The death of Orde Wingate

On the evening of 24 March 1944 an American B-25 Mitchell bomber of the 1st Air Commando Group took off from Imphal bound for Lalaghat airfield in Assam. Shortly afterwards the aircraft struck the jungle-covered hills of Manipur, near Bishnupur. There were no survivors. Among the dead was the 41-year-old Major General Orde Wingate, founder and commander of the Chindits, whose units had been fighting behind Japanese lines in northern Burma for less than three weeks.

The last day

Death found Wingate at the most fraught moment of his career. Since the night of 5/6 March Operation Thursday had been under way – the Chindits’ second expedition, in which aircraft and gliders carried several brigades of Special Force deep into Burma. At the same time the Japanese Fifteenth Army had launched its offensive against India, and in the preceding days its divisions had crossed the frontier and were approaching Imphal. Wingate was at odds with the commander of the Fourteenth Army, General William Slim, and with Joseph Stilwell over the further tasks of his brigades: he insisted on using them deep inside Burma, while the diversion of part of his force to the defence of Manipur was being considered ever more seriously. That same day Bernard Fergusson’s brigade, exhausted by its long march, began an attack on Indaw – the main objective of the operation – which collapsed over the following days.

On 24 March Wingate visited the Chindits at their bases in Burma and then flew to Imphal for talks with the air commanders. In the evening he boarded the B-25 piloted by Lieutenant Brian Hodges to return to his headquarters. He also took aboard his aide-de-camp, Captain George Borrow, and two London war correspondents, Stuart Emeny of the News Chronicle and Stanley Wills of the Daily Herald, who had asked for a lift. According to accounts cited by his biographers, the pilot objected that the aircraft was overloaded, but Wingate agreed to take them.

The crash

The bomber crashed in the hills near the village of Thiulon, about 60 kilometres from Imphal. Nine people were killed: the five members of the American crew – Lieutenants Brian Hodges and Stephen Wanderer and Sergeants James Hickey, Frank Sadoski and Vernon McIninch – as well as Wingate, Borrow, Emeny and Wills. Some accounts give the number of dead as ten; only nine victims, however, are known by name.

The cause of the crash was never established with certainty. The most common view is that the aircraft flew into a storm over the hills and lost control, and that overloading may have contributed to the accident. A possible engine failure or pilot error in difficult, mountainous terrain, at night and in poor visibility, has also been suggested. The remains of the victims could not be separated; they were buried in a common grave at the crash site.

For the British command in Asia the loss was hard to make good for one more reason. Wingate, though formally only a divisional commander, had direct access to Winston Churchill: it was the Prime Minister who had taken him to the Quebec Conference in August 1943, and it was thanks to his support that within a few months a brigadier had become an acting major general with six brigades under his command and his own American air force. Without this patron and without his own tenacity, Special Force had no chance of defending its separate status against commanders who had regarded it from the outset as a costly experiment.

The successor

Slim, to whom the operation was formally subordinate, had to choose a successor quickly. After consulting Wingate’s chief of staff, Brigadier Derek Tulloch, he settled on Brigadier Walter Lentaigne, commander of the 111th Brigade, then fighting in Burma. Lentaigne, a Gurkha officer, a veteran of the retreat from Burma in 1942 and a former instructor at the Staff College in Quetta, was regarded as the most experienced and level-headed of the brigadiers. Wingate’s passed-over deputy, Major General George Symes, protested and asked to be relieved. Nor did the choice of Lentaigne, who had earlier criticised Wingate’s methods, win him the loyalty of the dead man’s closest associates. Lentaigne flew out of Burma to take over command, and his brigade was taken over by Lieutenant Colonel John “Jumbo” Morris.

Without Wingate the Chindits lost their most powerful advocate. Soon a large part of the transport aircraft was diverted to supplying besieged Imphal, and the 23rd Brigade to the fighting at Kohima. The brigades in Burma were placed under Stilwell, who moved them north to support directly the advance on Mogaung and Myitkyina. Increasingly used as ordinary infantry, the Chindits fought there until August 1944, suffering heavy losses and ravaged by disease.

Burial and remembrance

The common grave near the village of Thiulon was found only after the war by British and American search teams, and in April 1947 the remains were moved to the war cemetery in Imphal. Since most of the dead were Americans and their remains could not be separated, it was decided, in line with established practice, to bury them in the United States: on 10 November 1950 all nine were laid to rest in a common grave at Arlington National Cemetery.

Churchill, who had brought Wingate onto the stage of high politics, called him one of the most brilliant and daring figures of the Second World War and “a man of genius who might well have become also a man of destiny”. Many soldiers judged him far more harshly. In his memoirs Slim acknowledged his energy and imagination, but concluded that special forces deprived the army of its best men without giving proportionate benefits in return. The British official history of the war against Japan, written under the direction of Stanley Woodburn Kirby, portrayed him as an unbalanced man who had risen beyond his competence. This provoked a long-running dispute with his defenders, among them former Chindit officers, and for historians Wingate has remained one of the most controversial British generals of the war.

In Israel his memory has a different dimension. As the organiser of the Special Night Squads in Palestine in 1938, Wingate trained Jewish volunteers from the Haganah, among them the young Moshe Dayan; streets, a youth village and the national institute of physical education there bear his name. In Ethiopia he was remembered as one of the liberators of the country from Italian occupation.

Wingate left a wife, Lorna, whom he had married in 1935. Their son, Orde Jonathan, was born shortly after his father’s death and never knew him.

Place in the war

Wingate’s death ended the most extraordinary career of any British commander of the war: in six years this unruly artillery officer had fought Arab insurgents in Palestine, led the Emperor of Ethiopia back to Addis Ababa and created in Burma a formation that had become a legend after its first expedition in 1943. For Operation Thursday his death meant a change of character: instead of an independent war deep in the enemy’s rear, the Chindits became an adjunct to Stilwell’s offensive, and their further fortunes depended on the Battle of Imphal and Kohima, which was then being decided. Nor did Wingate live to see the test his concept faced: the monsoon, disease and exhaustion, which that summer decimated the brigades more severely than Japanese bullets. The Japanese offensive collapsed in the summer of 1944 and opened the way for the British to reconquer Burma in 1945. Special Force was disbanded at the beginning of 1945; the dispute over how much the Chindits contributed to that victory continues to this day.