In the few days since May 14, the prodigious efforts of the Haganah's overseas arms-buying missions and the support of American and world Jewry had not yet begun to make themselves felt in Israel. Beset on every side by the Arab invasion Ben-Gurion had so long predicted, the new state was confronted by so many simultaneous tasks that the spirited improvisation and ingenuity which had been the Yishuv's greatest assets had been overwhelmed.
Sensing a tragedy, Yadin decided to make one more effort to change the mind of the only man who could now stop what he saw as a suicidal attack. The answer to his radio message was an unequivocal "No." Yadin was still not ready to go ahead. At two o'clock his Auster took off from Hulda's improvised landing strip for Tel Aviv, carrying both Yadin and Shamir. The Haganah's Chief of Operations hoped that Shamir might be able to convince Ben-Gurion of the folly of the attack, or at least secure a delay of a few days in which to prepare his troops. Before they went into the old man's office Yadin told Shamir, "It all depends on what you tell him. He's in a kind of trance about this thing and I can't argue with him any more. He just won't listen to me. He's sure Jerusalem will fall if we don't attack, and nothing I say seems to shake him."
Before Shamir could even finish describing his brigade's problems, Ben-Gurion was on his feet and launching into an impassioned description of Jerusalem's plight. Not a day, not an hour could be lost in opening up the road to the city, he said. His eloquence swept Shamir along with him. When he had finished, the Russian said simply, "Your will is my command. I will follow any order you give."
As they left, Yadin exploded. "Who the hell asked you to tell him you'll follow orders?" he said. "Of course you will. You were supposed to tell him what you think, dammit!"
It was too late for second thoughts now. The two men flew back to Hulda. On their arrival, they learned that at least the machine guns for Laskov's half-tracks had arrived, but it would take hours to scrape off the protective grease with which they were still covered. More hours of labor would be needed to load the loose ammunition into cartridge belts. Those and many other tasks like them had so burdened the officers of the Seventh Brigade for the past forty-eight hours that they had had neither the time nor the manpower to probe the foe's defenses with patrols.
Deeply concerned, Yadin remained in Hulda all afternoon, watching Shamir's preparations. Before leaving, he sent one last plea to Ben-Gurion, begging for a twenty-four-hour postponement in the operation. Then, brokenhearted, convinced that the brigade was doomed, Yadin flew back to Tel Aviv.
At seven o'clock, Shamir assembled his officers in the kibbutz's main building, converted into a temporary operations center. A 1:200,000 map of Latrun was hung on the wall. Before his dozen aides, Shamir ceremoniously began his final briefing according to the procedures employed by commanding officers in His Majesty's Army. Written in pencil, the document he held in his hand was the first operational order of the Army of Israel. It answered the four classic questions of a battle plan: the state of the enemy's forces, the state of their own forces, their objectives and the means they would employ to achieve them.
The objective was clear: to occupy a three-mile stretch of the Jerusalem road from Latrun to Bab el Wad, to secure it, then to push through to the capital the enormous convoy waiting on the highway between Kfar Bilu and Rehovot.
The information which Shamir then transmitted to his officers on the state of the enemy's forces was brief. The Jewish intelligence service, which had acquitted itself so brilliantly while operating underground against the British, had yet to adapt itself to the exigencies of military intelligence. "The enemy holds in unknown numbers the Latrun high ground," said Shamir's intelligence report, "and he has perhaps* some artillery." The area around Bab el Wad, estimated the report, "is probably held by irregular forces." That was all.
Shamir then began to analyze the assault plan. As he did, a runner interrupted their conference with a message from Tel Aviv. Reading the few words hastily scribbled on the piece of paper the messenger handed him, Shamir shuddered. It was an urgent communication from Yadin timed at 7:30 P.M.: "Enemy wheeled force of 120 vehicles including large number of armor and gun carriers left Ramallah apparently for Latrun. They are now at map coordinates 154-141." The arrival of Colonel Majali's reinforcements had been spotted by the Haganah.
Shamir walked over to his map and swiftly plotted the convoy's location. He estimated that it would reach Latrun in one hour. They would have to attack before those new troops were in position. "Gentlemen," he said, "we must advance zero hour by two hours." Instead of midnight it would be 10 P.M.
