Orde Charles Wingate

Bumped into this character called Orde Wingate in Pappe's book, 'Die Ethnische Säuberung Palästinas' and it turns out to be the same Wingate who led the Chindits down in Burma in the fight against the Japanese.1 Anyway there was Orde, with an alarm clock wrapped around his wrist and an onion hanging around his neck; the onion because he thought that chewing raw onions was healthy and the alarm clock was to make sure he kept to his schedule; this was the type of fucking nutter that you like to have on your side. For as General Mutaguchi, commander of the Japanese 15th Army, said 'I realised what a loss his death was to the British army and said a prayer for the soul of this man in whom I had met my match'.2 Windgate died in a plane crash in 1944 and if there were, sighs of relief in Whitehall for a man who might have ended up an embarrassment in post war England, no doubt, the Japanese in Burma in 1944 were also breathing a bit easier.
It might, of course, be argued that at certain points in history we need the Wingates of this world. That means, of course, providing they are on our side and, while he might have broken the back of the Taliban in a few weeks he would probably have wiped out half the Pashtun population in the process. In 1936 the British made the mistake of sending this deeply religious fundamental Christian down to Palestine to help sort out the problems there. The real problem was that Wingate was an implacable advocate for a Jewish State and when it came to being a Zionist this guy was right up there with Theodore Herzl. As as soon as Orde got to the Holy Land he started organising the Haganah and he was so good at what he did that Moshe Dayan, who had served under him, was to later say, "Wingate taught us everything we know.".3 What Moshe and his mates knew we were to see some nine years after Wingate had to leave Palestine with a stamp in his passport forbidding him to return. The British had finally realised that the man was a liability, although they still decorated him with a DSO. Anyway, by the time Orde had to pack his bags, the damage had been done; the foundations had been laid, a small, reliable force had been established and it was ready to adopt methods that it had learned under Wingate to achieve its aim, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and, in between, our mad Christian Zionist was to get the opportunity to put the fear of death into the Japanese .... well, at least, the Japanese were capable of returning fire.
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orde_Wingate
2 http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2242/is_/ai_67051559
3 See 1 Ibid
The picture above is of Orde, could be holding his bible, cannot see the alarm clock but he appears to have forgotten, or eaten, the onion.
Note: Read; http://ellissharp.blogspot.com/2006/05/orde-wingate-war-criminal.html