He was slovenly, insubordinate, thin-skinned, self-possessed, and a sadist. He often took meetings in the nude. He munched on raw onions between meals and mused on such diverse subjects as yoga, the social beliefs of a hyena, and the behaviour of flies trapped under a tumbler.

He had a theory that men could store up energy like a camel and in between missions he would sleep for days or lie on the floor listening to symphonies on his dusty monograph, storing his ‘fat’, as he called it, for his next foray.

Guided by an inviolable belief in God and himself, in roughly that order, he led men into war in such far-flung places as Sudan, Palestine, Abyssinia and Burma, and left his mark on the peoples and military history of all those places, particularly Israel, where his name is still legend.

He was, arguably, the most eccentric senior British general of modern times, as well as the most controversial. The debate about his tactics and character, as well as his contribution to the Allied victory over Japan, continues to the present day.

His name is Orde Charles Wingate, and this is his story.

Conversations about Wingate, who died in a bomber crash in March, 1944 at the age of 41 during his final, much-debated Burmese campaign, often begin by likening him to T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, who happened to be a distant relative. This is somewhat misleading.

To be sure, the two soldiers shared many character traits and qualities. Both Lawrence and Wingate were inspired leaders of men. ‘His orders, and above all his personal magnetism fired every man who served under him,’ wrote Charles Rolo, the author of the first biography of Wingate, published in spring 1944, shortly before his death.

‘You can’t help but follow him’, one of the veterans of Wingate’s first so-called long-range penetration raids the year before enthused to Rolo, ‘when you see him charge through the elephant grass in his old pith helmet.’

The same could be said of Lawrence screaming into battle on his white steed, with his robe flowing, a quarter of a century before in the desert, as his mounted berserkers galloped alongside him.

Both British officers were rebellious by nature and disdainful of authority.

Both were brilliant and original military theorists, particularly in the use of unconventional tactics against a larger, conventional army, as Lawrence demonstrated with the hit-and-run tactics he used against the forces of the Ottoman Empire during the Arab Revolt, and as Wingate did with his long-distance raids against the Japanese in Burma.

Both suffered from severe mood swings and were considered mad by their contemporaries, and very likely were by today’s psychological standards.

Still there are significant differences between the two men. Lawrence, like Wingate, had a messianic streak, but was not religious. Wingate, a ‘sword and Bible’ general like his martyred predecessor, General Charles Gordon – Gordon of Khartoum – was deeply religious and lived and breathed the scriptures, as recalled by Edwin Samuel, the 2nd Viscount Samuel, a British colonial official in Mandatory Palestine who was a neighbour of Wingate and his glamorous wife Lorna in Jerusalem during the mid-1930s.

According to Samuel, the eccentric captain ‘often recited the Psalms in Hebrew, so often that Lorna knew many of them by heart without having the slightest idea what any of the words meant’.

Lawrence, of course, was a dedicated Arabist, spoke fluent Arabic and deeply admired and identified with Arab culture and Arab people.

Orde Wingate also spoke Arabic. Indeed it was a course he took in Arabic on the advice of his father’s cousin, Sir Reginald Wingate, the former governor general of the Sudan, at the School of Oriental Studies in London in 1926, that finally set him in the direction of the Middle East, although one could say that he was headed in that direction since his birth.

Born in 1903 in British India, Wingate was the son of Colonel George Wingate. The scion of a military family, Wingate senior was a devout evangelical who belonged to an intense Christian sect called the Plymouth Brethren. The aging colonel, who had Orde when he was nearly 50, initiated him and his siblings into the teachings and tenets of the Brethren, which included memorising Scripture, and underlined the Jewish people’s place as the chosen people and Palestine as the Holy Land.

In 1916 the Wingates moved to Godalming in Surrey, where Orde was enrolled as a day boy at Charterhouse, returning home after school, rather than participating in the usual school sports and other activities, and continuing his immersion in the Bible and the ways of the Brethren, while his parents sought to toughen him up with challenging mental and physical tasks, reinforcing the eccentric, military-cum-religious mindset that would set him apart from his future fellow officers.

