaging a continent-wide victory arising from airborne offensives by LRP forces, with conventional forces reduced to holding territory they had cleared.

A study of the development of Wingate’s ideas, based upon his own papers and contemporary documents and testimony, and placed in the context of the development of British Army doctrinal thought and practice of his time – 1922 to 1944 – indicates that there was no one ‘master source’ for his ideas, nor is placing him within any particular ‘school of thought’ as easy as Kirby, Slim, Rossetto, Heilbrunn and, to a lesser extent, Bidwell and Lyman, have implied. He can be seen to have fitted into a number of doctrinal ‘currents’, some long-term, others less so. The official British Army doctrine, Field Service Regulations, editions of which were authored by Fuller and Wavell, centred upon the need for British commanders to impose a ‘master plan’ coordinating all their subordinates towards the single aim of enforcing their will upon the enemy; an emphasis upon breaking the enemy’s will to fight and ‘attacking his plan’ is visible throughout Wingate’s career, as is emphasis upon working to a single ‘Master Plan’ – witness his use of wireless to attempt to control widely dispersed forces in both Ethiopia and Burma. Field Service Regulations propounded also the need to engage and destroy enemy forces in battle – as did Wingate in Palestine, Ethiopia and on Thursday – but also envisaged a role for forces which would penetrate the enemy rear to attack his ‘administrative arrangements.’ Wingate, therefore, did not deviate as far from the ‘official’ doctrine as might be supposed.

Other methods associated with Wingate were established operational practice in ‘small wars’ fought outside Europe – the very arena in which Wingate obtained all his operational experience. The British Army had been using all-arms columns to surround and cordon off insurgent forces and dominate areas for decades, and, by the 1930s, not only were the actions of these columns being coordinated by wireless, but experiments were being carried in supporting these columns by aircraft in lieu of artillery, and re-supplying them by air, also. Such columns formed the basis of British operations in Ireland in 1919-22, various counter-insurgencies in the Middle East and India in the 1920s and 30s, and in Palestine, where Wingate served as an intelligence officer and with the SNS, in 1936-39. These methods were carried into operations against conventional forces in British offensives in the Middle East and East Africa in 1940-41, operations carried out by forces and commanders with extensive experience in ‘small wars’; in particular, much use was made of ‘Jock Columns’, all-arms ad hoc formations, organised as much for mobility as for fighting power, to harry Axis communications. Wingate’s use of such columns, with similar intent and similar means of command and control, is therefore perhaps not as surprising or as ‘heretical’ as some authors might claim.

Another long-standing practice from ‘small wars’ and, indeed, one still visible today, is the use of specialist ‘penetration’ forces to infiltrate and wage war inside enemy-controlled territory. The British Army had been using locally-raised units of ‘scouts’ and ‘skirmishers’ in colonial operations at least since the nineteenth century, and by the early twentieth, these were being used either to establish a British presence within certain designated areas – as with the ‘Auxies’ in Ireland – or for ‘ambush work’ along favoured enemy routes of movement and supply, as with the Gurkha Scouts on the Northwest Frontier. Wingate’s Night Squads therefore fit into a pattern: they included locally-recruited volunteers under British training, for ‘ambush work’, and their role developed eventually to extending the British presence within a deeply hostile area of Palestine. Again, this practice was continued into the Second World War, with forces such as the Long Range Desert Group and, later, the Special Air Service, the latter of which was revived, post-war, as a counter-insurgency and counter-terrorist unit. The Chindits in particular have been identified as part of this trend by Heilbrunn and John W Gordon, and, again, Wingate can be seen as part of his time and place, not departing from them.

The period after 1940 saw Britain, unable to do anything more directly, adopt a strategy for prolonging the war based on blockade, aerial bombing and encouraging sabotage, subversion and guerrilla warfare inside Axis-occupied territory, an approach extended to the Japanese in 1941-42. The encouragement of resistance was tasked to a number of covert warfare organisations including MI(R) and its Middle Eastern offshoot, G(R), with the aim of using indigenous partisans as locally produced penetration forces, waging extended guerrilla warfare inside enemy territory culminating in major attacks upon his communications in support of offensives by Allied regular forces. A doctrine for the raising and use of such forces had been authored in 1940 by Colonel Colin Gubbins, then with MI(R) and later the Director of the Special Operations Executive; this centred upon inserting teams of regular British personnel, trained guerrilla warfare specialists, into enemy-occupied territory to liaise with and train local guerrilla forces, provide them with a degree of planning and technical support, and ensure they were directed to British strategic aims. The application of this doctrine is visible in G(R)’s planning for guerrilla operations inside Ethiopia, which Wingate took over late in their development.