Shamir then resumed his briefing. Their jump-off point was on the Hulda-Latrun road, not quite two and a half miles below the Latrun crossroads. From there his two battalions would advance in different directions. The battalion borrowed from the Alexandroni Palmach Brigade would advance straight ahead, seizing the village of Latrun, the police station and the hamlet of Amwas to prevent reinforcements from reaching Latrun over the Latrun–Ramallah road. Once it had obtained its objectives, the battalion would dig in and give protection to the Jerusalem-bound convoy.
Shamir was about to turn to the mission of Zvi Hurewitz' immigrant battalion when a runner arrived with a second message from Yadin. "The position in Jerusalem is critical. You have to break through tonight," it read. For the third time in three days, the soldiers of Colonel Abdul-Aziz had seized the kibbutz of Ramat Rachel at the city's southern entry. Once again an Arab flag flew over its ruined buildings. More menacing still for the city's situation was the fact that the Arab Legion had joined the attack this time.
Shamir ordered petrol lamps brought into the room and once again, in the uneven light, returned to his briefing. Zvi Hurewitz' battalion would make a long sweep east from the jump-off point until it was opposite the point where the Jerusalem road entered Bal el Wad. It would cross the road and move up the slopes of Bab el Wad to the crest dominating the gorge, seizing the villages of Deir Ayub, Beit Nuba and Yalu. Then they too would secure their positions and give cover to the Jerusalem convoy.
Captain Laskov's armored force would give limited support to their attack; only three of his armored cars and two of his half-tracks were ready to take to the road. Shamir concluded by announcing that the immigrants' battalion and Laskov's cars would follow the convoy up the gorge to Jerusalem. The meticulous commander had even set out the composition of the column. Behind Laskov's three armored cars would come buses carrying the third, still incomplete battalion Shamir was holding in reserve, his own headquarters and the immigrants. Laskov's two half-tracks would act as the rear guard. Shamir predicted that dawn would just be coming up when the drivers of Laskov's lead cars saw the rooftops of Jerusalem before them, if the attack went off according to his hopeful previsions.
As Shamir finished, a sergeant of the Alexandroni battalion arrived to announce the first of the imponderables that always complicate any military plan. In their withdrawal from the Latrun police station ten days earlier, the men of the Givati Brigade had sown the Hulda road with mines. They would have to be dug out before Shamir's Tel Aviv city buses could move his men to their jump-off point. Without a mechanical mine detector, the job would take several hours and cause a worrisome delay. There was no choice. Shamir set zero hour back to midnight, the time he had originally chosen for the attack, hoping that some major obstacle might arise to cancel it altogether.
Instead, at twelve-thirty the commander of the Seventh Brigade got his third message from Yadin. The Haganah's Chief of Operations had received a reply to his last plea to postpone the attack. He had immediately transmitted its substance to Shamir. "You will execute your task at all costs," it read.
39
THE WHEATFIELDS OF LATRUN
NO SOUND beyond the metallic concert of the cicadas and the occasional baying of a dog broke the silence. Not a ripple of air moved the stands of maturing wheat or picked at the cypress trees. It was a breathless, suffocating night, but its quiet was deceptive. Shortly after the Tr
appist monks of Latrun began to chant their predawn vigil, the soldiers of Shlomo Shamir's brigade set out in quest of the road to Jerusalem.
They were already three precious hours late, and the four hundred men Shamir had finally been able to put into the field were far less than the number Ben-Gurion had counted on to seize the most vital crossroads in Palestine. The commander of Shamir's best Palmach battalion had collapsed two hours before the attack. Shamir had replaced him with Haim Laskov, who didn't know any of the men in his command.
Under a full moon, Laskov and his three companies set off across the plain on the attack's most important assignment, seizing the Latrun high ground, the fortresslike former British police station and the ridge above the Trappist monastery. As soon as they had left, Zvi Hurewitz and his immigrants began their eastward trek up the valley toward the narrow road running along the base of the Judean hills from Artouf to Bab el Wad. When they hit it, a few hundred yards above Bab el Wad, they would turn north, cross over the entry to the notorious gorge and begin their attack on the heights and villages above it.
