Fire in the Night: Wingate of Burma, Ethiopia, and Zion

New York: Random House, 1999. — 435 p.As a reappraisal of the career of one of World War II’s most eccentric and controversial leaders, the biography of Orde C. Wingate by John Bierman and Colin Smith is very welcome. The official British history of the Burma campaign, written largely by officers who disliked Wingate (and there were many), has tended to play down the achievements of the two long-range penetration operations he mounted into Burma. Their opinion, however, was not shared by the raiders, known as Chindits, who served under him, nor by Lt. Gen. Renya Mutaguchi, commander of the Japanese Fifteenth Army in Burma, against whom the Chindits fought. A writer of adventure novels would have been hard pressed to dream up a character more outlandish than Wingate. Contrary to regulations, he sported a full beard, and carried an alarm clock with him into combat because he claimed that wristwatches did not work. After having spent five years serving with the Sudan Defense Force, Wingate, who spoke Arabic and Hebrew fluently, was posted to Palestine as an intelligence officer in the late 1930s. While serving in Palestine, Wingate went against the prevailing pro-Arab views of his countrymen and became a militant Zionist. Early in World War II, he was dispatched to the Sudan to organize a guerrilla campaign against the Italians in Ethiopia. Between February and April 1943, Wingate’s Chindits ravaged Japanese lines of communication in Burma. As the only British ground forces in the Far East who had managed to beat the Japanese up to that time, the Chindits found themselves the heroes of the hour. Wingate, however, was killed on the night of March 24, 1944, while being transported in one of the USAAF planes. By that time his second operation was well underway, with six semi-permanent strongholds established deep inside enemy territory, just in time to seriously interfere with Japan’s last offensive against northern India.