Wingate – for reasons unclear from his papers or those of any other – escalated the role of these teams – by then known as Operational Centres - from liaison, training and advice to that of fighting units, intended to wage war on enemy communications deep in their rear and to inspire a mass uprising by their example. Wingate expounded this model in his ‘Appreciation’ and official report on the Ethiopia operation, where they formed the basis of his new doctrine of Long Range Penetration. He hoped to apply this model upon his arrival in Burma in 1942, but circumstances described already drove him towards greater ‘regularisation’ and the Chindit concept. LRP, therefore, might have been derived, indirectly, from the ideas of Gubbins as from any other individual, and, indeed, MI(R) were propounding similar concepts as early as 1940.

Another theme running through Wingate’s military thought is that warfare is human-centred and dialectical, centring upon matching the ‘national characteristics’ of British soldiers against those of the enemy. Hence, Wingate, arguing that Arab guerrillas favoured warfare based upon ‘hit and run’, advocated tactics based upon ambush and decisive close-quarter action involving cold steel (an idea shared with his commander in Palestine, Brigadier John Evetts), while the Japanese soldier was brave but obtuse, necessitating that he be fought using methods which emphasised ambiguity and setting a tempo he could not cope with. These methods, Wingate argued, would build upon British strengths – superior training, initiative and aggression – and advantages derived from superior intelligence (in both the military and general sense of the term) and technology. Such ideas were commonplace in ‘small wars’, and, indeed, Charles Callwell and Charles Gwynn both presented similar arguments in their theoretical works in this field. They can also be found in other contemporary works relating to the war in Burma. The cultural strengths and weaknesses of the Japanese soldier, and how to exploit them, were themes in training pamphlets and, indeed, in the memoirs of Field Marshal Lord Slim, the leading, and most respected British field commander in that theatre. Wingate can again, be seen as a product of his times.

Yet, it was with Slim that the most major differences emerged between Wingate’s ideas and those of others. Prior to 1943, Wingate could rely at least upon a sympathetic hearing from his senior commanders – Evetts, Wavell and Haining in Palestine, Wavell again in East Africa and the early stages of his Burma operations, and Mountbatten later. Wingate received support from these personages mainly because he offered viable solutions to strategic dilemmas they faced, and, at least, in Wavell’s case, because Wavell himself was an enthusiast for mobile and penetration warfare, expressed in the patterns of operations he adopted in Palestine, in the Middle East in 1940-41, and his proposed operations against Japanese-occupied Burma in 1942. As noted in the chapter on Palestine, there seems to have been a considerable interchange of ideas between Wingate and Evetts. However, in 1943, Wingate came under the operational command of Fourteenth Army, whose commander, William Slim, held ideas on beating the Japanese fundamentally different from his. Both men aimed to engage the Japanese in battles of annihilation, but differed on how to achieve this. Wingate hoped that his Strongholds, and Chindit columns issuing from them to attack Japanese communications, would force the Japanese to attempt a counter-offensive in which they would have no choice to attack the Strongholds in hostile terrain and with their flanks and rear under attack from other Chindit elements; if they concentrated for an attack, they could be pulverised from above by attached airpower. At levels above the battlefield, threats to their communications would force the Japanese into retreat.

Slim’s method, at least for the period he had Wingate under command, also hinged upon luring the Japanese into battles on unfavourable ground, but, on the defensive, this involved inducing them to come forward into the open country of the Imphal Plain to attack IV Corps’ ‘box’ defences, whereupon they would be pounded by Fourteenth Army’s superior air and firepower. On the offensive, rather than Wingate’s technique of mobility and dispersal, Slim aimed at applying overwhelming numbers and firepower in order to avoid a ‘fair fight’ and ensure the Japanese did not stand a chance. Slim certainly had a role for the Chindits, but this was to weaken Japanese forces at the front by attacking targets in their rear, denying them vital supplies and forcing them to keep troops from the front to protect their communications. Slim was also to use air-portable units in his offensive into southern Burma in 1945, but these were used to reinforce a rapid ground advance, the opposite of Wingate’s vision for them. ‘History is written by the winners’: Slim was able to demonstrate his model of victory whereas Wingate was not, and their differences of opinion were expressed lucidly in Slim’s memoirs, a major source in the literature.

