O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  Their radio station provided a constant and memorable reassurance to Jerusalemites of their capacity to withstand the siege. Many, like Aaron Elner, would never forget sitting night after night, in darkened bedrooms or cellars, the sound of Arab shells bursting in the streets outside, listening to the calm voice of the announcer repeat once again the reassuring phrase "Good night and goodbye from Jerusalem."

  Jerusalem's Arab population too was beset by problems, though none of them were as serious as those facing the Jewish parts of the city. The gravest was that caused by the refugees from the Arab neighborhoods seized by the Haganah on May 14 and 15. Almost thirty thousand people were crammed into the Old City and Sheikh Jarrah, and if the Haganah's shellfire was only sporadic, it still had devastating results in such a small, densely populated area.

  The hospital in the Austrian Hospice remained desperately short of almost everything. Most graveyards were under Jewish fire, and the dead were buried in gardens and back lots. Father Eugene Hoade, an Irishman, buried in the Garden of Gethsemane two of his countrymen who had deserted from the British Army to fight with the Arabs. The priestly veteran of El Alamein also took time from his ecclesiastical chores to teach a group of Arab Legionnaires how to use a bazooka.

  With the power station in Jewish hands, the Old City was without electricity except that furnished by a generator at Terra Sancta, the custodian's office for the Holy Places. The city was temporarily without water too, as it had lived on the same source cut below Bab el Wad. The Arabs, however, were able to reactivate an abandoned source at Ein Fara nine miles from the city.

  George Deeb handled the food problem by purchasing five thousand tons of foodstuffs from Steele Brothers in Beirut. By selling it at a ten percent premium, the municipality was able to overcome its most embarrassing shortage, caused by Anton Safieh's lost check—its total lack of funds.

  Sadly, his regard full of reproach, Tewfic Abou Hoda passed the slip of paper on his desk to John Glubb. It was a communication from the War Office. His Majesty's government, it noted, having taken cognizance of the fighting in Palestine, would be most embarrassed if any British subjects were taken prisoner. All British officers seconded to the Arab Legion were therefore to be immediately withdrawn across the Jordan River.

  "Is this the kind of allies the British are?" Abou Hoda sorrowfully asked.

  The order represented an almost complete reversal of Britain's position. "After waving the green flag for weeks we suddenly started sawing the branch off on them," Sir Alec Kirkbride would bitterly recall. In one swoop, London was depriving Glubb of more than two-thirds of the officers who had made his Legion such an effective fighting force. His brief session with Abou Hoda would be remembered by Glubb as "one of the most painful and humiliating" interviews of his life.

  The dispatch in Abou Hoda's hand was to be followed in a few hours by a second, even more important announcement. Britain was imposing an embargo on arms deliveries to the Middle East. Even the continuation of Britain's subsidy to the Arab Legion would be brought under review, the Foreign Office announced, if Transjordan was found to be defying the United Nations.

  London's change of mind was the direct result of Britain's relations with the United States. Washington had gone so far as to hint at cutting off all economic aid to England's war-shattered economy if Britain did not fall in line on the Middle East. Two decades later, British diplomats would still recall with bitterness the intensity of those pressures exerted by America to force a change in Britain's policy.

  To Glubb, the change was "absolutely catastrophic." That evening he summoned one of the men affected by it, Colonel Hugh Blackenden, to his office and ordered him to leave immediately for London to persuade the War Office to lift the arms embargo and to set up a recruiting office to find replacements for their lost officers.

  "We have been left here to implement a British government plan," Glubb explained to Blackenden. "We must try to salvage what we can from this debacle by setting the foundations of a viable Arab state here under Abdullah which will have reasons to maintain its association with England." If the Legion was deprived of munitions and officers, Glubb pointed out, they would have to either run the risk of a defeat or start yielding ground.

  Thirty-six hours later, at 6 Upper Fillimore Gardens, London, Colonel Blackenden opened his recruiting office. One of the first men in the door was Geoffrey Lockett, an angular, red-faced man with "a monumental hangover and a breath to curdle milk." He had been Orde Wingate's aide de camp, however, and Geoffrey Lockett was authorized to wear enough gallantry decorations to make a man a hunchback. Like most of the men Blackenden would recruit, he drank a little too much or owed too much money, but his military qualifications were above question. Three hours later he was on a plane heading east.