In 1921 Wingate entered the Royal Military School, Woolwich, the Army’s artillery training school, graduating in 1923, whence he was commissioned into the Royal Artillery.

In the event, Wingate arrived in the Middle East a decade later than Lawrence. Once he got there his Zionist background and love for the Jewish people influenced him to go in a markedly different direction from his illustrious forebear, eagerly fighting alongside them against Lawrence’s beloved Arabs.

That’s quite a difference.

There are others. Wingate was a general — a major general. Lawrence only made it to colonel.

Of course, Lawrence was able to write up his story, as he did in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, while Wingate never had that luxury, leaving his legacy up for debate. The argument continues.

The story of Orde Wingate’s career as a fighting soldier and military tactician begins in 1928 when, with Sir Wingate’s encouragement, the 25-year-old lieutenant was seconded to the Sudan Defence Force, the British-raised auxiliary unit charged with overseeing the security of the unruly 700,000 square mile joint Anglo-Egyptian territory.

Posted to the East Africa Corps, he served on the Sudanese-Ethiopian border, where his mission was to catch slave traders and ivory poachers, which he did with dispatch and élan, while putting his aggressive philosophy of soldiering into effect. There would be no more phlegmatic patrolling for Wingate; now his men ambushed.

Promoted to major in 1930, Wingate was given command of a company of 300 soldiers. He reportedly was never happier than when he was with his unit bushwhacking bad guys. While he was resting and gazing up at the firmament, he began sketching out his philosophy of war, which he saw as a kind of four-dimensional architecture.

He was less enthralled, however, when he reported back to Khartoum and had to deal with ‘the marsupial minds of GHQ’, as he called the officers and higher-ups at headquarters. The latter were more than happy to see their obstreperous colleague go when his Sudanese tour ended in 1933.

His first African adventure over, Wingate was reposted back to Britain, where he became involved with artillery training. He was good enough at that, however the natural-born warrior was anxious to get back into action. In the meantime the young officer met his love, Lorna, then 16 and travelling with her mother, whom he married two years later.

Three years later, in September, 1936, the man with ‘the eyes and bearing of an Old Testament prophet, the cunning of a hunted fox, and the endurance of an army mule’, as Rolo describes him, got his wish, and the chance to put those assets to use again, when Wingate was dispatched to British Palestine.

At the time the Arab revolt against the Mandate was approaching its height, despite the best efforts of the 100,000 men – the flower of Britain’s peacetime army – stationed there. Assigned to be an intelligence officer, Wingate quickly ditched his desk for the thrill of combat and the opportunity to strike a blow for the Jewish cause in which he passionately believed.

Sent to Haifa to investigate the smuggling of arms across the northern frontier, he discovered the routes the Arab smugglers took and times they travelled. Although Wingate had been ordered to merely submit a report, he blithely exceeded his instructions and, laying an armed ambush with the aid of a force of eager men he had recruited from Haganah, the Zionist paramilitary organisation, he captured an entire column of brigands.

Predictably, this upset the brigadier who was in charge of the area and the recalcitrant officer was recalled to headquarters to be disciplined. Fortunately for the latter, the new general officer commanding British Forces in Palestine and Trans-Jordan was Archibald Wavell, a general with a distinctly non-marsupial mind, and one who was destined to play a key role in Wingate’s career.

Eager to suppress the surging Arab revolt, Wavell, who had just arrived in Jerusalem, appreciated Wingate’s out-of-the box counter-insurgency thinking and encouraged him to continue his unorthodox tactics with the proviso that he would never again operate in the vicinity of the irate brigadier.

Inspired by Wavell and his Jewish allies, the new-fangled commando leader set about outwitting the elusive Arab guerrillas then entrenched in the hills of Galilee by setting up his own intelligence service in their villages. Previously the convoys of British troops sent after the Arabs had been thwarted because of signals sent by look-outs.

