Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 299 - Orde Wingate and the Chindits: Part 1

Episode Date: February 18, 2024

SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Orde Wingate was an insane person who thought exercise would cure malaria, wore a necklace of raw onions and garlic, and carried an alarm clock that would go off at random times like he was the Mad Hatter. He was also a commander of one of the most famous British military units during the Second World War. BUY JOE'S BOOK: https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-War-Military-Sci-Fi-Undying-ebook/dp/B0CQ6BH6BD/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2TQI3C0BO6I0B&keywords=joe+kassabian&qid=1707720101&sprefix=%2Caps%2C204&sr=8-1 SOURCES: John Diamond. British General Orde Wingate's Blurred Legacy https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2015/2/13/orde-wingate-and-combat-leadership David Rooney. Orde Wingate and the Chindits: Redressing the Balance.

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lines Led by Donkeys podcast, but I guess you probably already knew that. What if there was a war raging for a million years, but it was kept a secret? It's a question that Sarkis never considered. He was born as an upper-middle class man living in Prime City during the so-called millennia of peace. As far as he knew, or as far as anybody knew, humanity has no army, no weapons, and no wars. The people of Earth had been expanding into the stars as long as anyone remembered,

free of conflict, while the Techno King and his royal cabal enriched themselves in the backs of their labor. It was as it always had been. Then, Sarkis died. Unbeknownst to him, an app he used every single day of his life hijacks his consciousness and uploads it into a synthetic engine of war known as a sleeve. Along with countless others, he's been conscripted into the Undying Legion, charged with fighting a secret, unending war in the name of humanity. Their minds stolen, uploaded into war machines, they fight a secret war to preserve humanity. My new book, The Invisible War, comes out February 20th via Atheon Books and is now available for pre-order on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at www.patreon.com slash linesledbydonkeys. Just $5 per month gets you every regular episode early, access to our community discord, a digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, as well as its audio book read by me, and over five years of bonus content. By supporting the

show, you support us and allow us to keep our show as it has always been ad-free. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I am Joe in the depths of Tbilisi, and joining me in the caverns of London, I don't know what the fuck London has, is Nate. What's up, buddy? Yeah, it's me.

What's up? Hey, it was funny because you were talking about, God, I fucking hate Georgia. I really want to get out of here. And then up, buddy? Yeah, it's me. What's up? Hey, it was funny because you were talking about, God, I fucking hate Georgia. I really want to get out of here. And then you kicked into show mode. And all I could think of was the... Have you ever seen the Howard Stern private parts movie? God, I think I was a child. Yeah, we would have been... Because I would have been 13, 12 when it came out. So you would have been younger than me. But I just remember there's the scene where his... I think his dad works as as a radio station and there's some guy that does like the sort of like smooth easy listening and he's like freaking out like having a i don't say nervous breakdown but just like

kind of melting down right before the broadcast is like this is all fucking bullshit it's bullshit like breaking records and his dad has to go in and be like listen dude you got to do the show and the guy just snaps into like it's time for the easy listening hour and it's just basically that that was was you. You're like, hey, guys, welcome to Lions Slipped by Donkeys. Like 15 seconds after being like fucking central goddamn caucuses piece of shit. So you're a professional, Joe. I do my best.

This is my uplifting radio voice. We're recording this in January. It will be coming out in February, but I have been on what seems over a month now of, of an accidental road trip to, to visit family, to visit friends over the various different holidays and visa paperwork and stuff like that.

And I don't know how like people who tour for like a living do it like i i'm i'm honestly at a loss i'm impressed because it's just been like a series of like various travel sicknesses um horrible beds shit food um and like jet lag. And I don't know how people do this. My only real experience with it, we've toured for TF. We've done two small tours in the UK, and then one larger tour in Australia. And obviously, getting to Australia from the United Kingdom is... It's not the longest stretch on the planet, but it can become the longest stretch on the planet. You got to go to New Zealand for that, which I did. I don't know, man. When I think about it, it's like, we got in, you adjusted into tour mode pretty quickly. But I think for me,

the thing that really got me about it, like you said, was the lack of anything, lack of privacy, lack of ability to cook your own food. And it's wild. I mean, the shows were great and it was really fun, but there's a lot that goes in before and after. And I don't know, when I think back on it, I feel as though there's this kind of desire to make things feel a little bit like home if you can, just whatever you can do. I remember we did have a little mini fridge and a mini microwave in the place we stayed the longest in Sydney, which was like a budget Ibis that we referred to as the Swedish prison. Because it looked like when you see one of those documentaries about like, look how nice the prison cells are in social democratic Northern Europe. It basically was like a cross between a cruise ship, basically like the cheapest rate room in a cruise ship and or

a barracks room but like there was a pretty good grocery store um real what's it called real coals heads out there in australia will know what i'm talking about the coals in st peter's in sydney so i would walk there and buy little just things you know like even if it's just yogurt and granola just to have like a breakfast that's not fucking mc just things, you know, like even if it's just yogurt and granola, just to have like a breakfast, that's not fucking McDonald's. You know what I mean? Like things like that.

I wouldn't call it a certain control so much as just like giving yourself a choice. That's not just out of absolute necessity or desperation. I will be real with you. Touring Australia was easier than touring other places in the world in the sense that I'm kind of a coffee head. I just like having coffee. And I struggle to find an example of a place I've been in my life. And I admit I've not been to the sort of mega coffee parts of Europe as an adult. But I struggle to think of a place that has better coffee

in terms of just the default setting is really good than Australia and New Zealand. Basically, anywhere you go, we'll give you a coffee that's as good as the best coffee you can get in the United Kingdom. Interesting. It's genuinely unreal. Yeah, man, they just do coffee really well there. I don't know why. I would never go on the record as being like, oh, it's because Australia and New Zealand are just culturally superior because they're not. Emphatically, they're not. But they just... I don't know, man. They just do coffee really well so but yeah thinking about touring you get into the like the mindset of it um but god it's it's different when you you actually could have your own room and privacy which we have had at times versus when it's like you know everyone's i mean swedish prison is one

thing in the early days when we toured it was just like the promoters would just put us up in a shared house and we'd sleep on the floor. It was like vegan punk band shit. I've slept in a bed with every one of the cast members at one point. I don't want to go back to that. Riley farted on me and woke me up one time in a really cold room in Bristol because we couldn't get the radiator to work.

He's just trying to warm you up, bro. We had to wrap up for warmth together and then he fucking in his sleep just ripped a huge one like i've there's a part of me that would be that like i'm at the time i'm like i'm 34 years old what the fuck am i doing you know what i mean but i'm having i'm having that thought as i'm 35 and i so i'm gonna be 40 in september yeah this is why we were if we if we go on tour it has to be for a very good reason. We're not exactly trash future, but like... We need to tour in bus. We have to have a bus. I'm sorry. I don't care if it's a Volkswagen e-busy, it's got to be a bus.

I can offer you a lot of Neva. So like, I don't know fucking anything about Georgia. I'm here for very practical purposes. I don't speak georgian i don't speak russian very few people here speak english um so it's kind of hard to to navigate like in armenia i know how everything works i speak enough armenian to function you know um and so i rented an air an airbnb because they are cheaper still than much cheaper than any decent hotel in Tbilisi. And I took a car, um, six hours across the border because that is better than flying somehow.

And, uh, I get there. It's this, um, nice place in like the roost of LA area. So it's like the city center, um,

very, very cheap. And I show up and immediately start smelling like gas, um, like a gas leak. Uh, very, very cheap. And I show up and immediately start smelling like gas, like a gas leak. And I knew it was a gas leak because the kitchen window was open and it's January. And that is just how the gas leak was fixed. It was like, oh, we'll just air out the kitchen.

So I contact the Airbnb person who thankfully speaks English. And they contact this emergency Georgian service to come check for a gas leak and the first thing they do is like well have you turned the stove on like no there's a gas leak like well go ahead and turn the stove on I hate it when when Jugashvili gas repair services comes to my house and tells me basically in indirect terms to kill myself yeah so like i i

wouldn't um and they did and the apartment did not and mind you this is an apartment not a house like this if this apartment explodes i'm taking like 16 families with me um but yeah it doesn't explode uh and i end up just moving to a different place on the opposite side of town which so far does not have a gas leak, which is nice. So yeah, it's just the fun things of learning how to live in a new country. I don't know anything about Georgia. I have nothing against Georgians. I've often simply called them Armenians, but angrier, which I think most people in Georgia would agree with me on. most people in Georgia would agree with me on. But I don't know if you are in a position to tell me whether that my snap judgment is actually one for which I should apologize and feel ashamed. But in my mind, I understand the differences. I could recognize the differences in, for example,

the Georgian script versus the Armenian script. But knowing so little about it, to me, it's all just like this broad swath of kind of like unibrow and brandy country i mean you're you're just doing the the soviet ethnography graph which is still accurate like the we all look vaguely similar except some of us have bigger eyebrows and on the ethnography graph some of us have mustaches we all have we all have wine brand and brand, and we all insist that we did it first. It's fun, cultural, weird shit. I do love the Caucasus. I know I complain a lot, but I love the Caucasus, and the people are very nice.

