Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  The twin operations immediately rekindled Jewish fears that the government was preparing to impose martial law. On February 2, Meyerson told a press conference, “There is no doubt whatever that a regime of this kind will probably result in very little harm to the small number of persons in the two terrorist groups, but it will strike at the vast majority who have no connection whatever with them.” An editorial in The Palestine Post similarly described the new measures as “ominous and depressing” and designed “less … to pacify this country than to appease the ‘strong hand’ advocates in Britain.” Palestine’s Arabs remained unimpressed. To their mind, these developments provided further evidence of British perfidy and of a grand scheme to deprive the country’s rightful inhabitants of their homeland. “Can you conceive of such a state of affairs in a country ruled by Britain,” Falastin asked, “and where she has mustered 100,000 soldiers, that is, one fully-equipped soldier to every five Jews! By Allah, if we were asked what was the greatest lie ever told, we would say that it is the reason for the evacuation.”58

  In the Yishuv’s case, its suspicions were indeed well-founded. Less than twenty-four hours before the first British evacuees were due to depart Palestine, Creech Jones had informed Attlee of Cunningham’s intention to impose martial law on select Jewish neighborhoods in the event of some new terrorist incident. The high commissioner unveiled his plan the following day at the weekly top secret security meeting held at Government House. British military commanders made no effort to conceal the punitive-cum-coercive dimensions of Operation Cantonment and an ancillary operation code-named Fantail. On February 5, Sixth Airborne headquarters instructed its officers to tell any Jew who complained that it was the terrorists, and not the army, who were to blame for the seizure of their homes and that they should expect to be further inconvenienced if they did not begin to actively assist the authorities in ending the violence.59

  Operation Polly concluded successfully on February 8. Although thought to have been named for Barker’s spouse, the evacuees joked that “Polly” really was an acronym for “Panic Over Lots of Lousy Yids”—as much an unseemly retreat in the face of terrorism as it was unnecessary. Robert W. Hamilton, the government’s director of antiquities, excoriated the policy “of scuttle” in a letter to his wife. It “can only bring the British government and British people into contempt,” he fumed.60

  Some seventeen hundred British civilians were evacuated from Palestine without incident. The original plan had been to fly the families to Egypt in Halifax bombers. But after one crashed in a sandstorm while en route to Palestine to collect the evacuees, the military decided to transport them by train instead. The journey took a full day on board what one young participant recalled as the longest passenger train ever assembled by the Palestine Railways authority. As he and his mother departed Jerusalem’s Allenby Barracks with the other evacuees in an armed convoy for the train station just down the road, the pipers of the Black Watch serenaded them with “The Skye Boat Song.” Although the first group of evacuees would be back in Britain by the beginning of March, it was not until July that this young boy and his mother finally made it home.61

  Because so few military wives and dependents were still in Palestine by 1947, Operation Polly inevitably affected the troops less directly than it did the British civil servants who remained behind after their families had departed. Their morale, already shattered by the King David tragedy, now sank to a new low. “Yes, we are in an upset here!” Lloyd Phillips complained to his father, describing his new living conditions “behind simply masses of barbed wire and Bren guns” at the Gaza police headquarters as “pretty dreadful.” The situation in Jerusalem, he reported the following week, was hardly any better. “I hope to be left undisturbed in St. George’s [Cathedral compound] where a number of women and clergy are residing, protected by the odour of sanctity—a more efficient agent, I trust,” Hamilton told his wife, “than the blunted bayonets and misdirected bullets of the British army.”62

