When British Prime Minister Winston Churchill arrived at the Quebec Conference (code-name QUADRANT) in August 1943, he had a special guest with him. He was a small intense, rather odd-looking man, as Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, commander of the United States Army Air Forces, recalled: “You took one look at that face, like the face of a pale Indian chieftain, topping the uniform still smelling of jungle and sweat and war and you thought ‘Hell, this man is serious’.”
Brig. Orde Wingate had spent the first two months of 1943 in the Burma jungle, leading a guerrilla campaign against the Japanese that achieved little in terms of material damage: a few bridges blown, some railway lines cut and a few dozen enemy soldiers killed. The real significance of what Wingate and his 3,000 Chindits had achieved was psychological: they had attacked the vaunted Japanese army in its own territory.
The exploits of the British Special Forces unit were splashed across American newspapers, with the Ogden Standard-Examiner calling it “one of the greatest epics of the war” and the Waterloo Daily Courier hailing Wingate for his innovation in using aircraft for resupply. “Cutting an army off from its base and penetrating deep into enemy territory is an exceedingly dangerous maneuver,” said the paper. “But the ability to summon supplies by radio and receive them from the air makes such a maneuver more feasible. It may be that the Wingate expedition in Burma is only the forerunner of a new kind of warfare.”
Churchill took the 40-year-old Wingate to the Quebec Conference for exactly that reason: to show to his American allies that a new kind of warfare had been launched in Burma, what Wingate called “Long Range Penetration.” The brigadier addressed the American delegation on Aug. 17, and told them in his conclusion that “long range groups should be used as an essential part of the plan of conquest to create a situation leading to the advance of our main forces.”
The next day Wingate had an audience with Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR was so impressed that he authorized the deployment of American ground troops in Burma for the first time.
The official telegram of authorization from Washington was sent Aug. 31 to Lt. Gen. Joseph Stilwell. In February 1942 Stilwell had been posted to Burma as head of a small U.S. military mission to help train the Chinese army. It had not gone well. Stilwell and his men had been forced to flee the advancing Japanese
