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Orde Wingate and the Official Historians

Official military histories have considerable status and it is rarely that they are seriously challenged. Their authors are employed for long periods from government funds and have access to public documents well in advance of the general public. The results of their labours are sufficiently authoritative and detailed to tempt researchists to by-pass more wearisome investigation in the Public Record Office. When a serious error of historical fact or assessment is made in an official history the result can be particularly harmful for three reasons. The first stems from the status and high credibility of such volumes, open attacks upon the veracity of which are widely regarded as foolish and rather indecent. The second reason is the likely proliferation of untruth, as of truth, from an official history into many subsequent books, articles and lectures, which are then ranged together in opposition to dissenters from the official line. The third reason is the difficulty which exists in correcting errors and attitudes in an official history. In this article it is intended to consider a particularly gross malassessment of a British general, who was killed in the Burma campaign of the second world war, by the British Official History of that campaign. Major-General Orde Charles Wingate was born in 1903 and made his military reputation by his organization of the 'Special Night Squads' in Palestine before the war, by his command of the mainly Soudanese and Ethiopian 'Gideon Force' which invaded Ethiopia from the west in 1941 and by his two 'Chindit' campaigns in Burma in 1943 and 1944, in the second of which he was killed.