O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  In front of the police station, the flamethrowers that had turned a potential victory into a disaster were out. None of the assault team that had stormed into the ground floor of the police station would come back alive. In the welcome darkness, the survivors of the vehicles struggled to organize a retreat under a hail of fire from the Legionnaires on the roof, making their way as best they could back down the Latrun slopes.

  Once again the Haganah had failed to break the Arab Legion's hold on Latrun. Five days had elapsed between the first attack and the second, five days in which Jerusalem's rations, like the sands in an hourglass, had continued to flow out of Dov Joseph's warehouses. Yet the Israeli Army was no closer to relieving the city now than it had been the night Ben-Gurion had ordered Yigal Yadin, "Take Latrun." It was out of the question for Shamir to hurl his shattered brigade at the Legion still a third time. Their two defeats had made one thing clear: Jerusalem was not going to be saved at Latrun.

  The jeep scraped, whined, backfired, bucked, skidded, and spun its wheels in dumb mechanical protest. Two of the men inside leaped out to lighten its load and guide it from rock to rock. Clutching the steering wheel, a young Palmach officer named Amos Chorev guided the jeep which carried David Marcus and Vivian Herzog like a kayak in a riptide. At the bottom of the ravine they began to force their way up the other side, the aroma of burning rubber and oil curdling the freshness of the moonlit night. They finished their grueling climb by pushing the jeep themselves up the last few yards.

  Exhausted, they could see in the moonlight two and a half miles away the verdant promontory against which they had unsuccessfully thrown their forces the night before. Below the little clearing around the Monastery of Latrun, they could make out in the moonlight the road to Jerusalem skirting the foot of the Trappist estates up to Bab el Wad. The punishing passage along which they had just pushed their jeep paralleled that road. After running through the abandoned Arab hamlet of Beit Susin, it started through the wadis and steep mountain slopes leading up to the Judean heights. A passage for shepherds since Biblical times, it ran through the wild mustard, thyme and cyclamen without any discernible pattern.

  Gasping for breath, Amos Chorev looked at the dark mounds of the mountains still before them. "If only we could find a way through there," he sighed, "we'd have another way of getting to Jerusalem."

  "You think it could be done?" Herzog wondered.

  Marcus snorted. "Why not?" he said. "We got across the Red Sea, didn't we?"

  A few hours later the sound of another motor suddenly woke the three men, who had stopped to sleep a couple of hours before pushing ahead with their explorations. They picked up their Sten guns and crept to the cover of a little clump of wild olive trees. There, on the reverse slope of their crest, they saw a silhouette guiding another vehicle up the hill toward their position. Chorev crawled cautiously forward to study the oncoming forms. Suddenly, with a whoop of joy, he leaped up and rushed down the hill. He had recognized the driver of the jeep and his comrade. They were fellow Palmachniks from the Har-el Brigade and they were coming from Jerusalem.

  Their accidental meeting was a revelation to all five men standing on the desolate Judean ridge. Each vehicle had covered half the distance separating Jewish Jerusalem from its salvation.

  If the routes they had followed could somehow be made passable for men and vehicles, Jerusalem might be saved.

  Listening to the three filthy, unshaven men, David Ben-Gurion understood immediately. David Marcus, Amos Chorev and Vivian Herzog had come directly to the Jewish leader's office on their return to Tel Aviv, to give him a firsthand account of their trip in the hills beyond Bab el Wad. They had found the answer to the problem that had haunted them all since December—the isolation of Jerusalem.

  But with his terrible realism, Ben-Gurion knew well that a track over which they could somehow take a jeep was not going to save a city of one hundred thousand hungry people; they needed a road, a real road to Jerusalem. Turning to the man who had served in the army which in the course of just one war had laid more miles of road around the globe than all the armies since Alexander, Ben-Gurion said, "You've got to build a road, a real road."

  Then, alert to the moral value that even a single jeep arriving from Tel Aviv might have on his isolated Jerusalem command, Ben-Gurion ordered Amos Chorev to repeat their journey that night. This time, Chorev was to go all the way to Jerusalem!

