Son of Zion

Brigadier Orde Charles Wingate, God-fearing soldier son of a God-fearing soldier father, was steeped in the Old Testament. He was a Plymouth Brother, but by the time he went to Palestine as a captain in 1936 to train Jews against Arab night attacks, Wingate had come to think of the Zionist cause as if it were his own.

He set up headquarters for his Jewish "Special Night Squads" in the hilltop Jewish settlement of Ein Harod, facing Mount Gilboa. He considered that Israel's King Saul should have pitched his camp in the same spot, instead of in the valley below. In time, Wingate's "S.N.S." grew into Haganah's shock troops, Palmach. But that was after Wingate's day. The British government, which thought him too friendly to the Zionists, recalled him from Palestine.

The scholar-soldier (he spoke fluent Arabic and Hebrew) went on to military glory in World War II--in Ethiopia, where his raiders disrupted the Italian army, and in Burma, where his "Chindits" raided deep into Japanese-held territory. But Wingate and his beautiful young wife Lorna always dreamed of returning to Palestine.

Orde Wingate never got back. He died in a plane crash on a Burmese mountainside, four weeks before his son was born. But last week Lorna was back. "Israel is at war," she told Jewish friends in Tel Aviv, as she left for a visit to the U.S. "If I had gold and money I would contribute them for the war which my husband foresaw. Not having them, I decided to [bring] you my son ... to be educated in Israel and to be a loyal son of both Israel and Britain."

The village home she chose for four-year-old Orde Jonathan Ben-Zion (Son of Zion) Wingate was at Ein Harod.

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