  That the morale of remaining officials stayed afloat at all was credited to the tireless efforts and immense popularity of Gurney. An old Africa hand who had spent his career in the Colonial Service, the chief secretary had quickly won the praise and admiration of the entire secretariat for his superb managerial skills, remarkable efficiency, “complete imperturbability” (in Fletcher-Cooke’s words), and sincere concern for the welfare and careers of his subordinates. An accomplished golfer, he could be found most afternoons on the course outside Jerusalem popular with the expatriate community—playing while surrounded by armed guards. In the new, heavily circumscribed and austere existence imposed on civil servants following Polly, Cantonment, and Fantail, Gurney indefatigably arranged picnics, games, dinners, and bathing parties for the secretariat officers in hopes of enlivening their otherwise drab lives. The Jerusalem Sports Club also strove to continue its various sports and recreational programs. Indeed, the only activity that appeared to suffer was field hockey, as it was not possible to field a team that year because of both security conditions and a lack of time to properly train. Even the annual Ramle Vale Hunt went ahead as planned—despite a few days’ postponement until Operation Polly was completed.63

  Daily life for soldiers, though, had become even more exacting and demoralizing than for civilians. All Jewish areas, including the entirety of Tel Aviv, were declared out-of-bounds. This meant that the troops had no social life or opportunities for relaxation outside their heavily guarded bases and encampments. Thus the inherent monotony of garrison life was further exacerbated by the lack of amenities and poor condition of the eighteen facilities throughout Palestine where British military forces were domiciled. This was a constant concern of Montgomery’s as most housing consisted only of tented accommodation, which was insufferably hot during the summer and brutally cold in the winter. Living quarters also often lacked electricity and “all those things which go towards making life even bearable for a soldier,” the CIGS complained in his diary.64

  Barker acknowledged these hardships in a special order of the day issued to British troops on February 12—his last in Palestine. The GOC paid tribute to their discipline and comportment despite immense suffering and provocation. He cited the “considerable odium and abuse from sections of the Jewish community” and the lack of amenities that had made a difficult situation worse. “The future,” Barker concluded the farewell message, “is still not clear; it does not, however, appear that peace will come to this unhappy country immediately.” Just before boarding the plane that would carry him back to England later that day, Barker reportedly paused and, in a symbolic gesture of contempt, urinated on the ground.65

  The prospects for peace, which, as Barker noted, were already slim, suffered a further blow on February 10, when both the Arab delegation to the London talks and the Jewish Agency rejected the government’s latest proposals on Palestine’s future. Called the Bevin Plan, the new scheme had been presented to the cabinet the previous week by both the foreign secretary and Creech Jones. It represented a stunning reversal of the colonial secretary’s thinking. Until then, he had remained convinced that partition was the best of several problematic options. But a combination of entrenched Arab opposition and the prospect that an economically viable Jewish state would inevitably contain a large and implacable Arab populace, coupled with the uncertainty of obtaining the UN’s approval and, most of all, the large number of British troops that would be needed to implement partition, had conspired to convince Creech Jones of its impracticality. Accordingly, he agreed to support Bevin’s proposal that Palestine become a unitary, binational state following a five-year period of continued British rule under UN trusteeship. The provincial autonomy scheme that the cabinet had found so promising only a few months before was swept aside. Instead, a joint Arab and Jewish central government would administer a series of not necessarily geographically contiguous Arab- and Jewish-majority “cantons.” Up to a hundred thousand Jewish immigrants would be allowed to settle in Palestine over the
next two years, with future immigration left to both communities to determine or, failing agreement, for a UN arbitration tribunal to decide.66

  “Quite unacceptable” is how Shertok described the plan to Dugdale on February 10 over a dim, candlelit lunch imposed by nationwide power cuts at London’s popular Carlton Grill. It was “worse in most respects” than the provincial autonomy scheme, he explained, and anathema in terms of immigration both in stretching over two years a process that the Zionists demanded be immediate and in putting a cap on the total number. A Jewish Agency delegation, led by Ben-Gurion, was meeting with Bevin and Creech Jones that afternoon to formally convey its rejection. At what would prove to be the London Conference’s final substantive meeting the following day, Palestine’s Arabs restated their unalterable position that any proposal ceding any form of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine or allowing any further Jewish immigration was completely unacceptable.67

