O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  Crouched in his window in the Tannous Building, Ephraim Levi watched the outlines of Nevo's car move toward the gate. By the time it got within the circle of light made by the flaming wads of paper hurled from the wall, the Arabs' fire was murderous. Nevo tried to hold his cars out of grenade range, but, not aware of the device the Arabs were using to throw Kutub's bombs, he found them exploding all around him. Ahead of him, his armored cars opened fire on the walls with the twenty-one shells they held between them. Nevo saw a bazooka round zip past his car. Suddenly he realized his Bren wasn't firing. Turning around, he saw his gunner slide onto the floor of the car. The wireless operator crawled to him. With a puzzled regard, he looked back at Nevo. "I think he is dead," he said. He had barely uttered those words when he himself gasped and started to cough. He too had been badly hit.

  Nevo's driver chose that instant to slam shut the slit through which he saw outside. Terrified, he refused to open it. Up ahead the young officer saw his lead armored car stop well short of its assigned position, almost on the spot to which Salamon's bus was supposed to move. The car was blocking the column's advance. It had to be moved forward. Salamon and his sappers would have no chance of getting to their iron grill alive in the fire pouring down on them if their bus was forced to pull up short of their jump-off point.

  To his anger, Nevo discovered that a bullet had put his wireless out of action. Looking back, he saw Salamon's bus grind to a halt. The whole column was stalled now and heading to disaster if it didn't get moving again. Cursing, he forced his driver, who still refused to open his slit, to move blindly up on the lead car.

  Crouched behind a gunport on the wall above, Peter Saleh saw Nevo's car start its move. The wall was a confused hurly-burly of shouting, shooting men. The wounded lay propped up on the floor moaning softly or begging for help. The old stone runway was covered with blood and spent cartridges. Men were stationed every six or seven feet pumping fire into the Israelis below. Ammunition was desperately short. A ramp had been set up so a jeep could climb part way to the wall with crates of ammunition rushed up from Rawdah headquarters.

  An old man with his abaya clutched in his hand like a housewife carrying an apron full of apples moved from man to man distributing bullets. Some of Saleh's companions had old Italian rifles that lit up like a flare each time they were fired, providing the enemy a perfect indication of their position. Down the line, a Molotov cocktail splattered on the pavement. As its flames rolled toward Salamon's stalled bus, the Arabs on the walls cheered.

  The Rawdah School headquarters was on the verge of collapse. Yelling, shouting men rushed in and out screaming for arms and help. Its leaders shrieked angrily at each other, and a growing state of panic gradually paralyzed their effectiveness. At her switchboard, convinced that the Jews would soon be inside the walls, Nimra Tannous personally called the royal palace in Amman. To her astonishment, she was able to get the King. "Your Majesty," she cried, "the Jews are at the gates! In a few minutes Jerusalem will be theirs!"

  The Jews were, indeed, at the gates, but their assault was in trouble. Yosef Nevo had managed to get his command car abreast of the stalled armored car. Opening his door, he saw that the car's turret was shut and three of its tires shot out. There was no sign of life inside. He screamed over the din of fire; there was still no answer. He leaned out and beat on the car's panels. Still no reaction. The only course open was to try to save the car by pushing it out of the line of fire with his own vehicle.

  Salamon, meanwhile, radioed Levi he was taking heavy casualties in his bus. The Arabs' fire was slicing through its thinly armored roof. Then, as they talked, Levi heard his old friend gasp, "I am hit." Seconds later, Salamon's radio operator told Levi that his friend was dying.

  On the walls the situation was desperate, too. Dozens of dead or wounded littered the Citadel and Jaffa Gate. One of the dead was the irregular manning the gunport next to Peter Saleh's. Watching a pool of blood form at the base of his skull, Saleh thought how strange it was—he did not know the man or even where he came from. They had barely exchanged two words in all the time they had stood next to each other on the firing line.

  A sense of despair had spread like a disease along the walls. "This time," Saleh thought, "they'll break in." Behind him, Irekat raced from gunport to gunport, begging his men to save their ammunition, with little effect. His untrained followers fired off their rounds as fast as they could get them, as if, it seemed to Saleh, "by firing hard we could keep their shots away from us."

