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Gideon Force

1940–1941 military unit active in East Africa

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 21, 2026
Entity authoritySource title only
Source-derived summary

Gideon Force was a small British and African special force, a Corps d'Élite with the Sudan Defence Force, Ethiopian regular forces and Arbegnoch and a group of veterans of the Haganah, Special Night Squads (SNS). Gideon Force fought the Italian occupation in Ethiopia, during the East African Campaign of the Second World War. The leader and creator of the force was Major Orde Wingate. At its peak, Gideon Force had fifty officers, twenty British NCOs, 800 trained Sudanese troops and 800 part-trained Ethiopian regulars, a few mortars but no artillery and no air support, except for intermittent bombing sorties by the Royal Air Force.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Gideon Force” as 1940–1941 military unit active in East Africa. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Gideon, Force and military.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current 104-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Gideon, Force and military providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Gideon Force”, the useful work is to connect “1940–1941 military unit active in East Africa” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Gideon Force” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.