  For Yitzhak Levi the report being read out that first morning in June by David Shaltiel's ammunition officer would always be "the blackest piece of listening" to which he had ever been subjected. It was, almost bullet by bullet, an enumeration of the munitions left in their reserves. Making a swift calculation, Levi figured that that reserve might get them through twenty-four hours of intense fighting. Nor was that the end of the day's bad news. A few minutes later, in Dov Joseph's office, he was told that the city's reserves contained enough flour to continue their spartan bread ration for just seven more days. "Clearly," Levi told himself, "we have to be resupplied and resupplied quickly or we're going to collapse."

  While Levi pondered those grim statistics, the first jeep to reach Jerusalem over the shepherds' path lurched up to the Palmach base at Kiryat Anavim. Amos Chorev had made it all the way from the sea. He had proved that it was possible to take a vehicle to the city over the goat track he and his friends had found almost by accident twenty-four hours earlier.

  Learning that Chorev's Palmach comrades were going to try to duplicate his feat in the opposite direction, Levi urged Shaltiel to let him join their party. He wanted to warn Ben-Gurion personally of the catastrophic state of their supplies and to see if there were any way of supplying themselves across the forbidding hills by wheel or foot. The few cases of munitions being delivered by Piper Cub or parachuted from a DC-3 were not going to save them. "If we are not resupplied we are doomed," Levi reminded Shaltiel.

  At ten o'clock, Levi and a dozen Palmachniks set out. The little intelligence officer rode off into the night in the one jeep in Jerusalem that seemed capable of the grueling run down the Judean hills. The vehicle was camouflaged a light sandy beige; its previous owner had died in a desperate attempt to seal shut the very exit Levi was trying to open. It was Abdul Khader Husseini's jeep, captured in the fighting May 14.

  By five o'clock in the morning, after seven tortuous hours, Levi was in Rehovot, twelve miles from Tel Aviv. The exhausted officer stopped in a café in Rehovot for a cup of coffee.

  "Where did you come from?" its proprietor asked.

  "Jerusalem," said Levi.

  "Jerusalem!" screamed the café owner. At his words everyone in the café swarmed over the dazed Levi, kissing him, hugging him, cheering him as though he had "conquered Mount Everest." As the crowd parted, the famished Levi saw the owner bearing down on him with an extraordinary welcoming gift, a huge plate of strawberries and cream.

  Levi went straight from his strawberries to David Ben-Gurion's office.

  "Will we be able to hold Jerusalem or will it fall?" Ben-Gurion asked.

  Levi's reply was equally blunt. There was terrible hunger in the city, he said. People were not yet starving to death, but the situation was going to get worse and it might come to that. "The fate of Jerusalem does not depend on food this morning," he said. "It depends on ammunition. If there is a serious Arab attack we will simply run out of ammunition." Looking at the man on whose shoulders so many burdens weighed, Levi said gravely, "We will be overwhelmed."

  Ben-Gurion called Joseph Avidar, the Ukrainian miller's son who ran the Haganah's supply branch, to join them. If one jeep could get across the mountain, twenty could. The loads they delivered might be a pittance compared to Jerusalem's needs, but they could at least bring Shaltiel the reassurance that everything humanly possible was being done to relieve him. Ben-Gurion ordered Avidar to requisition all the jeeps he could find in Tel Aviv, load them with arms and ammunition and give them to Levi for a return run through the mountains that night.

  Avidar's mil
itary policemen rushed out to the principal crossroads of Tel Aviv to intercept these precious vehicles. As if by magic, Tel Aviv's jeeps disappeared from its streets. An entire day's search turned up exactly one jeep, in lamentable condition. Furious at his compatriots' lack of collective spirit, Ben-Gurion told Avidar, "Take mine at least."

  "Tell Shaltiel," he ordered Levi, "to hold on. We'll organize things here. We'll open a new road to save Jerusalem."

  An hour later, the officer whose men had barely a pocketful of bullets to hold off the Arabs ringing their city discovered the warehouses of the Haganah in Hulda. "My God," he thought, staring at what seemed to him a mountain of supplies, "what a difference it would make to have all that in Jerusalem."

  Like a child in a candy store, Levi didn't know what to take. Finally he loaded thirty Czech machine guns and 100 three-inch mortar shells into his jeeps and headed back.

  An unexpected drone cut across the silence of Amman's night sky, the drone of airplane engines. High-pitched and feeble, they might have been the sound of mail planes winging down to Cairo. They belonged, however, to two Messerschmitt 109s about to carry out the first bombing raid of the Israeli Air Force.

