Fire in the Night

...If his Gharterhouse nickname was uncomplimentary, neither was he popular at Woolich, the army college he graduated from without distinction in 1923 . Undersized, unkempt, unclubbable except for brilliant hunting and steeplechasing, an intellectual, a Beethoven fan, he resemb l e d - u p to a point-his distant cousin T.E...

...What is by now a small library of pro and con writings began appearing soon after ~_ Wingate's plane dropped into the ,_~ Burmese jungle...

...But it seems improbable...

...D id Wingate switch loyalties...

...Or rather, in a country Wingate knew as "Zion...

...A fascination with the Bible used to run through English ~ - - ~ a ~ , - ~ - - ~ ~ culture and was one ~ ~ - m o t i v e for the Bal~ ~ four Declaration of ~ ~ 19a 7 promising ~ ~ ' = - ~ the Jews a new ~ ~:" homeland m the old Land of Israel...

...The 1939 White Paper choked off immigration to the Jewish homeland just when, in Weizmann's formulation, the earth had been divided into places Jews had to leave and places they couldn't get into...

...Yet what makes the irony so nice is that quite a few unusual men and women carried the White Man's Burden...

...Recently, however, Wingate's memoranda were auctioned by Sotheby's, the original items, and the Jewish state where everybody has a cellular telephone failed to put in a bid...

...Theirs isn't the first biography...

...Largely a racket," his contemporary George Orwell said of that empire...

...It was gentlemanly realpolitik, not anti-Semitism...

...Weizmann declined the offer...

...One way or the other, the sneaky, daring methods winning him fame in Burma and Ethiopia had been originated by him in Palestine...

...By definition, great men aren't normal...

...At six decades' distance," write Bierman and Smith, "it is impossible to reach a firm verdict on the truth or otherwise of this allegation...

...Fire in the ii ~ N ightmayrankasthebest, Ii !i combining vivid storytelling with a grasp of the most l important thing in Wingate's ~ life, the "political idea that f - made him whole...

...Wingate talked his superiors into letting him form "Special Night Squads" based in Zionist collective farms and mixing Jews with British troops...

...Irony died back in the twentieth century, around the same time as the empire, so a youngster hearing Lord Palmerston's quip today might believe Gibralter and India, Tanganyika and Kuwait and Ireland and Hong Kong and Fiji and Jamaica and the 13 Colonies and the Falkland Islands and Malaya and the rest of the grandest portfolio of holdings ever built was stumbled over...

...Nowadays, say Bierman and Smith, these lows would be identified as "clinical depression, a condition that was to haunt him throughout his life...

...Back in London, he told everyone the Arabs would side with the Germans anyway- his forecast was largely correct...

...Having squelched the Palestinians' first intifada, having realized that Hitler was unappeasable, having decided to clear the decks for another world war, the Chamberlain government had also just revoked the Balfour Declaration...

...f ~ ~ ~-.~ lends any biography ~ - ~ -~ i ~ ? ! ~ : ~ its tragic element...

...Despite his rejection of Christian dogma...Wingate remained, and would remain all his life, absolutely certain of the existence of the Judeo-Christian God, n o t just as some remote prime mover but as a personal deity, and one moreover who intended him for some great purpose, as yet unrevealed...

...They were plentiful, for if the volunteer Brits, Ethiopians, Gurkhas, and Jews under Wingate's command loved him, cherishing his oddities, and if big names like EDWARD ~ROSSMAN divides his time between Israel and California...

...Churchill, Wavell, Mountbatten, and Ironside valued his gifts, the officer caste he belonged to detested him...

...It would take a decade or so for him to encounter and embrace a cause...and in so doing to direct his life toward a goal from which it would never deviate...

...The underdog of course is in the e y e of the beholder...

...On paper, it wasn't a colony but a mandate granted England by the League of Nations so the Balfour Declaration might be implemented, and now that refugees from Hitler were crowding in, the local Arabs understandably rebelled, demanding the homeland be junked before they were turned into a minority...

...An earlier biographer had him urging the Jews in 1939 to raise their own insurrection, starting with the blowing-up of the Haifa refinery, an operation he would lead...

...Was he luckier than he deserved, not only in Burma but Ethiopia, where, as the obituaries said, he'd first exploded into the news by defeating an Italian army much bigger than his and restoring Emperor Haile Selassie...

...Wingate drank too, but nothing like Churchill...

...Nor was his suicide x" attempt...

...Returning from Sudan aged 31, he met Ivy Paterson and her 16-year-old daughter...

...A perishable memory...

...The unfriendly likes of Beaverbrook and MacDonald gave nothing...