Not anymore, as Samuel, the son of the first British governor of Palestine, Herbert Samuel, wrote:

‘Arab watchers on the hilltops flashed signals, did they, when they saw which road the convoy was taking?’, Samuel remembered. ‘That was easy to circumvent. Wingate arranged for convoys with covered trucks to leave his camp every night in every direction. The Arab watchers never knew which convoy had troops in it and which did not.

‘Nor could they hear convoys pulling up on the roadside at night. Wingate’s convoys never pulled up,’ Samuel, an avowed admirer, explained. ‘They slowed down somewhat on a steep grade and the men, shod in sneakers, dropped off silently one by one and rallied around their sergeants in the ditches.’

In this way, Wingate could unload 100 armed men anywhere without a single Arab being the wiser.

‘Time after time he achieved tactical surprise’, Samuel said. Two or three hundred well-trained, determined, and heavily armed Jewish and British troops would be lying in the dark on the outskirts of an Arab village, 50 miles away from Wingate’s base. Everyone in the village, save the unsuspecting Arab watchers, would be fast asleep.

At the first light of dawn, a grenade would come rolling down a village street and suddenly explode, at which time every rebel would grab a rifle and dash out, to be met by a withering crossfire from Wingate’s strategically placed Bren guns. The Arabs who managed to escape would run into an outer cordon and be captured.

Impressed by Wingate’s success, Wavell’s successor, General Robert Heining, gave his rambunctious subaltern permission to continue to form new attack squads – gangs, essentially – dubbed Special Night Squads (SNS), with the aid of the Jewish Agency, the main Zionist immigration and settlement agency.

Call them gangs or squads, there is no question about their effectiveness – or in Wingate’s ability to lead them, as one SNS veteran told Leonard Mosley, the author of a 1956 biography. ‘I never knew him to lose an engagement,’ he told Mosley. ‘He [Wingate] was never worried about odds. If we were twenty and the Arabs were 200, or if we were at the bottom of a hill and they were at the top he would say: “All right, there is a way to beat them.”’

Suddenly the British Army had its first proper commando force and proof that ordinary men could be turned into guerrillas – a feat Wingate would later replicate in India with his scruffy Chindits. The Jews had their Lawrence.

Thanks to his courage and leadership and those of his motley band of brothers – this was still the period when Britons and Jews were working together and not blowing each other up – the back of the Arab resistance was broken by 1939. For his work Wingate was duly awarded a Distinguished Service Order (DSO), the first of three he would earn during his singular career.

At the same time, Heining also had a headache. It seems that his brash subordinate was also the victim of his success, as Samuel writes:

‘When [Wingate] was told that his “night squads” were to be disbanded, their goal having been achieved, he protested vehemently that this step would not at all commend itself to the Jewish Agency. He was reminded that he was an officer in His Majesty’s forces and that it was clear that he had ceased to take an objective view of his duties.’

And that was that. In May, 1939 he was shifted to the post of brigade major in an anti-artillery regiment in southern England. In the meantime, the Second World War broke out. He fretted that he would miss out on the action.

Wingate could console himself with the thought that he had left an indelible mark on the future Jewish state, including on its military leaders. Moshe Dayan, the future head of Israel Defence Forces (IDF), was one of his disciples.

‘Wingate was the father of the IDF,’ says Michael Oren, the Israeli historian and former ambassador to the US. ‘The IDF today remains Wingatean in terms of its tactics.’

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first president, thought that his English friend, who he met when then-Captain Wingate was posted to Palestine in 1936, might even have become the IDF’s first chief of staff had he lived, an extraordinary prospect for a Christian, no less a Briton. Edwin Samuel, who went on to become the last director of the Palestine Broadcasting Service after the Second World War, goes further. Wingate’s death, he wrote, ‘materially affected the course of Jewish history’, for had he lived, ‘I doubt if the boundary lines of modern day Israel would be those now in existence.’

Wingate took his passion for the Jewish people and the Zionist cause back with him to England, where he bombarded his superiors with proposals for a Jewish army that would rule over Palestine for the Crown, further ensuring that he would be forgotten.