I just don't know the first thing about Georgia. I'm only here because the embassy's here. And you don't want to deal with a gas leak, and you don't want to get exploded out of your fucking Stalingrad or whatever vintage ex-Soviet housing you're living in. Like, I get it. I absolutely get it. I know we have to talk about an actual serious subject, so I won't derail too much. But I just want to leave you on the thought. What if you found a secret lost tome, like the plot device in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose with like the, you know,

what is it? Aristotle's second poetics that's hidden in the secret library. But it's the lost home you find is Soviet ethnography, except about Britain. It just looks like the Baz meme. It's just, it's literally all the 4chan memes about North FC, but you know, 70 years prior. It's like eight different guys all in white work vans. Now that's a European universal thing. That's fair. That tracks to the Netherlands too. Only Fools and Horses, the British TV

show comedy sitcom about a white van man and his dumb friend who basically run a service in Peckham, where I live. And the idea is that he's constantly buying shit wholesale and trying to sell it and just generally being a pain in the ass. That's a rough summary. That show is super popular. But instead of them just dubbing it, basically every European country makes its own localized version of it.

So there's Serbian Only Fools and Horses because everyone knows that guy. That guy just... The guy with the van who buys shit wholesale and sells it and is generally kind of shady. The Serbian version of that has the opening song of My Dad's a War Criminal. Yeah. So basically, yeah, Albanian man in van gets his own TV show. They don't care about all the British things about it. They recognize that guy. He's like a Jungian archetype. So speaking of British characters, we're going to talk about one that I don't know if you've heard of, but he's definitely a very popular figure in British military history because

let's say he falls under the category of eccentric. I love eccentric British people, which can mean a lot of things. It can mean extremely racist. It can mean polymath. It can mean probably should go to jail for sex crimes. It can mean, I don't know, just weird guy you know but eccentric it's got a lot of kind of layer upon layer I got some bad news for you Nate you just picked every single thing about this guy

Joe did I say on previous episodes because my brain always dumps after we record anything it's like a like an old computer's internal memory. But there was the line... What if a brain operates on floppy disks? Yeah, exactly.

What if you needed an MS-DOS boot disk to turn your computer on in the first place? In this case, the boot disk is legal stimulants either prescribed to me or in the form of coffee. I would say... Did I ever make the joke about, this is a common thing, but some people really haven't heard it before,

I swear, about the joke about the Brits always said that the sun never sets on the British Empire and the truth is that's correct because God doesn't trust an Englishman in the dark. Like, okay, old joke. It's probably not a new thing to most people listening but it's probably a fair assessment of this guy well that basically the empire the british empire also

served as kind of like like the like the steam release valve and a pressure cooker for finding useful occupations for weird sex criminals in the sense of like exporting them and exporting all of their horrific behavior to the colonies time and time again. It's like, oh, this guy's a little too into, I don't know, fucking 13-year-old boys. All right, he's got a great colonial post for him in Burma. You know what I mean? Okay. You're getting entirely too close to this guy now. Okay. Listen, I have read nothing. I literally didn't know what we were going to talk about when I created the session file for this and on the Zencaster. I just called it

January 18th Lions because I didn't know. I'm just winging it. All I'm saying. I mean, he does fit an archetype. Eccentric, when we talk about it on the show, could mean guys who aren't so awful, like Dever like divert to people who are legitimately some of like the this most secretive but worst people who have ever walked the earth like baron sternberg um you know there's it could also be like lead poisoning just like like like fucked off that laudanum got exposed to way too much mercury as a child and just completely insane. Okay, that does come up. Oh, man. I just...

So the guy we're talking about today is one of those guys who had absolutely been in an asylum somewhere if he wasn't really good at killing people. And his name is Ord Wingate. Have you ever heard of him? I have not. No. So Ord Wingate might be the picture of the eccentric British military officer during World War II for all of the good and the fuck ton of the bad that comes with that statement. And there's going to be a lot of bad. And I'm going to say there's going to be a curveball

in here you're not expecting. Now, Ord Charles Wingate was born on February 26, 1903 in British India. Like you kind of pointed out, his father was a colonel in the army and his father were part of the Plymouth Brethren religious order that started in Ireland. Now, I'm not going to go into this religious order that much, but to make a long story short, they're effectively Anglican fundamentalists. That sounds like the Puritans almost. I mean, that's the first thing that comes to mind, but... Yeah. I mean, they probably would have been Puritans a few generations before. But yeah, if it's Anglican fundamentalists, it's basically like, I don't know, what if Opus Dei was Episcopalian? It's basically like, I don't know, what if Opus Dei was Episcopalian?

Like they quite literally missed the boat on being Puritans. So they had to settle for something else. And they couldn't have the big weird hats. Yeah. Or all of the buckles, which I know didn't exist, but I'm sticking with it. You know what? This is what we were taught by that fuck, the shitty, you know, like fucking laminated paper pictures or whatever they put up on the classroom walls when we were in grade school. And they had big buckles.

And there was a turkey and there was a Native American who seemed way too happy to be there. You know what? That's just what we default to when we think about it. That turkey needed a buckle. Exactly. Put a buckle on a turkey for some reason. Give it a huge belt like it's a WWE champion turkey. That's right.

His family was deeply entrenched in the British aristocracy. He's related to T.E. Lawrence. They're cousins. He's one of those guys. I'm really restraining myself to not start doing the voice. I suppose I should just send a letter from my uncle

saying I've been a bad boy i promise you we'll get a chance in the future you'll find i'm late to formation again please don't rip me have to be thrashed again it was a terrible thing i've done i would certainly hate to be savaged. Yeah, it's doing Milo's T.E. Lawrence voice. And I feel like I stray sometimes into Alan Rickman because it just doesn't come as naturally to me as... They're kind of the same. But Alan Rickman, I don't know if Alan Rickman has ever played the sort of like...

Because it's like the Sheriff of Nottingham combined with Herbert the pervert from Family Guy. And I don't really think Alan Rickman's ever played that character. If he has, I don't know his filmography that well. If he has, write in and correct me. Rest in peace, Cain. Yeah, rest in peace to a guy

with surprisingly good politics and also just seemed like a good dude. Yeah, it doesn't happen very often. Yeah, I know. It is rare to meet nice british people his uh win gate's dad retired from the army when ord was two and they moved back to england and he had a very strange upbringing he was in effect homeschooled and only socialized with his siblings until he was 12 years old most of his education up to that point boiled down to simply memorizing scripture. And that was the only way his father really ever spoke to him. And his dad was, let's say,

out there. He believed the most important thing a boy and a man could be was independent, self-reliant, but most importantly, strong. Because if you're physically strong, you could simply not get sick. So when they weren't in Bible study, he made his kids work out or simply spend time alone in forced isolation. Normally, you have to spend 60,000 pounds a year to send your kid to a boarding school to get this traumatized. But this man, he had like the Amway spirit. Oh, he's going to boarding school next. It's because there wasn't a formal version of homeschooling at the time. So in order to go to university or have official paperwork, he had to send his son to school. So he sent him to boarding school, but not actually

to board there or even to take part in any activities. He would go there for testing purposes so he could graduate and then go home. He didn't live there. He didn't socialize with anybody. He didn't do any after-school activities. He did no sports. He wasn't allowed to.

He went in, took the tests, and left. And he graduated in 1921 so yeah off to a good start miserable existence man geez that's just i mean like i'm sure i'm gonna feel less sympathy when i learn about what this guy does in his life but that just sounds oh you have no idea it's like it's like it's like what if the secret garden wasn't didn't have a happy ending it was just bitter and miserable like the country it's set in. Yeah, what if Children of Men was this guy's backyard? And once again, it was simply the Brits just did that.

Yeah, it's... Look, Americans don't necessarily have a leg to stand on when talking about weird insular eccentricities. Homeschooling, specifically. Homeschooling. Yeah, all that shit. I had to explain homeschooling specifically homeschooling yeah all that shit you know so i realize homeschooling to uh an armenian friend of mine because that doesn't happen even like the

most rural villages are like what do you mean the parents could just educate them legally i'm like look man i don't know i don't know why it's legal it just exists it exists it is what it is yeah exactly i mean yeah we won't derail on this, but I recognize that we're going to poke fun at Britain because that's one of the things we school. Once there, he began earning his reputation as being someone absolutely nobody liked. And that seemed to be something that he preferred. He refused to take part in any traditions or the norms of academy life, which admittedly, that's fine because it mostly boils down to ritual hazing. was when he was confronted with that ritual hazing like one of them was he was to effectively run the gauntlet as the upperclassmen beat people with a towel and then shoved them in a like a tub full of ice water and when he was like pushed in front to walk this

gauntlet he simply stared down the upperclassmen and dared them to hit him. And they just wouldn't. So, I mean, I presume that because of all the things his father made him and his siblings do that he, he was, uh,

he was jacked. He was formidable. Uh, he wasn't, you know, he didn't look like he was immediately going to die of tuberculosis or vitamin D deficiency. Yeah.

