Malcolm Vivian Hay was born into a Scottish gentry family in 1881. He was titular head of the Seaton estate, Aberdeenshire, and conventionally known as Hay of Seaton.
A career soldier, Hay fought in the First World War at the battle of Mons (1914), where he was wounded and captured by the enemy. He was later repatriated to the UK to recuperate. He then joined the War Office's cryptology department (MI1(b)).
In later life, he became a writer. Hay wrote historical studies of Scotland and the Catholic Church. He also wrote a study of the Jews in Europe, The Foot of Pride: the Pressure of Christendom on the People of Israel for 1900 Years (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950) and finally in 1981 as The Roots of Christian Anti-Semitism. Hay was supporter of Zionism.
He married firstly Florence de Thiene, who died in 1943, and they had five children. In 1956 he married Alice Ivy Paterson née Wigmore (she was Orde Wingate's mother-in-law). He died in 1962.
Orde Charles Wingate (1903-1944) was one of the most controversial British soldiers of the twentieth century. He was best known for his advocacy of unconventional guerrilla-style warfare. During the Second World War, he set up the Chindits, which fought behind enemy lines during the Burma campaign. Wingate devised new methods of infiltrating and supplying these troops, who undertook sabotage and delaying actions against Japanese forces. Wingate was killed in an air crash in the early stages of the second Chindit campaign, Operation Thursday, in March 1944. The success of the Chindit missions remains a matter of disagreement amongst military historians.
Earlier in his career, Wingate had taken a similarly innovative approach to counter-insurgency warfare while serving in Mandatory Palestine. The British had administered Palestine under a League of Nations mandate from 1922, and the British civil administration was supported by the British Army. One of the major issues for the authorities was maintaining civil order in the face of growing antagonism between the territory's Arab and Jewish populations. From 1936 to 1939, there was a major revolt by the Palestinian Arabs against British rule, which involved strikes and military action. Economic targets such as the Iraq Petroleum Company's pipeline in northern Palestine were sabotaged, and Jewish settlements attacked. The British initially deployed conventional military methods to stop this, including large-scale sweep and search operations, with limited success.
Wingate, who had been serving as an intelligence officer in Palestine since 1936, wanted a more radical approach. He proposed the creation of small units, which would launch counter-insurgency operations against Arab guerillas under the cover of darkness. Controversially, Wingate wanted to enlist Jewish settlement police into these Special Night Squads (Wingate was opposed to including the main Palestine Police, who he considered to be pro-Arab). Wingate was motivated in this enterprise by his passionate Zionism as well as his liking for military novelty, and he made little effort to disguise his sympathies. As a result, he was prepared to incorporate members of the main Jewish militia, Haganah, in the Squads, which he was not authorised to do.
The SNS went into action in 1938, and soon enjoyed considerable success in ambushing Arab guerillas. Wingate believed that his highly mobile units, operating under the cover of darkness, would outmanoeuvre the enemy by their surprise attacks. He also lead great emphasis on training, and his methods later became influential in the military training of Haganah and other Jewish militias.
By the time, Wingate left Palestine on leave in October 1938, the SNS had largely pacified troubled areas of northern Palestine. However, British officials had become increasingly concerned about Wingate's overtly pro-Zionist sympathies and about allegations of excessive force used by the SNS. By 1939, the British had switched back to more conventional pacification measures. This was against the background of the MacDonald White Paper on Palestine issued in May 1939, which took a much less sympathetic view of Jewish settlement and the ultimate establishment of a Jewish state in a partitioned Palestine.
Although the Special Night Squads operated for a relatively short period, they were influential in the military thinking of the Haganah and later the Israel Defense Force about counter-insurgent warfare. Several senior IDF officers received their original training in the Squads, and Wingate was held in high personal regard by Jewish political and militia groups with whom he dealt.
