Explain that, General Sheehan-

One of the best British combat generals of World War II- praised by Churchill- was also- as Arts & Letters Daily shorthanded him- "gay as a three-speed walking stick":

In the middle of the Abyssinian campaign, by which time he had already forced 20,000 Italian troops to surrender, Wingate radioed his immediate superior, General Cunningham, predicting that 500 of his irregulars could force the remaining 20,000 Italians to surrender within ten days. Cunningham was so appalled by Wingate’s arrogance he ordered him to hand over to his second-in-command. Wingate laughed and fell back on the old trick of pretending his radio was broken. Exactly ten days later he accepted the surrender of the Italian commander-in-chief.

He received no recognition for this feat, but, instead, had his rank reduced for insubordination and was given a desk job in Cairo. Shortly afterwards, he caught Malaria and, during a bout of fever, tried to cut his own throat. “You bloody fool,” said his commanding officer when he visited him in hospital. “Why didn’t you use a revolver?”

Wingate’s abrasive, uncouth manner didn’t endear him to his superiors whom he was fond of calling “military apes”. “Wingate would go in and be bloody rude to one or two generals and leave everybody thinking, ‘Well, I’m damned if I’ll do anything for that bastard!’,” wrote Thesiger.

It wasn’t until he was summoned by Winston Churchill, who’d heard about his exploits in Gojjam, that his fortunes began to change. “We had not talked for half-an-hour, before I felt myself in the presence of a man of the highest quality,” Churchill recalled.

He put Wingate in charge of the Chindits, a group of 3,000 irregulars in Burma, whom he led on guerilla operations against the Japanese, hundreds of miles behind enemy lines. Up until this point in 1943, the Allies had suffered a series of successive defeats for 18 months. According to Mountbatten: “The myth, the legend had grown up assiduously fostered by the Japanese propaganda machine, that the Japanese was a born jungle fighter and was invincible. It was Wingate who proved he was not. It was Wingate’s men who went in and showed that, man to man, they were superior to the Japanese at any game.”

One of the men who served with Wingate in Burma was Bernard Fergusson, who dropped a rank and forsook a desk job at General Headquarters to command one of Wingate’s columns in the first sortie into Burma. “If he told you that you could do something, you were at once sure that you could do it,” he said. “Not one of the men whom we left dead or dying, whether of wounds or more often from starvation, as we struggled on our way, ever upbraided him or me. They were proud of serving under him; they were proud of his very ruthlessness.”