  Half a dozen Messerschmitts had now arrived in Israel. One of the unstable planes had crashed on takeoff, and another had been shot down. But a third had served notice that Arab control of the skies over Tel Aviv was henceforth going to be challenged: it shot down two Egyptian DC-3s. Now, on Ben-Gurion's orders, the two warplanes of the Israeli Air Force were going to give Amman a taste of what Tel Aviv had suffered since May 14.

  In the city below, the lights of Abdullah's Ragdan Palace blazed as though a formal ball were under way. The sovereign was giving a banquet to his fellow Arab leaders. He had stubbornly refused to consider a blackout, saying, "Never will it be said that I, a Hashemite, have dimmed my lights before a Zionist menace." Now, for the edification of his guests, the little sovereign provided his own reply to Ben-Gurion's air raid. Grabbing a bodyguard's gun, he ran out into the night and began gleefully firing up into the sky.

  In the headquarters of the Haganah, a Russian, Joseph Avidar, and an American, David Marcus, presided over a tense meeting. Under their supervision, the people who had walked through the Red Sea and crossed the deserts of the Exodus were about to embark on an extraordinary engineering adventure. As David Ben-Gurion had promised Shaltiel's intelligence officer, they were going to try to achieve with sweat, ingenuity and mechanical skill what they had failed to accomplish with arms—opening a road to Jerusalem.

  Given the limited material means at their disposal, it was a gigantic undertaking. It meant carving out of those tortured goat tracks zigzagging through the wadis and precipitous hills of Judea a road that bypassed the Jerusalem highway and lay beyond the control of the Arab Legion.

  It could not be a trail open only to a daringly driven jeep; a dozen jeeps a night were not going to save the one hundred thousand Jews of Jerusalem. It had to be a road that could take fully loaded trucks; it had to be built quickly; and it had to be built under the constant menace of Arab shellfire from Latrun.

  For once, the Haganah did not turn to the Bible in search of a name for one of its undertakings. Inspired by the 750-mile highway that Chinese coolies had constructed from the jungles of Burma across the mountains to China, they decided to call the road with which they hoped to save Jerusalem the Burma Road.

  43

  "THE ARAB PEOPLE WILL NEVER FORGIVE US."

  AS REMORSELESS as an oncoming tide, the plague of hunger crept over Jewish Jerusalem. At Notre-Dame, the famished Gadna youths kept their field glasses trained on the adjacent Arab quarter of Musrara, looking for a stray chicken scurrying through the yard of an abandoned home. Musrara was a kind of no man's land, and at night the hungry youths would risk their lives going after the chickens they had picked out.

  Those forays could be dangerous. One night Netanel Lorch learned that one of his men had been killed by a Legion mortar shell as he crept back from Musrara with a sack of rice and a Persian carpet on his back.

  They could also lead to bizarre happenings. One group of Notre-Dame's Gadna youths broke into the store of an Armenian shopkeeper in Musrara, gulping down enormous bottles of what those desperately thirsty youngsters assumed to be pink lemonade. A few hours later Shaltiel's headquarters got a despairing call. "The Legion is using poison gas," the youngster said. "We need help desperately." Shalom Dror rushed to the building. Indeed, the kids were all sick, retching on the floor or lying in a stupor. Picking up a bottle of the lemonade they had been drinking, Dror sipped it and found the Legion's poison gas. They were all drunk. The bottle contained pink champagne. Products of rigidly orthodox households, none of the youngsters had known what it was.

  Few Jerusalemites outside of the Haganah dared venture into Arab-held territory no matter how painful their hunger. The Arab homes in the areas occupied by the Haganah's rush forward May 14 and 15 had long since been picked clean of food. Joseph ordered engineers, pretending to be looking for shell damage, to make a house-to-house survey of the Jewish city in quest of unusual food hoards seized by looters.

  A small community of forty-one people, at least, was spared the cruel hunger gripping Jerusalem's one hundred thousand Jews. Not surprisingly, they were all French. Trapped in their consulate, they had a secret food supply behind the Arab lines—a farm run by the Assumptionist Fathers of St.-Pierre in Gallicante on the slopes below Mount Zion. Built over the grotto in which Saint Peter had allegedly wept his remorse at having denied Jesus three times before the cock's crow, the church and its farm contained seven cows, one hundred pigs and six hundred chickens. Nightly its director, Brother François, slipped along the Valley of Silwan up to Sir Alan Cunningham's old residence, now occupied by the Red Cross, with a sackful of food for the consulate. One evening Brother François decided to bring his besieged compatriots a special treat, three suckling pigs. At Job's Well, one of his pigs squirmed out of his sack. Under the insults and threats of the disgusted Legionnaires watching him, the monk chased around after the fleeing animal.

