Anonymous Soldiers
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The Anglo-American Committee’s report was publicly released on May 1. That day, Attlee informed the House of Commons that Britain would only accept the report’s recommendations if the United States agreed to contribute military and financial assistance. On the matter of the admission of a hundred thousand Jewish immigrants to Palestine, the government’s position was firm: there could be no question of allowing their entry until all illegal organizations in the country agreed to surrender their arms and disband. The prime minister specifically called upon the Jewish Agency to pledge itself to work closely with the authorities in Palestine to effect these two essential prerequisites. In that instant, the Yishuv’s hopes for an immediate resolution of the displaced persons’ plight vanished. Eleven days later Moshe Sneh instructed the Haganah’s clandestine radio station, Kol Israel, to broadcast a warning to the British to expect a resumption of antigovernment violence.12
Cunningham was already anxious. On April 29 he had written to Hall to request permission to execute the internment operation. In his view, the car park attack had been a turning point in the government’s efforts to avoid resorting to such an extreme measure. All other alternatives had been tried and found wanting. Cunningham worried that if the Yishuv was not brought to heel now, there would be more incidents like those that had occurred in Netanya and Beer Tuvya. “I am therefore clear that unless the Jews disband their armed forces by agreement,” the high commissioner argued, “action should be taken against them as soon as possible.” The Chiefs of Staff were fully behind him. They similarly believed that the security situation in Palestine was now critical: security force morale was low, anger and frustration were high, and the need to respond to the massacre of the seven paratroopers was urgent.13
The latest news from Palestine gave added weight to these arguments. Intelligence reports indicated that a new terrorist offensive was imminent. The Yishuv was also said to be in an especially truculent frame of mind as a result of the Anglo-American Committee’s recommendations. There were also new reports that the Irgun was planning to attack the wing of the King David Hotel where the government secretariat and military and intelligence headquarters were located. And the Arabs were in a sour mood. Letters and petitions flooded the chief secretary’s office denouncing the committee’s proposals.14
“I agree the present situation is dangerous,” Bevin had scribbled in the margin of a detailed letter sent to Attlee by General Hastings “Pug” Ismay, the cabinet’s long-serving military secretary, whom the prime minister had sent to Palestine to assess the situation. Ismay related Cunningham’s growing concern that the negotiations with the Americans had tied his hands by preventing military action against the illegal Jewish organizations. “From the military point of view,” Ismay warned, “it is essential that there be no such restriction … Moreover if nothing is done there is [a] risk that troops will take [the] law into their own hands.”15
This was at the forefront of D’Arcy’s concerns when he met with the Chiefs of Staff on May 15. The troops had reached “the breaking point,” D’Arcy argued, and should a new round of terrorist attacks occur, he did not think it would be possible to restrain them. The police were the main source of Britain’s security difficulties in Palestine. The GOC described the situation as “catastrophic” given that the British section was deficient twenty-eight hundred men from its total authorized strength of fifty-five hundred personnel with recruitment efforts still foundering. As a result, duties previously performed by the police had fallen to the army, which, the GOC argued, “was utterly wrong” because it undercut the ability of the army and the police to coordinate operations and thus placed the onus for maintaining security in Palestine on the military. Replenishing the PPF’s depleted ranks, the chiefs agreed, must be a priority.16
D’Arcy painted a similarly bleak picture when he met with Attlee and Hall at No. 10 Downing Street the following day. His emphasis, however, was more on the inherent disadvantages that confront conventional armies fighting enigmatic enemies who conceal themselves within the surrounding civilian population in urban environments. The terrorists, D’Arcy explained,
always held the initiative against British forces. They had ample scope and time in choosing their objectives and carrying out any necessary reconnaissances. They could thus put in an attack when and where they pleased.
This initiative meant that British troops were always on the defensive, a role to which they were unaccustomed, and almost guaranteed that a certain success would be achieved initially.