  Below Saleh, Yosef Nevo saw men spilling out of Salamon's bus and fleeing back to Tannous. The attack, he told himself, was collapsing. By this time, Levi too had decided their assault was failing. He had two urgent tasks on hand, getting the wounded men out of Salamon's bus and bringing Nevo's "armored force" to cover.

  In the stalled attack, only one operation was going according to plan. Uzi Narciss' Palmachniks had rapidly swarmed up the hilltop whose name had symbolized their lost homeland to twenty generations of Jews. Huddled on Mount Zion behind the graves of the Armenian Cemetery, yards from the tomb of Jerusalem's founder, King David, they and the Arabs threw grenades at each other, the metallic bombs bouncing around the tombstones in the midst of the wounded.

  "Jerusalem is falling. Where is the Son of the Prophet?" screamed a frightened group of men bursting into the Jericho police station where Abdullah Tell was sleeping. The officer who had conquered Kfar Etzion leaped from his bed. One of his visitors was weeping. All of them were shaking. Jerusalem, they told Tell, was in a horrible state, its irregulars exhausted, its ammunition gone, its population close to panic. Tell told his orderly to make them coffee and urged them to rush to Amman. Picking up his phone, he warned the palace they were on the way.

  In Jerusalem, Fadel Rashid, despairing of help from King Abdullah, sent a desperate radio message to Fawzi el Kaukji. "The situation is perilous," it said. "The enemy has launched a generalized attack on all sectors of the city. We are bombarded from all sides. We must have help or it is our end. Our End, I assure you once again, it will be the end." The general who had been ordered to withdraw his forces from Palestine replied immediately: "I am warning Syria and Transjordan of your message. Resist, I'm coming at your call, O Divine Mosque."

  Meanwhile a chilling new sound filled the darkness around Jaffa Gate. One of the armored cars had missed a turn moving back to the Commercial Center and had crashed against the city walls. There a Molotov cocktail had killed its crew, and a short circuit had activated its horn. Now, like some mournful foghorn, its wail shook the night, grating with equal effect on both Arab and Jewish nerves.

  Netanel Lorch and three of his men groped through the wreckage of Moshe Salamon's bus toward the wounded officer. The man who was in the car on the toss of a coin guided them through the blackness, smoke and confusion with his soft whispers. When they had taken the dying man back to the Tannous Building, Lorch set out after Nevo's wounded radio operator.

  He found the wounded man by groping through the darkness, refusing to use his flashlight so as not to draw Arab fire. Lorch felt the man's body with his fingers until he located his head wound. He bandaged him as best he could, then reached down and felt for his pulse. There was none. He had just bandaged a dead man. For just a second, he cast his flashlight's beam on his face. As he did, he gasped. It was his cousin.

  It was just after two o'clock in the morning when the telephone rang in Abdullah Tell's headquarters. The young officer's orderly shook as he handed Tell the receiver. "It is our master," he said.

  This time King Abdullah was convinced. The deep emotions conjured up by Jerusalem had overcome at last the reasons of state entailed in his agreement with the British. Persuaded that the city was going to fall and that the flag of the new state of Israel might indeed soon fly over the mosque in which his father was buried, Abdullah now wanted his men to take Jerusalem, not just threaten it. Deliberately ignoring his army's chain of command, he chose to give his order not to its English commander, who
might raise again his wise objections, but to a man whose emotions he knew would lead him to act within the hour, a fellow Arab like himself.

  "Ya habibi, my dear," he told Tell, "I saw the Palestinian leaders you sent me. We cannot wait any longer. Go save Jerusalem."

  In Jerusalem, the temporary lull in the firing had not reassured the Arabs. At his gunport on the wall above Jaffa Gate, Peter Saleh waited for the rush that would carry his foes inside the city. Hundreds of frightened civilians gathered at St. Stephen's Gate waiting to flee if the wall was breached. From Mount Scopus, Haganah observers caught an occasional glimpse of others who had already begun their flight plodding toward the Mount of Olives.