Pretty much. Yeah. It was a tough, I mean, when you compare like where the, looked like he was immediately going to die of tuberculosis or vitamin d deficiency yeah pretty much yeah it was a tough i mean when you compare like where a lot of the upbringings his classmates probably had he was easily the toughest guy in the school and just to underline that they couldn't make him do anything that he didn't want to do he walked the gauntlet without them daring to hit him and then jumped into the tub of ice water on his own. Like, just an absolute flexing moment. Yeah, just mic drop. I also realized, too, as an aside,

that my great-great-grandfather was assigned to Woolwich Arsenal. I have no idea if he would have had any interactions with the Academy or anything along those lines. But what I do know is that there is a non-zero possibility that he would have been there at the same time as this guy he probably would have hated him mike yeah he probably he would have been old enough to be like a traitor because my great-grandfather is basically the same i mean he's long dead but he was born around the same time so and also in woolwich so uh yeah

interesting who knows maybe maybe maybe my uh my great-great-grandfather was receiving the report from... He was receiving the report and thinking internally with T.E. Lawrence's voice, while a guy who also had T.E. Lawrence's voice was delivering the report that they couldn't haze this guy. He was just too jacked. He graduated a few years later and went to his first army posting during which time he he spent you know his hours doing things like you would expect him to like fox hunting and horse riding he but he was also legendarily terrible with money and this wasn't because like he was he was an alcoholic or anything like that, like most other guys would. He just spent it on frivolous bullshit.

He never paid his bills on time to the point that his boss was always fielding complaints from creditors. But nobody seemed to care. And in 1926, he was sent to the School of Equitation or the Cavalry School, where he became the most unsufferable prick that any of them have ever met. He never wore his uniform correctly, never got a haircut, hardly shaved. He had no intention of ever making friends and seemed to do things on purpose that he knew would piss people off. For example, in the middle of history class, or really any class at all, he'd interrupt his instructors and begin to recite passages from Karl Marx texts and discuss Marxism at length, despite the fact he was not a Marxist. He just knew it pissed them off. The man was a real-life internet troll.

This sounds like a combination of guy who spent the bulk of his adult life on Discord meets subject of a documentary called Raised by Wolves. Raised by the Discord Wolves. I don't want to say he didn't like any part of Marxist theory, to say the least, but the man was not a communist. theory to say the least but he the man was not a communist um there by no stretch of the imagination he just knew it would infuriate his you know upper crust officer class peers that were around him and this is a weapon that he would wield throughout his life like whatever as someone that he didn't like was bothering him he would just start quoting marks uh about the situation knowing it would infuriate them and make them leave him alone.

Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where because you've given me enough prelude, I know to not say critical support, but I do think that this is funny that this guy, because some people, they get into the machine, if you will, into the milieu of the upper class

society and all those things. And there's such an incredible urge to or pressure to conform, to adapt, to just normalize yourself to that standard. So someone who's just like, no, I'm going to be a pain in the ass forever, while also bench pressing a house on a regular basis. Doing burpees all the way to work. Exactly. Until that person starts doing bad shit in the world, which it sounds like this is going to happen,

there's something inherently funny about that. Yeah. I'm not going to say many positive things about Ord Wingate, but I will say is he never conformed to anything, even when he should have, perhaps. However, whatever degree of reservation for critical support for stealth bullying your annoying upper class

classmates, we can support it. Yeah, I feel comfortable saying that. Rules did not matter to him if he simply decided that they didn't. One classmate said, quote quote he and i have one basic common belief regulations are made for sods and fools and they're to be circumvented and not obeyed where they become inconvenient there's also the point of his life where yeah there's also the

point of his life where we came clear that something wasn't quite right with him he had untreated depression and this is the 1920s and healthcare back then consisted of having your brain melted with electrical current and telling you to stop being sad. Yeah. I remember reading, what is it? Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That, which is a great memoir about his experience in World War I. His experience and his upbringing in this system, in the boarding school system, and then his experience as an infantry officer in the First World War. And I remember him talking about being on leave back in England and getting surgery to correct a deviated septum, but it's like 1917 or something. It's like, yeah, well, the surgeon didn't do a

really good job, so I just lost the ability to smell in one nostril. It's just like, oh, cool. Sounds like a great place to live. On bright side i kept my nose he did keep his nose uh yeah so strongly strongly recommend goodbye to all that and and uh memories of an infantry officer those are both good books memories of a fox hunting man maybe maybe less good but uh you know what you know me i'm just gonna spout off about random ass books uh because i've encountered this guy or someone who encountered this guy who wrote about it a lot. This is what happens when your co-host has a master of fine arts. I was going to say one of the books we had to read is Pat Barker's. It's a trilogy of novels,

the Regeneration Trilogy, but they're specifically about not just World War I, but about the advent of psychology to treat what was now known as post-traumatic stress, what was called shell shock at the time, or combat fatigue. But phenomenal series of books. In the strongest terms, recommend you read all three of them. It's called Regeneration,

The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road. And to be honest with you, there is a character who is literally a working class guy from the North who gets commissioned as an officer because so many commissioned officers just get fucking killed in the first year of World War I.

You know who we call that? A good start. And he does exactly this, basically like knowing the system and knowing how to adapt himself and then he's bullying the shit out of what the Brits would call TOFs, like kind of pampered upper class people

because that's who the bulk of the officer corps was made up with until the war put them in a blender that would be an awful protein smoothie um like uh wingate would go through incredibly high highs followed by weeks where he'd lock himself away in his bedroom ord's way to cure himself of this, of what he called his particular curse, was savaging himself with brutal workouts and exposing himself to the environment, standing naked outside in the cold and the heat while working out until he pretty much vomited. He believed that this was the cure to virtually any ailment because that's what his dad taught him. was the cure to virtually any ailment because that's what his dad taught him. And though his first real hints of,

let's call it weirdness, would hit when he was transferred to the British Army in Sudan. Then, because it's fucking Ord Wingate, he decided the best way to get there would be to ride a bicycle the entire way. Man, we used to be a cool fucking civilization. You could get orders and instead

of going to the defense travel office to get your ticket, like airplane tickets on whatever dog shit cheap ticket they would give you, you'd be like, no, I'm riding my bike. The closest thing to this I ever did was driving a Volkswagen Golf from Alaska to Georgia, but it wasn't a bicycle. So I wasn't able to be that hard. Also, you know what? Sometimes getting a little cold water on your face can make you feel better if you're feeling a bit of anxiety. But I wouldn't necessarily recommend smoking yourself to death in the heat or the cold. The Volkswagen Golf, the bicycles of cars. He sent his luggage ahead and left in September 1927, cycling through France and thenany for going to genoa

then czechoslovakia austria yugoslavia and then he took a boat to egypt and from cairo he cycled all the way to khartoum why wouldn't you just take a boat from marseille or even from fucking southern italy like i guess he can't cut out those cycling miles you know yeah exactly he really wanted to to hit all of those different like 1920s strava legs or he or i don't know maybe he really liked coffee with fine grounds in it or baklava you know like baklava equivalent uh you tell me see peloton wasn't invented yet so he had to just look like a dumb ass out in public can you imagine how weird it would be to be a balkan villager who basically grew up like you See, Peloton wasn't invented yet, so he had to just look like a dumbass out in public. Can you imagine how weird it would be to be a Balkan villager who basically grew up like, where the best thing that's ever happened to you in your life is someone once gave you

a lump of sugar, and then you see a man riding a funny contraption with wheels, but he's also like the pit bull of a human. He's just jacked to all hell. He's the British man version of an american xl bully cycling the end times were upon you the man cycles through eats every bit of protein available to the villagers and cycles out no further explanation and does this strange devotional ceremony to his god that he calls the workout of the day the world's first crossfitter that's what it sounds like this wasn't like this post in sudan wasn't a very high post and most of his time he spent

hunting uh and not only hunting for animals but for poachers and slave trainers uh around the sudanese border i mean respect for killing the slave traders, but I don't know. At the same time, it's like... When someone's like, oh, I'm going to go hunt for the most dangerous game. It's just like, this is not a normal person. And he actually really looked forward to being stationed in Sudan, not because of combat or anything.

He didn't really care about that, but because he thought that the Sudanese countryside, being know particularly a harsh climate would cure him of his depression and he did really well in his duties mostly because where every other officer did their best to get out of long desert patrols he volunteered for all of them he turned out to be really good at lying ambushes for bandits, laying bait and sitting around for days waiting for them to come because his favorite pastime was baking in the sun and doing pushups. Everyone thought he was a fucking all star as long as he was out on a mission. As soon as he got back, they realized they would hate him. He would start arguments about everything.

And if nobody would bite, he would simply bring up Marxism again. arguments about everything. And if nobody would bite, he would simply bring up Marxism again. At one point, the colonel in command of the East Arab Corps, which he was a part of, said he needed to keep his opinions to himself because, quote, I don't like the things you say, and I don't like you, which is always what you want your colonel to tell you. And there's a reason for this. He would attend all of the staff meetings butt naked. And if that was enough to keep people away, some of his favorite snacks throughout the day were raw onions and raw garlic,

which he wore around his neck as a necklace at all times, insisting that they warded off disease and illness. He wore an alarm clock around his neck as well, like Flava Flav, which would go off at seemingly random intervals, like he was the fucking Mad Hatter. That's the thing is that they didn't have the concept of something just being a bit back then. They didn't have the concept of like, oh, this is the hidden camera for Big Brother or Instagram or TikTok. There was no camera.