The behavior of his troops in these difficult circumstances was “beyond praise,” but the warning implicit in D’Arcy’s message was clear. Unless the army was unshackled from the restrictions on offensive operations, morale and discipline would suffer. For the moment, though, Attlee’s priority was to enlist U.S. support for the implementation of the AAC report’s recommendation. And it was this consideration that overrode all others. Accordingly, despite the concerns repeatedly expressed by both Cunningham and D’Arcy, the restrictions on military operations in Palestine remained in place.17
The problem, however, was that the often febrile pace of events in Palestine rarely conformed to the ebb and flow of Whitehall’s deliberative processes and still less when delicate bilateral negotiations further slowed decision making. So while the British and the Americans traded entreaty and innuendo and appointed new expert committees to reconsider their predecessors’ recommendations, the Irgun and Lehi busily laid plans for renewed operations. Lehi struck first. On June 6, Dr. Israel Scheib, the group’s chief ideologue and a member of its high command, known by his underground nom de guerre, Eldad, was scheduled to travel under armed escort from Latrun prison to a Jerusalem orthopedic clinic for treatment of a severe back injury sustained during his capture the previous year. The subject of a massive police manhunt, he had been cornered at the Tel Aviv high school where he taught under a pseudonym. Attempting to avoid capture, Scheib leaped from the school’s roof—hence the reason he was sitting that day in the waiting room with his two-man police escort. There was a commotion as two stretcher bearers carrying a seriously injured patient rushed into the clinic. The injured man, however, suddenly jumped to his feet, pistol in hand. One of the policemen raised his tommy gun but was shot in the thigh by the Lehi gunman; the other promptly dropped his weapon. Scheib was hustled into a waiting taxi that sped off while under fire from an RAF guard detail positioned outside the clinic. The flawlessly executed operation, British intelligence subsequently noted, revealed the extent of the communication that the terrorist organizations maintained with their imprisoned comrades.18
It was now the Irgun’s turn to embarrass the authorities. Around 6:30 on the evening of June 10, two passengers seated respectively on the Lydda–Haifa and the Lydda–Jaffa trains calmly stood up and pulled the emergency cord, forcing both trains to immediately come to a stop. Suddenly several passengers, men and women alike, were on their feet, brandishing guns. They ordered the passengers and the crew off both trains and then blew up the engines. A third attack against the Lydda–Jerusalem train instead involved a large party of some thirty armed Irgunists who boarded the train after it had stopped because of a red flag placed on the rails in front of it. Once again, the train was evacuated and rigged with explosives. The coordinated operation completely destroyed two engines and ten coaches and heavily damaged a third engine—at a cost of about £100,000. Cunningham repeated his request to put into effect the internment operation. He was again rebuffed.19
These events, however, were quickly overtaken by a series of developments that threatened to plunge Palestine more deeply into an abyss of mutual suspicion, recrimination, and ultimately bloodshed. On June 9, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the exiled mufti of Jerusalem and accused wartime Nazi collaborator, dramatically surfaced in Damascus. Three days of tumultuous celebration had followed across Arab Palestine, doing little to allay Jewish suspicions that Britain had somehow contrived the mufti’s deliverance to the region as part of some gr
and conspiracy to put the Yishuv again at risk and thereby make it once more dependent on British protection. With tension thus already rife, on June 12 Bevin again stuck his foot in his mouth. Addressing the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth, the foreign secretary remarked that the only reason the United States was pressing Britain so hard to admit the hundred thousand Jewish displaced persons into Palestine was that it “did not want too many Jews in New York.” Though less offensive, his further observation that Palestine’s absorption of these immigrants would necessitate the deployment of at least another whole division of British troops on top of new expenditures totaling £22 million, neither of which Britain was willing or able to provide, was widely interpreted by Zionists and their American supporters as proof that despite the continuing Anglo-American discussions Bevin had already made up his mind to bar their entry into Palestine. In response, Kol Israel warned that in fact at least two or three more divisions of British troops would be required to suppress the violence that would erupt if the hundred thousand displaced persons were not admitted. This was by no means an idle threat as the Haganah and the Palmach laid plans to resume their own offensive.20