Fortunately for him, one of those ‘apes’ at GHQ, as he called them, remembered him very well – Lieutenant General Archibald Wavell, now commander-in-chief of Middle East Command, who came to his rambunctious protégé’s rescue and summoned him to Cairo.

Following Italy’s entrance into the war, Wavell was keen to accelerate the unrest in Italian-occupied Abyssinia and he knew just the man to do it – Orde Charles Wingate. The latter returned to his old East African stomping ground in November, 1940, where he enthusiastically went about organising a new mixed commando force consisting of British officers with Sudanese regulars and Ethiopian levies. The Bible-toting hellraiser named it Gideon Force. The whipped up assembly of just over 1,500 had but a few mortars, no artillery and no air support.

But it had Wingate, who, in turn, had Wavell’s blessing, and that of Haile Selassie, the exiled Emperor of Ethiopia, who was eager to liberate his homeland. He would become a close friend of Wingate’s.

With the ‘mad’ pith-helmeted Briton in the lead, Gideon Force succeeded in battling, manoeuvring and bluffing Mussolini’s vastly larger force into retreat, defeat and, ultimately, in spring 1941, into surrender. The killing or capturing of 40,000 Italians gave Britain a much-needed morale-boost following a year of relentless Axis victories.

On 5 May 1941, mounted on a grey charger, Wingate proudly led the re-entry of Selassie and his men into his restored capital of Addis Ababa. He was literally back in the saddle.

But not for long. Although he received another DSO for the inspired Abyssinian campaign, the splenetic commando was quickly dispatched back to Cairo. Along with his disrespect for his superiors – Wavell excepted – Wingate’s strident support of Selassie, like his support for the Jews, was considered not in His Majesty’s interests.

Sick with malaria, exhausted, anxious about his friend Selassie’s independence, worried that he would not receive proper credit for his Abyssinian exploits, in July 1941 Wingate tried to commit suicide in his room at the Continental Hotel in Cairo, stabbing himself twice with a fruit knife. The second wound cut his jugular vein and he fell unconscious to the floor.

Fortunately the thud of his fall attracted attention, help arrived, and the suicidal officer was sent to hospital where he recovered, before being invalided back to England.

Once again, it appeared that Orde Wingate’s military career was over.

Once again, his patron, Wavell, now commander-in-chief in India commanding the South-east Asian theatre, came to his protégé’s rescue. Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India and Burma, who also admired Wingate, asked Wavell whether he felt could use the ‘mad’ major’s skills against the Japanese.

He could.

In the event, Wavell was urgently in need of help in Burma, which the Japanese had successfully infiltrated in the wake of their successes at Pearl Harbor and Singapore. It was thought that Wingate, who arrived in Rangoon in March 1942, days after it fell to the Japanese, might organise guerrilla units to fight behind Japanese lines. However, the lack of an adequate base made that prospect academic, and he returned to GHQ in Delhi to see what he could cook up.

Building on his experience in Palestine and East Africa, Wingate, who Wavell promoted to acting brigadier, came up with the idea of a highly trained mobile-regiment-sized force – a super-guerrilla force, as it were – that would raise havoc with the Japanese, somewhat like his prior commands, except that it would have to travel much longer distances and penetrate the sweaty fastness of the Burmese jungle.

They had to have the ‘right stuff’. Wingate neither needed nor asked for supermen. He wanted stalwart men who could think and fight as he did.

With Wavell’s blessing he proceeded to take a mixed group of men from Lancashire and Yorkshire, most of whom had spent their lives in factories, in pubs, and on city pavements, and conveyed them off to central India in the middle of the monsoon season. There he took his prospective guerrillas, mostly second-line troops, married and in their late 20s and early 30s, and taught them to beat the heat by downing lots of salt and how to live in the jungle with cobras, pythons, ticks and scorpions.

To this improvised army Wingate added some Gurkhas from Nepal and a company of Burmese, plus a few experts who could assist with radio and aerial supply to help air-drop materiel to the long-distance raiders.

It was this untested force that Wingate proposed to send out behind Japanese lines in northern Burma to cut rail lines and demolish strategic bridges.

