Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (32 page)

After many months of planning and training, in February 1943 Wingate led some three thousand troops, a single brigade, into Burma on foot, their gear carried by a thousand mules. Over the next few months they raided Japanese outposts, disrupted their rail lines, and attacked other logistical sites. The Chindits were resupplied from the air and, lacking artillery of their own, relied on the occasional air strike to support their ground operations. By May, when they were being closely pressed from all sides by Japanese columns intent on their destruction, Wingate ordered dispersal into smaller teams with better chances of eluding pursuit. The retreat of the Chindits, like their raid itself, was replete with bitter, small-scale firefights.

About two-thirds of Wingate’s men made it back safely. Of the thousand who didn’t, half fell in the fighting, the rest were taken prisoner. Many conventional officers saw this as too high a price to pay for too little strategic gain—they noted that the Chindits had caused little lasting disruption to the Japanese buildup for an offensive into India.
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But Wingate and his supporters saw something else: solid proof of the value of his concept. As Leonard Mosley put it, regarding the first Chindit operation: “Wingate and his three thousand troops lived in and off Japanese territory, and demonstrated the capacity of British troops not only to withstand the sweaty terrors of the jungle but their ability to outwit the enemy at the game of jungle warfare.”
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Beyond the evidence that long-range penetration worked, and could be improved upon, this first expedition’s psychological effects proved to be profound. After an endless string of defeats and retreats, the British were back on the offensive in Asia. When word began to spread, Wingate was dubbed the “Clive of Burma,” an allusion to the great eighteenth-century hero who had won India for the empire in the first place. Winston Churchill, Britain’s prime minister since the spring of 1940, asked that Wingate be sent to see him when he came to Britain. Wingate arrived at Downing Street in August, and his brief scheduled meeting with the prime minister turned into a lively discussion over dinner. Churchill recalled, “I felt myself in the presence of a man of the highest quality.”
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On impulse Churchill decided to bring Wingate along to the Quebec Conference with Franklin Roosevelt for which he was leaving the following morning. As they crossed the Atlantic on the
QUEEN MARY
in August 1943, Wingate was given the opportunity to brief the British chiefs of staff who were traveling with Churchill. The chiefs took time from planning sessions for the upcoming Normandy invasion to hear him out. They were impressed. At Quebec he made less of an impression on President Roosevelt, who found him a bit odd. But General H. H. “Hap” Arnold, commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces, was deeply drawn to Wingate’s concept of long-range penetration operations and became intent on providing the next expedition—for all this high-level attention meant there
WOULD
be one—with better air support.

The meeting between Arnold and Wingate sparked development of the American “air commandos” who would, some months later, take most of the Chindits far behind Japanese lines on gliders and in transports. In this second expedition, U.S. airmen supplied the Chindits’ remote “strongholds” completely from the air, provided close support by attacking enemy formations on the ground, and evacuated the wounded. This last function was of crucial importance to the troops themselves, as on the first raid into Burma the wounded had had to be left to die or be captured. Thus Churchill’s spur-of-the-moment decision to take Wingate to Quebec set in train a series of events that led to greatly increased capacities for the Chindits—and prefigured ideas about air-and heliborne operations. Decades later they would come to be called “vertical envelopment.”

For the second Chindit operation Wingate, now a major general, was given command of three brigades, a division-sized force. In March 1944 two of the brigades were inserted by air into remote places, some more than two hundred miles behind enemy lines. They became strongholds from which the Chindits mounted their raids. The third brigade made the trek overland and started out a month earlier. There were also American troops, Merrill’s Marauders, to a degree configured like the Chindit forces, who joined the campaign. The Japanese now had a lot to worry about in their rear areas. Raiders popped up seemingly everywhere, destroying bridges and rail junctions, ambushing troops on the march, even attacking fixed positions.

Wingate lived to see little of this. As general-in-charge he hopped about from one stronghold to another by air, going to and from India as well. On March 24, 1944, the Mitchell B-25 in which he was traveling went down in a storm. None survived. The crash was so violent that it was near impossible to sort out the remains; all that was recognizable was Wingate’s battered pith helmet, still intact.

What of the campaign after Wingate’s death? Perhaps this phase offered the surest proof that his ideas about deep penetration and the role of airpower in irregular warfare were valid: those who carried on after him performed outstandingly. No historians seriously question their tactical skills. They spent months far behind the lines, not just surviving but also doing considerable damage to the Japanese, who had finally launched their long-awaited invasion of India just as the second Chindit operation was getting under way. Even though U.S. General Joseph Stilwell continually sought to integrate the raiding forces more closely into his own offensive campaign plans, aimed largely at the capture of Myitkyina (pronounced
MICH-IN-UH
), they were also able perform their more disruptive tasks, helping to defeat the Japanese invasion of India.

The Chindits were disbanded in 1945, apparently a sign that this kind of irregular operation was not to be nurtured. In the West after the war a long debate ensued between Chindit supporters and those who argued that the strategic impact of their operations was slight and that the resources devoted to them could have been put to much better uses.
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While helicopters would come to the fore, unsuccessfully, in American counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam two decades later, there were—and remain—few signs that the legacy of the Chindits is substantial.

