War of Shadows

by Gershom Gorenberg

  The British defensive plan was called Final Fortress of Palestine.36 The apocalyptic tone may have been at least half intentional. “The Land of Israel [Palestine]… according to the prophetic vision, which the Christians believe even more than the Jews do, will one day be the final battlefield on which [the Devil] will be defeated. On the plain of Megiddo—precisely there!—the battle must take place,” the Jewish Agency’s Moshe Shertok said at a conference of Haganah militia commanders. “I have met [British] officers who believe this with a perfect faith,” Shertok said.

  Personally, Shertok added, he didn’t claim that the current war would be decided in Palestine. But he did believe Britain’s defense of the country would decide the fate of its Jews. He was pushing for Palestinian Jews to enlist in the British army.37 The opposing view was strongest among the hard-left faction in the kibbutzim: Jews needed to build up their own independent military because “our interests and those of the [British colonial] regime are not the same. The regime might abandon us.” So wrote Yisrael Galili, a leader of the Haganah and of the United Kibbutz Movement.38 Behind this position lay both intense yearning for an army of one’s own and a fierce inner battle about the British: they were the people fighting the Nazis; they were also the people who’d closed Palestine to Jews fleeing the Nazis.39

  Galili had found his own British ally, though: Major General B. T. Wilson, the Special Operation Executive’s “number one for Palestine.” Wilson’s job was to make sure that if the Nazis did conquer Palestine, a trained resistance would destroy roads and railway lines and ambush soldiers. High Commissioner Harold MacMichael’s office had placed “a ban on any mention” to Arabs that the British were worried they might lose the country. So Wilson only worked with the SOE’s established “Friends,” the Palestinian Jews.

  “The plan has been authorized by the gentiles,” Galili wrote to his wife in late March. “A report says that there was a negative recommendation from police circles—casting doubt on the loyalty of the Jews. Nonetheless, even the high commissioner had to give his seal of approval.” Wilson would fund the project, a detail that in typical SOE fashion he forgot to tell his Cairo office. The Palmah, the tiny full-time military force of the Jewish community in Palestine, created the year before, would provide the recruits. Wilson’s money would allow it to double its strength to one thousand members. Galili was pleased that they would not wear uniforms, be sworn into the British army, or serve outside Palestine.40

  The training camp opened at the end of April at Kibbutz Mishmar Ha’emek, less than five miles from Megiddo. From Nicholas Hammond, a Cambridge classics scholar who’d gone from hiking in prewar Greece to being the SOE’s expert in detonating German ammunition dumps there, they learned sabotage. From the SOE’s small-arms expert, Hector Grant-Taylor, they learned how to hold a pistol low, next to the belly, and to shoot so that what you saw, you hit. (Palmah fighters knew for a fact that Grant-Taylor had worked for the FBI against gangsters in the 1930s, and had led a commando raid in France in which he’d assassinated German officers. All this was false, but his ability to teach people to kill was real.) For the young Palmah recruits, the atmosphere was a near-erotic mixture of youth movement and underground, which alchemized into lifelong nostalgia the moment they left.41

  According to one SOE document, 160 saboteurs were trained; according to another, 400.42 According to Lieutenant Aubrey Eban, or Abba Eban as he was called in Hebrew, “The camp actually trained all of the Palmah’s members.” Eban had been a Cambridge fellow in Middle Eastern languages and an aide to Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann before he went into uniform. The army had sent him to Cairo for the mind-numbing work of censoring Arabic letters and newspapers. In early 1942, he wrote to Moshe Shertok, begging him to find a way to bring him out of Egypt. Very quickly, an SOE major called Eban into the organization’s Cairo office. Eban was needed for delicate diplomacy: The SOE and Palmah more or less trusted each other. High Commissioner MacMichael’s office and the Jewish Agency did not trust each other at all. Nor did the high commissioner trust the SOE. It was a medical disagreement: MacMichael was concerned with the long-term health of the British Empire, to which Jews trained in sabotage would not contribute. The SOE saw the empire as being on its deathbed; Jewish saboteurs were indicated as urgent treatment. Among the Jews, the argument was nearly reversed: Galili was fixed on the long-term goal of Jewish independence, Shertok on coping with the immediate threat of extinction.