Into this volatile mix was added the outcome of a trial held in a Jerusalem military court on June 12 for two of the Irgun fighters apprehended following the raid on the Sarafand army base in March. Yosef Shimshon, aged nineteen, and Itzhak Ashbel, aged twenty-four, became the first two persons to receive death sentences under the recently amended Defence (Emergency) Regulations. A succession of prominent voices pleaded for mercy—among them leading editorialists and prominent religious and political figures, including Dr. Weizmann. They all condemned the crime but counseled against making martyrs of criminals and further poisoning Anglo-Zionist relations. Ashbel was in particular deemed worthy of clemency. He was described as a “poetic soul with literary ability,” driven to violence by the tragedy that had been visited upon his family in wartime Poland. The Irgun, however, refused to scrape or bow on bended knee to beg for commutation. Its high command simply warned the government not to “hang the captive soldiers. If you do, we shall answer gallows with gallows.”21
Then, in the midst of this already explosive situation, there was a development of seismic impact. On June 15, Kol Israel announced that the Haganah had obtained details of the long-standing, top secret plan, code-named Operation Broadside, to arrest and intern the Yishuv’s political leadership. According to Israel Galili, the Haganah’s chief of staff, this information had reached the group as a result of a casual conversation between a gentile British army officer stationed at Sarafand and his Jewish girlfriend. Like many of these officers’ paramours at the time, she was a clandestine Haganah agent. Alerted to the planning document’s existence, the Haganah mounted an operation to penetrate the Sarafand camp and surreptitiously gain access to the safe where the “blacklist” was kept. The document was reportedly removed, photographed, and returned without anyone in authority knowing. The radio broadcast described to its incredulous listeners every detail of the British plan before concluding, “It is perfectly clear from the order that this blacklist of candidates for imprisonment and deportation is aimed not only at the liquidation of the Hagana, but the liquidation of the entire leadership of the Yishuv … Let the Yishuv, the Diaspora and the whole world know what Bevin, Attlee and their henchmen are preparing for us, and let the world know that we shall fight.”22
The Haganah moved swiftly to make good on this promise. In a brazen and unprecedented show of force, multiple Palmach commando units destroyed or damaged ten of the eleven road and rail bridges linking Palestine with Trans-Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt the following night. Most of the targets, especially the Allenby Bridge spanning the Jordan River, were heavily guarded by British and Arab forces. Nonetheless, the meticulously executed assault—enshrined in Israel’s pre-state history as “the Night of the Bridges”—caused the death of only one member of the security forces. As a message later broadcast over Kol Israel explained, the bridges had been attacked to demonstrate that if Palestine’s borders were to be closed to Jewish immigrants, then they would be closed to everyone else as well.23
But this was just the beginning of a triad of attacks. Under cover of darkness on June 17, Lehi launched an uncharacteristic en masse assault on the Kishon railway workshops in Haifa. Some forty-five men and women attempted to bomb their way into the rail yard, having obtained details of its physical layout and defenses from an agent employed there. According to Scheib, the high command’s decision to mount this operation was a reflection not only of the target’s strategic importance but also of Lehi’s desire to better compete with the Irgun for young recruits. At 9:15 p.m. a loud explosion was heard across Haifa as the Lehi fighters stormed the facility. Fourteen smaller blasts followed: one of which claimed the lives of two of the raiders. A locomotive was destroyed and some buildings were set on fire before the assault party withdrew. The assault took longer than had been anticipated, and the rapidity with which the army could blanket the surrounding area with roadblocks was gravely underestimated. Accordingly, a truck carrying the fleeing attackers blundered into one such checkpoint, manned by troops with heavy machine guns supported by tanks and other armored vehicles. Nine more raiders were killed, at least thirteen others were wounded, and everyone else was captured. “It is lamentable evidence,” Cunningham told Hall of both the bridges and the railway workshop attacks, “of the moral and psychological degeneration caused by political extremism that this wanton destruction should have been carried out with the connivance, if not by the direction, of the Jewish authorities and that it has been greeted with no genuine expression of regret from the Jewish community.”24