  Whatever his allies' infidelities, King Abdullah remained the courteous Bedouin monarch. The day the British officers were withdrawn, he made it a point to call on the two Britons wounded in his service. After ceremoniously shaking Major John Buchanan's hand, he graciously handed the Englishman an enormous bouquet of flowers. As the King left, Buchanan fondly noted the paper in which the sovereign had wrapped his bouquet. It was an old Arabic newspaper.

  42

  "WE'LL OPEN A NEW ROAD."

  THE BALD and wrinkled man bursting into the nursery of the kibbutz in which Shlomo Shamir had installed the headquarters of his Seventh Brigade was not an Israeli. He was a graduate of West Point, a veteran of the Normandy landing, the holder of numerous British and American decorations. David Marcus' presence in the Hulda nursery was the result of one of the most secret of David Ben-Gurion's preparations to arm his people for the conflict breaking over them. Aware that modern warfare required experienced men as well as advanced weapons, he had ordered his representatives in the United States to recruit a number of high-ranking officers as a nucleus for the Haganah's general staff.

  Among the distinguished officers prepared to offer their services to the new state had been Brigadier General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower's chief of staff in Europe during World War II. A formal veto of the plan by the Defense Department, however, had prevented their departure. Only Colonel Marcus, determined to aid his Jewish brothers, had defied the ban, walking away from a prestigious post in the Pentagon.

  Aware of the terrible urgency of Jerusalem's situation, the Jewish leader had given Marcus the same orders he had earlier given Yadin: take Latrun and open the road to Jerusalem. In the pocket of Marcus' fatigues this May morning was an order naming him commander in chief of the Jerusalem front, responsible for all the men from the city to Latrun. The same order made Marcus the first general of a Jewish army since the Maccabean revolt, assigning him the newly created rank of aluf.

  He had come to Hulda to prepare a new attack with Shamir. The two men decided to use basically the same tactics that had been employed in the first, unsuccessful assault—with one important modification: this time, they intended to run the attack according to a rigid timetable.

  They began by occupying the two Arab villages on their line of attack, Beit Jiz and Beit Susin. They forced their officers to study the terrain scrupulously and through a series of patrols obtained the intelligence on the Arabs' defenses that had been so seriously lacking the first time.

  To improve their forces, they substituted a battalion of the Givati Palmach Brigade for the battered Alexandroni battalion. Led by Jacob Prulov, a Palmach veteran, the battalion was assigned the decisive role in the attack. It would seize the heights of Bab el Wad, occupy the Arab villages of Deir Ayub, Yalu and Beit Nuba, then circle around behind the Legion's positions at Latrun to the Ramallah road. To bolster Prulov's force, Shamir assigned him the survivors of Hurewitz' immigrant battalion.

  Latrun itself would be hit by the first armored attack ever made by the Army of Israel: thirteen half-tracks purchased by Xiel Federmann in Antwerp Christmas Day and the twenty-two locally made armored cars.

  In three days of frantic effort, Haim Laskov had succeede
d in organizing his unit into three assault groups. They would draw the Legion's forces to their front with a concerted attack and facilitate Prulov's strike at Bab el Wad. The one on the left would seize the Arab village of Latrun, the one on the right the junction of the Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Ramallah roads. To the strongest group in the center would go the most difficult assignment: seizing the former British police station on the Latrun hillside.

  With stones, sand and huge packing crates, Laskov meticulously reconstituted the entire Latrun hillside in a field near the kibbutz. Everything was there: the ruins of the Crusader château on its crest, the Trappist monastery, the blockhouselike police post. By an extraordinary coincidence, Laskov himself was familiar with its interior. A year before, as an employee of the Palestine Electric Company working on a high-tension line, he had been invited by its British occupants to visit the installation.

  The post's principal entry was a massive armored door. Above it a fortified tower protected the station's flanks. To blow in the door, Laskov counted on a charge of 250 kilograms of TNT. The tower he would neutralize with a far more terrifying weapon, one he himself had employed in action against the Wehrmacht outside Rome—flamethrowers.