Thus the world still awaits its next Wingate, a commander willing to work with a small force and mount sustained deep strikes. It is a form of action seen among several of the earlier masters profiled in this book, notably Rogers, Davydov, Forrest, and Crook. But this mode of operations has fallen into disuse. Perhaps the dark American experience in Vietnam sapped the ardor of those who would otherwise wish to explore the edge that airpower gives irregular forces in mobility and lethality. Even when a revival of Wingate’s techniques has occurred—as in the U.S. Special Forces campaign in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001—it has quickly given way to larger, more conventional, and more problematic, operations.

The greatest damage to the cause of long-range penetration may have been done by the historical controversy itself. Soldiers usually do not like to embrace an approach that is controversial, for this implies risk and a willingness to stand against much criticism. Yet war is the riskiest of all human activities, and the need to fight with an edge should impel thoughtful soldiers to seek out advanced, even if perilous, concepts of operations.

When it comes to Wingate’s great Chindit experiment with long-range penetration, the historical debate should be re-enlivened by focusing less on the criticism of his colleagues and more on the opinions of his enemies in the field. Here one finds a tremendous respect for Wingate’s operations. More than thirty Japanese unit commanders who fought in Burma, when interviewed after the war, said that “the raiding force [Chindits] greatly affected Army operations and eventually led to the total abandonment of Northern Burma.”
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It is just as important to consider the views of Wingate’s Israeli friends, for long-range penetration grew from roots planted in Palestine. Wingate’s willingness to strike deep, to seize the offensive always, notwithstanding the numerical odds, these became and remain the core practices of the Israeli Defense Forces. Moshe Dayan, who served with Wingate in a Special Night Squad and later became one of Israel’s most accomplished soldiers, confirmed his profound influence: “Every leader of the Israeli Army, even today, is a disciple of Wingate. He gave us our technique, he was the inspiration of our tactics, he was our
DYNAMIC
.”
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There can be no higher praise for a soldier than to have such a great impact, on friend and foe alike.

UNDERSEA WOLF:
CHARLES LOCKWOOD

PD-USGOV-MILITARY-NAVY

If long-range penetration played a key role in driving Japanese forces out of the jungles of Burma, this concept of operations was to have an even greater impact at sea in the wide-ranging naval war sparked by the Japanese Navy’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Just as Orde Wingate’s deep-striking Chindit irregulars had allowed the British to take offensive action early on against a militarily superior foe, American submarines would mount widespread, insurgent-type strikes—daring incursions that routinely lasted six to eight weeks—at a time when much of the U.S. Navy battleship fleet had been sunk and the Japanese had a better than two-to-one advantage in aircraft carriers. The time would come when American mass production would restore, then at last overturn the material balance in conventional naval power; until then, and even afterward, submarines served as the principal striking force against the far-flung Japanese maritime empire.

This would continue to be the case even in the wake of the great American victory at Midway in June 1942. Despite the loss of four carriers to one U.S. carrier in that battle, the Japanese retained their large advantage in conventional sea power. As Ronald Spector has put it: “The Japanese still had sufficient forces after Midway to again take the initiative for another try at the U.S. fleet.”
1
In the six-month struggle for Guadalcanal, which commenced not long after Midway, American naval losses exceeded those of the Japanese—though the favorable “exchange ratio” (of losses inflicted to losses suffered) enjoyed by the Imperial Navy cost it more dearly, at least in a proportional sense, due to the growth of the American fleets.
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The point is that undersea warfare remained at the forefront of U.S. naval strategy at this juncture in the war and continued to be the leading edge of the Pacific campaign even during the island-hopping invasions to come. Resources devoted to this theater of operations were always being constrained by the Allied priority of going after “Germany first.”

That American naval leaders would embrace this form of irregular warfare at sea was hardly a foregone conclusion. Submarines were seen as something close to illegal weapons, given the German record of unrestricted U-boat attacks during World War I, at a time when there was not yet a highly reliable technology for detecting a submerged boat. The millions of tons of losses inflicted by U-boats on merchant shipping in the 1914–1918 war at sea dwarfed the results achieved by German surface raiders, most of whose depredations were swiftly curtailed. Despite the speed and fighting power of these swift surface vessels, their positions were usually pinpointed by radio reports, and they were quickly hunted down. Thus these heirs apparent to the classical form of the
GUERRE DE COURSE
, or “war of the chase,” that had been waged by most leading states since the “sea dogs” of Sir Francis Drake’s day in the sixteenth century, gave way to stealthy, deadly submarines. The grave new threat they posed was so apparent that all maritime powers sought to outlaw or sharply curtail their use.

The submarine clearly overturned the rules governing traditional naval warfare. Yet despite this heightened general sense of awareness, and the more specific aim of preventing the Germans from ever building their U-boats again, submarines continued to thrive as a weapons system. Even the great Washington Naval Conference of 1921–1922 concluded with a treaty that affected only surface vessels; no agreement could be reached on prohibiting the production and use of submarines, and all the major naval powers continued to build them even though they feared them.

Germany too threw off its shackles after some years of constraint imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, mounting a new U-boat offensive at the outset of World War II. The highly pernicious effects of this campaign in the early going only redoubled American opposition to unrestricted submarine warfare in the two years of peace that remained to the United States before Pearl Harbor. Beyond diplomatic protests against the U-boat campaign, American naval forces began to wage an undeclared war at sea during this period, with convoy escort vessels often involved in edgy incidents with German submarines.