By being punked. Yeah, there was no such thing as being punked. It's just literally this is just how he was. Yeah, I mean, it's strange that they didn't identify there might be a problem. I was going to say, I feel as though every single one of us who's been in the military has encountered a person who is extremely

good at being deployed and extremely bad at being in garrison. Yeah, that was him. Right, exactly. But I don't think that for all the sort of binary behavior attributes that you can see in that situation, I can recall a soldier who was on the money deployed, but then at home was walking around completely naked

with garlic to ward off Dracula. Granted, I was stationed in Alaska, and that would be somewhat inconvenient. But, you know, I mean, like I said, the Brits, I guess... I've seen 30 Days of Night. There's vampires in Alaska. Well, I was just thinking of walking around butt naked in Alaska in the wintertime.

You're not going to last very long without frostbite. You see, the extreme environment will ward off your depression that you've accumulated from all of your deployments. Yeah, these fucking nuclear-powered mosquitoes will suck the depression out of you and also all of the iron in your body. That's someone's fetish. I'm gonna move on. Yeah, pro tip.

If you go to the north, the far north, Alaska, Siberia, Norway, wherever the fuck, just understand, it might look beautiful in summer in pictures. There are mosquitoes that will take your fucking head off. Just be prepared. That's Nate's tip for this episode. Critical support to the mosquitoes.

After all of this, he was sent back to England. But on his boat trip from Egypt, he ran into a 16-year-old girl named Lorna that he immediately fell in love with and then married. It's probably best we move on from that part. Yeah. The one thing that I'll say, the one thing is just to understand that in Britain and in Europe at the time, people started work and were treated like adults, even though we realize now that's not appropriate at about 14 or younger. And in Britain, for example, still to this day, they're slowly shifting it in some legal senses, but the legal age of majority is 16. Yeah. I mean, a 16-year-old getting married

to someone who is, let's say, older back then was not uncommon. It's still just kind of gross looking back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it is. I mean, my grandfather was 19 or 20 when he married my grandmother who was 16 and about two weeks away from giving birth um to his child so you know what right i i have traditions carry on i was gonna say don't don't don't quote the age gap discourse to me which i was there when it was written you adopted the age discourse i was bored to it i was molded by it yeah exactly yeah anyway i'm just pointing that out that like that that that still would have been a scans if there was like a pretty like people would have looked funny at that when someone was a a lot older but i think

like in terms of 16 being in his early 20s i believe that's still like like technically speaking in this country yeah no no like don't. Don't get me wrong. And I think we have hindsight now and we have a lot more perspective on how people develop and how exponentially different you are at that kind of age difference versus if you were 25 and 20 or 25 and 21,

which is still... Yeah, but less so than 21 or 22 or 16. There's places today that have an age of consent that is 16 or younger that are considered part of like the quote unquote developed world. So, you know, the world moves slowly, unfortunately. It is what it is.

It's just one of those things where I think that, yeah, like looking back on it, that's not, it's not quite as, it wouldn't be quite as eyebrow raising then as it is now. But I think that if it's like, oh, the guy who's naked with vampire garlic and loves fucking, you know, doing the CrossFit smoker named after one of the fallen troops out in the middle of the desert while on patrol is marrying a 16 year old. Like, well, I think you can stake a decent amount on saying that people would have told you they thought it was weird.

So what you're saying is it wasn't his pure charm that won her over? Like, hey, would you like some onions? Like, I got some right here. Teenagers' brains are still developing, and I feel like 16 is probably the right age where you could find yourself falling in love with literal Beowulf. like that 16 is probably the right age where you could find yourself falling in love with literal Beowulf hey someone dated me when I was 16 so weird things have

happened I mean yeah me too but I mean let's not talk about that there was I will say he went on some strange side quest here where he was sent to locate a lost oasis as a part of a royal geographical society survey this is just a fucking Borges story.

What in the hell is going on? Called the camel expedition. Um, and, uh, he decided to go, not because he gave a shit about geographical surveys or whatever, but because it sounded hard and the entire expedition was a complete failure.

He and everybody else almost died, but that seemed to be like his favorite hobby. Uh, after this, he was sent to... All right, here's the curveball. The British Mandate of Palestine. And despite having previously no opinions of the ongoing conflict in the region, nor being Jewish at all, he became a full-throated Zionist to the point it terrified the British government. He saw the creation of a Jewish state in the Mandate territory as a religious quest from God

and immediately allied himself with paramilitary-turned-terror organizations like the Haganah and the Irgun, despite the fact the British government, who, remember, he represented, did not work with them officially. But he was doing it openly and i know the word officially is carrying a lot of weight here but just bear with me later on the hagen killed a lot of british army people in manchuria palestine like yeah hold that thought we this is a good a leads to be here uh he began training paramilitaries and created the special night squads, which included famed military heroes of Israel, such as Moshi Dayan and Egal Alam. The S&S were, in effect, a death squad. Israeli historian Yoram Kalanick describes this period as such, quote,

The Arabs complained to the British about Wingate's brutality and harsh punitive measures. Even members of the field squads complained that during the raids on Bedouin encampments, Wingate would behave with extreme viciousness and fire mercilessly. Wingate believed the principle of surprise and punishment, which was designed to confine the gangs to their villages. More than once, he simply lined up rioters in a row and shot them in cold blood. It should probably come to nobody's surprise that the modern-day Israeli Defense Forces consider Ord Wingate to be their founding father. Well, I mean, there you have it. I mean, I think that when you look at this stuff,

I mean, when it's Theodore Herzl or Zeynep Jabotinsky or British Army officers who are on wandering rogue quests, when they write about it, when they talk about it at the time in those primary sources, they're not particularly subtle about what they believe needs to happen in the sense of like, oh no, we're going to colonize this place and or in people like Wingate's case, like no, we need to exterminate these people. It's just, you know,

when, what's his name, when Churchill talked about, you know, wanting to I believe, was it Syrians that he wanted to gas? I can't remember, but he talked about wanting to deploy poison gas on Churchill wanted to gas Indians. Yeah, at the end of the day,

the argument that there's this nuance and subtlety in the intentions, well, go read and see. You tell me. The thing is, there's going to be more curveballs that come to describe this guy in the future, which we'll get to. But he was such a bloodthirsty,

weirdly Zionist British military officer, it worried the British government. The SNS operations were horrifically bloodthirsty, they were relentless, and they would define Wingate's idea of war. Offense was

everything. Always be attacking, and when you attack, make sure it's by surprise. And of course, this violence is not something the British disapproved of. It is why they kept promoting him and giving him awards. However, Wingate refused to toe the weird British government line about the mandate. And when he went back to England on leave, he consistently screamed about the need for a Jewish state, which is not what the British government was talking about at the time. His intense Zionism disturbed most of his superiors. One of him labeled him a national security risk. When a fellow officer pointed out that there were

two sides to the Palestine issue, Wingate replied, I know that. I just happen to be on the right side. You're on the wrong side. Wingate was fired and ordered to return to England in 1939. He was put in command of an anti-aircraft unit as World War II started and kept getting pissy because he wasn't given a command, nor was he allowed to run his death squads in palestine and he believed that this was a punishment because it was however winston churchill loved him like they surprise yeah i mean okay this is the weird part winston churchill loved him but everybody knew that he was fucking insane and didn't want to give him a large command so after italy declared war on

the allies in 1940, they decided that despite sitting back and doing nothing a few years before when Italy conquered Ethiopia, Ethiopia would now need to be liberated because it had now become geopolitically and tactically important. So they kicked Wingate back to Africa

under the command of Archibald Wavell, who you might remember from our Singapore series. Wingate was called to the front because the British were outnumbered by the hundreds of thousands, and it was decided that an irregular ambush-type warfare would be the key to their victory, and they just so happened to have a crazy dude who was really good at that kind of thing lying around. Wingate tabled the idea of what was known as deep penetration warfare, otherwise known as what I did to your mom.

I knew. I fucking knew. I was like, nope. There's no way. There's no way. Joe's from Michigan. I'm from Indiana. There's just no way.