  Made to his design in the Haganah's Tel Aviv workshops, Laskov's flamethrowers were mounted on his half-tracks. They could shoot a jet of napalm twenty-five yards and would be fired a yard ahead of the vehicle by an incendiary bullet. It was a complex weapon, and its use involved disadvantages as well as advantages. Because he had overlooked one of them, a disaster was going to overtake Laskov's half-tracks in the midst of his attack.

  Unlike its predecessor, Operation Bin Nun II began with precision. At exactly 11 P.M. Sunday, May 30, the mortars and "Napoleonchiks" of Shlomo Shamir began to rake the Latrun promontory while, off to the right, Jacob Prulov's men moved toward Bab el Wad.

  Almost thrown from his bed by the first explosions rocking his abbey, Father Martin Godart pulled on his robes and sandals and rushed from his cell. It was not fear for his own well-being or for the sacred objects in the abbey chapel that prompted his precipitous flight. Rushing along corridors already strewn with broken glass, he headed for the room which harbored his most valuable treasure, those winemaking instruments thanks to which he had given the abbey a special renown on the best-spread tables of the Middle East. He carted off his retorts and alembics to the deepest corner of his wine cellar.

  The monastery's cloister, freshly decorated by the monks with flowers and olive branches so that, as one of them wrote, "Jesus will not see His Palestine is at war," was covered with broken glass and tiles from shells landing nearby. A suffocating odor of cement dust and smoke choked the members of the community who had tried to take refuge there. Finally, a candle in one hand, straw mattress in the other, the monks filed down into Father Godart's cellars to find safety among his barrels of Pommard and Chablis.

  From his observation post on the crest behind the monastery, Colonel Habes Majali and his staff studied the shells streaking through the night. As the barrage died, the clank of treads rose from the valley below. The Jews were attacking.

  Majali turned to the frail man with a Vandyke beard and rough-spun robe standing beside him. "Pray Allah that he grant us another victory," he ordered his regiment's imam.

  Haim Laskov too listened to the reassuring sounds of his half-tracks' treads as the vehicles pushed through the night toward Latrun. He looked at his watch. It was midnight.

  In the third half-track, a pair of earphones clamped on her head, a nineteen-year-old Polish girl peered at the somber ridge line rising before her. Hadassah Limpel had walked across half the world for the privilege of riding in a half-track this night toward the crest barring the road to Jerusalem. Nine years earlier, the armored vehicles of Nazi Germany had terminated Hadassah's childhood and cast her onto the roads of Poland and Russia. From Siberia, along with a miserable flock of fifteen hundred Polish children no one wanted, she was herded across the Soviet Union to Iran, then to Karachi. From there a journey on a dilapidated old steamer took her to Bombay, Aden, Port Said and finally the docks of the Promised Land. There was no familiar figure on those quais among the hundreds of adults who had come in hopes of finding a missing child or relative lost in the chaos of war. Sent to a kibbutz, Hadassah became determined to resemble as closely as possible the vigorous young sabras who now surrounded her. In pursuit of that goal, she had enrolled in the Palmach's youth movement.

  During all the harsh springtime of 1948, armed with a Sten gun and a pair of grenades, she had served with the Furmanim, escorting Jerusalem-bound convoys past the ambushes of Abdul Khader Husseini. Caught in Tel Aviv when the road was finally cut, she had volunteered for an operator's course to learn how to work the radios purchased by Xiel Federmann. It was, in her mind, a final symbol of her acceptance in the army of her new country.

  Nervous and tense, Captain Izzat Hassan tried to follow the sound of the advancing treads across the Latrun plain. Commander of Majali's support company, he was in charge of the antitank guns and mortars that were supposed to stop their attack. Their eyes fixed to their gunsights, his gunners peered into the darkness, looking helplessly for some moving form. Hassan's hopes now lay on a little ridge below the police station on which he had zeroed in his guns. If he could spot the Haganah's vehicles crossing that ridge, he was confident he could destroy them all.

