Orde Wingate

A detailed study of one of the most influential commanders of World War II, one who is often regarded as a 'flawed genius'. Orde Wingate rose to fame by creating the Chindits in Burma in 1943. He is an extremely important figure in military history, and deserves just as much attention as Alanbrooke, Montgomery, and Auchinleck. Unlike them, however, he always operated outside the accepted etiquette and the formal chain of command. He was a maverick and misfit, and he held to the belief that the type of mass warfare demonstrated on the Western Front (1914–18) had very little to do with the warfare of the future. He believed that the latter would require an 'indirect approach', in which heavily lumbering armies would be exquisitely vulnerable to small groups of highly motivated, mobile and well-armed guerrillas. This book covers Wingate's experiences in pre-war Palestine, in Ethiopia in 1941 (where he formed an irregular guerrilla unit to harass the Italian garrisons) and in World War II Burma, where the two Chindit campaigns would be his apotheosis.