A brilliant exponent of guerrilla warfare, in the 1930s he helped to establish and train Jewish irregular forces operating against Arabs in Palestine, and in 1941 he organized Sudanese and Abyssinian irregulars to fight the Italian occupiers and restore Emperor Haile Selassie to the throne. He created and led the chindits, a Burmese guerrilla group that operated behind Japanese lines. He died in an air crash in 1944 at the outset of his second, and greatly enlarged, chindit operation.