The Sharp Side

The memorial to Orde Wingate on the embankment, across the river from the London Eye and County Hall. The memorial, not far from Big Ben, faces the offices of the Ministry of Defence; the front portion, facing the river, is a memorial to those associated with the Burma campaign in the Second World War.© Ellis Sharp 2006

The conventional view of Major General Orde Wingate (1903-1944) is that he was a brilliantly unconventional soldier, a brave man who three times won the Distinguished Service Order, and a tactician whose name will be forever associated with the guerrilla unit known as the Chindits, who fought in Burma during the Second World War. Wingate died when the plane he was on crashed into the side of a mountain in India. Winston Churchill said of him: "There was a man of genius who might well have become also a man of destiny."

Well, forget all that. Orde Wingate was a man who, by the standards of the Second World War and the judgements passed at Nuremberg, should have been hanged as a war criminal. He wasn’t all that great as a soldier either. Major General Woodburn Kirby, author of the Official History of the Burma Campaign (1961), wrote

Wingate had neither the knowledge, stability nor balance to make a great commander. Just as timing played a great part in his rise to prominence so the moment of his death may perhaps have been quite propitious for him.

This judgement continues to outrage admirers of Orde Wingate but if anything was far too generous. It was connections, not timing or merit, that won him promotion. Wingate’s military career abroad falls into four parts: (i) the Sudan 1928-1935 - a posting he characteristically obtained through his cousin, Sir Francis Reginald Wingate, a Governor General of Sudan and High Commissioner of Egypt. (ii) Palestine 1936-1939 (iii) the Sudan 1941 (iv) India/Burma 1942-44.

In identifying Wingate as a war criminal I am concentrating on his activities in Palestine. To understand his crimes it’s necessary to put them into two contexts – the personal and the historical.

Wingate’s personality was shaped by his extreme religious upbringing: his parents belonged to a faction of the fringe fundamentalist Christian Protestant sect known as Plymouth Brethren, and were strict disciplinarians. He seems to have had an austere, punishing childhood; he was also saturated in the Old Testament and made to memorise passages of the Bible by heart.

This deeply damaged childhood probably accounts for Wingate’s weird, unstable personality as an adult: dogmatic, arrogant, averse to taking a bath or a shower, deeply unpopular with his fellow officers, keen on outlandish health fads and contemptuous of doctors, a would-be suicide, and curiously fond of exhibiting himself naked in front of other men. He kept a Bible with him at all times and fervently believed he was the instrument of God’s wishes.

Wingate’s arrival in the Palestine in 1936 had an electrifying impact upon him. He was now in a landscape which he knew profoundly – but through the medium of the Old Testament, not its actual social history. For Wingate it was a mythic landscape, to be shaped by theological imperatives. He had been brought up to believe in Christian prophecy and the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land. In effect what happened in 1936 was that British imperialism in the Middle East and the increasingly powerful Zionist movement in Palestine converged to give Orde Wingate an opportunity to put his theology into action through the instruments of terrorism and murder.

Rod Quinn rightly identifies the material, imperialist motives which sanctioned Zionism and Christianity in Palestine:

If Christian fundamentalism provided some justification for what was essentially the British colonisation of Palestine, economic fundamentalism provided the rest. Control of Palestine meant control and strategic protection of the Suez Canal and Britain’s major source of oil. In encouraging the fulfilment of God’s covenant with Abraham, the British Mandate prepared the foundations for a protected European outpost policing the region. With characteristic bluntness, Winston Churchill stated that: "The Balfour Declaration must, therefore, not be regarded as a promise given from sentimental motives; it was a practical measure taken in the interests of a common cause at a moment when that cause could afford to neglect no factor of material or moral assistance"

Wingate came to Palestine as a Captain in military intelligence, based in Nazareth. His arrival coincided with a massive national wave of protest and resistance by Palestinians both to British military occupation and to growing Jewish immigration and sectarian land appropriation. One important form of resistance was the sabotage of the railway system and of the pipeline bringing oil from Kirkuk in Iraq to the port of Haifa.

Wingate persuaded General Wavell, Commander of British Forces in Palestine, to let him set up Special Night Squads (SNS). These were units which combined a small number of British troops with much larger numbers of armed Jewish colonists. They were located not in British army bases but in Zionist settlements. Wingate trained his squads in guerrilla warfare and night fighting.

This military alliance between the British occupiers and the Zionist colonists took other forms. Thousands of Jewish settlers enlisted in the colonial police force. Just as Wingate was unequivocal about the true purpose of the SNS (“establishing the foundations of the Army of Zion”), so the Zionist leader Moshe Shertok understood that Jews in the occupation police service would provide valuable recruits for a future Jewish fighting force against the Palestinians.

