O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  For Zev Benjamin, an enduring image would be the sight of Jerusalem's dogs. "They were so thin," he would recall, "they couldn't understand what was happening. They would run from garbage can to garbage can, only to find them as dry as they had been when they had come off the assembly line."

  Carmi Charny and the machine-gun crew with which he had halted two Legion armored cars studied the thick walls of the building in which they had been ordered to set up their gun. Here at least, Charny thought, they'd be safe from the Legion's shellfire.

  Exhausted after forty-eight hours of almost nonstop combat, the New Yorker stretched out on the floor to catch a few moments' sleep. As he began to doze, a strange and delicious odor tickled his nostrils. It was the smell of a delicacy so rare he had almost forgotten its existence—chocolate. Charny leaped up and with his comrades plunged into the next room. To their astonishment, they discovered they were in an abandoned chocolate factory. Frantically they began to search the building for some scrap of that precious substance left behind by the factory's owners. It was a fruitless search. All they found were a few bars so rancid that even the rats in the building wouldn't touch them.

  A few hundred yards away, three other Haganah men crawled through the darkness in pursuit of a different treasure. Elbows and knees bleeding, their clothes torn, Yosef Nevo, Jacob Ben-Ur and Mishka Rabinovitch crept up on three dark shapes scattered down St. George Road. With their turrets full of ammunition, their cannons, their radios, the three abandoned Legion armored cars represented a potential windfall. If they could somehow be put back into service they would double Nevo's armored force, and he was determined to drag them back into his lines.

  From a window of the Mandelbaum house, Sarah Milstein covered the trio with her fiancée's Bren gun. Convinced that an Arab sniper was tracking them, the nervous Rabinovitch thought he could hear the bones in his head cracking. He crawled to a pile of rubble for cover, then started, terrified. Pointing starkly into the night sky from the pile, like a tree ravaged by a forest fire, was a bone. He had hidden behind the remains of a Legionnaire caught by one of the Gadna's Molotov cocktails.

  For fear that the cast on his wounded arm was shimmering in the starlight, Rabinovitch smeared it with mud before continuing his advance. He and Nevo fixed a rope to the car's front axle. With Jacob Ben-Ur manning its Bren gun, the Haganah's stolen British police armored car slipped down the road to pick up the tow. Rabinovitch climbed into the Legion car and slipped its gear into neutral. Slowly the lead car began to tug it up the road toward the Mandelbaum house.

  A few minutes later, the operation was repeated with the second car. As it started to move, another dark object began to roll along the road in the opposite direction. It was the third car. While Nevo and his companions had been pursuing their salvage operation, Lieutenant Zaal Errhavel of the Arab Legion had been doing exactly the same thing a few dozen yards away, at the other end of the street.

  Two thousand miles from Jerusalem, other men too were concerned with arms, the arms David Ben-Gurion had promised would turn the tide of the combat in which their new state was engaged. The site of their activities was the little Czech town of Žatec, until recently a part of the Nazi-occupied Sudetenland. Its outskirts harbored Ehud Avriel's latest achievement. To make sure that the men, planes and equipment of an air service supposed to bring salvation from the sky to Israel reached their destination in time, Avriel had persuaded his Czech friends to lend him a complete air base. While the United States and the Soviet Union were sliding into the quagmire of the Cold War, under Avriel's direction a largely American-staffed airfield was coming into being behind the Iron Curtain.

  Thursday, May 20, marked, in a sense, the beginning of operations in Žatec's hastily converted Luftwaffe base. For three days Ben-Gurion had been pressing Avriel to start shipping his Messerschmitt fighter planes to Israel. The skies of the new Jewish state were still the exclusive domain of the Egyptian Air Force. Nightly its planes were bombing Tel Aviv, their attacks virtually unchallenged. Forty-one people had been killed only forty-eight hours earlier when a bomb had fallen in the city's bus depot.

  Summoned to Žatec from Paris, where they had been resting after their last trip to Palestine, the crew and owners of Ocean Trade Airways' one plane watched Avriel's men with awe. They were trying to maneuver into the door of their DC-4 the most unusual cargo they had been called on to carry in their turbulent career, the stripped-down fuselage of a Messerschmitt 109. Six weeks after having flown the Haganah its first load of Czech arms, the Ocean Trade Airways crewmen were scheduled to deliver the Israeli Air Force's first fighter plane.