  On the other side of the city, Shaltiel's headquarters and Ephraim Levi debated whether or not to renew the attack. Although none of Salamon's sappers had gotten close to the gate at the base of the Citadel, his assault platoons were largely unscathed. Shaltiel urged him to try one more time. Levi resisted. The Arab irregulars' inability to conserve their dwindling ammunition supplies was about, perhaps, to deprive their foes of the Old City of Jerusalem for two decades. Since their fire had not slackened in pace with their disappearing supplies, Levi had no way of knowing how desperate the Arabs' situation was. To attack again, he argued, would lead to unacceptable casualties. Shaltiel finally agreed.

  It would be twenty years before an Israeli flag would fly from the Tower of David.

  A few minutes later, at Rawdah School, a call from Amman informed Mounir Abou Fadel that the Legion was on the way. A noisy celebration immediately revived the dispirited Arab headquarters. Abou Fadel sent an order to the men on the walls: "Hold on at all costs. Help is coming. Our brother Arabs are on the way."

  Opposite Jaffa Gate, Netanel Lorch and his men were ordered to barricade the windows of the Tannous Building with sandbags. Lorch could not find any dirt inside the building, and it was too dangerous to dig outside. He ordered his men to stuff their bags with an unlikely filling in a city as hungry as Jerusalem, the sandwiches made at such sacrifice by the mothers of the city. In a few days, Lorch reasoned, they ought to be hard enough to stop a rifle bullet.

  34

  "A LAMENT FOR A GENERATION"

  MAJOR ABDULLAH TELL stared down the Mount of Olives to the darkened community at his feet, its' skyline illuminated by the occasional flash of an exploding grenade. "The most important city in the world," Tell thought, and it had just been entrusted to his care. An avid student of history, Tell knew that it was on this hilltop that the Caliph Omar, son of a black slave, become the successor of Mohammed, had accepted the city's surrender and brought it its first Islamic rule. How much blood had the centuries mixed with its soil? he wondered, aware he would soon add still more to it.

  One of Tell's infantry companies, ordered to the Mount of Olives at sunset, had followed from the hilltop the sound and glare of the battle for Jaffa Gate. Tell had no intention of throwing his battalion piecemeal into Jerusalem, but the urgency of Abdullah's call and the pleas of the irregulars rushing to the Mount of Olives from the city led him to order Captain Mahmoud Moussa to send fifty men into Jerusalem immediately. He reasoned that their presence would bolster its defenders' sagging morale until the rest of his men arrived.

  Tell and Moussa watched the shadowy figures move slowly down the Mount of Olives toward the Garden of Gethsemane and St. Stephen's Gate. Forty minutes later, at 3:40 A.M. on Tuesday, May 18, a lime-green signal flare cut a parabola across Jerusalem's black skyline. Although John Glubb still did not know it, the men of the army he had wanted to keep out of Jerusalem were now on the ramparts of the Old City.

  At about the same time, a laconic four-word message was being relayed to David Shaltiel's headquarters. "We have Mount Zion," it read. If Shaltiel's assault on Jaffa Gate had failed, Uzi Narciss' diversion, at least, had succeeded. The ideal springboard into the Old City was in Jewish hands. Barely fifteen feet separated Narciss' Palmachniks and the walls of the Old City itself.

  Listening to the despairing pleas for help from his besieged comrades only yards away, Narciss resolved to break into the Jewish Quarter as soon as possible. His men's fatigue and an Arab mortar round on a truck bringing him a Davidka ruled out his hopes of a daytime attack. He was certain, however, he could break in under cover of darkness. He promised Shaltiel that he would smash through Zion Gate and establish a corridor along the rear of the Armenian Quarter to the Street of the Jews. Once he had, the Jerusalem commander would have only to provide the forces to hold the gate and the corridor. By midmorning, Narciss announced to his men that everything was ready. Shaltiel's headquarters would provide a force to exploit their success. This time it was sure. That night they would relieve the siege of the Jewish Quarter.

  At about the same time on the other side of the Old City walls, Captain Moussa made a startling discovery. The towerlike structure of Zion Gate through which Narciss' men would rush into the city was deserted. Its irregular defenders had fled after the fall of Mount Zion. Moussa rushed to reoccupy it, together with the buildings adjacent to the gate itself. The door into the Old City, left briefly ajar by the fleeing irregulars, had been slammed shut.

