Sublime

When I commanded in Palestine in 1937–8, I had on my staff two officers in whom I recognised an original, unorthodox outlook on soldiering . . . One was Orde Wingate, the second was Dudley Clarke.

The most dramatic part of the engagement came after the Hittites sent out two men—Shoshu Bedouin, as we are told in the Egyptian account—to spy on the Egyptian forces, but deliberately in such a way that the men were almost immediately captured by the Egyptians. Under torture, presumably, the spies yielded their contrived disinformation (perhaps on

The United States entered the war on the British side in 1917, and President Woodrow Wilson declared that the principle of self-determination should govern any postwar reorganization of territories that were formerly controlled by the Ottoman Empire.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill also recognized the power of using irregular forces to combat the Wehrmacht in conjunction with regular military operations. In July 1940, he charged a new organization, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), with the mission to “set Europe ablaze.”9 For the next several years, British agents assisted local resista

When WW2 got under way, and Wavell became commander-in-chief, Middle East, he encouraged the development of special forces and secret fraud by picking Orde Wingate for guerrilla war in Ethiopia and Dudley Clarke for strategic deception.

It might make things easier if he went down to London again and found Marlowe. Report in, like a good soldier. But he swore he wouldn’t work for Marlowe again. Not after Malaya.

Lawrence not only helped lead the Arab Revolt but he also reflected on this group of irregular soldiers and their guerrilla campaign.166 Whereas other campaigns, such as those fought by the Irish or Boers, are remembered through a variety of memoirs, government reports, and histories both official and scholarly, Lawrence’s own writings were—and in