Person

Wingate, Orde Charles, 1903-1944

1903-1944

Orde Charles Wingate was born on February 26, 1903, in Uttarakhand, India.

He was a Major-General in the British Army. He was educated at Charterhouse School and the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, the Royal Artillery's officers' training school. He was treated roughly by his classmates as a result of his strong-mindedness, which impelled him to always follow his own path. After studying Arabic, he got an appointment with the Sudan Defence Force (1928-1933), followed by a three-year post in Bulford on Salisbury Plain, England. In 1936, he successfully applied for an intelligence post in Palestine, where he became a supporter of Zionism and set up a joint British-Jewish counter-insurgency unit, the Special Night Squads. He left Palestine in 1938 with a Distinguished Service Order. Wingate began the Second World War as a light anti-aircraft brigade major. His previous experience on the Abyssinian border and recent exploits in Palestine made him a natural choice for a position in Khartoum in 1940, where he gathered and trained a force that would accompany the emperor Haile Selassie back into Abyssinia to fight the Italian troops. Exhausted, depressed by his removal from command, ill with malaria, and overusing an early anti-malarial drug, Wingate attempted suicide in his hotel room. After his recovery in Britain, he left for Rangoon, Burma, in 1942 and organized guerrilla units, the Chindits, a mix of British, Indian and Burmese, to fight behind Japanese lines. They were so successful that the Japanese Army called off their 1944 offensive into India.

In 1935, he married Lorna Elizabeth Moncrieff Paterson (1917–1990). He died on March 24, 1944, in a plane crash in Manipur, India, on his way to a conference. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia, USA.