Wingate's Burma Raid

by CHARLES J. ROLO

1

LED BY Brigadier Orde Charles Wingate, eight British columns last February secretly crossed from India through the Japanese lines into Burma and then for three months spread confusion and panic. The Japanese buzzed about Wingate and his men like bees from an overturned hive, but were never able to stop them. The expedition wiped out Japanese outposts, exploded ammunition dumps, wrecked airfields and hangars.

In Burma’s mountains and jungles, every line of communication is a crucial life-line. Wingate’s men — he called them Chindits after the dragons which guard Burmese temples — put highways out of commission, blew up bridges, and dynamited the key railway along a 100-mile stretch. All this time every pound of supplies for Wingate’s several thousand men was flown over the frontier by the RAF and dropped by parachute. The raiders penetrated 300 miles into Japaneseheld territory and did damage on a front 300 miles wide, then made good their escape by a heroic march back to India. Casualties for the whole campaign were fewer than anyone had dared to predict. It will be one of the legendary tales of this war.

But it was much more than pure adventure, for the expedition accomplished important strategic aims. It relieved pressure on the Chinese and on the heroic little force of Burmese tribesmen still holding out in the north. It gathered information which enabled the RAF to make devastating raids on Japanese concentration points. It tied up the Japanese on repair work all summer and probably staved off an invasion of India. Above all, it set a pattern of training and tactics for the reconquest of Burma. Keen-eyed little Gurkhas, loyal Burmese, and a regiment of city-bred Englishmen beat the Japanese soldier at his own game and showed him he was no longer master of the jungle.

When Wingate arrived in India, in the summer of 1942, he had never seen a Japanese soldier and knew nothing about jungle fighting. The first thing he did was to send for books — on the training, tactics, religion, and customs of the enemy, and the climate and topography of Burma — and for every available report on the engagements fought against the Japanese. When he had mastered the material, he laid his plan of campaign.

Wingate explained: “My organization is built around two weapons—the plane and the radio. Our supplies will be dropped from the air; we shall have no other line of communication. We shall maintain contact by radio with the RAF and between the columns, which are self-contained mobile units, prepared to operate at long distances from one another.”

Wingate’s British Chindits were men from the North of England, aged twenty-eight to thirty-five — second-line troops taken from a coastal defense unit and sent out to India to do internal security work. None had ever been under fire. But for six sweltering months in the Indian jungles, Wingate trained them in river crossing, infiltration tactics, and long forced marches with heavy packs, until they were the toughest of shock troops. In fact, after the expedition had returned from Burma, one private remarked: “The whole job was a piece of cake compared to the training.”

Field Marshal Wavell inspected the Wingate expedition before it left India and as a gesture of respect saluted the Chindits before they could salute him. He knew — and every man knew — that anyone who was wounded, became sick, or fell out of line would probably be left to the Japanese.

2

THE half-mile-wide Chindwin River, boundary between Britishand Japanese-held territory, was the first critical step in the advance. Darkness was approaching as the main body of Wingate’s men reached the stream. Reconnaissance parties had already reported that the opposite bank for some miles was clear of enemy patrols. One of the column commanders whistled a bird call. It was faintly repeated in the distance, and the troops filed quietly into a rice paddy field on the bank of the river.

The heavy equipment was ferried across in sampans, rubber boats, and dugouts. The officers and men stripped and swam across’against the swift current. At dawn scouts reported that no enemy patrols wore in sight, and the crossing continued through the day and far into the night. Wingate tossed his helmet into the last canoe, peeled off his clothes, and plunged into the swirling yellow-brown water.

The Chindits’ advance took them through dense jungle, over razorback mountains, along paths not more than three feet wide flanked by sheer precipices, then down into valleys where the elephant grass grows taller than a man. Rotting skeletons marked the tracks over which the Allies had retreated the summer before.

Wingate used a variety of stratagems to evade Japanese concentrations. He kept clear of beaten tracks, hacking his own path through the jungle. At times he took laborious precautions to cover up footprints, or again he would send out “deception groups” to lay false trails. But mainly he relied on speed of movement. His raiding parties would slab at an objective, then cover five or six miles at top speed before the Japanese could bring up more troops.

Enemy patrols were often so close to Wingate’s men that scouts would bump into each other in the jungle. One Chindit came face to face with a redcapped Japanese officer, probably a Brigadier, who spun around and fled into the undergrowth yelling: “Wheel wheel British!” At night, to trick the Chindits into betraying their position, Japanese officers would cry out: “Sergeant Major, come over here.” Throughout the campaign Wingate’s men were skirmishing almost continually, and killed more than a thousand Japanese. But the enemy never caught up with them in force.