You can't let that one just fly through. I had no choice. Unengaged. We'll put it that way. Yeah, I know. So deep penetration warfare was sneaking behind enemy lines in large numbers and just kind of fucking shit up. Wavell loved the idea and put him in charge of a newly created Gideon force, who Wingate quickly staffed with British and African veterans. And when that wasn't enough, he invited his old friends from the Haganaha and the irgun to come in and join him too

and i'm just imagining the equivalent of like you have this crack force assembled and it's just like yeah you're you're motley crew of british veterans of the conflict and random guys he's picked out and then like 50 dudes whose modern equivalent is selling you those fucking bath salts in the mall and they're all there just Just like, some of them just seem a lot more intense about killing people than others. And it's just like, But they have the smoothest hands. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. There's nothing to exfoliate on their skin. They emerge from the tent with a V-neck so deep you can see their balls when they're ready to go to war. Yeah, exactly. You know what? It's just they they didn't have like skin-tight denim and

white belts back then but they ought to spiritually they did now when he was putting this forest together he met someone that struck him with like like he saw the sun rising behind him uh absolutely fell in love it was love at first sight. That was the emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie and I don't mean it was like a slight reverence either like he considered him his

best friend making him quite possibly the first British Rastafari. I was gonna say this man became a Christian Zionist, and he could have become a proto-Bob Marley fan. Yeah. He was immediately completely on board with the emperor, the concept of Ethiopian liberation and sovereignty, seemingly overnight. liberation and sovereignty, like seemingly overnight. So you got to realize too, that like the, the, the kind of very simplified potted history version of this is that Rastafarianism is messianic and saw Selassie as a kind of Messiah figure because

of the fact that there was this, this notion of a country led by a black emperor, a black king. And because- It was never conquered. Well, until it was, of course. Right. And so there's not an explicit Jamaican connection to everything to do with the Empire of Ethiopia. But obviously, when people talk about Selassie now, it's very hard to escape that

because that movement and that religious fervor around him happened in his lifetime he visited jamaica his quotes on this subject are really strange too like it's it was like like the the was it the prince in england who found out they had a cargo cult like treated it with like weird curiosity but that was about it. He was pretty respectful in the sense of he was willing to... As I understand it, he was uncomfortable with it, but also he was like,

I'm not going to try to disabuse these people of their beliefs. But you can imagine that... Sure. I mean, who would? Right. But he didn't have anything to do with Jamaica. It's just that this was a thing that happened. And so, yeah, just bear that. have anything to do with jamaica it's just that this was a thing that happened and so yeah just

just bear that like but yes it's lossy is is is it's just inescapable that if you encounter reggae music and you encounter anything that's to do with rastafarianism and that as a cultural reference like you will encounter this so of course that's the first thing that comes to mind all we can think of is like what would have happened if you simply had gotten Ord Wingate in front of a phonograph and played Peter Tosh's Legalize It. But that's just because we are interpreting it through that lens. Unfortunately, he would not live that long to see the birth of his possibly favorite religion, where his best friend was God. You know, I mean, he believed that garlic was God. You know, I mean,

he believed that garlic would ward off disease. So, I mean, like Peter Tosh listing all of the lung diseases that weed cures in that song might have resonated with him. One thing we can be certain, there was no vampires in Ethiopia.

Now, Wingate ignored pretty much every order he was given and just kind of did whatever he wanted when it came to battle planning in his small part of the overall British war effort. In situations where he was given orders he didn't like, he would simply claim he never received them or couldn't decode them and would just keep on doing what he was doing. This included leading every raid that he launched from the front, despite constantly being ordered not to because he might

die. And even with his insanity, the Gideon force was incredibly successful. They would smash behind enemy lines, fuck up supply systems, causing the Italian front to bend and waver like overcooked pasta. And then they would abandon their forward positions because they could no longer be supplied.

Also because they have the Italian military. That was going to happen anyway. You were like, oh, they're outnumbered by hundreds of thousands. Like, yes, but they're Italians. Yeah, that's like 20 guys total. I'm just saying, like, look, like, no disrespect to the good things about Italian culture, but like all of the dumb Iraq war American butthurt shit

about the French and the cheese-eating surrender monkeys and all the like, oh, they always lose in wars. It's like, look, France's military history is complicated, but when you're talking about the European military that sucks at fighting and is constantly losing no matter what, you're talking about the Italians. You need to get it straight. The French have won some wars,

but they also invented waterboarding. So let's just keep it in perspective. I'm really surprised the Italians didn't just immediately try to join Ord Wingate's army because it's uh uh i i'm i'm really surprised the italians didn't just immediately try to join ord wind gates army because they it's normally their their uno reverse card we don't have to surrender if we join you right yeah basically like the the italian look my understanding of all of this is based mostly on reading about the Allied campaign against the Axis in Italy from 1943 onward and the experiences of American and British troops dealing with the Italians. Let's be real.

Most of the time, you could get an entire brigade to surrender by being like, we'll give you shoes and a hot meal. Actually, hold that thought. Fuck me. God damn it. I fucking... Okay. I swear I'm not cheating. That's the one thing that I will tell you I am not cheating. Now, by the nature of the kind of war he was fighting, it meant Ord's supply lines were always going to be iffy at best, and most of the time he would have nothing. They would burn through food, water, and ammo and have nothing left. In one situation, well, pretty much out of everything, but still trying to chase them and harass Italian troops under the command of Severio Manatevello. Sorry, I didn't say that right. Severio Manatevello.

Well done. And I have to say, as an aside, sometimes when I sing whatever song I can remember the words to my daughter, if it involves the opportunity to do something like a gesture, like the Guido voice line in the Billy Joel song, Big Shot, I'll literally do the hand thing. It's just reflexive. You have to do it. I have to admit, we're not on camera today, but I did do the hand thing when I said it. I figured you would have. I was going to say, I sensed it through the ether. Wingate sent him a letter indicating that he was about to be joined by reinforcements as well as a large-scale air support and if he didn't surrender immediately his fate would be left to the ethiopian partisans who had won the hell of a reputation to cut the dicks and balls off their

pows so the italian commander surrendered a few hours later, turning his 12,000... Not my dick and not my balls! Oh no, my meatballs! So he surrendered... There is one thing that is important in my life! Sorry. Sorry. They knew their enemy's weak point and motivations. That's all I'm going to say. So he surrendered his 12,000 man

force over to Wingate's weird group of Africans, Brits, and militant Zionists who were only about 2,000 in strength, all out of food, water, and only had a few bullets between them. This broke the back of the Italian army in Ethiopia and before long, the war

in East Africa was over. Wingate was lauded and everybody loved him and the people who hated him hated him more, but the people who loved him loved him more, namely Churchill and Wavell. Wavell. It's nuts how this can happen where you're like, what's the decisive point of this battle

between a large military unit or grouping of Italian forces and some kind of insurgent or opposing force? And it's like they deployed their secret weapon, exactly one loaf of bread and a bowl of olives. He captures Manatee Velo and he's like, tell me everything about your battle plans.

Like, no, I will not do it. So he just slowly starts breaking spaghetti noodles in half until he starts talking. I won't fucking salt the water either, bitch. So he just slowly starts breaking spaghetti noodles in half until he starts talking. He's like... I won't fucking salt the water either, bitch. Okay, I'll tell you everything you want to know. It's just like he's hardened by an austere upbringing in southern Italian poverty. So no normal method of torture works on him.

But then you just start, you know, I don't fucking know, drizzling olive oil and tomato sauce into a carbonara. He breaks immediately. Now, by 1941, the East Africa campaign was over, and so was the Gideon Force. None of his men were given awards, even though he recommended them for a ton. And his local African forces were not even paid. This combined with Wingate himself not getting recognition or promotions that he thought he was due, and he wasn't even allowed to say goodbye to his BFF, the Emperor of Ethiopia. This finally drove Wingate over the edge. He had temporarily been promoted to colonel through a brevet system, and he was under the impression that he would become permanent, but it wasn't. So as soon as

the Gideon force was disbanded, he was dropped back down to major. So when he flew to Egypt, he penned an absolutely savage letter trashing virtually every officer involved in the operation. And at about the same time, he caught malaria. Now, Wingate knew other people thought he was insane. Hell, he himself knew that there was something off. Remember, he called it his particular curse. And he was worried that if he went to a military doctor to get treated for malaria, it would add fuel to the fire of his enemies that they could use to discredit him. Have I mentioned that he is sometimes incredibly paranoid? I'm getting that impression.

So he went to a local doctor, not a British Army doctor, who gave him a massive quantity of a drug called Adabrine. Adabrine is well known. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Fuck, fuck. Adabrine. I know what that is. Jesus Christ. Oh, fuck. Adabrine, for people who don't know, is known for two things. It's very effective at suppressing malarial symptoms, but it has horrific side effects, one of which is known as a toxic psychosis. I was going to say Adabrine psychosisosis i know all about this because this was the thing with the uh u.s army in new guinea and people regularly people who were considered mentally and emotionally stable would just go insane uh the famous story of a like a brigade chief medical

officer committing suicide like just out of nowhere. And yeah, it's, yeah. Oh my God. All you got to do is mention that. It's like, if you ever got the Methylquin dreams, imagine that times infinity. Yeah. And unlike Methylquin, like Adabrine was 100% connected to psychotic breaks and suicide, where Methylquin is kind of in a gray area. Only partially connected to those. Yeah, I mean, well, like, you know, Robert Bales blamed his shooting spray on mefloquine and that didn't work because

I just took doxycycline and it made me feel like I was going to puke every morning. But there's also the secret dark horse candidate for mandated anti-malarial drugs that my soldiers were fond of. It's called not taking them and getting malaria. I was going to say, you want to know what my life hack was of. It's called not taking them and getting malaria. I was going to say, you want to know what my life hack was? I never once took my doxycycline.