The major conclusion of this thesis, therefore, is that the ‘Wingate model of warfare’ was of its time, had multiple sources and enjoyed multiple institutional and cultural influences, and found a degree of acceptance from Wingate’s peers and superiors until the end of his career. Even Slim accepted that there was a role for LRP, albeit not on the scale that Wingate envisaged. LRP seems to have grown organically from British practices in ‘small wars’ and the doctrine for covert operations devised by Colin Gubbins in 1940. It was adapted by Wingate to meet the strategic situations faced in Ethiopia and Burma, filtered through his own agenda and a number of factors arising from British military culture of the early to mid twentieth century.
The Literature Reassessed

In the light of these findings, a number of previous works claiming to ‘place’ Wingate in one school of thought or the other can be seen as manifestly over-simplified. Indeed, as implied in the introduction, they might be viewed as polemics for their time, merely using Wingate as a ‘case study’ in support of whatever set of ideas they are enthusing about. The most obvious, and egregious, example was Wilfred Burchett, who tried to present Wingate as a fellow revolutionary, fighting the good fight, but some investigating Wingate’s military ideas fall into this trap also. Elliot-Bateman wrote in the 1960s, against the background of Malaya and Vietnam, and Wingate was presented as an exemplar of ‘people’s war’. Heilbrunn’s and Rossetto’s works come from the same period, but their emphasis is upon how penetration forces may be used to defeat larger regular forces, an echo not only of Vietnam, but of the prevailing scenario of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Lyman and Atkins wrote in the late 1990s and early 2000s, against the background of the post-1970s American and British Army’s rediscovery of ‘manoeuvre warfare’, and so Wingate and Slim were presented as forerunners of this. To many authors, Wingate has been what they wanted him to be.

Other authors can be seen as approaching more closely the model emerging from Wingate’s own papers and other testimony from the time. John W Gordon correctly placed Wingate in the context of the enthusiastic use of special and penetration forces by the British Army in the Second World War, while Shelford Bidwell, as cited in the introduction, summarised Wingate’s claim to have no peer or inspiration, although he implied that there was an unacknowledged Liddell Hart influence. Among Wingate’s most prominent critics, Kirby and Slim can be seen as focusing upon one particular aspect of Wingate’s operational thought and practice and criticising it: Kirby was not incorrect in criticising Wingate as a guerrilla leader, nor was Slim in citing him as part of his case against Special Forces, but both were inaccurate in implying that these particular aspects of his ideas were all that he was about. In all cases, attempts to analyse and ‘place’ Wingate’s ideas were hampered by the inaccessibility of his papers until Lorna’s death in 1995, this thesis being the first extended work to be based upon them. Orde Wingate and the literature about him need, therefore, to be re-assessed in the light of his papers’ availability and this work is the first step in this direction.
Avenues for further research

These papers can be the starting point for further research not only on Wingate, but on military operations of his time. One theme touched upon throughout this study, but only incidental to the central thesis question, is the possible inspiration for Wingate’s ideas. It has been established that he shared ideas with Evetts, met with Liddell Hart and derived elements of LRP from Gubbins’ doctrine for covert operations, but there seems to have been little grounding in theory derived from reading the works of others. Wingate seems to have been familiar with Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom and was widely read in English literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries², and a survey of works of military literature he had in his possession followed by comparing and contrasting them with his own thought and practice might clarify issues raised in this thesis further, as well as allowing a more thorough assessment of previous literature about him.

Another theme is the extent to which the controversy surrounding Wingate was based upon his presenting a form of warfare his peers found unacceptable. Again, this has been touched upon in this thesis, particularly in terms of Wingate’s relationship with Slim and GHQ India, but there is also plenty of implication in the literature that he had his critics in Palestine and Ethiopia.³ There is extensive correspondence between Wingate and others in his papers, not all of it cited in this thesis, but some of it concerning his approach to operations and some of this extremely heated; an entire alternative thesis might be written on the origins of the animosity towards Wingate, which must now be reassessed in the light of the findings of this one, that his ideas, when placed in their context, were perhaps less radical than supposed hitherto.

A third possible subject for investigation, following from the findings of this thesis, is an assessment of the effectiveness of Wingate’s operations, a common theme in the literature, but again, hampered by the unavailability of Wingate’s papers and other contemporary documents. Calvert, Tulloch, Thompson and Mead all discuss this issue at great length, but now it might be possible to match Wingate’s intent, as derived from his papers, with their interpretations of it; it might also be feasible to compare this with assessments of Wingate in other collections and contemporary documents. A reassessment of Kirby’s and Slim’s views of Wingate might also be possible.

Moving beyond Wingate, as noted above, the history of MI(R) and G(R) remains unwritten, apart from summaries in histories of SOE. Wingate’s papers, combined with the PRO papers cited in the chapters on Ethiopia and Burma, would be a major source for such a work, in that they cover the largest and most important action carried out by these organisations.

Consequently, it can be concluded that although this thesis has advanced the body of knowledge about Orde Wingate, and presents a better-balanced understanding of certain aspects of his relationship with the British Army of his era, he remains an interesting, controversial and sometimes enigmatic figure with much work still to be done on him.

1. 
   Interview with the author of 23/8/2004
   
2. 
   See, for instance, Sykes, Orde Wingate, pp.40-41, 335-336, 498-499
   
3. 
   In his interview with the author of 23/8/2004, Sir Douglas Dodds-Parker opined that Wingate’s Distinguished Service Order for Palestine was won ‘not entirely honourably.’