  On the tower of the police station, behind his Vickers machine gun, Sergeant Yossef Sa'ab, a Druze, also stared through the night at the ridge. All around him, crouched behind sandbags, grenades in their hands, other Legionnaires watched for the vehicles those advancing treads propelled toward them. Below them behind the ring of sandbags guarding the entrance to the building, Mahmoud Ali Rousan, a cousin of the regiment's adjutant, held a bazooka tube tightly against his cheek.

  All of those men were in for a brutal shock. Protected by a series of smoke grenades and the moonless night, Laskov's vehicles passed over the ridge without receiving a single hit. From his command car, codenamed "Yona," Laskov heard the quiet, poised voice of Hadassah Limpel announce, "We're crossing their wire."

  At that instant, Laskov's attention was diverted by a green flare popping into the sky to his right. A smile spread over his face. It was Prulov announcing he had taken his first objective, the village of Deir Ayub, overlooking Bab el Wad. Laskov was reassured. In a few minutes, Prulov would be in position to begin circling behind the Arab positions his armor was attacking. A few minutes later, coming from the same direction as Prulov's flare, Laskov heard a series of violent explosions. "They've run into resistance," Laskov thought.

  At Latrun itself, his attack was moving ahead exactly as he had hoped. "The lead half-track is fifty yards from the gate," Hadassah announced.

  While the Legionnaires on the roof of the police station pummeled them with hand grenades, the sappers in the lead half-track ran to the door and placed their charge. It was a useless gesture. The door was unlocked. A few hundred yards away, Captain Hassan followed the fighting with anguished eyes. In the darkness he could barely distinguish forms. He was afraid of placing his fire too close to the police post and killing his own men.

  "Flamethrowers ready," the voice of Hadassah Limpel from Yona, the command car, announced. Suddenly a fantastic stream of flame lit up the night, clearly illuminating the façade of the police post. Watching the sight, Captain Rousan thought, "The Jews are using acetylene torches to cut the door from its hinges." Their real tool, the sappers' charge, went off with a roar. An assault team leaped from the second half-track and rushed for the door.

  A savage hand-to-hand battle with grenades, Sten guns and knives soon left the ground floor of the building littered with dying men.

  It was outside, however, that the Haganah's assault was encountering its gravest problem. The terrifying bursts of flame on which Laskov counted to drive the post's defenders from its roof had set fire to its façade. The flames lit up the building and the area around it like a stage. The frustrat
ed Captain Hassan was startled to see illuminated before him five perfect targets, Laskov's half-tracks. In the brilliant light, Captain Rousan even caught a glimpse of "a blond woman with a radio helmet on her head."

  In her quiet voice, Hadassah Limpel continued to describe the attack for Laskov. The force commander had just left the car to see what was happening in the building. He had covered only a few feet when a burst of fire from the roof killed him. His deputy, a young immigrant who had fought in the Red Army, tried to take over, but in the inferno no one could understand him. He spoke only Russian. Then, from only yards away, Captain Hassan's antitank guns opened fire.

  One after another the half-tracks were reduced to flaming wrecks. Laskov heard a stifled gurgling in his earphones, then nothing. "Yona, Yona," he called. There was no answer from his shattered command car. All of its occupants were dead. Hadassah Limpel's long journey had ended in front of the police station at Latrun.

  A pair of haggard men stumbling into his command post brought Laskov the news of still another disaster that had struck his men. The engineers had demined the road before the buses carrying his infantry, but they had put the mines into a roadside ditch without disarming them. Leaping into the ditch, the first soldier out of the bus had set off a terrible explosion that had killed twenty of his fellows and sent the rest rushing to the rear.

  A few minutes later Laskov got a radio message that ended the Seventh Brigade's second unsuccessful effort to seize Latrun. "Your pal has disappeared," Shamir informed him. Laskov understood that Prulov and the men he was counting on to sweep around the Legion's rear had somehow vanished into the night. Just after firing off his first flare, Prulov had stumbled on a Legion machine-gun nest, which had killed three of his men. Considering those losses too much for an operation in which his battalion had been detached from its regular Palmach command, Prulov had broken off action on his own initiative.