Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  The Irgun’s response to the conclusion of the Anglo-American Committee’s visit unfolded on the night of April 3, when coordinated attacks were made on the Palestine railway system, causing some £16,000 of damage to track, station buildings, and rolling stock. The operation’s success was vitiated, however, when a column of thirty armed Irgun fighters were spotted by an RAF reconnaissance plane near Rehovot and captured.72

  One immediate result of these latest provocations was the recommencement of discussions in London about the military means that might be employed to bring the Yishuv to heel. The region’s commanders in chief as well as Cunningham were in complete agreement with D’Arcy that seizing illegally held Jewish arms was no longer a viable option unless the entire Jewish Agency Executive and the Haganah’s commanders were simultaneously arrested and indefinitely interned. This conclusion represented a major change in security policy—the first since the events at Ramat Ha-Kovesh in 1943—and one that would set the government and the Yishuv on a new collision course. Authorization for such a move, pending the cabinet’s approval, was readily provided by the Chiefs of Staff. More striking still was the urgency attached to its implementation as soon as was practicable.73

  On April 20 the Anglo-American Committee submitted its report to the British and American governments. The document itself was not publicly released for another ten days. The committee’s most important recommendation was for the immediate admission of a hundred thousand Jewish displaced persons to Palestine. It also proposed that all restrictions on Jewish land purchase and transfer be terminated. The report, however, failed to endorse partition as a solution to Palestine’s most fundamental political dilemma. Although the commissioners had exhaustively discussed and debated this solution, in the end they dismissed it on the grounds that “any attempt to establish either an independent Palestinian State or independent Palestinian States would result in civil strife such as might threaten the peace of the world.” Accordingly, they recommended the continuation of the status quo: that British rule should continue pending review by the United Nations and the execution of a new trusteeship arrangement.74

  The report paid particular attention to the militarized environment that the commissioners found in Palestine. “Palestine,” it plainly stated, “is an armed camp.” Addressing the state of public security, the commissioners recounted how “we became more and more aware of the tense atmosphere each day. Many buildings have barbed wire and other defences. We ourselves were closely guarded by armed police, and often escorted by armoured cars. It is obvious that very considerable military forces and large numbers of police are kept in Palestine.” They termed the emergence of “large illegal armed forces” an especially “sinister” development and therefore recommended that if the British and U.S. governments adopted the report, “it should be made clear beyond all doubt to both Jews and Arabs that any attempt from either side, by threats of violence, by terrorism, or by the organisation or use of illegal armies … will be resolutely suppressed.” The Jewish Agency was also directly prevailed upon to resume at once “active co-operation” with the authorities both in the suppression of Jewish terrorism and in the prevention of illegal Jewish immigration.75

  The cabinet’s Defence Committee began the British government’s consideration of the report at its meeting on April 24. Bevin was alone in finding anything positive to say about it. Although he expressed profound concern about how the Arabs would react to the recommendation pertaining to the immediate admission of a hundred thousand new Jewish immigrants on top of the suspension of the land transfer restrictions, he felt that the prospect of America’s support in the report’s implementation and its active involvement in solving the Palestine problem outweighed any misgivings. On one point, however, the foreign secretary was emphatic: before Britain could agree to admit any more immigrants to Palestine, all illegally held arms in the country would have to be surrendered and all illegal Jewish paramilitary forces disbanded. Accordingly, he proposed asking the United States to contribute sufficient troops to assist in the enforcement of these key security provisions. Attlee, the minutes tersely record, “took a less rosy view of the report.” In addition to his deep skepticism about obtaining the assistance from the United States that Bevin envisioned, the prime minister could not see how the report offered any sort of a satisfactory solution from the British point of view. To his mind, it instead “proposed a policy which would set both the Arabs and Jews against us and that we should have to go it alone … The burden of Palestine,” he observed, “was a heavy one. It was time that others helped to share it with us”—implying that broader international involvement and support, beyond even the United States, was required.76

  CHAPTER 13

  Only Death Will Free Us

  At half past eight on the evening of April 25 three vehicles pulled up to a house in a working-class district of Tel Aviv near Jaffa. Moments later its inhabitants were being held at gunpoint as one group of Lehi fighters quietly took up firing positions on the upper floor overlooking a parking lot across the street, while another group of some two dozen men crowded into the downstairs hallway. Directly opposite them was the entrance to a Sixth Airborne Division motor pool used to transport men on leave to and from the city. It was guarded by a section of six enlisted men from the Fifth Paratroop Brigade, commanded by two noncommissioned officers, all of whom were billeted in a handful of tents surrounded by a defensive perimeter consisting of a single coil of barbed wire.