  Yosef Atiyeh, a bespectacled schoolteacher, was about to go home for lunch when he was ordered to the courtyard of the Schneller School.

  It was going to be almost a year before Yosef Atiyeh would get home for lunch. With the half-trained men around him, he was, as one of Shaltiel's subordinates declared, going "to save the Old City." Some of the men gathered at Schneller barely knew how to handle a rifle, but they represented the only force Shaltiel was able to find in his strained command to exploit Uzi Narciss' attack on Zion Gate. The man he had selected to lead them, Mordechai Gazit, was appalled by his first sight of these men, dressed in ordinary street clothes, without any organization or structure. He appointed the most martial-looking among them as his sergeant major. The choice turned out to be a poor one. The man would desert in a few hours.

  Shaltiel issued each man a new Czech rifle, eighty rounds of ammunition and four hand grenades. It was, Atiyeh noticed, the first ammunition some of his comrades had seen. As uniforms, they were issued British left-behinds captured in Bevingrad and U.S. Navy gunnery helmets. Designed to be worn with earphones under them, they wobbled like soup tureens on the men's heads.

  From the beginning there was confusion about their task. Gazit thought their job was to reinforce Mount Zion. Narciss expected them to man Zion Gate and push into the Armenian Quarter. Most of the men thought they would be porters bringing supplies to the Jewish Quarter and would return home at dawn.

  While this unlikely troop assembled, two men puzzled over a maze of metal spread on the floor of one of the classrooms of the Schneller School. They represented the parts of two Czech machine guns flown to Jerusalem by Piper Cub to give covering fire to the attack. Bobby Reisman had recruited Carmi Charny, the soft-spoken rabbi's son from the Bronx, to man one of them, but neither man had any idea of how to assemble the guns. Swallowing their pride, the two Americans finally sent for the foremost expert on machine guns in Jerusalem, a former ordnance sergeant of the Red Army.

  Once the ochre wings of Ramallah's Grand Hotel had welcomed to its luxuriant gardens the gourmets of Jerusalem. It was not its Moroccan couscous or chicken Musaghan that had drawn to its terraces a uniformed group of men this Tuesday evening, May 18. The Grand Hotel was the headquarters of John Glubb's senior deputy, Brigadier Norman Lash.

  Confronted by the King's fait accompli in ordering Abdullah Tell to Jerusalem, Glubb had meditated all day on the dilemma before him. Clearly, he could not rescind the King's command and order Major Tell to leave Jerusalem. Committed to the city, he now had to make certain that the force stationed there was large enough to rule out the possibility of defeat. "I have decided to intervene in force in Jerusalem," he cabled Lash. The die, as he was later to write, was cast.

  Pouring himself a whiskey and soda, Lash told the officers around him that a task force composed of a score
of armored cars and three infantry companies would move south from the Ramallah area to join Tell's men in the city. Lash wrote out the task force's assignment on a sheet of paper. Behind a dawn artillery barrage, it would drive the Haganah from Jerusalem's northern buttress, the Arab quarter of Sheikh Jarrah, and proceed to Damascus Gate to link up with Tell's forces.

  A few minutes later, Colonel Bill Newman, the Australian commander of the Legion's Third Regiment, and Major Bob Slade, his Scottish deputy appointed to lead the task force, assembled their Arab officers under an apricot tree outside the village of Kalandia. Spreading his maps in the white glare of a storm lantern, Newman stabbed his finger at Jerusalem. "That's where we're going," he said. An explosion of joy and shrieks of delight drowned his words. Newman looked up astonished. Beside him Lieutenant Fendi Omeish, an artillery officer, noticed tears in the Australian's eyes.

  "Why?" the lieutenant said. "It's wonderful."

  "No," replied Newman in a half-whisper. "They're sending my Bedouins into a fight they're not trained for."

  As Newman finished his briefing, the news of the regiment's mission raced through the bivouac. By their tents, trucks and armored cars, his Bedouin soldiers began to sing, to dance the dabke, to pray. The villagers who a few hours before had jeered at their inactivity rushed up with fruit, flowers and sweets for these men whom Allah had chosen to defend the Holy City.