The Daring Dozen (37 page)

That was only part of the explanation as to why Wingate proposed to raise a unit of counter-insurgency troops to protect Jewish settlers from terror attacks in Palestine. Imbued as he was with an intimate knowledge of biblical history, Wingate believed that the Old Testament was the incontrovertible proof that Palestine belonged to the Jewish race.

In June 1938 Wingate submitted a paper to the British High Command in which he outlined his idea for Special Night Squads, the purpose of which was to conduct ‘night movements by armed forces of the Crown with the object of putting an end to terrorism in Northern Palestine’. Authorized to proceed, Wingate formed his squads as units of 12 men (ten soldiers, an NCO and an officer, all British) but in the first three months of the Night Squads’ existence he also recruited more than 100 Jewish volunteers to the force.

At their base at Ein Haroad, Wingate oversaw the training, drilling the 300 men in close combat, explosives and silent patrols. Many of his men found him eccentric and driven, but they admired his thoroughness and his determination that the Night Squads would succeed.

The Night Squads operated in an area between Haifa in the south and Nahariya to the north, protecting oil pipelines from sabotage by Arab guerrillas and engaging the enemy whenever possible. The unit quickly made a difference, killing more than 70 Arab fighters in a few weeks, and Wingate was awarded a DSO for his ‘consistent and arduous’ conduct in raising the Night Squads and turning them into such an effective force in a short space of time.

Gradually, however, Wingate’s activities aroused suspicion and eventually disapproval within the British headquarters in Jerusalem. It was considered that Wingate was fighting more for the Jewish cause than protecting British interests in Palestine. Wingate was relieved of his command and posted back to Britain, much to his disdain and the sorrow of the Jews, who had come to revere the Scottish Presbyterian as one of their own. He returned to England in the summer of 1939 to find an assessment of his work written by Wing Commander A.P. Ritchie, head of intelligence in Palestine:

Captain Wingate possesses many exceptional qualities; however his ardent nature which gives him the power to pursue an objective enthusiastically often obscures his judgement and distorts his sense of proportion. He has a first-class brain, is exceptionally well read and has great mental energy but he is liable to employ these gifts for the furtherance of some idea which he has adopted because of its emotional appeal. While he has been in Palestine he has given his sympathy so wholeheartedly to the Jewish cause that his service to the intelligence branch has become valueless. He is an exceptional linguist, possesses great physical energy and powers of endurance and has proved himself to be a tactician of outstanding ability.

It was a prescient report by Ritchie, one that infuriated Wingate but which nonetheless could be said to have characterized Wingate’s military career in the tumultuous years that lay ahead.

When Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939 Wingate was serving with the 56th Light Anti-Aircraft Brigade, a mundane posting after the excitement of his work in Palestine. He spent his time during the Phoney War, the dragging winter months that followed the outbreak of war, devising methods of how best to shoot down enemy bombers, and also conjuring with the possibility of raising a Jewish army in Palestine. Following the occupation of the Low Countries by German troops by June 1940, and the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk, Wingate instead turned his mind to the feasibility of waging a guerrilla war in Britain in the event of a Nazi invasion.

By September 1940, however, the RAF had defeated the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain and the threat of invasion had diminished. On 18 September Wingate was posted to Middle East Headquarters (MEHQ) in Cairo under the command of Archibald Wavell, Commander-in-Chief of Middle East Command. His task upon arriving at his new post was to wage an insurgency war in Ethiopia using local militia against the Italian forces.

Wingate embraced his new mission. As he had done in Palestine, he had found what he viewed as a noble cause to espouse, and, in Emperor Haile Selassie, Wingate had someone he respected and admired. Upon meeting Selassie for the first time on 6 November 1940, Wingate wrote: ‘I told him that the liberation of Ethiopia was an indispensible part of the British war aims; that it was also of the greatest importance that the Ethiopians themselves should play a leading role in the coming campaign, and, finally, that he should take as his motto an ancient proverb found in Gese: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”’
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Wingate began raising what came to be known as ‘Gideon Force’ (in honour of Gideon, whose story in the Old Testament was one of Wingate’s favourites). Consisting of two Ethiopian battalions and a battalion from the Sudan Defence Force, under the command of British NCOs and officers, the force planned to attack the Italians in the kingdom of Gojjam in north-west Ethiopia, while simultaneous attacks were launched by two Indian divisions in the north and three African divisions in the south.

