Gay Dutch soldiers responsible for Srebrenica massacre? Balls. One of the finest British commanders of the Second World War was as bent as a nine-bob note

By Toby Young World Last updated: March 19th, 2010

I was shocked by General John Sheehan’s remarks about “open homosexuality” in the Dutch Army being to blame for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. (He was testifying in the Senate against President Obama’s plans to end the ban on allowing gays to serve openly in the US military.) Not shocked by his bigotry, but by his ignorance of his own profession. Isn’t the General aware that some of the finest soldiers in the history of warfare have been “openly homosexual”? As Churchill himself said, the three time-honoured traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, buggery and the lash.

I’ll give just one example here, a personal hero of mine: Orde Charles Wingate. Born in 1903, he was educated at Charterhouse and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, before being commissioned in the Royal Artillery in 1923. He had what I call “negative charisma” — almost everyone he came into contact with took an instant dislike to him. “As he shambled from one [office] to another, in his creased, ill-fitting uniform and out-of-date Wolsely helmet, carrying an alarm clock instead of waring a watch, and a fly-whisk instead of a cane, I could sense the irritation and resentment he left in his wake,” wrote Wilfred Thesiger, who served under him in Abyssinia. Thesiger, incidentally, was as gay as they come, yet he won a DSO after forcing 2,500 Italian troops to surrender to him.

At Charterhouse, the boys organised “Wingate hunts” and he would take refuge in the school library where he read the Bible. It was during one such episode that he came across a passage which described a “people against whom every man’s hand was turned, yet they remained bloody and unbowed”. From that moment on he became a passionate philosemite and it was in Palestine in the 1930s that he came into his own as a soldier, leading Jewish night squads to repel Arab raids on Jewish communities along the Mosul-Haifa oil pipeline. The military tactics he pioneered during this period — harassing the enemy’s rear with light infantry — were later taken up by the Israeli army and one of the irregulars who served under him was Moshe Dayan. Wingate became so committed to the Zionist cause he was dubbed “Lawrence of Judea” and his superiors became suspicious that he was passing on secret information to the Jews. When he left Palestine in 1939 his Jewish friends blessed him by laying their hands on his head. He was known to them as “hayedid” (the friend).

He was 37 when he arrived in Khartoum in 1940 as a major in the Royal Artillery. He was put in charge of an outfit that consisted of 50 British officers, 20 NCOs and 1,600 Ethiopians and Sudanese. He named this motley crew “Gideon Force” after the Gideon of the Old Testament and led them into Abyssinia to liberate an area occupied by 40,000 Italian troops.

Wingate was notorious for paying scant attention to personal hygiene. Kenneth Anderson, a Reuters correspondent who followed Gideon Force into Abyssinia, wrote: “He was certainly one of the most ruthless chaps I have ever met. Absoltely fearless, tireless and at times uncouth. He never bothered to wash or shave. On the rare occasions when we came to a waterhole, he would lower his trousers and squat with his bottom cooling in the water. But that was as far as he went with his ablutions.”

In the middle of the Abyssinian campaign, by which time he had already forced 20,000 Italian troops to surrender, Wingate radioed his immediate superior, General Cunningham, predicting that 500 of his irregulars could force the remaining 20,000 Italians to surrender within ten days. Cunningham was so appalled by Wingate’s arrogance he ordered him to hand over to his second-in-command. Wingate laughed and fell back on the old trick of pretending his radio was broken. Exactly ten days later he accepted the surrender of the Italian commander-in-chief.

He received no recognition for this feat, but, instead, had his rank reduced for insubordination and was given a desk job in Cairo. Shortly afterwards, he caught Malaria and, during a bout of fever, tried to cut his own throat. “You bloody fool,” said his commanding officer when he visited him in hospital. “Why didn’t you use a revolver?”

Wingate’s abrasive, uncouth manner didn’t endear him to his superiors whom he was fond of calling “military apes”. “Wingate would go in and be bloody rude to one or two generals and leave everybody thinking, ‘Well, I’m damned if I’ll do anything for that bastard!’,” wrote Thesiger.

It wasn’t until he was summoned by Winston Churchill, who’d heard about his exploits in Gojjam, that his fortunes began to change. “We had not talked for half-an-hour, before I felt myself in the presence of a man of the highest quality,” Churchill recalled.

He put Wingate in charge of the Chindits, a group of 3,000 irregulars in Burma, whom he led on guerilla operations against the Japanese, hundreds of miles behind enemy lines. Up until this point in 1943, the Allies had suffered a series of successive defeats for 18 months. According to Mountbatten: “The myth, the legend had grown up assiduously fostered by the Japanese propaganda machine, that the Japanese was a born jungle fighter and was invincible. It was Wingate who proved he was not. It was Wingate’s men who went in and showed that, man to man, they were superior to the Japanese at any game.”

One of the men who served with Wingate in Burma was Bernard Fergusson, who dropped a rank and forsook a desk job at General Headquarters to command one of Wingate’s columns in the first sortie into Burma. “If he told you that you could do something, you were at once sure that you could do it,” he said. “Not one of the men whom we left dead or dying, whether of wounds or more often from starvation, as we struggled on our way, ever upbraided him or me. They were proud of serving under him; they were proud of his very ruthlessness.”

Wingate had a wife back in England, but from the late 30s onwards he was always accompanied by Akavia, his civilian Jewish “companion”. In his autobiography, Thesiger described a typical evening meal for Wingate and Akavia: “I once watched the two of them roast a chicken over a fire. They had no pots or pans, no plates or knives or forks, and when it was cooked, Wingate, squatting on the ground, tore it to pieces with his teeth, getting his hands and face smothered in grease. Having finished he said: ‘Here, Akavia, catch!’ and threw the remains to him.”

Wingate died in a plane crash in 1944. He was 40-years-old, the youngest Major-General in the British Army. He was initially buried in Manila, but his remains were relocated to Arlington in Virginia in 1950 because the majority of the men killed with him in Burma were American. I would suggest that General Sheehan pays a visit to his grave over the weekend and asks his forgiveness for suggesting that homosexuals don’t have the backbone to be good soldiers. According to Churchill, Wingate was “one of the most brilliant and courageous figures of the Second World War.”