Zealous for Zion
Philip Ziegler
FIRE IN THE NIGHT: WINGATE OF BURMA, ETHIOPIA AND ZION by John Bierman and Colin Smith Macmillan, £20, pp. 434 0 rde Wingate was viewed with some uncertainty by his superiors. Mountbatten thought that he was a madman but useful. Slim agreed about the madness but doubt- ed the usefulness, Churchill, however, believed him to be a hero, and one who should
command the army against the Japanese in Burma. He is a man of genius and audacity and has rightly been discerned by all eyes as a figure quite above the ordinary level.
All of them could make out a reasonable case for their point of view: it is a strength of this book that it presents a balanced pic- ture of this most unbalanced man. The sub- title describes Wingate as being 'of Burma, Ethiopia, and Zion'. Left to himself Wingate would probably have reversed the order. Burma brought him fame, but the Jewish cause was closest to his heart and the restoration of the Emperor Haile Selassie meant more to him than the return of Burma to the British Empire.
Wingate made his name in Palestine. As a British army officer, cousin and protégé of the eminent Arabist Sir Reginald Wingate, he might have been expected to favour the Arabs against the Jews. Instead he conceived an extravagant admiration for the energy and pioneering spirit of the Jew- ish settlers and rapidly concluded that we should back them through thick and thin. 'The Jews are loyal to the Empire,' he told his cousin.
The Jews are men of their word. . . The Jews will provide better soldiery than ours. Pales- tine is essential to our Empire — our Empire is essential to England — England is essen- tial to world peace. Islam is out.
The British attitude towards Zionism was still cautiously benevolent while Wingate was in Palestine and he was acting in accor- dance with official policy when he set up Special Night Squads to take on and destroy dissident Arab groups. The mur- derous efficiency with which the Squads operated, however, as well as Wingate's policy of promoting Jews to positions of responsibility and his partisan espousal of the Zionist cause, stirred up alarm in the military establishment. He was suspected — not without reason — of passing confi- dential information to the Jewish Agency, and some maintained that he went even further by telling his Jewish friends that, if the British reneged on their support for a Jewish state, it would be their right and duty to take up arms against them.
Bierman and Smith acquit Wingate of any such treason but make it clear that his reputation as an irresponsible and fanatic maverick was not unearned. His inability to accept direction or work with other people became still more evident in the next phase of his career, when his independent force of some 2,000 men was charged with restoring Haile Selassie to his throne in Addis Ababa. The campaign was conduct- ed with exemplary courage, resourcefulness and energy; it laid the foundation of a new philosophy of warfare, but the task could have been performed more efficiently and rapidly if Wingate had not quarrelled fero- ciously with anyone who seemed to present a challenge to his autocratic conduct of affairs. Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India and champion of Wingate's, protest- ed 'that Wingate's draft report on the Abyssinian operation made it clear that he viewed the high command with contempt and considered his commander, General Cunningham, to be a 'military ape'. This, Amery pointed out mildly, 'would certainly not encourage the authorities to entrust you with the kind of organising work that you want'.
His final battleground, Burma, was marked by the same vengeful acrimony. Bierman and Smith are perhaps too ready to dismiss the staff-officers in Delhi as reactionary blimps — 'curry colonels' — who resented the upstart who seemed actu- ally to want to 'fight' the Japanese. In fact many of them were sensible and experi- enced; they may have disliked Wingate per- sonally but they had legitimate grounds to doubt whether his concept of operations behind the Japanese lines was a good idea, Slim himself — no curry colonel he — questioned whether the Chindit expedi- tions were worth the effort and resources devoted to them. Militarily they were almost cerainly not; in terms of morale — whether of the Japanese in Burma, the British troops in India or the civilians in Britian and the USA — the balance proba- bly tips the other way.
Wingate, like his distant relative T. E. Lawrence, became a legend in his own lifetime, and his personality, if not his achievements, amply justified his iconic status. Bierman and Smith's rendering of his story errs occasionally on the side of raciness, but it is well considered, lucid and exciting. This is the best book on the subject yet available, and the subject is one which is well worth a fresh examina- tion.
Previous page