The offensive began on 18 January 1941 and Wingate, promoted to temporary lieutenant-colonel, split Gideon Force into two as they entered Ethiopia, one half to cut the Dessye to Gondar road and harass the Northern Italian Force, the other half to wage a guerrilla war against the Italian garrisons and also seize the Nile bridge at Safartak. Before the attack commenced, Wingate instilled in his British officers the new concept of warfare upon which they were about to embark, reminding them that ‘surprise is the greatest weapon of the guerrilla; that it is far easier for him to obtain surprise against the enemy than vice-versa; that to obtain value for the surprise achieved the commander must think out carefully beforehand how he will exploit the enemy’s confusion’.
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Surprised the Italians certainly were in the weeks that followed the start of Gideon Force’s Ethiopian offensive. Finding their remote forts under attack and suffering several ambushes while out on patrol, the Italians began withdrawing. Meanwhile in the south the African divisions advanced almost without resistance, occupying nearly 800 miles of territory in under three weeks.

Wingate continued to press the attacks, leading one assault on the Addis fort on 20 March that ended in hand-to-hand fighting before the Italians surrendered. By April the campaign was all but over, and at the start of May Emperor Haile Selassie entered the capital Addis Ababa to jubilant acclaim.

Hardly had the campaign in Ethiopia run its course than Wingate (who was awarded a Bar to his DSO for his conduct and leadership) was exploring other ideas to attack the enemy. In June 1941 he was in Cairo, as was David Stirling, whose own ideas of Special Forces warfare were being developed from a hospital bed. Wingate drafted his concept for a guerrilla force and presented it to Wavell. A year earlier the commander-in-chief of British forces in the Middle East had authorized Ralph Bagnold to establish the reconnaissance unit that came to be known as the Long Range Desert Group, and any innovative method of striking at the Axis forces would have been welcomed by Wavell. But Wavell was replaced by General Claude Auchinleck in July and so Wingate lost an important ally in MEHQ.

With Wavell gone and no sign of imminent action, Wingate fell into a deep trough of despair, his state of mind worsened by a severe attack of malaria. On 4 July he attempted to kill himself in the exclusive Continental Hotel in Cairo. Fortunately the officer in the adjoining room heard Wingate fall to the floor, and on investigation discovered him lying on the floor with a knife in his throat. Wingate required extensive surgery, and 14 pints of blood, at the General Scottish Hospital (where David Stirling was still a patient following his parachute accident) before he was out of danger.

Nonetheless, suicide attempts were a court-martial offence and though Wingate was not charged for his failure to end his life, he was reduced in rank to a major and shipped back to Britain to recuperate from ‘acute depression’. He was given six months’ leave but by the end of December 1941 Wingate had convinced a War Office medical board to pass him as fit once more for active service.

Delighted with the assessment of his health, Wingate was soon brought back down to earth when on 7 February he received his next posting – to 114 Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, in Wimborne, Dorset. But he did not have long to rage against his superiors, for on 11 February Wingate received a cable from Wavell, now Commander-in-Chief India, instructing him to travel to Rangoon to coordinate guerrilla attacks with the Chinese against Japan.

Those instructions soon changed as the Japanese conquest of south-east Asia continued. Having seized Hong Kong on 25 December 1941, the Japanese Army swept through Malaya and on to Singapore, where the British capitulated on 15 February with the surrender of 130,000 soldiers. Burma, meanwhile, had been invaded in January and the capital, Rangoon, was evacuated by the Allies on 7 March 1942.

Initially Wavell had planned for Wingate to work with the Chinese forces in India (having been prevented from returning to China by the rapid advance of the Japanese) but these soldiers were put under the command of American general Joseph Stilwell. Wingate was diverted instead to India, arriving on 19 March, and was ordered by Wavell to organize a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the Japanese in Burma.