He also bestowed them a memorable name – Chindits – after Chinthe, the mythical griffins whose sculpted forms guarded the entrances of Burmese temples.

In February 1943, after months of training and inculcation into their idiosyncratic leader’s ways, the newly minted raiders, organised into eight separate columns, crossed the River Chindwin to raise havoc and test the utility of Wingate’s novel tactical concept.

Virtually everyone back in GHQ in Delhi – Wavell excepted – was convinced that the Chindits were a ‘suicide column’, according to the New York Times, in one of the breathless accounts of the historic ‘super-raid’, as it was called, that later emerged, ‘but the men believed passionately that their boss would pull them through’.

‘They marched across high ranges and through jungles and every so often their radio men and RAF technicians could figure out a good place where the hungry guerrillas could be supplied from the air.’

The results of the nervy foray were spectacular, but costly.

As promised, the Chindits destroyed a number of Japanese bridges, including the key Bouchaung Gorge Bridge, as well as more than 100 miles of rail lines in dozens of places and blindsided the Japanese.

They also saved 5,000 loyal natives by forcing the Japanese to withdraw the punitive expedition they had planned.

Unsurprisingly, their intelligence about the vast area they tried to cross was faulty, and did not take into account the Japanese roads that the enemy was able to use to intercept air drops. Soon the hungry and exhausted men began to drop out, something they didn’t wish to do, particularly in light of their commander’s draconian ideas about discipline, which included flogging anyone he deemed to be a slacker, or worse, leaving him behind to find his way back to India on his own – a disturbing dimension of the Wingate way that didn’t emerge until after the war.

On 22 March 1943, a month after the raiders set out, Eastern Army HQ ordered Wingate to withdraw his starving and emaciated men, as well as himself, which they did with some difficulty, dispersing in various directions, including via China. The truth about the secret raid could finally be revealed, or at least most of it.

Ultimately Wingate was only able to pull less than 2,200 – a little over 70 per cent – of his men through, an exceptionally high casualty rate, too high for the taste of many British and Indian officers, in light of the questionable strategic gains.

Nevertheless from a psychological point of view, the raid was a success, destroying the aura of invincibility of the Japanese in Burma, and capturing the imagination of the Allied press, witness this excerpt from a sensational report in the New York Times of 21 May 1943:

A super-raid by British and Empire troops that for three months swept through Burma on a 300-mile front, wrecking bridges and generally harassing Japanese occupation forces, drew near its close today as the weary raiders, many of them disease-ridden, struggled out of the jungle.

‘The raid’, the purplish report continued, ‘was an epic struggle against the jungle, with death, valor, despair and victory marching along with Great Britain’s fighting men as they flung their weight against the Japanese.’

You can’t make up copy like that, and Wingate didn’t have to. That July, his patron, Wavell, soon to become Viceroy of India, recommended him for the Royal Society for Asian Affairs’ Lawrence of Arabia Memorial Award.

Most significantly, Wingate’s experience, which he recapitulated in an after-action report that he sent to Leo Amery, also captured Winston Churchill’s attention. Wingate was ‘a man of genius and integrity’, the prime minister told the Chiefs of Staff Committee, ‘and has rightly been discerned by all eyes as a figure above the ordinary level’.

Churchill decided that he wanted to have a look at Wingate himself before he headed off to Canada for the First Quebec joint Allied strategy conference in August, and invited him to dine with him at 10 Downing Street. The former, relishing his moment in the sun as well as his chance to make a case for an even bigger operation, readily accepted.

Churchill liked what he saw. ‘We had not talked for half an hour before I felt myself in the presence of a man of the highest quality,’ the PM later recalled. ‘He [Wingate] plunged at once into his theme of how the Japanese could be mastered in jungle warfare by long-range penetration groups landed by air behind enemy lines.

‘This interested me greatly,’ the special operations-enamoured British chief wrote. ‘I wished to hear much more and also to let him tell his tale to the [Allied] Chiefs of Staff.’

‘I decided at once to take him with me on the voyage.’