  They were, that is, if a way could be found to force it into their DC-4. No matter how Avriel's men maneuvered the fighter's fuselage, it always managed to stick in the door.

  Petrified by the thought that his precious Messerschmitts might remain grounded on his little airstrip two thousand miles from the country in which their appearance was so anxiously awaited, Avriel followed the work with anguished eyes. Maneuvering their cranes with the precision of a watchmaker's drill, his men slipped, pushed, pulled on the bulky fuselage until, without anyone quite knowing how, it slid into the hold of the DC-4. Israelis, Czechs and Americans let out a triumphant cry. Then, so that the plane could go into action as soon as it arrived, the DC-4 was stuffed with bombs and machine-gun rounds. The Israeli Air Force's first fighter pilots, Mordechai Hod and Ezer Weizman, climbed on board. Along with them went a pair of Czech mechanics to reassemble the plane.

  Eight hours later as it approached the Israeli coastline, the DC-4 got an astonishing welcome. A salvo of tracer shells fired by the Hispano-Suiza antiaircraft guns of "Don Jose" Arazi suddenly bracketed it. Egypt's mastery of the skies over Tel Aviv was so complete that no Jewish antiaircraft gunner could imagine that the plane approaching was anything but Arab.

  Twisting through the shellbursts, the pilot set course for the former R.A.F. field of Akir, not far from the airfield where he had landed during the night of March 31. No one on board was more anxious to see this historic flight end than the DC-4's pilot. Indifferent for the moment to the importance of his mission to the survival of Israel, the former Milwaukee accountant had only one thing on his mind—an acutely painful souvenir of his Paris visit given to him by a pretty young lady. To one of the joyous Israelis rushing up to congratulate him, he mumbled, "Quick, get me a doctor and some penicillin!"

  The dockers of the port of Haifa looked with rising incredulity at the pile of pack racks they had pulled from the cargo hold of the S.S. Isgo and wondered what contribution they could possibly make to the country's war effort. Purchased almost as an afterthought on Christmas Day in Antwerp by Xiel Federmann, they had arrived along with a more substantial product of his activities, two dozen half-tracks.

  The half-tracks of the S.S. Isgo, three other boatloads of auxiliary equipment and Ocean Trade Airways' Messerschmitt represented the only elements of the Haganah's overseas stockpile to reach Israeli ports in the first week of Israel's existence. The problem of getting their arms from one end of the Mediterranean to the other was even more difficult than the Haganah's planners had imagined. Wary of the conflict raging in the Middle East, shippers, insurers and captains were proving extremely reluctant to handle cargoes bound for the new state. In some countries, particularly the United States, strictly enforced embargoes on arms deliveries to the belligerents had forced the Haganah into complicated and time-consuming transshipments. The result, despite a daily stream of angry cables from Ben-Gurion's office, had been an agonizing series of delays.

  Yet as each day passed, the need for those arms grew more desperate. Despite the Haganah's tenacious resistance, the Arabs' superior firepower and armor were inexorably turning the balance against the Jewish army. Forty-eight hours after the war had begun, Ben-Gurion had asked his young Chief of Operations if the Haganah could hold out for two more weeks without further arms. Yigal Yadin had bluntly replied that it was not certain.

  The m
ost serious situation was in the south, where two Egyptian columns pushed steadily northward. They were composed of over ten thousand men, supported by fifteen fighter planes, a regiment of Sherman and British Matilda tanks, and 25-pounder field guns. Only five of the twenty-seven Jewish settlements in their area of operations contained more than thirty defenders. The army defending them consisted of just two Haganah brigades. The first, the Negev Brigade, contained eight hundred men with two 20-millimeter guns and two Davidkas with ten shells. The second, on the seacoast, had 2,700 men, but not a single antitank weapon except mines and Molotov cocktails.

