Orde Wingate - A Friend Indeed

Orde Charles Wingate was born in 1903, to a military British family stationed in India. Affiliated with the Plymouth Brethren, his mother taught Orde from a young age to memorize the Old Testament. Being a military man, his father subjected him to a harsh physical regimen and long marches. Orde enrolled in the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, where he became a gunnery officer. He studied the Arabic language and was posted to the Sudan.

It was in 1936 that Orde and his young wife Lorna were posted to British Mandate Palestine. Although he had been pro-Arabic for years (according to British Imperial policy), after reading about the Zionist enterprise, his earlier love for the Bible blossomed anew. A changed man entered the Promised Land. That first evening in Haifa, Orde paid a visit to the Chief Intelligence Offer of the Haganah, at that time an underground defense force. Orde told Emmanuel Wilenski in his usual, direct way he would have to fight for a free Palestine, and to win. Prodding Wilenski in the chest, he added, “And you will not win, my friend, unless I teach you how to fight and I lead you into battle!”

Not only the Haganah, also the Jewish leadership was suspicious about the British officer who said he wanted to help them. This was unusual, as most British officials disliked the Jews.

Being in Palestine was like coming home for Orde. All the places he read about in the Old Testament came alive before his eyes. He often sat on Mount Tabor, singing Psalms in his rapidly improving Hebrew. As his love for the land and the Jewish people grew, he was determined to fight to regain this land for the Jews. Not only against the Arabs, but if necessary, also against his own country – Britain.

The Haganah leadership still didn’t trust that strange man, who was obsessed with Zionism. According to his biographer, “he plunged into Zionism with all the joy of a grown-up sinner at last brought to baptism.”

Orde was unusual by any standard: he was bold, eccentric, a brilliant tactician, a person of great determination, immense physical endurance, and a fierce warrior. Being a loner and outsider, he was also an “insider’s outsider’.

Seeing the need for offensive actions against the constant Arab
infiltrations, Orde received permission to create special night squads – armed groups of British soldiers and Haganah volunteers who were trained under his leadership.

One night, Orde led a raid to a border village near Hanita, which Arab infiltrators used as a base. Attacking the village, they killed the terrorists, and punished the people for harboring them. Hearing about the raid, the British were furious. Turning Jews into formidable fighters was not really in their interest. 

“Hayedid (the friend) is in trouble with the British over the raid,” a secret Haganah message relayed.

From then on, every Jew in the Yishuv and the underground army was prepared to trust Orde with his secrets and his life. The volunteer soldiers learned to live with their commander’s eccentric habits – wearing an alarm clock around his wrist that would go off at times, or wearing a raw onion on a string around his neck, in which he would bite into as a snack.

While his superiors thought Orde was protecting the oil pipeline from sabotage, he was actually leading reprisal and deterrence raids of Jewish soldiers against Arab gangs. He became a legend amongst the Jews of Palestine and the Arabs put a price on his head. With the approval of General Wavell, Orde chose Ein Harod, in the shadow of Biblical Gideon, to start a school for training “Jewish settlers in the art of making guerilla war.”  Many of these trainees later became officers in the Israeli Army.

On leave in Britain, Orde openly spoke about the importance of a Jewish State in Palestine. His fellow British officers didn’t like Orde – his rebellious scorn, arrogance, paranoid touchiness, reckless rudeness, the fact he flouted of convention, personal scruffiness, and above all: his leftist ideas and strange obsession with Zionism and the Jews. The latter caused his superiors to remove him from his post in Palestine.

It was in 1939 that Orde was banished from the Holy Land and forced to return to England. When he said good-bye to the people he loved, he spoke to the unit and Haganah leaders in Hebrew. “I am sent away,” he said, “but I promise you I shall come back.” However, upon leaving the country, Orde’s passport was stamped “forbidden to return to Palestine.”

When Churchill heard about Orde’s deep penetration warfare ideas, he asked him to join him at the Quebec Conference. Orde the brilliant tactician was able to share his ideas with Roosevelt and other allied military leaders.

During the Second World War, Orde went back to Sudan, and promoted

to major. Posted to the Far East in 1942, Colonel Orde Wingate organized guerilla units to fight behind Japanese lines. In 1944, Orde became an acting major general. While trying to assess bases in Burma, he died in a plane crash at the age of 41. He left behind his wife and son, Orde Jonathan, who later became a regimental colonel at the Honorable Artillery Company. Buried at the site of the air crash, all the victim's remains were later moved to the British cemetery in India.

After the Second World War, Orde Wingate’s remains were reburied in the National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia. (It was custom to repatriate mass grave remains to the country of origin of the majority of the soldiers.)

 The British officer, Orde Wingate,  had become the hero of the Yishuv.

 “The father of the Israeli army,” he was called.

“He taught us everything we know,” Moshe Dayan said.

“Wingate would have become Israel’s first Chief of General Staff, had he not been killed in WWII.” Ben Gurion.

April 1948, Ramot Naftali, a Jewish settlement which had been named in honor of Orde Wingate, was attacked by Arab forces and besieged. The only way help could be given to the defenders was by dropping supplies from Piper Cubs. According to legend, Orde's widow, Lorna, threw down the Bible which her husband always carried with him on his military campaigns in Palestine and Burma. 

The 1999 biography of Wingate states that Lorna was denied permission for reasons of her own safety and instead inscribed the Bible and gave it to a group of women who had been evacuated from the kibbutz. The bible is in a museum at Ein Harod.

Hayedid – The Friend. Orde Wingate had appeared and disappeared like a whirlwind in the lives of the Palestinian Jews, but forever left his mark on the people he loved and the development of the Jewish State.  A friend indeed!

In 1953, the Yemin Orde Youth Village was established in the Carmel Mountains to accommodate Holocaust orphans and immigrant children. Today, the campus is home to more than 500 children from around the world. Almost  devastated by fire in 2011, they hope to rebuild it as soon as possible.

The Wingate Institute, Israel's National Centre for Physical Education and
Sport, was inaugurated in 1957 and is named in honour of Major General Orde Charles Wingate  - “The Friend". It is located near the coastal city of Netanya.                                              

Source:  www.haydid.org/wingate

 

From the book Israel, History in a Nutshell © Hela Tamir