O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

He split the men into four companies and issued rifles to them. Although a third of his men had had some military training, none of them had ever used the weapon with which they were equipped, the British Lee Enfield. The companies were split into platoons and squads, keeping men who spoke the same language in the same unit as far as possible. Each man was issued a rudimentary uniform. Since nobody knew anyone else and there was no way of telling noncoms from officers or soldiers, Hurewitz ordered his sergeants and corporals to sew a red ribbon on the shoulder of their shirts.

  The most difficult problem of all was that of language. The platoon and squad leaders were all sabras who spoke only Hebrew. How, Hurewitz asked himself, could they be expected to lead into battle men who couldn't understand their orders? He assembled them to study the problem. Finally he said, "Look, we haven't got much time. We'll have to get along with the kind of thing we'd do with children. Teach them just a few simple words, the words they'll have to know to fight." Soon, Hurewitz noted, a strange murmur began to rise from the esplanade of Tel Hashomer, the sound of hundreds of voices slowly articulating a succession of syllables. In the language of the Judges and the Prophets, the recruits of his 72nd Battalion were trying to learn the words with which they hoped to save Jerusalem.

  Hauled up to the Old City walls with great effort, two of John Glubb's six-pound guns peeped through the gunports designed four centuries before by the architects of Suleiman the Magnificent for wars of bows and arrows. Farther along the ramparts, near Damascus Gate, were a pair of Vickers machine guns. On the ground below waited a battery of eight two-inch mortars. In front of Herod's Gate, protected by a natural depression, was the most important piece of all, a 25-pounder field gun. It was noon, Sunday, May 23, and without exception every muzzle of that array of artillery was fixed on one target. Notre-Dame de France, built by the "Pilgrims of Penitence," was about to do penance for the grandiose ambitions of its founders.

  Lieutenant Fendi Omeish took a last look through the 25-pounder's gunsight. It was pointed straight at the center of Notre-Dame's façade, right at the statue of the Virgin. He adjusted its aim to the left. "Try not to hit Mariam," he told his Moslem gunners, who had, too, a certain veneration for the Virgin. Then he ordered the shelling to begin.

  Soon Notre-Dame's mammoth shape was enveloped in a cloud of dust. To John Glubb's trained eyes, however, his guns seemed to have the effect of "a peashooter" on Notre-Dame's solid masonry. "The Holy Catholic Church," he observed glumly, "seemed to have built for eternity."

  For the men inside the building, the shelling had a different aspect. To Netanel Lorch it was like "a continuous earthquake." Stonework, masonry, timber, plaster rained down on its defenders. Dust and smoke choked the teenagers of the Gadna and their middle-aged fellow fighters. The roar stunned many of them. For two hours it went on, half a dozen shells a minute, until Notre-Dame's proud eastern fac,ade was pockmarked and shattered.

  As the roar of the Legion's artillery finally died away, another, more terrifying sound rose up to Notre-Dame's defenders, the rumble of motors. Four armored cars of Lieutenant Zaal Errhavel were advancing up Suleiman Street from Damascus Gate toward the building. On the third floor, Mishka Rabinovitch watched them with the homemade periscope he had devised out of two pipes and a broken mirror. The solid walls of Notre-Dame had protected Rabinovitch and the building's lone Piat antitank gun during all the shelling. Rabinovitch, his arm still in a cast, aimed the weapon for the Gadna teenager beside him, as he had at Mandelbaum.

  The tension was enormous. Lying on the floor, they could hear the steady drone of the advancing cars' engines and the snap of rifle fire all around them. Everyone in the building waited for the Piat's first shot, knowing that once the gun's position had been revealed, it might not get a second chance. Looking at the two of them lying on the floor, Zelman Mart, one of Shaltiel's deputies, thought, "The kid's never going to be calm enough to hold on and wait until he's sure of his shot."

  The four cars came closer. Coached by Rabinovitch, the Gadna teenager patiently held on under Mart's admiring gaze until they were only a hundred yards away. Coolly, he squeezed off his first round. The lead car spun to the side. His assistant gunner dropped a second shell into the Piat. He fired again and a second car ground to a stop.

  "My God," thought Mart, "if he can do that, anybody in this command can."

  In the cars, Errhavel's gunners found that at that range they could not elevate their guns to an angle wide enough to shell Notre-Dame's top floor. Errhavel ordered his two damaged vehicles to withdraw and pulled the other two cars back out of the Piat's range.