Can you imagine doxycycline, a drug that reduces your ability to handle UV exposure? Imagine me. You've met me in person. You know my complexion. Imagine me inoutheastern afghanistan and i'm taking a drug that makes you more susceptible to sunburn yeah it's a you would just become like lobster destroyer of skin yeah it's it's uh thankfully most of my skin was covered by all the bullshit we had to wear but my nose wasn't so guess what probably gonna get cancer in my nose someday shit who needs it just go to the

british doctors they'll make you lose your sense of smell exactly you know what solved the problem for me now now i'm even more miserable which means i'm even better integrated into this country now like the important part about adebrine is like it was already known to cause what was called toxic psychosis in people who did not have underlying mental health concerns and wingate had those so ripped to the gills on malaria pills didn't mean to rhyme that on purpose he ran into his hotel room and jammed a fucking knife directly into his own neck uh the only thing that saved his life was shitty thin hotel walls because his neighbor heard his body smash off of a table and hit the ground and ran over and rendered first aid and called for a doctor. So he saved his life.

Now, his political allies made sure to keep what really happened under wraps while the British army did the rest. You see, despite everyone knowing Wingate wasn't all there in the best of times, the effects of Adabrine combined with cerebral malaria were pretty well known. So the entire incident was written off as a psychotic episode because of the Adabrine. However, there was a still good chance that this would have sidelined him for the rest of his career anyway, because he went nuts and stabbed himself in the fucking neck. That will generally derail

anybody's career in the 40s however winston churchill directly intervened to make sure a board found him fit for service three months later in a way i kind of wonder if like you could like if people thought he was going to be useful they could even retroactively explain his fucking insane behavior and just be like oh yeah this happened this guy had this thing and it's like no he's been crazy before this made it worse but he was crazy before but like this could either be ammunition that part yeah they just left all that part out of any official memo well you know what sometimes you just need you know mr war crimes mr mr workout Workout of the Day, Jack Caveman War Crimes, and you got to just...

Just sweating Adabrine out of his pores at all hours. Yeah, I'm just imagining like... That's my secret. I use Adabrine as a pre-workout. Is that like how you can process it without getting the toxic effects? You have to lick the guy's sweat after he sweats it out. It's like the Siberian shaman. It's like a frog.

You eat the mushroom and then you piss out and you drink the piss and that makes you trip. Yeah, it's like tripping off of licking a frog except you're pinning down the world's strongest British man and licking his neck. That's a Pornhub category. Just in and of itself. Weirdly, it was during

this time recovering from stabbing myself in the neck and malaria and waiting for a new assignment, and he's in England, that Wingate took up another new thing to defend, Ethiopian independence and sovereignty. He loved the emperor and was worried that the country that he had just helped liberate would be absorbed

by the British Empire. Since he was a soldier, not a politician, he ended up becoming an unofficial campaign champion of this. He conducted it on his personal time, waited in bushes and behind cars for ministers of parliament to walk by, and he would simply jump out and start screaming at them to not allow Ethiopia to become a British protectorate. He conducted complex screaming ambushes.

Once again, you all thought that I was just being flippant making the Beowulf comparison, but what would your garden variety British member of parliament in the 1940s think when haggard, neck-stabbing, naked guy jumps out of the bushes and screams at you? They would think that it was something out of a fucking old Norman myth. You know what I mean? They would think that it was something out of back when English was written looking like Icelandic. Okay? This man was just... He was just becoming Beowulf. You would think they would have smelled the garlic and onions hanging from his neck, but I guess not. They all had that corrective surgery that Robert Hughes has had.

Yeah. That way they can't taste British food. He was warned if he continued this, the army was going to send him somewhere in the middle of nowhere as punishment. He didn't care, so the army sent him to Dorset as punishment to sit behind a desk. This is where his career was. Just knowing England is very funny.

It's like, I can't send you. No, got to do the right voice. I can't send you to hell, but I'll send you. No, no. Gotta do the right voice. I can't send you to hell, but I'll send you to Dorset. This is probably where his career is going to die until Archibald Wavell, who is now in command of the Southeast Asian Theater, requested his posting over to Burma. Told you you were checking the blocks. Wrong.

I was not wrong. And I literally just guessed that. India seemed too obvious. Burma, just, I don't know. It was in the ether. I just picked up on it. This actually infuriated Wingate because not only did he not want anything to do with Asia, he saw himself as England's Africa guy, or at least the Zionist. And his reassignment to this place as a punishment, trying to silence him regarding his two favorite causes that the British hated, Ethiopian freedom and Zionism. So they sent him there and still refused to promote him behind major. He almost refused to take the posting, but was talked into it by a friend at the last second.

So in March of 1942, he ended up in India with Wavell wanting him to put together an Asian version of the Gideon Force to do battle in Burma against the Japanese. Though Wingate made a quick stop in China to meet Chiang Kai-shek for some reason, and like everyone else

who ever talked to this man, absolutely hated him. So it's a small side quest there. I was just thinking for a second that this guy is an ardent Zionist and pro-Ethiopian liberation, believes in strange health cures, has very intense beliefs about things in general,

and wants to live a life of what you might call incredibly shredded and jacked monastic solitude while also just randomly aggressing people. This man is the first white black Hebrew. He's the only one. This man's a black Israelite. This man

should have made Aliyah to Israel and then get deported because Israel doesn't recognize it. It's a really fucked up thing. I don't want to joke about too much, but there were communities of black Israelites in America who did that. And they kind of live on the margins of Israeli society because Israel is an incredibly racist country and doesn't recognize them as Jewish.

Even those who have converted to Orthodox Judaism, Israel is not going to want to let them become regular citizens because they don't want black citizens. See, they at least adopted him as the founding father of their state death squad, so they're more accepting of Fort Wingate. Anyway, back in India, he began to set up training camps for his guerrilla warfare team unit that would be named a mistranslation of the Burmese word for lion. He called them the Chindits. Now, what did the mistranslation actually translate to? It would be really funny if it was just like... It translated to nothing.

Oh, I was going to hope it was going to be like bottle gourd fritters or something like that. Yeah, it's like one of like english t-shirts that say like yeah yeah yeah fish or something yeah yeah yeah yeah i know exactly yeah i remember seeing a small child maybe seven or eight year old boy in japan with a shirt with like an old propeller playing on it in a cartoon and it said like marijuana city excursions. That fucking whips. Yeah, it's badass. This is where Wingate ran into problems.

He was a well-known quantity at this point, not only for his politics, but his conduct and reputation as being not all there. It didn't help that as soon as he was back in the field, he was back to doing what he had always done, constantly working out,

walking around naked, eating raw onions and garlic while his alarm clock blasted out, and just generally being annoying. I didn't realize he continued this. I thought this was a thing that he just did when he was in officer training to be like world's most annoying lieutenant. I didn't realize this was a thing. It was just him. Yeah. He insisted that the raw onions and garlic would ward off mosquitoes and therefore protect him from malaria, which obviously didn't work. He caught malaria, but it didn't mean he was going to... He was doing it for the love of the game at this point. Fucking God is skywriting in the stars. How's that working out for you?

Now, as always, everyone hated him. And he made this worse by insisting that he was a subject matter expert about guerrilla war. Regardless of the fact that he was standing in the middle of a fucking jungle for the first time, the terrain and the environment seemed to not matter to him. So you can imagine how the other officers who've been there for a while saw this. I also have to jump in with something really important, which is that specifically people who understand the terrain and how to use it to fuck the enemy over, the Japanese. I'm sorry, but if you read anything about the Japanese campaigns in Southeast Asia or

in the South Pacific, they understood the terrain, they understood the environment and they made it basically so that like they they i'm not praising them because for a variety of reasons but you have to understand that if you were going up against the japanese and they had any indication they needed to defend they would basically create a situation where your options were be into like 18 different interlocking fields of fire on any kind of solid ground or be in the swamp that kills you i mean it helped that they were the only army at the time that actually had a jungle warfare manual where nobody else did. We talked about that during our Singapore series where their soldiers had a baseline education of how to fight in the jungle while everyone else just didn't.

Also, whenever they were at any kind of tactical halt, they had their soldiers basically cutting education of how to fight in the jungle while everyone else just didn't also like whenever they were at like any kind of tactical halt they had their soldiers basically cutting down every every you know palm tree they could find to build build bunkers etc fill them with sand like they just they they that harshness was which they treated everything to include their own soldiers meant that like oh boy did they always always improving their fighting positions and yeah like i'm not saying like oh they were super humans they were unstoppable it's just more like you wouldn't want to go into it like with the mentality of oh they're all the same war is all the same it's like no the terrain really matters and particularly in jungle warfare

and they knew how to do it yeah i mean it doesn't mean they didn't die horrifically from diseases from any like lesser extent than anyone else. They just simply cared less. They're like, oh, whatever. He's dead. Fuck him. Yeah. They just had the ultra-Westernized but also insane Japanese military ethos of if you get malaria, you have weak genes.