  The impending attack’s purpose was to seize the stock of arms kept in the guard tent near the car park entrance. At 8:45 p.m. a bomb was thrown from the upstairs window toward the encampment—the signal for the assault to begin. The machine guns upstairs opened fire, raking the car park as the Lehi assault party rushed from the house—tommy guns blazing—into the encampment. Two soldiers were cut down in the guard tent as they dove for cover. Their sergeant miraculously escaped injury by lying on the floor and feigning death. He was the only survivor. The attackers hastily grabbed the weapons from the gun rack and withdrew. Meanwhile, another team of gunmen shot to death two unarmed paratroopers in an adjacent tent while they lay in bed. Three more soldiers were killed, two while coming to the aid of their fallen comrades, before the firing ceased and the Lehi team withdrew.1

  The unbridled shock and anger that swept through the ranks both in Palestine and beyond was unprecedented. The account carried by the Mid-East Mail, the Cairo-based daily newspaper of British forces in the region, reported that the raid was “carried out with almost incredible barbarity,” noting that one of the assailants had “callously shone a torch into the darkness so that his accomplices could riddle with automatic gun bullets British soldiers resting in their beds.” Civilian British officials were equally condemnatory. Cunningham termed the massacre “nothing less than premeditated murder. There was no military objective whatsoever. This is gangsterdom in its worst form.”2

  The following morning, every major representative Jewish body in Palestine—the Jewish Agency, the Vaad Le’umi, the Histadrut, the Chief Rabbinate, and Weizmann himself—hastened to offer messages of condolence and assertions of their collective, unmitigated horror. Neither, however, could mollify the authorities nor spare the Yishuv retribution. Only hours later Cunningham met with the Palestine government’s most senior officials. Nine options were considered:

  • demolishing with explosives all the houses surrounding the car park—including those that had played no role whatsoever in the Lehi assault;

  • seizing and having troops occupy those same structures for an indefinite period of time;

  • seizing and occupying a block of buildings elsewhere in Tel Aviv for a similarly indefinite period;

  • imposing a collective fine on the entire city;

  • withholding government grants previously earmarked for the Tel Aviv municipality;

  • delaying a £1 million government development loan to the municipality that had been approved but not yet paid;

&
nbsp; • ordering the indefinite closure of all the city’s cafés, bars, cinemas, and other places of entertainment;

  • declaring Tel Aviv out-of-bounds to HM Forces; and

  • imposing a curfew on the city’s roads.

  Two hours of exhaustive discussion followed, overshadowed throughout by the forthcoming publication of the Anglo-American Committee’s report. In the end, accordingly, all the options save the general curfew and closing of all places of socializing and entertainment were rejected as either politically undesirable or impractical. Astonishingly, even declaring Tel Aviv out-of-bounds to British military personnel was dismissed because of the adverse effect on troop morale.3

  That evening, the Sixth Airborne’s commander, Major General James Cassels, summoned Tel Aviv’s mayor, Israel Rokach, to his office. He explained that at 8:00 p.m. a dusk-to-dawn curfew would be imposed on all vehicular traffic in Tel Aviv and that all places of entertainment would remain closed from 8:00 p.m. until 5:00 a.m. daily for the next two weeks.4

  But neither these measures nor a public statement conveying Cassels’s opprobrium was sufficient to mitigate the anger and frustration welling inside officers and enlisted men alike. “For the first time the word outrage acquired true meaning,” Blaxland writes of the attack and its aftermath. Only a week before a group of Sixth Airborne soldiers sitting in a café in Tel Aviv had been set upon by a crowd that, an official report stated, had “savagely chased … and kicked and injured them until they were exhausted.” Jewish passersby had attempted to trip the soldiers rather than help them, and shopkeepers had denied them refuge. Rokach had also deplored that incident and had apologized to Cassels. But with this latest attack, the soldiers’ pent-up rage and frustration could no longer be contained. On the night of April 26 a group of Sixth Airborne troops billeted at Qastina ran amok in Netanya and the nearby settlement of Beer Tuvya, ransacking homes and vandalizing property and beating any Jews that they happened upon. Although the miscreants were swiftly identified and punished, their actions, an intelligence assessment ominously reported, “were generally sympathised with or even applauded” by their comrades-in-arms.5

  As Major Roy Farran, then serving in an armored unit assigned to a different part of Palestine, recalled in his memoir, “The first bitter, one sided blow was when the Stern gang murdered six [sic] parachutists in the Airborne car park in Tel Aviv … That was the beginning. The troops were all the more incensed that they were not allowed to retaliate. In the Arab Rebellion there had been no deep emotions. But here was the beginning of something very different.” Shortly afterward a poem titled “A Soldier’s Will” began to circulate among British troops in Palestine. It read,

  A British soldier boy dying

  And on his bed he lay.

  To friends who around him sighing,

  These dying words he did say.

  A Jewish boy had got me at last lads,

  I haven’t much longer to live,

  But before I hand my checks in,

  These last words of advice I do give.