  Meanwhile, the infantry, led by Lieutenant Ghazi el Harbi, a burnished veteran of hundreds of tribal skirmishes in his native Saudi Arabia, opened its assault. His men got to the hospice's garden wall, broke in and rushed to the base of the building itself. From the dozens of cell-like rooms above, bearing names like Notre-Dame de Lourdes, Sainte Françoise Romaine, Sainte Eulalie, came an uncharitable rain of hand grenades.

  Despite the intense fire, a party of Harbi's men managed to get a foothold on the ground floor. Watching from the Old City walls, the United Press's Samir Souki could see them trying to push forward in one room while through another's windows he could see Jewish soldiers rushing forward to check their advance. The fighting was savage, with grenades and bayonets; yet the Gadna youngsters, many of them only sixteen and in action for the first time, succeeded in holding the Legionnaires to half a dozen rooms.

  Inside Notre-Dame, Mishka Rabinovitch was beckoned to a window by a seventeen-year-old French boy named Jacques. The little Frenchman, a veteran of the Maquis, had already acquired an extraordinary reputation. He was, one of his commanders noted, "continually engaged either in fighting or in looting." He was covered with pink brick dust from the shattered hospice and looked to Rabinovitch more like a clown than a fighter.

  There was nothing comic about the sight to which Jacques was pointing, however. It was a Legion armored car maneuvering below the window. Silently, Rabinovitch pointed his good arm to a Molotov cocktail and gestured to Jacques to throw it.

  Lieutenant Fendi Omeish had just leaped from the car to help a wounded man at New Gate when he turned and saw the bottle arching gracefully through the air to smash onto the pavement in front of the car. Since it was on a slight incline, the burning liquid rolled down under its bumper and fired its engine. From the window above, the dark-moustached Rabinovitch and Jacques, "looking like a pink Picasso," peered down with pride on the boy's handiwork. Its turret crammed with munitions, the car began to explode in sheets of blue flame and the stench of burning rubber. "Everything I have," moaned Omeish, "my blankets, my toothbrush, my soap, my wife's picture, and there it goes."

  There, too, went the car's driver, Ali. Disgusted by the turn the war had taken, he scrambled from his turret, dashed through New Gate and, presenting himself as a civilian, kept right on going until he reached his Arabian home.

  South of the city, Shaltiel's reserves had retaken Ramat Rachel, catching Abdul-Aziz' men in the act of looting the kibbutz. Then, concerned by the Legion's assault on Notre-Dame, Shaltiel had felt he could not have his last two reserve platoons so far from the city's center, and he had replaced them by Home Guardsmen. Once again the Arabs had attacked and captured the settlement.

  And once again Shaltiel's reserves repeated their attack. Incredibly, they found the Egyptian Moslem Brothers busy looting what they had not been able to carry away the first time. Once again they routed them. By dawn, the Israeli flag was back on the blackened chimney of the kibbutz's ruined dining hall.

  In that same dawn of May 21, the Legion's attack, stalled the night before, began again at Notre-Dame. Once again the Jews held their ground. Gradually, the Arabs' casualties began to mount at a worrying rate.

  John Glubb, disturbed by his army's long delay in capturing Notre-Dame, observed the attack from the Old City with increasing apprehension. Just after noon, his Third Regiment's Australian commander, Bill Newman, b
rought him a distressing piece of news. Half of the two hundred men who had launched the attack the day before were dead or wounded. It was a jarring revelation. "Our business is fighting in the open country, not slogging from room to room," Glubb told himself. He ordered the attack stopped and Harbi's men withdrawn to Musrara.

  The Saudi Arabian was heartbroken. When he had pulled his men back, he sought out Glubb in the Old City and begged him to allow him to attack one more time. The Pasha was adamant; their failure before the walls of Notre-Dame was a crucial turning point in Jerusalem. Once and for all, he was sure the Legion did not have the men or the training to fight its way from house to house and room to room through New Jerusalem.

  John Glubb knew, however, that a house-to-house fight was not the only way to take Jewish Jerusalem. There was another way: blockading it. The key to that was the vital crossroads he had studied with Sir Alec Kirkbride a few nights before. There, on the plains below Latrun, the Bedouins of his Legion would at last meet their enemies in the open country that was their natural fighting environment.

