Wingate, Orde

views updated May 14 2018

Wingate, Orde (1903–44). Soldier. Wingate's father was a colonel in the Indian army and Wingate was born in India. His parents were Plymouth brethren. Commissioned in the Royal Artillery in 1923, he was sent to the Sudan in 1940 to lead an invasion of Italian-held Abyssinia, and with a small force, assisted by supporters of Haile Selassie, captured Addis Ababa in May 1941. He was then put in charge of the Chindit force to operate in Burma behind the Japanese lines, using radio to keep in touch and supplied from the air. A successful sortie in 1943 led to a more ambitious campaign for 1944, but Wingate was killed in an air crash in the jungle early in the operation. In a memo of July 1943 Churchill had called him ‘a man of genius and audacity … quite above the ordinary level’.

J. A. Cannon