Wingate’s aim was to deter Palestinian resistance to occupation by launching attacks on Arab villages. Brutality, torture and murder were employed, ostensibly to identify and punish individuals engaged in the Palestinian resistance and to seize arms. In practice the SNS were state licensed terrorists who imposed collective punishments, both in reprisal for any local acts of resistance to occupation and in the hope of deterring wider social support for the resistance.
But Wingate, though a fanatic, was not a rotten apple in a barrel of wholesome fruit. As John Rose rightly notes, “it is difficult to separate Wingate’s excesses from the wider British apparatus of repression of the revolt…the principle of collective punishment, so beloved by the Israeli army, was pioneered by the British.” (John Rose, The Myths of Zionism (Pluto Press, 2004), p. 130)

The evidence for Wingate’s personal sponsorship of and involvement in war crimes comes from those who were accomplices in them. Quinn cites one such instance:

Describing his own initiation into Special Night Squad tactics, Moshe Dayan said that after killing four and capturing five Palestinians in an attack on a "suspect" village, Wingate provided his pupils with a practical example of his military doctrines. When the captives protested ignorance of the whereabouts of an arms cache,"Wingate reached down and took some sand and grit from the ground; he thrust it into the mouth of the first Arab and pushed it down his throat until he choked and puked". Questioned again, the Arab still denied knowledge of the arms and Wingate ordered a Jewish Squad member to shoot the still spluttering and coughing prisoner. The Jew looked at him at him questioningly and hesitated. "Wingate said in a tense voice, ‘Did you hear? Shoot him.’ The Jew shot the Arab. The others stared for a moment, in stupefaction, at the body at their feet. The boys from Hamita (the ‘suspect’ village) were watching in silence. ‘Now speak,’ said Wingate. They spoke"(Dayan quoted in Leonard Moseley, Gideon Goes to War, 1955).

Tzion Cohen, another member of the SNS, described how Wingate would sometimes whip Palestinian villagers on their bare backs:

As time went on, Tzion Cohen wrote, the punishments became more severe. Sometimes Wingate would make the villagers smear mud and oil on their faces. On occasion he would shoot and kill them.

(Cited in Tom Segev, One Palestine Complete (Abacus, 2001) p. 430)

In reprisal for the killing of fifteen Jews in Tiberias, Wingate and his troops marched into a village called Hitin. Ten men were arbitrarily selected and executed.

One of Wingate’s officers, Humphrey Edgar Nicholson Bredin, once ordered all the men in a village to line up. Every fifteenth man was shot dead.

‘At times British soldiers went out on operations drunk; they tortured Arabs and looted the villages.’ (Segev, Op. Cit., p. 431)

No numbers seem to be available for the number of Palestinians murdered or ill-treated by Wingate, his officers and men. Collectively, they presumably ran into the hundreds. Even if any Palestinians kept records of these atrocities it has to be remembered that many fled in terror in the ethnic cleansing of 1948, often leaving not just their homes but all their possessions and documents behind. It is also the case since 1948 that the Israeli state has sought to seize statistical data owned by Palestinians. The Zionist project over the past half century has been twofold: one is to extend sectarian appropriation of Palestinian land, the other is to annihilate Palestinian national identity in every possible way.

Although the great Palestinian resistance of 1936-39 was finally broken and repressed by the power of imperial Britain, the costs to Britain were enormous. By the end of 1938 the financial burden of occupation had rocketed, 63 British soldiers had been killed and one-tenth of the British regular army was tied up in Palestine. As Quinn notes:

One achievement of the Revolt was that the current (Conservative) British government finally recognised the three main [Palestinian] demands on immigration, land sales and self-determination. The White Paper of May 1939 abandoned partition and recommended that, though remaining tied by treaty to Britain, Palestine should be self-governing within a decade, that neither Arabs nor Jews should dominate a Palestinian government, that Jewish immigration be restricted to 75,000 per year, after which there be no immigration without Arab consent, and that sales of Arab land be restricted.

Wingate was enraged by this capitulation. Previously, in October 1938, he had requested home leave and in London had a private meeting with Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald to lobby against the findings of the 1938 Woodhead Commission, which had abandoned earlier proposals to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. Now he urged his Zionist allies to rise up against the British occupation. He even offered to lead a Jewish attack on the Haifa oil refinery. But his views were too extreme even for the Zionist movement, which, believed in a more cautious approach.

Wingate had by this time fallen out of favour with army command and he was sent back to Britain and prohibited from re-entering Palestine. He departed, promising his Zionist allies that he would one day return and lead a Jewish army to victory. His death in an air crash prevented that possibility but it is a fact that many of those who served in the SNS later became leading figures in the Israeli army. Today, Orde Wingate is honoured as a significant figure in the creation of Israel. Appropriately, there is even a 77-acre campus, on ethnically cleansed land, named in his honour: Yemin Orde (“in the memory of Orde”).





‘An important influence in the creation of the Israeli Defence Forces…’ © Ellis Sharp 2006

In the words of the Israeli Ministry of Defence: "The teaching of Orde Charles Wingate, his character and leadership were a cornerstone for many of the Haganah’s commanders, and his influence can be seen in the Israel Defense Force’s combat doctrine".

This is perfectly true. Orde Wingate’s inspiring example helped to make all these events possible.