At the upper end of the little road toward which the Jewish soldiers were moving, Lieutenant Qassem Ayad of the Arab Legion's Fourth Infantry Regiment cursed the stupidity of his engineers. They had forgotten a pair of unused detonators under the road's only bridge, which Lieutenant Ayad and his reinforced patrol of fifty men had been assigned to destroy. Before blowing it, Ayad had sent them back for the missing detonators, a tactic which would delay his return to Latrun by almost an hour.
The men who had spent barely seventy-two hours on the soil of a land they had dreamed of for years were going to suffer for Lieutenant Ayad's missing detonators. Heading back down the road toward Bab el Wad, the Arab lieutenant suddenly caught sight of a series of suspicious shadows in the plain to his left. Peering through the darkness, he made out the silhouettes of a long column of men moving toward Bab el Wad. He rushed to his radio. "The Jews are attacking," he informed headquarters. Ayad's accidental discovery of Zvi Hurewitz' immigrants had deprived the Israelis of the most important element in their attack, surprise. It was four o'clock in the morning of Tuesday, May 25.
The first battle of Latrun had just begun.
In his observation post on the hilltop from which Colonel Majali had studied the valley the afternoon before, Lieutenant Mahmoud May'tah could not believe the sight before him in the first gray haze of dawn. Moving through the wheatfields of Latrun, almost under the muzzles of his field guns, were dozens of Jewish soldiers.
From May'tah's guns, from the regiment's mortars, from rifles and machine guns all over the hillside, a devastating fire swept down on the hapless Jews trapped by the first light of a sun that would not stand still. Stunned by the Arab outburst, their forward progress stopped. None of the principal objectives had been reached or even approached. In the center of Laskov's sector, the men of his lead company had not even reached the Latrun-Bab el Wad road. They threw themselves for cover into the tomatoes and stringbeans of the Trappists' vegetable garden, waiting for the shelling to stop. To their left, the second company was caught outside the hamlet of Latrun below the police post. Up the road, near Bab el Wad, Lieutenant Ayad's men, bolstered by a number of villagers, fell on the unprotected flank of Hurewitz' immigrants.
In his Hulda command post, Shamir heard his men's pathetic appeals for artillery support to silence the Arab batteries hammering their ranks. A few minutes later in his classroom in the monastery at Latrun, Father Martin Godart, the abbey's viticultural expert, was interrupted in his lecture on the dogma of the Incarnation by a series of violent explosions. The two old French mountain guns, the 25-pounder of Mike Scott, the three-inch mortars without sights and a handful of light mortars were doing their best to silence the guns of Habes Majali.
Desperately short of ammunition, the Jews' counterfire was brief. Their infantry was soon alone before the machine guns and cannons of the Legion.
A pale sun climbing into a leaden sky overhead heralded the arrival of still another enemy, the cruelest the Jewish soldiers would face that morning. It was the hot, burning wind of the khamsin rolling up from the depths of the Arabian Desert to wrap Palestine in a mantle of fire. The wind brought along with it wave after wave of tiny black mosquitoes called barkaches. They infested the men's nostrils, their mouths, their eyelids, every exposed inch of their skin, driving some of them half mad with their sharp little bites.
Studying the battlefield from Hulda, Shlomo Shamir realized that his first battle as an Israeli officer was lost before it had really begun. His forces were much too weak to take Latrun in a daytime frontal attack. The only thing left was to minimize his men's losses and suffering by organizing a rapid retreat. Before giving the order, Shamir waited for the results of a desperate effort of Laskov's lead company to outflank Latrun village and reach the Latrun–Ramallah road. But the vicious fire from the Vickers machine guns on the roof of the police station and a Legion counterattack thwarted his attempt. Without waiting for an order from Laskov, the commander of the company told his men to withdraw. With their radio communications cut, most of the units along the front started to do the same thing.