...Code Name: The Friend Fire in the Night: Wingate of Burma, Ethiopia and Zion John Bierman and Colin Smith Random House/4~9 pages / $29.95 REVIEWED BY Edward Grossman S ome MTV viewers just possibly have a clue what the British Empire was...

...This idea, this move- / o...

...Later, experts would quarrel about that...

...The moment at which the English officer did or didn't broach treason was desperate...

...Lorna became no less a Zionist than her husband when they showed up in Palestine in 1936...

...For three years after Germany and Japan surrendered, the Brits held on to Palestine, maintaining the White Paper, and the same Jews who'd been trained by Wingate in the thirties now defied England by running weapons and "illegal" immigrants on board leaky ships, including one named in his memory...

...Pulling strings, he got interviews with Lord Beaverbrook, that era's Rupert Murdoch, and Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald...

...Unlike his attempted suicide, this could not have been hushed up...

...We Jews remember our friends," he was told by Moshe ShareR, the Zionist who'd go on to become Israeli foreign minister and prime minister...

...It was groups of men stalking and killing other men in the dark, and it worked beautifully...

...But his unpopularity was already quasi-official at Charterhouse school, where, as John Bierman and Colin Smith tell us, his nickname among the boys was "Stinker...

...But no one came near Wingate for extremism or, for a time anyway, usefulness...

...But is there a single one who knows that it--the empire, that is--was picked up in a fit of absentmindedness...

...Bierman and Smith--two Englishmen living on Cyprus--avoid hero-worship while espousing the great man view...

...Bierman and Smith might not agree, but they do find Wingate's greatness in his passion for the underdog, as if there was no other means to redeem himself or his nation...

...Fire in the Night leaves the dynamics of this marriage to be guessed at...

...But at his death, when he was a 41-year - ill old star, his obsession and his ~ dream of returning to help bring it ! to fulfillment weren't known to the world at large...

...The same English government that tried to appease Hitler suggested, for the record, immediately paring offa ministate for the Jews, and when the Arabs said no, it put the boot into them...

...The front-page sto W in the New York Times reporting the crash of his B-25 noted , , ~ some exploits in Palestine but dwelled on his creation i.'q, and leadership of the Chin- "~i,~ dits, an English-Indian 'i " < force spreading havoc" behind Japanese lines...

...Middle Eastern oil, the Suez Canal and passage to India were vital The American Spectator _9 March 2 0 o o 61 to the empire, the region's Arabs were liable to side with the Germans if the English didn't abandon Zionism, and since the Jews had no option they were betrayed...

...And to this day, mention of Wingate fires up 8o-ish retired colonels and brigadiers...

...If he'd kept his vow when these Jews were in revolt, his enemies would have gotten his head, field marshal or not...

...Wingate's Raiders" the Chindits were known as stateside, where, since the plane was American and the rippedup bodies intermingled, the young celebrity was buried...

...A man of genius," his palxon Churchill orated...

...It made his banishment from Palestine once the uprising was crashed inevitable...

...His family were soldiers '~ / a n d missionaries, Plymouth Brethren, coldwater-inside-and-out Nonconformists whose i kids were made to rise at dawn to hear chunks of the Old Testament and, if male, to be struck (/ occasionally by papa...

...Wingate in 1939 had pledged to his lads, in Hebrew, to return...

...He "was always ready to put himself at the beck and call of the supreme Zionist leader [Chaim Weizmann]," say Bierman and Smith, and when the SNS got disbanded and Wingate reassigned to England, he offered to quit his commission and stay underground...

...The country was at the beginning of a native revolt...

...Here was an individual who'd spend afternoons in the Holy Land naked except for a pith helmet, munching onions, reading the Bible and grooming himself with a horse brush...

...A favorite guerrilla target was the oil pipeline from Iraq to Haifa...

...62 March 2 o o o _9 The American Spectator...

...Rarer still-unheard-of, really--was a junior officer bombarding London with memoranda to this effect...

...Not likely, and maybe that's good...

...ment, was Zionism...

...He "may have been an outsider," Bierman and Smith remark, "but he was an insider's outsider, just as the Zionists themselves, for all their outsider status, had powerful insider connections within the British establishment...

...If that B-25 hadn't crashed, he would have come out of World War II a hero, possibly a field marshal...

...His ill-wishers might have been even gladder if he'd done a better job...

...It was rare to hear an officer saying that for England's own good the Jews ought to have a state and army before the next world war...

...They say that to the day he died Wingate meant to go and lead a Jewish army...

...There came a night when he tried to end it by slitting his throat with a Bowie knife...

...He was hospitalized, observed by psychiatrists, given a convalescent breather, then passed fit with recommendations from Weizmann and King George's personal doctor...