  This night, no one from the French Consulate was on hand to greet Brother François at Government House. Undaunted, he continued across the fields toward a Jewish kibbutz to see if he could contact the consulate from there. The gesture almost cost the good monk his life. He had forgotten that he had dressed as an Arab for the first half of his trip. When his frightened cries in French had finally calmed the kibbutz's defenders, they tore open his sack, then recoiled in disgust. Its contents were as loathsome to their hungry orthodox stomachs as they had been to the Legionnaires' at Job's Well. A few hours later, roasted in Madame Sabine Neuville's ovens, Brother François's unpopular piglets made a triumphant appearance on the consulate table.

  There was practically nothing left to put on the other tables of Jewish Jerusalem, however. On Friday, June 4, Dov Joseph transmitted to David Ben-Gurion the grimmest alarm he had been forced to send Tel Aviv. By reducing the population's already spartan bread ration from 200 to 150 grams, he would have enough flour to supply his citizens bread for five more days. "We can't rely on miracles," he warned. "I ask you to order the transportation of bread any way possible. Minimum seventeen cons per day. Try to send it by jeep or by camel."

  Despite Dov Joseph's words, Jerusalem was going to have to rely on a miracle to survive, and the instrument with which David Marcus would have to perform it was before him—a solitary bulldozer belonging to the Solel Boneh construction firm. The Haganah was not the American Army, and that machine was the sole representative of the parade of road levelers, scrapers and hydraulic shovels he had hoped to see converge on the Arab village of Beit Jiz, the beginning point of Marcus' Burma Road.

  The American colonel waved toward the looming crags of the Judean hills. "There," he told the driver, "it's through there we've got to go."

  Beit Jiz became a construction camp overnight. Ahead, the bulldozer tore away yard by yard at the first hill along its route. Slowl
y, steadily it shoved aside the topsoil, rolled stones out of the way, terraced the slope, uprooted tree trunks. Lacking machines, Marcus and Shlomo Shamir used men. Sweating and choking in the red dust raised by the bulldozer, an army of laborers and stonecutters followed behind the bulldozer, filling in holes, leveling the ground, widening with axes and saws the path hacked out by the bulldozer's blade.

  They worked around the clock, one shift sleeping in Beit Jiz while the second worked. By day a cloud of dust marked their advance into the hills. By night it was the clang and snort of the bulldozer echoing from crest to crest up toward the ridge of Latrun.

  Sure that the noise and the dust would alert Colonel Majali to their activities and lead him to shell the area or attack it, Marcus set up outposts and laid ambushes all around the work site. Each night, as soon as darkness and a total blackout covered their activities, the jeeps came up, fifteen or twenty of them, weighed down with three-inch mortar shells, rifle ammunition and Beza machine guns. While the workers slapped their metal sides as a man might whack a pony's flank, they rolled through the darkness over the stretch of road workers had built toward the forbidding hillside still untamed by their shovels.

  Marcus received a second bulldozer to speed the work. But the terrain was so rough, the inclines they had to pass were so steep, that each hundred yards forward required three hundred yards of winding road. Marcus despaired. The miracle was going to take too much time. Before he could tear out of the resistant hills of Judea a road over which a loaded truck could pass, Jerusalem was going to be shelled or starved into submission.

  The daily quota of shells hurled into Jerusalem by Emile Jumean's guns had now been supplemented by a second menace. The fieldpieces of Colonel Abdul-Aziz' Egyptian army in the south were battering the city with airbursts which flung showers of shrapnel through its streets. In lives, in morale, in property damage, the shelling was taking a frightful toll. The Arabs were apparently aware of the bread and water distribution schedules. Every time one started, a new flood of wounded submerged the desperately overcrowded hospitals. Wounded were packed into every available corner. In the growing heat, flies became a major problem. After attempting to drive them off for a while, hospital inhabitants, both patients and staff, grew apathetic. Wounded and doctors alike lived on a cup of tea, a slice of bread and a spoonful of jam three times a day.