Yeah, pretty much. They should have done more burpees and wore more onions. Now, other officers thought that Ord was out of his head, and if he was anyone else, he probably would have been fired, but Wavell loved him, so it didn't matter. Then, to underline everything, Wingate had ignored everyone when they told him the location of his training camp was prone to floods. So, of course, it flooded, killing dozens of his trainees.

But Wingate casually swam away from the flood, butt butt naked and didn't see what all the fuss was about. This man is just, he's just doing Iron Man's left and right all the time. Except instead of losing, like, oh, I lost 12 more trainees. Skill issue. Don't care, get me new ones. Naked Rastafarian, black Israelite, Iron Man. This man is just every single stereotype about the city of Bristol combined into one. When Wavell gave him new men, they were, let's say, not the best to continue training to prepare

for his missions because everyone hated him and thought he was crazy. Nobody was willing to give him soldiers that, let's say, might be considered good. The Chindits were a dumping ground. So he got what was left over. He's got a good track record of like, hey, put your best guys here. They'll be well taken care of. They seem to be getting washed away by biblical floods. If you're going to give him soldiers, you might as well be like, hey like hey guys read the manual on building an ark so yeah why would you get like and also conversely having been a junior officer and you having been an nco if you've got problem soldiers you don't want to deal with like i'll give them to the guy that's going to get them washed away in the fucking great inundation you know what i mean yeah give them to the guy who's going to get them swept

out to sea by Neptune's wrath. Look, they're either going to die from a flood, die from disease, die of like rhabdomyolysis from his workouts, or choke to death on garlic. Either way, this guy isn't my problem anymore. Yeah, they call him Mr. Cellulite. Sleep on sleep. Now, Wingate's complaints about his men were they got sick too often. And he considered this not a result of living in the middle of the jungle and not taking any kind of effort to have a sanitary camp, but the fact that they were weak. So he ordered them to all wear garlic and onions and crush them ruthlessly with constant physical training, insisting that if you were in shape, you couldn't get sick from the jungle. For example, this might sound familiar to

you, Nate. One rule was his soldiers were not allowed to walk anywhere. They must run and not just like a jog. They have to be in a dead sprint going from point A to point B, no matter what they were like. If you had to take a. Like if you had to take a piss, if you had to take a shit, if you were going to the mess hall, you better be sprinting like Usain Bolt or he was going to appear out of the jungle ether and beat the shit out of you.

This is because this would have developed healthy disease-proof lungs. So basically, aside from being a founding father of the state of Israel, this man is also the spiritual father of second battalion ninth infantry manchu my former unit in korea because jesus christ this is fucking familiar i had to do this in basic training as well like if we were outside the the barracks building like going to the chow hall going from you know the pay phones

because i still had pay phones back then. Yeah. You had to run. If they caught you walking, you were going to pay for it. And I mean, Grant, I'm not comparing these two because I didn't get malaria. I mean, though, worse than malaria. I did basic training in Kentucky. It's hard to say which one of those is worse. But yeah, this is a trend. So rather than getting individuals to train, Wingate was given entire units, assuming, you know, a little correctly that this would be an easier way to build overall unit cohesion.

So one unit, the King's Rifles, lost 70% of their men within weeks of starting training because of illness. The Gurkhas lost 250 men the only men uh left standing in any unit were from the burmese rifles because they were locals they had a higher level of resistance not immunity but resistance to various sicknesses in the jungle i just feel like if you were forced into this environment of basically yeah you've got imt everywhere and if you don't then like you know the wraith of the jungle appears out of random and throws a spear at you. I feel as though this is just how you turn people into believing in a cargo cult. Yeah.

I mean, to be fair, the attitude that his men developed by the end of this whole thing, this two-part series, they lauded Ordate. Like he was some kind of messianic figure. Like he could do no wrong. Um, and okay. Part of that almost certainly has to do with how the series ends. I'm not going to give it away, but his men loved him. Everybody else hated him,

but his men loved him. I assume this is like, uh, some kind of Stockholm syndrome. I don't fucking know. Yeah. I, I know that people like that Stockholm syndrome may be kind of Stockholm Syndrome. I don't fucking know. Yeah, I know that people,

that Stockholm Syndrome may be kind of like an incorrect concept in some ways, but I understand exactly what you mean. In the sense that like... I don't mean in the sense that they were kidnapped, but like the sense that he treated them so fucking badly that they kind of fell in love with him. Yeah, so basically your options, I mean, it makes sense as to either believe that

this the guy and therefore the system is right and you have to get with the system or believe that god has forsaken you and this is actually hell and so it's like it does make sense why the devil is a naked british man wearing garlic for a necklace i mean he is that's correct but yeah yeah exactly the gurkhas casualties were replaced by random individual British soldiers and officers who could not speak the Gurkhas language, which is some regional dialect of Nepal. But some of the Gurkhas could speak English, not all of them, but it creates a language gap, a problem that would not become important down the road. There were also multiple casualties incurred during training

due to the fact that the men had been bitten by snakes or because they had accidentally eaten poisonous frogs while undergoing survival training. You know, it's one of those things where it's like, maybe you want to pull this guy aside and do the train the trainer thing that like, you shouldn't be writing the jungle warfare manual from scratch in the sense of like you shouldn't wait the whole the whole like caveman process of figuring out like what what frogs you can eat without tripping

or dying like there is some established literature on the topic you might want to consult that first he did but like he didn did, but he understood the jungle manuals of survival as well as anyone would if they simply read them and then immediately tried to do them with no further training. But instead of doing that, he skimmed them and then acted as a subject matter expert to train everybody else, which led to many of his men dying from eating poisonous frogs and snakes. Whoops. You know what? They wouldn't have died if they had a better, I don't know,

workout of the daytime. They simply did thrusters faster. They wouldn't have died from those snakes. If they had more energetically worn the ingredients of an incorrect carbonara around their neck, they wouldn't have died. Exactly. Now, despite going through his own men like a scythe through wheat, planning went ahead anyway. His men would be split up into different columns. Each of them would work completely and totally on their own to better penetrate Japanese lines in Burma and attack the logistical systems from railroad tracks to communication lines, supply storages, you name it.

Raise so much hell behind Japanese lines that their front line would collapse. But because Wingate is nuts, in order to get all of his men into position for their coming operation, he ordered them to march 130 miles by foot, rather than travel by rail, because fuck them. Then when they made it to the camp near other British army units, he made sure to order his men to build their camp eight miles away from everyone else because he was worried that his men would be softened up by things like a working shower and a cinema. I love doing the Nijmegen march on myself constantly for hardness reasons.

He is the first CrossFitter. People do this for fun now. And then they would get a medal for it at the end. So the overall plan made up by Wavell was to use Wingatesmen to push behind enemy lines, followed by an advance on the Chindwin River, as well as down to the Akyab with the rest

of the British Army. The idea was to pressure the Japanese front line, which would then collapse because the logistical system had been sabotaged. The chindit part of the operation was called Operation Long Cloth. Their goal was to get so far behind enemy lines that their own resupply would be limited to airdropping only. However, a little while later, Wavell decided to cancel the overall plan and Long Cloth with it, which infuriated Wingate. He was terrified that if the plan was canceled, it would give fuel to the army brass who doubted

and hated him and cancel his chindit plans. Wingate begged him to allow Operation Longcloth to go on totally on its own without the rest of the army pressing the Japanese front line. Wavell saw this as a suicide mission, as they would be going without any support whatsoever, and not to mention the overall plan would be pointless, because there was no regular army units to exploit any damage the Chindits would do, which was the whole reason the Chindits were to do their long cloth operation in the first place, right? I mean, ironic that a man who would never cover his dick would come out so hard in defense of something called

long cloth but it does seem that this is like a to him it's coming across like an opportunity to win personal glory even if it's exactly actually in support of a military objective yeah that's exactly what it is like It was personal glory combined with he was convinced that if he didn't have a proof of concept for the Chindits, it was going to be dissembled, taken apart.

And after hearing Wingate bitch and moan constantly, Vivel finally agreed to give him the pointless suicide mission he was asking for. So on February 8th, 1943, Operation Longcloth began with 3,000 Chindits, led personally by Wingate, sneaking into Burma. They ran into problems, namely the massive Chindwin and Irrawaddy rivers. Despite all of their training, the Chindins did not know how to cross a river in any effective

tactical way. And this is apparently something that just slipped his mind, I guess. Jungles famously don't have rivers, creeks, streams, bodies of water. No need. Don't need to practice. If you can't cross it, you're weak. And this was made worse by the fact that not only did he have to get men across it but also pack animals like mules and elephants who are absolutely not having it so in a chaotic traffic jam turned riot between man mule and pachyderm boats and fuck knows what else they barely made it across the river somehow the japanese did not see them coming despite the fact it took two full days to accomplish i mean i'm sorry but that is a fucking huge failure on the part of the japanese that if you when you hear like a brigade-sized

element having arguments with their elephants like normally that's a pretty big indication that something like if people are showing up with a 3 000 strong force and there's elephants involved that that kind of makes alarm bells go off in my head. Sitting down at my staff meeting afterwards, doing my after action review with my mules and pachyderms, hoping I can come to a conclusion correctly. Yeah, it's like, all right, I need three sustains and three improves. Sustains first.