  With all hope of a negotiated settlement now lost, the cabinet met on February 14 to determine Palestine’s fate. Nearly a decade before, as the Arab Rebellion had approached its third anniversary, the Palestine government’s treasurer, William Joseph Johnson, had predicted that the time would come “when the British taxpayer will not be prepared or able to make large grants in reimbursement of the cost” of internal security operations for that country. In February 1947 that time had arrived. An unrelenting succession of record snowfalls had paralyzed most of Britain as the harshest winter in nearly a century wreaked havoc on the nation’s faltering economy. Growing fuel shortages had set in motion the first sporadic, local power cuts on January 28. Two weeks later widespread, nationwide outages were being reported. Factories and industries lay idle as some ten million workers were sent home, where they huddled in the dark with their families, trying to keep warm. Few would therefore have disagreed with George Taylor, a Sheffield accountant who two days earlier had noted in his diary, “We seem infinitely worse off than at any time during the war.”68

  Accordingly, the drag on the economy imposed by Britain’s still vast overseas military commitments and attendant expenditure, alongside the continued slow pace of postwar demobilization, could not, as Bevin and Creech Jones reminded colleagues in a joint paper, be separated from the discussion about Palestine. Churchill had made the same point in his peroration before the House of Commons the previous month. The cost of maintaining British military forces in Palestine was about £35 million annually—approximately 3 percent of the 1947 defense budget. Although this proportion was small, its implications were huge. Four times as many troops were now in Palestine as had been there even at the height of the Arab Rebellion. As the government was eager eighteen months after the war had ended to demobilize at least 800,000 of the nearly 2 million people still in military service, the continuing commitment of so large a garrison to Palestine had become untenable. At a cabinet meeting the previous week, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Dr. Hugh Dalton, had questioned Britain’s ability to afford a military establishment even a quarter of its size on V-E Day and urged greater economies.69

  Indeed, the rise of world commodity prices combined with a stronger than anticipated U.S. dollar had almost completely eroded the three-year $3.75 billion loan that America had made to Britain in December 1945. The war might have ended, but rationing of bread and most other foodstuffs continued. With defense spending still consuming 40 percent of the budget, the cabinet faced a stark choice: either drastically pare back military expenditure or reduce “the standard of home consumption”—a politically treacherous move that the government recognized would cause “crippling dislocations in our national economy.”70

  In these economically grim circumstances, a sweeping reevaluation of Britain’s overseas commitments had become as inevitable as it was unavoidable. Indeed, by the end of that same week, the Labour government would announce in rapid succession its intention to place the question of Palestine’s future before the United Nations, withdraw its military forces from Greece and have the United States assume responsibility for defending both that country and Turkey against communist subversion, and grant independence to India. Surprisingly little debate or discourse attended the meeting on Palestine. The minutes simply record, “Further discussion showed that it was the general view of the Cabinet that the right course was now to submit the whole problem to the United Nations.” A series of important caveats, however, followed. Referring the issue of Palestine’s future to the UN entailed neither an outright surrender of the mandate nor an irrevocable, final step. Britain would remain responsible for the administration and security of Palestine until such time as the UN reached a decision on the mandate’s future. Moreover, it was under no obligation to implement or enforce whatever solution the UN might eventually propose. “If the settlement suggested by the United Nations were not acceptable to us,” the cabinet noted, “we should be at liberty then to surrender the Mandate and leave the United Nations to make other arrangements for the future administration of Palestine.” In addition, there was nothing to preclude Britain from continuing to work with both Arabs and Jews to reach some mutually agreed-upon solution. Neither community, Bevin pointed out, seemed inclined to have the UN decide Palestine’s future. Accordingly, he was hopeful that the government’s decision might bring both parties to “a more reasonable frame of mind.” Should negotiations resume and a breakthrough occur, Britain would be free to withdraw the matter from UN consideration and proceed with the implementation of whatever solution was found. Perhaps most important was the fact that the next session of the UN General Assembly was not scheduled until September, and convening an extraordinary meeting for this purpose was deemed impractical. Accordingly, for the next seven months there would be no change in the status quo, and British rule over Palestine would continue along the same frustrating lines that it had since Labour had come to power eighteen months earlier.71

