Orde Wingate

Orde Wingate

Major-General Orde Charles Wingate, DSO and two bars (26 February 1903 – 24 March 1944), was an eccentric but brilliant British Army officer and creator of special military units in Palestine in the 1930s and in World War II.

A highly religious Christian, Wingate became a supporter of Zionism, seeing it as his religious and moral duty to help the Jewish community in Palestine form a Jewish state. Assigned to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1936, he set about training members of the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization, which became the Israel Defense Forces with the establishment in 1948 of the state of Israel. Wingate became known to the Jewish men he commanded during the Arab Revolt as "The Friend". He is most famous for his creation of the Chindits, airborne deep-penetration troops trained to work behind enemy lines in the Far East campaigns against the Japanese during World War II.