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27 • • • Chapter 3 Chapter 3 To this point the experiences of Col. Orde Wingate—he was promoted as soon as he arrived in the Far East in late February or early March 1942—had been noteworthy, both for the detritus he left in his wake in the form of outraged or offended or perhaps jealous colleagues and for the honors his government bestowed upon him. That he was peculiar, eccentric, vain, opinionated, brash, dismissive, and headstrong was never a point for debate. Even his admirers allowed all the labels were true. That he was also brilliant, courageous, daring, passionate, loyal, sensitive , and scholarly were qualities that his enemies—and they were many and increasing—were loathe to acknowledge but were equally true.1 Wingate headed north out of Rangoon and scouted the countryside for several days, getting a basic and cursory sense of the land and the obstacles that an army operating there would face. The timing of his recce could not have been worse. Within days the seemingly invincible Japanese overran most of Burma, setting the stage for rolling westward into India and north into China. Rangoon itself fell on 8 March 1942. A long retreat by British troops and civilians through hellish terrain left the roads and trails littered with 14,000 of their dead, and the survivors who trekked into India looked like walking skeletons, hollow-eyed and gaunt, ill with dysentery and malaria. However much the Brits might like to call it a strategic withdrawal, it was an old-fashioned rout. The American general “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, who had walked out himself, was blunt in his assessment: “I claim we got a hell of a beating. We got 28 • • • Project 9 run out of Burma and it is humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, go back and retake it.”2 His acid comments did little to endear him to the British, but he had little good to say about them in any regard. Wingate flew out of Rangoon and arrived in India soon thereafter, with an assignment to train guerrilla troops such as the Gideon Force in Ethiopia or the Special Night Squads in Palestine. The idea was to fight an irregular war in Burma, since conventional warfare was not going well for the Allies. Wingate, however, held that guerrillas were born, not made. Like the Jews comprising the night squads, the Gideon Force soldiers were experts in their own country. Moreover they had obvious incentives for fighting and winning: it was their country, and they could expect no mercy if they lost. Additionally, guerrillas ideally would have the support of the local population. In Burma this was hardly the case, as many Burmese looked upon the Japanese as friends who were throwing out and thoroughly humiliating the hated British colonial troops.3 No, there would be no Wingate-trained and Wingate-led irregular force of expatriate indigenous troops crossing into Burma. His fertile brain had been at work during the voyage to Rangoon from his last posting in Ethiopia: what was needed was a long-range penetration group made up of ordinary British troops (including Indian troops, West Africans, Gurkhas from Nepal, and a contingent of loyal Burma Rifles, in addition to several units of Brits) and led by extraordinary officers. He long had held the view that the keys to victory and good soldiering were good leaders. The plan continued to evolve as the 77th Indian Brigade (so-called for reasons of secrecy) began training near Gwalior, south of Delhi. It was to cross into Burma from India’s eastern province of Assam and divide into columns to attack rail lines, communications, and outposts, thus pulling Japanese troops away from the front. The brigade’s actions would be coordinated with three major drives: Stilwell and his Chinese troops from the north, a spear into the south from the Burmese state of Arakan by British forces, and a push by an Indian army corps to the Chindwin River from Imphal in Assam. Wingate was maniacal and unrelenting in his training; perhaps he needed to be. His goal was to train ordinary soldiers to accept the hardships , deprivations, and dangers of operating as far as 200 miles behind enemy lines and to create an esprit de corps that would make them relish being there. To Wingate’s mind ennui had permeated much of the military in India. As during the Phoney War in France before May 1940, the enemy...

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