Thanks. I was also going to say that. That's a good call. Donkey, what do you have to say thank you i mean that does sound like something that fucking wood gate would do and that's also like the elephants do crossfit like this guy like this guy is at the point where if you told me in the next detail like he decided that the way to prepare for battle was to have sex with the wind itself like I would believe it

just air thrusting into the distance I'm gonna fuck the air I call this the hands free cummies Jesus Christ oh now I have to imagine that in like whatever weird accent he had ugh I don't want to this is traumatizing once across the river the men sat in for their long marching bogged down by

around 70 pounds of gear apiece now windgate was immediately disgusted by the conduct of his soldiers they were loud they left trash behind they could hardly march together i assume because they were tired from the hundreds of miles of marching that they had already been forced to do and the diseases they were all carrying from training, not to mention the river crossing apocalypse they had just survived. So Windgate decided the best thing to do to fix the situation was to

run back and forth up and down the jungle trail screaming at them. Anyway, they finally found their first Japanese garrison in a nearby village. Did they make contact with the Japanese? Did they do a fucking recon? Did not recon by fire, like recon

by fucking insane British guy screaming? Recon by burpees. By the time they raided it at night, the Japanese had simply left and the Chindans managed to capture a single elephant. The next day, they ran into their first actual Japanese patrol and the men completely lost their shit, firing wildly in every direction while others tried to run away. The Chindans took their first casualty, which was by confused friendly fire.

Also, the sound of the gunfire scared off the mules and pachyderms who sprinted away carrying all of their supplies on their back into the jungle you know all right who forgot to tie up the goddamn donkeys fucking christ we like don't really have any basis for comparison because of how military logistics worked when we were in the military like imagine if your LMTVs were

sentient and they could just get pissed off and leave who forgot to feed the trucks periodically the LMTV uses its nose to suck up pond water and spray you with it because it's mad it uses its weird appendage face to feed itself apples

when I think of what a sentient elephant LMTV would look like, in my mind's eye, it just becomes like the way the first Europeans to encounter elephants drew them in like their manuscripts. It's just like, is that a person or a dog? What the fuck is going on?

It's a camouflage elephant with wheels instead of legs. It's a transformer. Nate, we invented a transformer. We've invented the worst iteration of the Cars universe you can possibly imagine. It's Animorphs, but the elephant got caught halfway.

So anyway, so you're saying that basically once under actual enemy fire, the animals fucked off, and so he's left holy. everybody accidentally shot at one another yeah after this the the marching continued broken only by according to one officer uh windgate ordering his men to stop form like a school circle and so he could walk up and down shit

talking the miracle at dunkirk oh my Just like in the middle of the jungle. Just doing Milo's bit. Milo's bit about like when your military operation is saved only by blokes who fish, it's not really a success. Right. Pretty much, yeah.

And if that wasn't bad enough, Wingate set two columns off to set up ambushes on the Japanese, only for them themselves to get ambushed. In one case, the units broke and ran, leaving everything behind they couldn't carry on their backs. Both columns were effectively wiped out and had to limp back across the border into India on their own. Another column simply went missing after he ordered them to go south. I mean, my recollection of doing research for the military paper I had to write when I was a captain about the Papuan campaign in New Guinea is that basically, and I know it's not the same climate or environment, but in a comparable way,

that when you would engage with the Japanese, your options were either like, nice inviting road that has all of the hallmarks of you are going to get ambushed and you will, or literally walking into a crocodile's mouth and there's no way. to get ambushed and you will or literally walking into a crocodile's mouth and there's no way so it sounds like the missing column probably did option B there I think they just had shitty maps

and got lost but like they were trying to ambush so you know they weren't good at their jobs I don't know how other way to explain this they don't have an excuse for this they had weeks to prepare and at the end of the day they had bad fucking maps and also some people just didn't know how to navigate in the jungle i mean all simple oversights because he

was too obsessed with physical training and other weird shit it's one of those things where yeah you start to realize that if this like so much of these things that goes into the military mythos of these people, even if they're recognized as being eccentric, as code word for out of their mind, where the actual operation takes place step by step, it just seems like constant chaos and self-inflicted injury. It's like, what if the op order... Because also remember, at the very beginning this operation is pointless from the outset what if an op order also had adabrin psychosis what if the adabrin psychosis was an integral part of the battle plan yeah literally like the concept of the

operation is we get adabrin psychosis and kill ourselves like it's just you know it's one of those things where it's it's funny but it's this is like the same thing with talking about Stalingrad like it's funny but then as you start getting detail upon detail like man this would suck so bad this would be fucking awful and it's all because this one guy

is just was yeah was was basically raised to be like the fucking living inside the underground mound people from the 13th Warrior. But in early 20th century Britain. I do have to put on that. Everything was a cartoonish mess of mule stampedes and failure. The remaining columns attacked the Japanese base at Nankan, blew up bridges, railways and supply stores without casualties.

at Nankan, blew up bridges, railways, and supply stores without casualties. That was until someone forgot to actually check for the Japanese, who had a bunker overlooking the village and just absolutely laid waste to them with machine guns. At this, the Chindits broke contact and left their dead and wounded behind and ran off into the jungle. The Chindits hit another garrison at Penelbu and much the same way. They blew up storage facilities, blew up railways.

The Royal Air Force bombed the base as well, sending the soldiers into cover. And the Chindits rushed in, blew things up, set things on fire, and hauled ass back into the jungle. After this, they decided they would cross the Irrawaddy River, where they found the missing column who popped out of the jungle about 40 miles away from Wingate's HQ. Their crossing of the Irrawaddy went about as badly as it could. This time, the Japanese were on full alert, as were their Burmese allies. So

while the columns split up to make their crossings, virtually all of them had to do so under withering gunfire. All the wounded were left behind. In one case, a British officer left a nice little note pinned to the jacket of a wounded man, addressing it to the Japanese commander, warmly greeting them and telling him, due to the honorable code of Bushido, he knew that his wounded would be cared for, noting that they had fought for king and country. I presume this guy was immediately beheaded. Oh, they all were. Yeah. Every single one of them was executed. Yeah. Now, by March 18th, the entire force was across the river and things would only get worse. And that is where we'll pick up next time on the conclusion of Ord Wingate and the Chindits.

Wow. I did not know what I was getting myself into. I'm not even going to pat myself on the back for calling some things correctly because this is going in directions I never would have envisioned. All I can say is, in probably the understatement of our careers, this guy sucks. Yeah, I would say he's a wee bit problematic. Just a little bit. I've got some concerns I want to address.

Yeah, he's not a great character by any stretch of the imagination. He's certainly colorful. I'll say that. Yeah. I feel like eccentric is one of those classic understatements like the one thing i will say the brits are very rarely able to accurately describe themselves and i suppose americans are like this too but i will say that there is there it is accurate when they say that there's a quite of like like the the mild understatement that an american might take is like to mean what it says literally when it's like oh he's eccentric which

is coded to mean this guy is fucking bananas and yeah dip so that's he he sounds like your classic british eccentric who happened to be born in a time when he could inflict the most chaos um yeah now he would just go to Spain and get arrested for getting drunk and punching cops or go to Amsterdam and get drunk and drown in a canal. Yeah, catastrophic stag do injury makes headlines in Britain. The first man ever to lose a leg

due to an IED at a stag do. Yeah, exactly. This guy decided, no, he was going to jump off a bridge onto a canal boat, but he was then going to touch the bottom of the canal with his feet and bench press the boat.

It didn't go well. Nate, thank you so much for joining me here on part one of Ord Wingate, the garlic onion wearing jungle thrall of Burma. You have other podcasts you host and work on use this time to plug those

shows so I am the co-host of a show called what a hell of a way to die a show about why you shouldn't join the military that is rapidly just becoming a show about being dads because both Francis and myself are parents it's a great show though we have a lot of fun, so please listen to that.

I also edit and co-host a show called Trash Future, a podcast about why the tech industry is, in fact, bad and often incredibly stupid. I also am the producer of a show called Kill James Bond, a podcast hosted by three incredibly funny trans people. Their names are Abigail Thorne, Alice Caldwell Kelly, and Devin. It is a feminist podcast that started out about making fun of

or assessing Bond movies from a feminist lens and has rapidly just become a very, very funny movie podcast. They are currently slogging through the trenches of terrible 60s and 70s Euro spy movies. And it's extraordinarily entertaining. It's some

of the most I laugh when editing or listening to a show. So I strongly recommend it. And obviously, I am the co-host of this show as well. And this show and my other shows all have Patreon accounts where you can subscribe and receive bonus content, typically one episode a week or three to four a month. So Joe is going to plug the Lions Patreon and I strongly recommend you sign up for that if you like this show. But also if any of those shows are interesting to you and you want to hear them and hear more, you can go to patreon.com slash the show name and you will find them. Thanks. So this is the only show that I host. But if you like what we do here, you can consider supporting the show via Patreon. We have almost six years of bonus content on there now. You can get everything for $5. You also get Discord access. You get eBooks.

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