The plain came alive with crawling, running men as the Haganah began an agonizing retreat. To cover the withdrawal, Laskov ordered the men who had taken cover in the monks' vegetable garden to move across the plain to a rocky crest called Hill 314 just opposite the Latrun heights. From there he hoped they could protect the immigrants' retreat. As soon as the company started to move, the Arabs opened fire. All around the men, the wheatfields which had once been fired by the flaming tails of Samson's jackals were set ablaze by Arab tracers and phosphorus shells.
Trapped by flying shrapnel, bullets, the withering heat, the dense smoke of the burning fields, tortured by thirst and clouds of barkaches, men collapsed of sheer exhaustion. Some were not able to get up. The others crawled and dragged themselves, pulling their wounded with them, trying to jump from one rock to another for cover. The survivors who finally struggled to the crest of Hill 314 saw that they were on a desert of rocks. With no entrenching tools, they had to dig the emplacements for their guns with their fingers. Their fire kept the Legion from circling around the hilltop to fall on their retreating comrades, until their machine guns jammed. Ezra Ayalon saw their commander take his Sten gun and leap behind a tree to continue his fire. While his men pulled back, he remained there, covering their withdrawal. For half an hour, it seemed, Ayalon could hear the burst of the Sten gun. Then there was silence.
From their observation posts near the Tomb of Ibn-Jebel, Lieutenant Colonel Habes Majali and Captain Mahmoud Rousan followed the attack. "My God," thought Rousan, "the Haganah must really want Latrun to throw themselves in front of our guns like this." Rousan was particularly awed by the Israelis' determination to take their dead and wounded off the battlefield with them. Six times he saw a group of men on Hill 314 trying to get down its forward slopes to pick up their dead comrades. "Each effort," the Arab officer noted, "cost them a couple more dead." Their retreat seemed without pattern, the flight "of a flock without a shepherd."
Majali ordered his mortars to concentrate their fire on the hill while his field guns worked over the passages just behind it. There Zvi Hurewitz was trying to lead his immigrants back to Hulda. For many of those men the road away from the ghettoes and death camps of Europe was ending on the sun-scorched plain of Latrun. The Promised Land had offered them nothing but a brief and fatal exposure to its unrelenting sun, its savage swarms of mosquitoes and the tortures of thirst. Like packs of wolves, the Arab villagers followed their retreating footsteps, using their knives on the wounded or those who fell from exhaustion.
In the terror of the Arab shelling, many of the immigrants had forgotten the few words of Hebrew hastily learned on their descent from the Kalanit. Matti Megid, who had begged Ben-Gurion to give his men more time for training, tried to gather some of them and lead them to safety. They were like frightened animals. "They didn't even know
how to crawl under fire. Some of them didn't know how to fire the rifles that had been thrown at them a few hours before. Their section leaders had to run from man to man under fire to show them how to take their safeties off." Many who did know how to fire their rifles could not sight them. Hurewitz picked up one exhausted survivor of his battalion mumbling in Yiddish, "I saw him, I saw him, but I couldn't hit him."
Megid saw the familiar face of a seventeen-year-old boy he remembered from the Kalanit. He was lying in a ditch, dying. "Oh," he whispered to Megid, "we must have disappointed you." Farther on, he came on a boy who had mimeographed a news sheet for him in a D.P. camp in Germany. Weeping, the youth was clawing through the weeds looking for the thick glasses without which he was helpless.
The survivors of Laskov's first company and the debris of Hurewitz' battalion finally found themselves huddled together on the slopes of Hill 314. At eleven o'clock, their ammunition virtually gone, they were authorized to withdraw and move south to the Arab village of Beit Jiz, now occupied, according to Laskov, by friendly forces. There they would at last find water—none of them had been issued canteens—and buses to get them back to Hulda.
From all sides the survivors struggled toward Beit Jiz. To provide cover, Laskov took his armored cars and half-tracks bouncing across the open plain toward the village. Buffeted by the khamsin, literally dying of thirst, the Jewish soldiers fainted one after another in the parched plains; even the indomitable Laskov, dizzy with heat and exhaustion, felt his own strength beginning to ebb. The sight of one of Hurewitz' company commanders driving his immigrants toward safety at gunpoint revived him.
O Jerusalem! Page 58