Frequently the Chindits covered thirty miles a day in a temperature of 105 in the shade. Wingate saw to it. that not a moment was wasted. He forbade shaving because it would mean ten minutes less sleep; all waking hours were spent marching or fighting. Wingate had a theory that sickness could be kept down by constant marching - and it is a fact that there was hardly a case of malaria while the columns were on the march.

At the head of each column trotted scouting dogs, trained to recognize the scent of the Japanese. The eight prongs of the expedition kept in constant touch with one another by radio, messenger dogs, carrier pigeons, and strange bird calls. Elephants, ridden by little Burmese mahouts, plodded ahead with the mortars, Bren guns, folding boats, and wireless sets with a thousand-mile range. Next came the horses and men; then the pack mules. In the rear were the slow-moving oxen and small gray bullocks, drawing carts loaded with machine guns, tommy guns, grenades, rifles, and ammunition. Wingate marched at the head of one column, issuing orders from a radio mounted on a mule, and receiving daily reports by radio from his company commanders.

The Chindits were equipped with rubber-soled hockey shoes, Australian-type slouch hats, antimosquito veils, and machetes. Each man entered Burma with six days’ paratroop rations on his back, and thereafter was supplied from the air. All told, the Wingate expedition received 500,000 pounds of air-borne supplies.

An RAF flying officer marched with each column to select sites for dropping the supplies — rice fields, dried-up river beds, tracts of flattened elephant grass. Wireless messages in code notified the air base in Assam of the exact time and place for the next delivery. Smoke columns guided the aircraft in the daytime, flares and Very lights at night.

Frequently within a few minutes’ flight of Japanese airfields, the big planes would swoop as low as 150 feet, releasing by parachute their loads of arms, ammunition, dynamite, and ration cans containing bully beef, biscuits, dates, raisins, tea, sugar, salt, and Vitamin C tablets. Breakable equipment was so carefully packed in canvas-covered wicker containers that, of the many hundreds of bottles of rum parachuted to the Chindits, only one broke.

The RAF made a valiant attempt to give the columns any special items they requested. One officer asked for a recently published life of Bernard Shaw, and got it by return trip. Another had Iris will dropped, for signature, when his column was surrounded by the Japanese. Two Irish majors appealed for a bottle of Irish whiskey with which to celebrate St. Pat rick’s Day. When a column radioed to Assam at 5.00 P.M. an urgent request for 400 pounds of chocolate — a rare luxury in India — the message was immediately relayed to Calcutta, where a leading restaurant worked all night to make the chocolate. Next morning it was flown 700 miles into Burma.

On one occasion a Chindit raiding party dined in style. It came upon the headquarters of a Japanese unit, deserted except for servants busily preparing dinner. The Burmese obligingly waited on Wingate’s men, who polished off every scrap of food in the camp.

The Burmese throughout were extraordinarily friendly to the Chindits. They always referred to the British as “the Government” and to their present rulers as “the Japs” and asked Wingate if “the Government” would soon return to restore trade and deal with the smallpox, which was spreading because of Japanese neglect.

The expedition had penetrated within 120 miles of the Burma Road wdien Wingate received orders to return to India. When it reached the Irrawaddy on the way back — it was a bitterly cold night with a brilliant moon — the Japanese opened up with mortars and machine guns. Wingate could have forced a crossing, but it would have meant heavy losses. Instead he ordered the Chindits to break up into groups of forty, and to play hide-and-seek in the jungle until they had given the Japanese the slip. Each party covered fifty miles in the next fortyeight hours, crossing the Irrawaddy safely at widely scattered points. Then, in order to travel rapidly, they buried their wireless sets, smashed their heavy equipment, and set off on the 300-mile trek to the boundary.

Without radios, air-borne supplies were cut off. The Chindits first ate their bullocks and mules, and then lived on rice, snakes, vultures, banana palms, jungle roots, and grass soup. Hunted every yard of the way, they were forced to avoid the main drinking places and sometimes went for days with only a few mouthfuls of water drained out of hollow bamboos. Knowing that their only security lay in speed, Wingate drove his men without mercy. And he brought them through.

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THOUGH conventionally trained as a gunner at Woolwich Military Academy, Orde Wingate is a throwback to the adventurous days when commanders charged into battle at the head of their men. He carries on the tradition of the eccentric soldier-genius that the British Army produces once every generation — Clive of India, “Chinese” Gordon, Lawrence of Arabia. He is a “sword and Bible” general with a love for the desert and the jungle and a flair for strange races. “ You can’t help but follow him,” said one of the Chindits, “when you see him charge through the elephant grass in that old pith helmet.”

The sword, the Bible, and the flair for strange races are all a part of Wingate’s heritage. His father served thirty-two years in the Indian Army, and after retiring founded a mission for the Pathans. H is mother, too, is deeply religious and gave her son a strict Puritan upbringing. All his life faith has meant a great deal to Wingate — faith in a higher Providence, in his own destiny, and in the cause he is fighting for.

