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and well-conducted rearguard action’, back to Cape Esperance in the east of the island, from where 13,000 of them, including Hyakutake, were miraculously evacuated by night on 9 February 1943 by Tanaka’s Transport Group.19 They were the lucky ones; Japanese left in the interior of Guadalcanal looted native villages to survive, and so ‘The islanders exacted terrible revenge, and Japanese heads decorated the native long-houses for years afterwards.’20 In the entire land campaign, the Japanese had lost 25,000 dead and 600 planes, the Americans 1,490 killed and 4,804 wounded. Both sides lost twenty-four ships, but the Japanese far more tonnage. The first rung of the ‘Solomons ladder’ had been successfully trodden, and the Americans would now move north. Most importantly, though, just as Midway had proved that the Imperial Japanese Navy was far from invincible, Guadalcanal showed the same for the Imperial Japanese Army. In all 103,000 American lives were to be lost defeating Japan, as well as 30,000 British, Indian, Australian and Commonwealth. Guadalcanal was to be the first of several stations on a via dolorosa whose names – such as Kwajalein, Tarawa, Saipan, Guam, Luzon, Iwo Jima and Okinawa – are ‘written in blood into American history’.21

The onset of the monsoon in May 1942 had halted the Japanese advance into India, and Commonwealth attempts to attack in the Arakan and retake Akyab came to naught in 1942 and 1943, so the British resorted to a new type of warfare for their forces in Burma in 1943: long-range penetration jungle fighting. This innovative strategy was the brainchild of one of the most glamorous, unconventional and controversial figures of the war: Brigadier (later Major-General) Orde Wingate. Churchill called him ‘this man of genius who might well have become a man of destiny’ and likened him to Wingate’s relation Lawrence of Arabia, who had been a friend of Churchill’s.

The Chindits, Wingate’s British, Indian and Gurkha troops of the 77th Indian Brigade, fought deep behind Japanese lines in northern Burma. The heavy losses they suffered, on occasion having to abandon their wounded, makes Wingate’s military legacy something that historians continue to debate.22 There is disagreement over how the name Chindit originated; some believe it came from Wingate’s mishearing of the Burmese word for lion, chinthe, others that it was after a figure of Hindu mythology, others after the Burmese word for griffin. Whatever its genesis, the force soon found great popularity with the British public, which appreciated the high courage shown in spending long periods of time operating far behind enemy lines.

Wingate could be unscrupulous, especially in leapfrogging senior officers by using his access to his admirer Churchill, and he made a fair number of enemies in the Fourteenth Army in building up his command from a brigade to a division, but for all the sometimes bitter criticisms of him he was undoubtedly one of the true originals. On 31 August 1940, lunching at the War Office, ‘He said he had acquired quite a taste for boiled python, which tasted like chicken,’ the Director of Military Operations Major-General John Kennedy recorded. ‘His men kept remarkably fit – he thought chiefly because they knew they would fall into the hands of the Japanese if they didn’t. He is a man of great character, a good talker and a very good writer too.’23 A manic depressive who tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat with a knife in a hotel in Cairo in 1941 after the Ethiopian campaign; a nudist who frequently wore only a pith helmet and carried a flywhisk in camp; someone who never bathed but instead cleaned himself by vigorous scrubbing of his body with a stiff brush, Wingate ate raw onions for pleasure and has been described as a ‘neurotic maverick’ and a ‘foul-tempered, scruffily dressed egomaniac’.

Born in India when his father was fifty-one, Wingate was raised a strict Nonconformist, who was thus excused chapel at Charterhouse. He came sixty-third out of sixty-nine candidates entering the Royal Military Academy Woolwich in