  38

  "EXECUTE YOUR TASK AT ALL COSTS."

  SLOWLY, METHODICALLY, Lieutenant Colonel Habes Majali, commander of the Fourth Regiment of Glubb's Arab Legion, panned his field glasses over the vast panorama at his feet. From his observation post, some of the most famous generals of history had scanned the approaches to these heights of Latrun. Ibn-Jebel, one of the Caliph Omar's lieutenants, had even built his tomb in the field of wild lavender surrounding Majali. The young colonel had climbed onto a pile of stones left from a fortified château built on these heights by Richard the Lionhearted, then razed by Saladin, to scan the countryside in his latest attempt to discern the intentions of his enemy.

  The commander of the Fourth Regiment had little doubt as to what those intentions were. To get help to the 100,000 besieged Jews of Jerusalem, the Haganah, he was sure, would have to storm his positions and break open a passage to the city. By midday of May 24, Majali sensed that their attack was imminent.

  His soldiers had been preparing for it for days. The hillside so precipitously abandoned by Fawzi el Kaukji was now well seeded with machine-gun nests. The trenches in which the Turks had fought off Allenby's attacks on Latrun had been cleaned out, deepened and reoccupied. Mines and rolls of barbed wire covered the slopes before them. Antitank guns controlled the principal approaches to the crest. Three Vickers machine guns had been posted on the roof of the old British police station west of Latrun's Trappist monastery controlling the plain rolling down toward Tel Aviv. In the village of Yalu, the Ayalon of Biblical times, Majali had hidden his three-inch mortars.

  Nightly his adjutant, Captain Mahmoud Rousan, had been sending deep penetration patrols out into the plain to uncover the Haganah's positions and intentions. Rousan had even stationed a detachment of men in the police station of Artouf, a village three miles south of Latrun on the road to Beersheba. On this evening of May 24, he intended to send a major patrol across the valley to Artouf to destroy the one bridge on the road leading to the village and thus eliminate any possibility of its being used as an access road to Jerusalem.

  To supplement his own manpower, Majali had reorganized Haroun Ben-Jazzi's irregulars and the local villagers into auxiliary units. It was a task for which Majali, son of the paramount sheikh of Transjordan's most important Bedouin tribe, was particularly suited. In the formalist tongue of the desert, the first Arab to be honored with the command of an Arab Legion regiment had given each group of irregulars the name of an animal whose ferocity was legendary. Thus, Majali's Lions, Tigers, Wolves and Falcons, equipped with new rifles, had been attached to his regular companies.

  The core of Majali's force was hidden under camouflage nets in an olive grove near the hamlet of Beit Nuba. From that piece of high ground, his six 25-pounder field guns commanded all of the roads converging like the tributaries of a river on the single ribbon of asphalt leading up to Jerusalem. Like Majali, their young commander was the son of one of Transjordan's most famous Bedouin tribes. Mahmoud May'tah, the brother of the officer who had opened fire on Jerusalem, had initiated his illiterate Bedouin gunners into the mysteries of geometry and ballistics with an old French seventy-five captured in the struggle with Vichy France in Syria. So expert had they become that two smoke shells fired on their arrival in Latrun had sufficed to range their guns on the targets selected for them by May'tah. He had had no difficulty in picking the targets. The subject of May'tah's last prewar maneuver had been the conquest of Latrun.

  Standing on his observation post, Colonel Majali contemplated Latrun's amber stands of ripening wheat, then to the northwest the square minaret of Ramle and, farther on, at the edge of the horizon, the rooftops of Tel Aviv and Jaffa outlined against the sea. As his glasses moved carefully back across the green Plain of Sharon toward the Valley of Sorec, homeland of Delilah, one of his aides brought Majali a radio message. It was from brigade headquarters and it informed Majali that three companies of the Second Regiment with artillery support were en route to Latrun to reinforce his positions. A satisfied Majali resumed his scrutiny of the vista before him. This time his binoculars stopped on a grove of pine and cypress trees five miles distant. Through their branches Majali could pick out a series of red-tiled roofs. Lowering his glasses, he consulted his map. As he suspected, they belonged to a Jewish settlement, the kibbutz of Hulda, the last Haganah stronghold on the road to Jerusalem.

  Calmly, Dov Joseph looked at the group of ultra-orthodox rabbis gathered before him in the Jerusalem home of Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog and waited for one of them to break the silence.