One of the first men Wingate recruited to his nascent force was Major Mike Calvert, a 29-year-old regular army officer who had commanded a Bush Warfare School in Burma prior to the Japanese invasion, where he had taught guerrilla tactics to Allied soldiers. According to a contemporary newspaper report Calvert was ‘a professional wrecker and saboteur, and the look of the artist comes into his eyes when he tells you about the bridges that he has blown … Mad Mike – flattish nose, twinkling eyes, tousled hair.’
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‘Mad Mike’, as Calvert was known to his comrades, had a personality far removed from Wingate’s. Short and stocky, in contrast to the lean, gaunt physique of Wingate, Calvert was a brilliant athlete – he excelled at swimming and boxing – and he was neither religious nor a deep thinker; nonetheless he was a Cambridge graduate and more to the point he was staggeringly brave. On one point he and Wingate were of one mind – they both believed in what Calvert described as ‘unconventional warfare’.

Wingate went to see Calvert at his base in Mayamo in the east of Mandalay. An instant rapport grew between the two men and Wingate outlined what he had in mind – deep penetration patrols into Burma to harass the Japanese. What Wingate needed from Calvert was his expertise on jungle fighting. Wingate had used guerrilla tactics in the Sudan, Palestine and Ethiopia but not in the fearsome terrain of south-east Asia with its mountainous jungles. Few people in the British Army knew the jungle like Calvert, who in the 1930s had served in Hong Kong with the Royal Engineers and witnessed the Japanese attacks on Shanghai and Nanking. Calvert told Wingate what he would later tell the British public in a wartime radio broadcast on the BBC: ‘Burma gives far greater chances for individual initiative and responsibility to junior leaders than in any other theatre of war. A keen young soldier has greater chances there to show his powers than anywhere.’
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Calvert then tackled what he considered a gross misconception, that the jungle was hostile and cruel to all who entered. ‘It frightens some people as a placid ocean is frightening,’ said Calvert,

because it is so large and so deep, but it is not in itself dangerous. It is like being in an aeroplane where, within reason, the higher up you are the safer you are. In the jungle, with a compass and map, there is nothing to fear … the way to behave in the jungle is as the tiger behaves – as king of the jungle. The tiger only creeps and crawls when he is stalking his prey. He is only silent when he wishes to surprise his enemy. At other times he relaxes, well camouflaged, with a wary eye open and with what one may call a battle drill ready for any emergency.
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Calvert took Wingate on a tour of Mayamo, demonstrating some of the techniques he had taught in his Bush Warfare school. He explained to Wingate that the best defence in the jungle is to ‘seek out the enemy and attack him, and thus impose your will on him’. In addition Calvert passed on his thoughts of the average Japanese fighting man, ‘a keen, hard, vigorous soldier, usually well versed in his training pamphlets, but not particularly well blessed with much imagination, common sense or knowledge of the world. This makes him an easy person to lead up the garden path, a pastime which I, for one, thoroughly enjoy’.
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Inspired by his meeting with Calvert, Wingate’s idea for a Special Forces unit to fight the Japanese behind their lines in Burma was committed to paper in a memorandum entitled ‘Notes on Penetration Warfare – Burma Command’. He opened his memo thus:

Modern war is war of penetration in almost all its phases. This may be of two types. Tactical or strategic. Penetration is tactical where armed forces carrying it out are directly supported by the operations of the main armies. It is strategic when no such support is possible. That is when a penetration group is living and operating 100 miles or more in front of its own armies. Of the two types Long Range Penetration pays by far the larger dividends on the forces employed. These forces operating with small columns are able, wherever a friendly population exists, to live and move under the enemies’ ribs and thus to deliver fatal blows at his military organisation by attacking vital objectives which he is unable to defend from such attacks. In the past such warfare has been impossible owing to the fact that control over such columns, indispensable both for their safety and their effectual use, was not possible until the age of the easily portable wireless set. Further the supply of certain indispensable materials such as ammunition, petrol, wireless sets and spare parts is impossible until the appearance of communications aircraft.

Wavell was impressed and, as he had done two years before with Ralph Bagnold’s idea for the Long Range Patrol in Italian-occupied Libya, so the commander-in-chief in India sanctioned a full-scale trial of Wingate’s proposal. A training camp was established at Saugor in the Central Provinces for what was designated the 77th Indian Infantry Brigade, comprising the 13th Battalion, The King’s Liverpool Regiment, the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Gurkha Rifles, the 2nd Burma Rifles and 142 Commando Company, most of whom had been resident at Calvert’s Bush Warfare School. There was also a signal section, a mule transport company from the Royal Indian Army Service and eight RAF sections to provide air support.