Wingate is of medium height and average build, with the lean face of an intellectual, deep-set, piercing blue eyes, a thin bony nose, severe mouth, and lantern jaw. His blond hair is bleaching into gray.

“The mind of the white man,” Wingate believes, “is dulled by the narrow troughs in which we live,” and he has always sought out broader horizons. When serving in Palestine he spent his leaves in a Jewish settlement, fn the Sudan he mastered several Arabic dialects. In the early morning he can be heard singing to himself in Arabic in his tent. In Burma, when he wished to congratulate a column commander, he would radio “Nice work” — in Arabic.

Wingate talks like an encyclopedia. In the officers’ mess he will hold forth with equal facility on Yogi, the social habits of the hyena, the behavior of flies when you put them under a tumbler, eighteenth-century painting, and how to win the war. In Ethiopia he once amazed a group of junior officers with a discourse on the technique of hyena hunting by pistol in the moonlight. Out in the field, if he came upon two or three officers together, he would lecture them on the strategy and tactics of the campaign.

Wingate’s zeal is no respecter of rank or title; his indiscretion is prodigious. He lectures superiors and subordinates alike on their mistakes of policy. He is probably the only British officer in modern times who has used the ancient prerogative of complaining in writing to the King about one of his superior officers. After provoking the wrath of a group of brass hats with his unorthodox ideas, Wingate once soberly remarked to a friend: “You know, I’m not half so crazy as people think.”

The love of adventure runs deep in Wingate’s blood. As a lieutenant, ordered to proceed from England to the Sudan, he crossed Europe via the Alps on a bicycle. Later he spent a long leave exploring the Libyan desert in search of the “Lost Oasis” mentioned in an ancient Arab ballad. lie is a natural-born guerrilla fighter — fearless, inexhaustible, always alive to the unexpected. In Palestine in 1938 he was awarded the D.S.O. — to which he has since added two bars — for leading the night patrols that cleared the country of Axissubsidized Arab terrorists. In Ethiopia he won the admiration and support of the tribesmen by a series of swashbuckling commando forays against vastly superior Italian forces.

Wingate’s conception of warfare is a fantastic combination of the primitive and the modern. “Nothing is so devastating,” he believes, “as to pounce upon the enemy in the dark, smite him hip and thigh, and vanish silently into the night.” Yet Wingate is the man responsible for introducing to guerrilla warfare a Wellsian brand of modern science.

Wingate is one of the few white men in this war who have succeeded in swaying the primitive native mind. He always carries with him a duplicating machine, a loud speaker, and a unit of specially trained native propagandists. At every village in Burma and Ethiopia he paused long enough to hand out leaflets and broadcast a manifesto framed in picturesque language. “The mysterious men who have come among you,” he told the Burmese, “can summon from afar great and mysterious powers of the air, and will rid you of the fierce, scowling Japanese.” The Burmese named him “Lord Protector of the Pagodas.” They kept mum about the movements of the Chindits and guided Wingate’s men over secret jungle trails. Without this cooperation the expedition would probably have been tracked down and annihilated.

The Ethiopian campaign was a typical Wingate show all the way — full of dash, surprise, and successful bluff. With only 1800 Sudanese and Ethiopian Askaris, a sprinkling of British officers and noncoms, two trench mortars, a few field guns, and virtually no air support, he stormed the first Italian strongholds in a series of rapier-like thrusts. Groups of fuzzy-haired Ethiopian irregulars — Wingate insisted they be called “Patriots” — rallied to his side. Altogether this half-pint army accounted for 40,000 Italians, killed or captured. In May, 1941, Wingate entered Addis Ababa on a white charger by the side of Haile Selassie.

Field Marshal Wavell was so impressed that he summoned Wingate to India in 1942, raised him to the rank of Brigadier, and gave him a free hand to build up a raiding force that would be the vanguard of reconquest in Burma.

The Wingate expedition proved several things which have a vital bearing on the coming offensive in Burma. It showed that a large force could operate indefinitely in enemy territory without orthodox lines of communication, and be supplied entirely from the air. It revealed that the Japanese have outstayed their welcome in Burma; after twro years of Japanese intimidation, Burma’s fifth column is ready to change sides. The expedition justified Wingate’s boast that he could “make any man into a jungle fighter capable of coping with the best the Japanese have got,” and it gave the Allies a new insight into their Japanese enemy.

“The Japanese,” says Wingate, “is no superman. His operational schemes are the product of a thirdrate brain. But the individual soldiers are fanatics. Put one of them in a hole with 100 rounds of ammunition, and tell him to die for the Emperor — and he will do it. The way to deal with him is to leave him in his hole and go behind him.

“Jungle warfare demands great resourcefulness and endurance. The Japanese has tremendous endurance, but he cannot solve problems he has never faced before. We have proved that we can beat him on his own chosen ground.”