  Finally the exasperated Chief Rabbi said to the assembly, "You wanted to speak to Dr. Joseph. Here he is. Speak."

  Embarrassed, the group's leader, an elderly man, began by giving Joseph a lecture on Jewish moral precepts and the value attached by the Jewish faith to preventing the loss of a human soul. Mea Shearim had been badly hit by the Legion's shelling, he said; many women and children had been killed. While clearly the Haganah could not be expected to abandon the struggle with the Arabs, perhaps they, in the quarter, could go to the Arabs and make some arrangement whereby it might be excluded from the fighting.

  Joseph sensed immediately what was coming, a plea for a partial surrender. He knew he could not tolerate such a gesture. The result might be a wave of panic that would infect the whole city. Awkwardly the man before him stumbled toward his conclusions. At least, under his plan, their women and children would be spared further suffering and many innocent souls saved. What did Joseph think of his proposition?

  The Canadian fixed him with a steady gaze.

  "You do what you believe to be right," he answered, "and I shall do what I believe to be right."

  There was a long silence. And what, Joseph's interlocutor inquired, did Joseph think was right?

  "I think that if anyone attempts to raise the white flag, he will be shot," he said.

  The forces whose intentions Colonel Habes Majali had attempted to discern were in the process of assembling this Monday, May 24, in the kibbutz of Hulda. Zero hour for the Jewish attack on Latrun had been fixed for midnight, and, as they had so often before, the officers of the Haganah had turned to the Bible for a name for their operation. It was "Bin Nun," for Joshua, the son of Nun, for whom the setting sun had stood still on the Valley of Ayalon so that he could complete his victory over the enemies of Israel. To conquer the same valley, the officers of a modern Israeli Army might well have prayed for the rising sun to stand still, for the success of their operation would depend above all on carrying it out under the cover of darkness.

  Undertaken in an atmosphere of anarchy and argument, the preparations for the attack hardly seemed to augur well for its outcome. Originally set for midnight May 23, zero hour had had to be pushed back twenty-four hours because the Seventh Brigade's manpower had not been assembled at Hulda nor its armament delivered. The strike force of the brigade, an infantry battalion detached from the Palmach's Alexandroni
Brigade, hadn't even arrived at Hulda at six o'clock on the evening of the twenty-third. Those farmers from the Plain of Sharon were the only members of the brigade with real military experience, and Shamir had assigned them the key role in the attack, the capture of the police station west of the Monastery of Latrun.

  Haim Laskov's homemade armored cars and half-tracks had not been ready to participate in the attack, either. They still had not received their machine guns, ammunition or radios. As for the immigrants of Zvi Hurewitz' 72nd Infantry Battalion, delivered to Hulda by buses requisitioned from Tel Aviv's No. 5 bus line, they had had neither packs, helmets nor canteens. The battalion's officers still did not know their men nor the men their arms. And, as at Tel Hashomer, the immigrants continued to mutter the few words they had been able to learn in Hebrew, the words on which their survival might soon depend. Faced with such an impossible situation, Shamir had been obliged to advise Yadin that he was postponing his attack for twenty-four hours.

  When his missing Palmach battalion finally arrived at Hulda at noon the following day, Shamir and his staff welcomed them with relief. Their pleasure, however, turned to stupefaction as they saw the men getting off their buses. Ten days after its creation, the new state of Israel possessed an army still fundamentally organized for clandestine combat, a series of baronies in which commanders often interpreted superiors' orders according to their own estimate of the situation. Before allowing its battalion to leave for Hulda, Alexandroni's Palmach commanders had systematically stripped their men of all their arms and equipment. Twelve hours before they were due to attack the Legion, they had showed up without a single rifle, "a battalion of beggars," as Vivian Herzog bitterly observed.

  No one was more horrified by the lamentable state of the Seventh Brigade's preparations than Yigal Yadin, who had argued so hard with Ben-Gurion against the attack. Flying up to inspect the brigade, Yadin saw that its battalions were in fact companies lumped together without reserves, support or communications. Its artillery was made up of a pair of old French Army mountain guns nicknamed "Napoleonchiks," the 25-pounder stolen for the Haganah on May 13 by the Australian Mike Scott, four three-inch mortars without sights and a Davidka no one knew how to use. Yadin also saw to his horror that there was no effective medical service: the brigade had no doctors, no ambulances, not even enough stretchers.