Off to Canada Wingate went, after Lorna, then ensconced in Edinburgh, hastened to join her headline-making husband with the aid of the Scottish police.

In the event, Quebec was a triumph for Wingate. His proposal for a second, more ambitious ‘super-raid’, complete with airlift, also excited US President Franklin Roosevelt and the American chief of staff, George Marshall, who promised to supply him with the necessary air support for a new Chindit offensive in North Burma to cut the Japanese lines facing US General Joseph Stilwell, commander of US forces in China, Burma and India.

And how could they not be excited? Wingate’s plan ‘read like a moving picture scenario’, the New York Times enthused. ‘It was to plant self-sustaining fighting forces deep behind the enemy fronts.’

‘The only way to do this was by air. But in this virgin forest-land there were neither supply dumps nor landing-fields – only two dubious and uncharted clearings, which were promptly christened “Broadway” and “Piccadilly”.’

Not a problem, Wingate vowed, as he mapped out the envisioned operation for his bedazzled listeners, much as Lawrence had sketched out his plan for the conquest of Damascus for Allenby and his bemused aides a quarter of a century before.

Thus empowered, Wingate returned to Delhi, promoted to the rank of acting-major general, in command of a corps-sized Special Force, and supported by an American air unit and the right to appeal to Louis Mountbatten, now Supreme Allied Commander in the theatre as well as Churchill.

Week after week, his new fighting force, numbering over 12,000, loaded and landed their gliders, training men and mules for the arduous work ahead.

In the event, Wingate’s second ‘super-raid’ was a mixed success.

When the time to take off came in March, 1944, the aforementioned Piccadilly site was blocked. But the other one, Broadway, was open and there the Chindits landed in the dead of night after a wild 200-mile flight over the Burmese mountains.

Nearly all of Wingate’s gliders were smashed or damaged. Nevertheless he managed to form a protective ring of soldiers, construct a serviceable landing field with the aid of his engineers, hold it against the Japanese defenders, and construct a belt of other ‘combat rings’ stretching across Burma, from east of the Chindwin, to within 50 miles of Yunnan – a promising start.

‘We are now’, he declared, ‘in the guts of the enemy’, he signalled. And he was.

Yet he and his intelligence officers had underestimated the enemy’s ability to concentrate his force to deal with airborne landings, and they were soon on the back foot. Once again, as with the first raid, casualties were high – 1,400 killed, 2,400 wounded – over 30 per cent of the force.

Still, the master-ambusher was undeterred. He could take North Burma, he cabled Churchill, if he were given four more transport squadrons.

In the event, he never got the chance to find out.

Three weeks after the raid began, Wingate boarded an American B-25 Mitchell bomber bound for India, impetuously ordering the pilot to take off despite the forbidding weather. The plane crashed into the forward side of a mountain, killing all aboard, including two British correspondents, and the Chindit commander. Wingate was 41. He was later buried with his American comrades at Arlington National Cemetery.

Without its leader, the new offensive faltered. Without his vision and resolve, the Chindits fought on as conventional troops.

With Wingate’s death, Churchill wrote to his widow, Lorna, ‘a bright flame went out’.

‘There was a man of genius who might well have become a man of destiny’, he told Parliament on 2 August. ‘He has gone, but his spirit lives on.’

So does the debate over the storied general’s tactics, strategy and character.

What is incontestable is the electric effect Wingate had on his men. Shelford Bidwell, the late British military historian and a brigadier himself, described the rebel general’s divergent legacy for The Times: ‘His obstreperous behaviour and his peculiar views of strategy must be considered separately from his powers of leadership. He passes the acid test of generalship: he could inspire men to fight.’

Perhaps the last word on Wingate should be left to a civilian who actually knew him and wrote about his wartime exploits, Herbert Matthews, who covered the Asian theatre for the New York Times. ‘Wingate’, Matthews recalled in 1956, ‘was a dynamic, unforgettable man, the kind that burns himself out. His heart was great – that was the impression we all got. And he was always audacious. Always audacious.’