  Put a bomb in the Agency building,

  Wipe the synagogues all off the earth,

  Make every damned son of Zion,

  Regret the day of his birth.6

  Lehi, on the other hand, wondered what all the fuss was about. Posters that appeared on the walls of various Jerusalem neighborhoods on the night of April 28 presented their version of the attack. It was a military operation carried out against a military target—plain and simple. “The enemy troops, being in perpetual alert position, put up armed resistance. Their resistance was broken down by our fighters,” the posters explained. Lehi also specifically voiced its objections to the emotive language used by British authorities to describe the operation, now widely referred to by the military and the government alike as “the car park massacre.” “This is an additional example of the record of disgusting British hypocrisy. Those who have murdered people in shackles are daring to complain about cold-blooded murder,” Lehi’s propagandists opined, before detailing a list of British depredations against Jewish women and children as well as those meted out to the terrorist detainees exiled to Eritrea. “The soldiers of the Airborne Division, killed during the action in Tel-Aviv, were no children, no women, no people in shackles, nor were they unarmed, they were soldiers of the 6th Airborne Division,” the group unapologetically declared.7

  It was against this backdrop of renewed tension and heightened Anglo-Zionist antipathy that the cabinet formally began its consideration of the Anglo-American Committee’s report. Following the inconclusive results of the Defence Committee’s meeting on April 24, Attlee had tasked a working group of senior ministerial officials to prepare in coordination with the Chiefs of Staff a more complete analysis of the report’s recommendations. Its conclusions were somber. The Yishuv, they agreed, would not be satisfied with anything short of partition. “Widespread action by the Haganah is thus a possibility and continued outrages of the terrorist groups a certainty.” The likely Arab reaction to the report was hardly more encouraging. Its adoption “would only provoke a general Arab rising in Palestine, which would be supported both materially and financially by the Arab states.” Although sufficient troops were on hand in Palestine to cope with any immediate disturbances, implementing its recommendations would be an entirely different matter—requiring substantial reinforcements. This would further undermine the already slow pace of postwar demobilization. The working group could therefore find little in the committee’s report favorable to Britain. It would have “disastrous effects on our position in the Middle East and might have unfortunate repercussions in India. It would not silence the Zionist clamour in the United States, where our administration of the policy would continue to be misrepresented and … provide a weapon for anti-British propaganda.” The only circumstances under which the Anglo-American Committee’s recommendations could be accepted, these officials and the Chiefs of Staff believed, were if the United States would agree to actively assist in their implementation. Specifically, American troops were required to enforce the provisions to ensure the surrender of illegal weapons and the dissolution of the Jewish paramilitary organizations. Both were deemed imperative given British fears that “these illegal armies would be swollen by recruits drawn from the new immigrants.”8

  At the full cabinet meeting on April 29, Bevin alone remained optimistic about both the report and the prospects of American assistance. He was also desperate to avoid having to submit the matter before the new United Nations organization. The foreign secretary wished especially to avoid the Security Council’s involvement, which, he averred, would only “invite the Russians and others to get their fingers into the Palestine pie.” “The essence of our policy,” Bevin told the cabinet, “should be to retain the interest and participation of the U.S. Government.” His colleagues disagreed. In their view, the committee’s recommendations created more new problems rather than resolving existing ones. The economic burden that Britain alone would have to shoulder was a key point. According to Dalton’s calculations, the cost of settling a hundred thousand Jewish immigrants in Palestine, coupled with the additional expenditures for Arab economic development that the joint inquiry recommended, would initially require some £100 million with recurrent expenses of between £5 million and £10 million annually. The cabinet therefore agreed that the report should be rejected unless the United States was willing to provide both financial and military assistance to implement it. Both those contributions, it noted, would be vital if the recommendations pertaining to the surrender of all illegal weapons and the disbanding of illegal organizations were to be enforced.9

  Bevin’s hopes of obtaining American assistance, however, were dealt a fatal blow the following day. Without first consulting or even informing Attlee, Truman announced his endorsement of the report’s recommendations pertaining to Jewish immigration and land acquisition—while mostly ignoring those affecting Palestine’s Arabs and Palestine’s security requirements. Coming only days
after the car park massacre, the president’s remarks effectively doomed from the start Bevin’s plan to enlist U.S. support. Grasping at straws, the foreign secretary made one last effort to win the Americans over. Appealing to his counterpart, Byrnes, Bevin wrote, “I must remind you that in Palestine British soldiers have been foully murdered by the armed forces of the Jews … This is a position which the British people will not be prepared to tolerate any longer, and I shall be bound to call attention to it in public … If the United States do not accept the implications regarding the need for disarming illegal armies before immigration, a situation which will endanger the security of the Middle East is likely to arise.”10

  Byrnes was completely unsympathetic—and in fact counseled Truman against making any military commitment whatsoever. Like Britain, the United States was intent on rapidly demobilizing its citizens still under arms as soon as possible. The British request that American forces on the order of two infantry divisions and at least one armored brigade be made immediately available for indefinite deployment to Palestine was a nonstarter. Moreover, Truman and his advisers were suspicious that British concerns about Palestine’s internal security masked a grander scheme to lock the United States into a direct policing role that the United States both did not think necessary and wanted to avoid at all costs. The Pentagon’s Joint Intelligence Committee concluded that there were already sufficient British troops on hand to handle any trouble that might arise.11