BURMA FRONT

Grey River Argus, 3 April 1944, Page 4

BURMA FRONT

General Wingate’s Death CRASH ON MOUNTAIN RIDGE. (Rec. 7.50.) LONDON, April 1. Major-General ,C. G. Wingate, the British guerrilla leader in Burma, has been killed. ' He was 41 years of age. London newspapers pay high tribute to his successes against the Japanese. His troops ranged over 10,000 square miles of Burmese territory, taking the unorthodox warfare of which Major-General Wingate was master to the Japanese and beating them at their own game. Major-General Wingate was returning to his base in a Mitchell bomber, which was escorted by Mustangs. They encountered a severe storm. The bomber crashed into a mountain ridge behind the British lines, says Reuter’s New Delhi correspondent. The American crew of five, and one or two other passengers, as well as Major-General Wingate, were killed. An American pilot reported a blaze on the mountainside at night, and search ’planes were sent out at dawn the following dav, but it was some time before the wreckage was located. A British United Press correspondent at New Delhi says Major-Gen-eral Wingate met his death after an inspection of an Allied airstrip. 170 miles to the rear of Japanese lines, where air commandos landed by glider. Sometimes compared with Cromwell, also with Lawrence of Arabia, to whom he was distantly related, Major-General Wingate earned a legendary reputation for leadership of a “ghost army” which carried out a prodigious programme of destruction behind the J'apanese lines last year, and also for planning a vast air-borne expedition which recently landed in Upper Burma. Gener d Wingate’s widow is aged 26. He first met his bride to be in 1935, when he was returning from exploration to discover’ a lost oasis in Libya. Aboard the ship was a darkhairen girl, who walked up to General Wingate, who was then 33, and said: “You are the man. I am going to marry.” Two years later she was Mrs. Wingate.