  After encountering furious opposition at the first two settlements he had attacked, the commander of the column heading for Tel Aviv had decided to bypass the kibbutzim along his way if their locations did not menace the coastal road. By the time the Haganah's first Messerschmitt reached Israel, his column was assaulting the one kibbutz it could not bypass, Yad Mordechai, one of the oldest settlements in the Negev. Named for the leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943, the settlement stood right alongside the coastal road. Once the Egyptians had overwhelmed it, they would be able to advance all the way north to Ashkelon, only thirty miles from Tel Aviv.

  The second Egyptian column, composed mainly of Moslem Brotherhood volunteers under Colonel Ahmed Abdul-Aziz, had been advancing through purely Arab territory. Ironically, his forces were following almost the same route taken by the Children of Israel in their flight from Pharaoh's Egypt to the Promised Land. The natural lack of opposition had not prevented Abdul-Aziz from announcing a "victory" with each Arab town he entered. Now his men had passed through Hebron. With Kfar Etzion in Arab hands, not a single Jewish soldier stood between Abdul-Aziz' forces and the settlement of Ramat Rachel, barely two miles from the heart of New Jerusalem.

  That the Jewish situation was not yet desperate was due to the relative inactivity of the other Arab forces. The Arab Legion's thrust into Sheikh Jarrah May 19 had been the only real action of the Legion so far. The Iraqi Army that was supposed to have reached Haifa in a fortnight had confined itself to sporadic artillery and air attacks on its foes.

  However, in the north, the Syrian Army, led by thirty armored vehicles, including French Renault tanks, had captured three Jewish settlements and was in the process of assaulting two more, Degania A and B. This attack led to one of the most anguished moments in David Ben-Gurion's life. The leader of Degania B, one of his oldest friends, came to him to beg for just one field gun to turn back the Syrians' armor. Almost sick with sorrow, Ben-Gurion told him, "We have no guns. If I had one, I'd give it to you. Maybe tomorrow we'll have one. But today there are none. You'll have to go back and tell your people to fight with what they've got."

  Ben-Gurion knew his words meant that men would die in a hopeless fight. Watching his friend's figure disappear, he felt, for the first time in his adult life, tears on his cheeks.

  It would be almost two decades before he would shed tears again— on the day when he would announce to his people his retirement from public life.

  The exploit of Yosef Nevo and his Gadna youngsters had stopped the first rush of the Arab Legion, but other grave problems were accumulating for David Shaltiel. The most important was in the south, where Abdul-Aziz' armor had reached Bethlehem. Foreshadowing the storm about to break in that sector, the Egyptians' artillery began to shell the kibbutz of Ramat Rachel on the afternoon of Friday, May 21.

  The second critical area was the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Arrayed against it was Major Abdullah Tell's battalion and fifty guerrillas led by ten Yugoslav, English and German volunteers whose commander was a former S.S. lieutenant named Robert Brandenburg. In addition, Tell could call on Fawzi el Kutub's explosives units and dozens of Haj Amin's irregulars.

  The Arab Legion commander had taken over the Rawdah School headquarters on his arrival, quietly but firmly inviting its disorganized occupants to get out. On the wall of his office Tell had installed a huge map of the Old City. Around the Jewish Quarter was a chain of red pins, indicating the positions held by his men. Instead of the haphazard attacks of the irregulars, Tell decided to squeeze the quarter methodically from all sides. And as each Jewish strongpoint was captured, he ordered it destroyed. That way his foes would not be able to reclaim it, and the territory held by his enemies would be steadily reduced. Tell's chain of red pins would creep forward with deliberate slowness. He had chosen this tactic for one reason: it would save the lives of many of his men.

  Moshe Russnak understood his tactic immediately. Slowly and inexorably, he saw, he was being driven deeper and deeper into the territory left to him. The days since the Palmach had left Zion Gate had brought him other bitter discoveries too. The reinforcements he had been sent were reluctant combatants. Some had disappeared into the cellars of the synagogues with the civilian population. Others complained that they were not supposed to be there at all, causing Russnak to lament that instead of eighty fighters he had received eighty new mouths to feed and listen to.