Then, the following afternoon, the Irgun put into motion its plan to blackmail the government into commuting the death sentences imposed on Shimson and Ashbel. At 1:15 p.m. a taxi carrying five armed Irgun men stopped in front of the British officers’ club located in Tel Aviv’s Hayarkon Hotel. That was the signal for one group of Irgunists waiting nearby to detonate a small diversionary explosion and thus distract the attention of the four-man guard detail positioned outside the hotel and for another group of Irgun gunmen to quickly surround the sentries and disarm them. The taxi’s passengers now marched unimpeded straight into the hotel’s dining room with pistols drawn. The roomful of officers, who just moments before had been enjoying a quiet lunch, found themselves herded into a corner where the most senior ones were pulled aside. Two who resisted were subdued with blows from a lead pipe, and the five captives (including three Sixth Airborne Division officers) were herded into two waiting cars that sped away. Shortly afterward, they were transferred to a truck that had been cleverly modified with secret coffin-like compartments concealed beneath the floorboards to prevent detection if the vehicle were stopped at a roadblock. Meanwhile, about an hour later in Jerusalem another Irgun team abducted a British army major as he strolled along King George V Avenue. A third kidnapping, however, was foiled shortly afterward when two other majors walking down the same street fought off their assailants but ended up getting shot in the process. The ease with which the Irgun seized the six men is all the more astonishing given the warning issued by the DSO’s office three days before that the group had already told the Jewish Agency it was planning just such an operation.25
The government immediately ordered a dawn-to-dusk curfew in Tel Aviv and declared all Jewish premises out-of-bounds to British forces. Almost every Jewish newspaper and elected leader in the country pressed the Irgun to free the hostages. Fearing harsher government reprisals, the Haganah implored Begin to do the same. According to the Irgun leader, however, the Haganah’s intervention was prompted less by concern over the impact that the kidnappings would have on the Yishuv than that its assaults on the bridges a few nights earlier would now be eclipsed by press coverage of the abductions. The Irgun ignored all these entreaties. Indeed, the fate of the Irgun’s prisoners now became inextricably linked to that of Shimson and Ashbel—and whether or
not their death sentences would, as the Emergency Regulations required, be confirmed by the GOC. That decision fell to Lieutenant General Sir Evelyn Barker, who had only recently arrived in Palestine to replace D’Arcy.26
Nicknamed Bubbles because of his effervescent personality, Barker had previously served in Palestine with the Tenth Infantry Brigade at the height of the Arab Rebellion in 1937. He later distinguished himself during World War II as one of Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery’s most competent corps commanders during the 1944–45 campaign in northwestern Europe. Barker had ended the war as the military governor of Schleswig-Holstein—an experience that likely gave the new GOC greater insight into managing military relations with the local civilian population than other senior officers in Palestine at the time arguably possessed. This is clearly reflected in his measured reply to a letter from Weizmann concerning the two Irgun terrorists awaiting confirmation of their death sentences. In prose suggesting perplexity more than petulance, Barker struggled to find some common ground with both Weizmann and the Yishuv. As a document reflecting the contradictory mix of emotions—ranging from compassion to frustration and from sympathy to enmity—that came to define the last years of British rule of Palestine, it is worth quoting in full. “You may rest assured,” Barker informed Weizmann,
that all the points that you mentioned are recognised, and will be fully considered when the case comes in front of me. It is naturally an unpleasant task for me, and one which will require full legal consideration.
I feel it would help if the Yishuv would, without favour or affection, sometimes balance up the debt that they owe to the British, and realise that, firstly by defeating the Turks in the first world war we made the settlement of Jews in Palestine a reality, and secondly, in the second world war, by defeating the Germans, we made it possible for the settlement of Jews to continue.