...Home," Robert Frost said, "is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in...

...As, by the way, it did Churchill, who treated it with sleep, alcohol, writing, fighting, painting, gardening...

...There were other Brits, in and out of uniform, not many but some, who believed the Arabs should be discounted and faith kept with the Jews...

...This was the last thing Downing Street, the War Office, the Foreign Office, or the Colonial Office wanted...

...He had "only his belief in a personal God to hold on to" when the black dog visited...

...This helped Wingate and especially the Zionists little whenever the establishment had more important fish to fry...

...It's this which i...

...Although they gave him a decoration, his chiefs were suspicious...

...As for the IDF, the Zionists would have made it, would have cast off their defensive mentality, by themselves-already before Wingate a few baby steps had been taken...

...Great or not, Wingate qualified as eccentric, and his rehabilitation after Cairo shows that even as it was about to die the empire knew how to use eccentrics to gain victory...

...He enjoyed being different while insisting the milieu recognize him for what he was sure he would become, i.e., a great man...

...Wingate, however, exceeded his orders-ambushes turned into pursuits, then into raids on Arab villages...

...By the -.~_ i time Wingate ~ ~ i arrived ~ duty in Palestine his ~IS:'.~ ~;: ' nation's mandarins had had ! second thoughts...

...Among the strangest has to be a man famous once in the U.S...

...Lawrence, alias Lawrence of Arabia...

...He would have been damned as both a madman and a traitor...

...It hap- i' ~~ pened to depend on Eng- ~ land just when Wingate found his mission...

...Military apes," he called its members...

...They did it never aiming to get wealthy...

...Rightly, for what the captain intended was "breaking [the Jews] of their defensive mentality," as Bierman and Smith put it, and laying the foundations of a regular army so the nation God and Balfour had promised it to might conquer Biblical Israel...

...One easy assumption," Bierman and Smith write, might be that she was unconsciously looking for a father figure...And yet, casting around for an entirely rational explanation A fascination with the Bible used to run through English culture...

...You'll hear two judgments: He was a mentally unbalanced, impossible, disruptive, not all that loyal self-promoter, or the last great man produced by England...

...Bierman and Smith think cerebral malaria caused Wingate to try and kill himself in a Cairo hotel in 1941...

...There's no refuting this kind of judgment...

...of why Orde Wingate, mature soldier, fell so hard for Lorna Paterson, adolescent schoolgirl, and vice versa, does not really lead anywhere...

...Bierman and Smith imply that luck spared him an excruciating choice...

...Nonconforming is what 60 March 2000 The American Spectator Orde seems to have been from the get-go, at least outside the home...

...Treason, in other words...

...But the most sensational tale about Orde the authors do not credit...

...Enlightened imperialist, number one anti-Nazi, old friend of Weizmann and champion of Wingate, nearest thing to a dictator since Cromwell, he let the White Paper be enforced throughout the Holocaust, and let the idea of a Jewish Brigade to fight with the Allies sit in a pigeonhole until Wingate, its natural commander, had died and the war virtually ended...

...Worse, Churchill as prime minister gave only words...

...This both was and wasn't peculiar of him...

...His role was to expedite things, and supply a legend, an ideal on which for many years IDF officers were modeled...

...Although not surprised, Wingate was upset...

...Seen through a child's or moralist's eyes, it was here England touched bottom...

...Belief enabled Wingate to survive...

...As philosophers, scientists and poets down the ages have found, there is no explaining the phenomenon of romantic love...

...It was also to leave behind the memory of a Gentile who stuck with the Jews when they were forsaken by others...

...but now practically unknown, despite lying in Arlington National Cemetery: Major-General Orde Wingate (x9o3q944...

...As soon as it was legal, the girl and he married, she holding a copy of Wuthering Heights, passing up Oxford to be a soldier's wife...

...Other Zionists blew up the Haifa refinery...

...As for the Zionists, once they decided he was for real, they code-named him "The Friend...

...But lead it against whom...

...Bierman and Smith discuss t h e second issue while ignoring the first...

...Adults will view it differently...

...Possibly Lorna helped, too...

...His first imperial posting was to the Sudanese bush, where his moods fluctuated as he chased smugglers and improved his Arabic...

...Wingate came by ~ ~ his obsession naturally...

...The first Arab-Israeli War didn't begin until 1948...

...A Palestinian must s e e Wingate the raider of Arab villages and father of the Israel Defense Forces as a villain, a specimen of imperialism at its worst...

...The Patersons were Scottish planters in Ceylon, well-off, thank you, and if Loma weren't such a bonny lass, she might have passed for a bluestocking...