  The third target of the Arab Legion was the most massive building in Jerusalem, the three-story Hospice of Notre-Dame de France. With its 546 cells, named for French saints and the philanthropic Frenchmen who had provided the funds to build it, Notre-Dame was a honeycomb of rooms and windows, a kind of pilgrims' Hilton in the heart of Jerusalem. Above all, its great granite wings were a superb manifestation of the material and political considerations underlying much of nineteenth-century Christian Europe's spiritual attachment to the Holy City.

  The building had been launched with a collection taken on a homeward-bound steamer after one of the "Pilgrimages of Penitence" undertaken by French Catholics following the Franco-Prussian War. "It is not simply a question of building a pied-à-terre for pilgrims," noted the first fund-raising appeal, "but of opposing to those of our rivals our own national monument, vast in its proportions, grandiose in its architecture, a colossal witness to our solicitude for Jerusalem and for the secular rights we possess there." In every parish in France, Catholics were urged to "donate a franc, sacrifice a gold Napoleon" so that France in Jerusalem "would no longer be a nomad camped under a tent . . . but ensconced in her own palace, equal to her rivals; represented not only by spiritual but by material interests." Its crowning glory was a twenty-foot, six-ton statue of the Virgin offering her infant son to the Jerusalem skyline and, by no accident, towering over the three onion domes of the nearby Russian church. On Notre-Dame's inauguration in 1888, so that no one would misunderstand its significance, the French consul had proclaimed the building "a great monument to Catholic France, here where Russia has crushed us under her millions and her buildings." It was indeed a prodigious monument to the glories of France, and each stone of Notre-Dame was going to pay for its grandeur.

  The building had been retaken by the Haganah on the night of May 19 after a bitter struggle. Since then, its defenders, as at Mandelbaum, had been a unit of Gadna teenagers. They were supplemented by middle-aged Home Guardsmen, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, many of whom had to be taught how to shoot by their seventeen-year-old comrades.

  To John Glubb, Notre-Dame was the pivot on which Jerusalem turned. He was persuaded that his men could not move into the New City so long as it was in Jewish hands. Indeed, the armored cars which had stumbled by error into Yosef Nevo's trap at Mandelbaum should have led an assault on the building. If his Bedouin soldiers could capture Notre-Dame without heavy casualties, Glubb would feel confident enough to unleash them in a house-to-house drive to seize the New City. If they could not, he would have to find other tactics to subdue Jerusalem.

  Almost across the street from Notre-Dame, another French institution was already living its ordeal. Learning that their convent was unoccupied, five of the cloistered Soeurs Réparatrices who had fled their dwelling on Pentecost Sunday had returned in the hope that their presence might somehow keep the building out of the fighting. It was a vain hope. Snipers on both sides observed their figures in what they had all assumed was an abandoned building.
Each, persuaded that the other had occupied the convent, opened fire on it.

  Caught in the crossfire, the terrified nuns huddled for safety in the vaulted chapel in which they had so often prostrated themselves before the Blessed Sacrament. Their leader, Sister Emérence, had what seemed to her a particularly felicitous idea: she hung the convent's yellow-and-white papal flag from a window.

  That served only to further confuse the Arabs and the Haganah. Ignorant of the flag's meaning, both assumed it was hostile and intensified their fire. An incendiary bullet from one of their exchanges set a wing of the convent ablaze. Desperately the nuns gestured from the convent window until Dr. René Bauer, director of the French Hospital across the street, saw them and opened his door. Gathering up their skirts, they rushed under fire to the hospital.

  Their anguish was not quite ended, however. The next day, Sister Emérence noticed that the Haganah had strung a net of cables from Dr. Bauer's office to the convent. Over the French physician's protest, the army had occupied the hospital. What, asked Sister Emérence, were the cables for? Bauer shrugged. The Haganah was probably putting in a telephone in their convent, he said. Not quite. Short of mines, without antitank weapons, the Haganah had to use any tactic it could to close Jerusalem's main streets to the Arabs' armor. Before Sister Emérence's horrified eyes, the convent in which she and her colleagues had planned to spend the rest of their lives exploded. From it a cascade of masonry, stones and timber spilled out into Suleiman Street, a firm and blessed barrier to the free movement of John Glubb's armored cars.