  CHAPTER 17

  An Instrument of Death

  Nineteen long months of procrastination and prevarication had deprived the Labour government of any credibility on Palestine. The decision to involve the fledgling United Nations had thus been greeted with suspicion in Palestine, skepticism in Parliament, and criticism in the press. Neither the Yishuv nor the Arabs were persuaded of the government’s sincerity, regarding this latest development as a cynical ploy to perpetuate British influence and deny both communities their respective claim to the country. In the House of Commons, Opposition and Labour backbench MPs alike expressed incredulity that the government remained incapable of producing either a clear policy or a coherent vision for Palestine while bemoaning the paretic stasis that had consigned an already demoralized civil administration and military there to at least seven more months of muddled uncertainty. Neither The Times nor The Economist nor the New Statesman was persuaded that Palestine’s referral to the UN would result in any outcome other than partition and similarly lamented the British lives and treasure that would be expended before the UN would meet in September.1

  A critical component of the government’s thinking had been the hope that the referral decision might bring both communities to their senses and, in turn, restrain the extremists within their ranks. The cabinet based this faulty premise on the belief that the two sides would not wish to “prejudice[e] the case which they would have to present to the General Assembly.” Bevin had specifically cited this rationale when he addressed the House on February 18. The fact that there had been no terrorist incidents since the beginning of the New Year contributed to the illusion that this overly optimistic scenario might actually materialize. But it was dashed within hours of the foreign secretary’s statement when, that same evening, the Irgun resumed offensive operations with the first in a string of attacks against military convoys traveling in Jerusalem, along the Haifa–Jaffa Road, and the following day in Haifa itself.2

  Each involved what had now become a favored Irgun tactic of either burying an improvised explosive device (IED) in the road or disguising it to resemble some innocent r
oadside object. These mines were quickly and easily laid and had proven devastatingly effective by both day and night. An Irgun team would lie in wait and then, just as a vehicle or convoy came into view, electrically detonate the device via a concealed wire. This means of attack had become so pervasive that in December 1946 army headquarters issued a meticulously detailed thirty-five-page pamphlet, complete with photographs and diagrams, describing these weapons and their emplacement and effects. Even so, as both the Palestine government and the army acknowledged, these IEDs were virtually impossible to defend against.3

  The night of February 20 brought a fresh round of incidents. Irgun bombs damaged the Iraq Petroleum Company pipeline in two places near Afula. Shortly afterward the group launched a coordinated, mortar-backed assault on an RAF base outside Hadera that was repulsed by its defenders after a twenty-minute gun battle.4

  Only a few weeks before, British forces in Palestine had welcomed the announcement of the enforced evacuation of British women and children, according to the Sixth Airborne Division’s historian, as a “sign of the firm measures which appeared at last to be on the way, and of the decks being cleared for action.” But to their immense frustration, the latest attacks evoked no such response. Instead, the War Office issued a directive specifying that the word “terrorist” would no longer be used in any military communication to describe “members of the Stern and Irgun and other Jews involved in outrage and sabotage.” The logic behind this change in terminology, the War Office explained, was to deprive the perpetrators of the “glamour” and publicity they received in press accounts of their operations. An ancillary intention was to counter a tendency among law-abiding Jews to “dissociate” themselves from these acts much the same as Germans now dissociated themselves from the Nazis. The invidious rationale used was that “everything was blamed against the Nazis, yet no one professed to be a Nazi or to hold Nazi views,” while, in Palestine, “everyone blamed the terrorists as if they were a race apart” and provided no help to the authorities. “The so-called terrorists are in fact members of the Jewish community in Palestine. [The] word ‘terrorist,’ ” the order concluded, “will therefore not be used; when referring to such persons terms such as armed Jews, Jews, thugs, murderers will be used.” The troops applauded the decision, but it was completely ineffective as both the BBC and other news outlets continued to use the term.5