  Eban was sent to Jerusalem, given a house on Bethlehem Road amid the well-off Arab burghers, and became the four-way liaison. Whatever number of Palmah irregulars were officially supposed to be trained at Mishmar Ha’emek, Eban “interpreted” this—as he put it—as the number who could be present at one moment. Everyone in the Palmah rotated through for explosives and pistol training. Mandatory police regularly arrested young Jewish men in civilian dress carrying guns; Eban got them out. Judging from the rest of his long diplomatic career, the British police were overwhelmed by the same upper-crust Eban mannerisms that infuriated the Hebrew-speaking socialists he was springing from jail.43

  Besides cooperation with the SOE, Galili was promoting another proposal that spring: turning a “region around Haifa” into “a kind of Tobruk.” Just as Tobruk had held out for months the year before while Rommel reconquered the rest of Libya, “Haifa-Tobruk” would hold out against a German invasion. Jewish fighters would defend it, as long as the British supplied the port from the sea. He suggested alternate names: “Haifa–Musa Dagh” and “Haifa-Masada.” Musa Dagh was a mountain 240 miles north of Haifa on the Mediterranean coast, where thousands of Armenians had held out against Turkish forces during the 1915 genocide, until they were finally rescued by Allied ships. Masada was the mountain fortress in the Judean Desert where Jewish rebels resisted during the Great Revolt against the Roman Empire in the first century CE, finally committing mass suicide rather than surrender. Rediscovered, Masada had become the destination of dangerous pilgrimages by Zionist youth groups in the 1930s.44

  The names marked a range of expectations for what Jews with guns could do against the Axis armies—from defiant hope of holding out, to a tragedy in which the only choice was how to die. Many of the leaders of the Haganah and Palmah would quickly remember the proposal as the community’s concrete plan of action. The half million Jews of Palestine, or at least the hundred thousand of the Haifa area, would take refuge in the Carmel to determine their own fate. Memory transmogrified the British defenses of the Final Fortress into the groundwork for Masada on the Carmel. Yet, to be carried out, the plan depended on support that Britain never offered or considered giving. The memory was a defense of the mind against the horror of being defenseless.45

  “ACCORDING TO A report from a good source,” the German message said, the British Seventh Armored Brigade in Egypt was “apparently being reconstituted,” meaning that for the moment it was out of action. The radiogram was sent to Rommel’s headquarters, and intercepted by a British operator, on the morning of May 2.

  Another message to Rommel, later that day, gave an “unconfirmed, general picture” of the location of troops who’d shipped out from Britain since December. At the end, if the reader was paying close attention, came two items with more solid confirmation. “According to a report from a good source,” the British Tenth Armored Brigade in the Middle East was “presumably not in fighting condition,” and Lieutenant General W. H. E. Gott was the new commander of the Thirtieth Armored Corps.46

  The volume of Ultra intelligence from Hut 3 to Auchinleck’s headquarters was rising. If anyone at the Grey Pillars complex in Cairo’s Garden City noticed that the material from “a good source” was more accurate than the usual German reports on the location and condition of British units, there’s no known evidence that word got back to Bletchley Park. The report, or the Hut 3 translation of it, did mistakenly identify William Gott’s new command: it was the Thirteenth Corps, not the Thirtieth.47

  A week passed. On May 9, Rommel’s intelligen
ce officer received a long radio message that began with two-month-old information: “A good source reports on March 2, 1942: Axis air force recently suffered from fuel shortage. The Germans have nine battalions [of] infantry… Rommel needs a further month’s rest.” The information appeared drawn from at least one detailed British intelligence document from Cairo.

  The same message to Rommel said that the “good source” had reported on April 4 that the British had put down “continuous minefields” from the Libyan coast to Bir Hakeim, in the desert thirty miles southeast of Tobruk, and that British positions were “in part blasted out of the rock.” Following that came the map coordinates of a series of British units and battle headquarters in Libya.48

  The German message came in the Chaffinch II key, with which Hut 6 still struggled. It took two days to decode. On the third day, a paraphrase was encoded on Britain’s own TypeX cipher machine and sent to Cairo. Strangely, despite the provocative questions the message raised, Stewart Menzies did not put it in one of the thin packets of Ultra material and decoded diplomatic cables that he delivered at least once a day to Winston Churchill. Judging from his behavior on later occasions, the most likely reason was that the MI6 chief understood that the Germans’ good source represented a problem, and he preferred presenting problems to the prime minister along with their solutions.49

  The message did, however, go immediately to the Naval Section in Hut 4, where Margaret Storey and Russell Dudley-Smith dissected Enigma messages looking for Axis espionage. It went in a file that—later, at least—was labeled “Bluebird.” For the moment, all they could do was wait for more bluebirds to land, perhaps bearing evidence of where they had come from.50

  2

  MARE INCOGNITUM

  May 1942. Bletchley Park–Cyrenaica–Rome–Cairo–Gilf Kebir.

  JUNE 1 WOULD be too late to save Malta. So Air Marshal Kesselring had said.

  What did he mean, though?

  It was a riddle known to a very few people at Bletchley Park and in Cairo and at the Joint Intelligence Committee in London, the experts who were supposed to make sense daily for the chiefs of staff of all available secrets about the enemy. They received many clues from Ultra—and yet not enough clues, because the most important decisions that Hitler, Mussolini, and their generals made in conference rooms were not sent by radio and because the decisions were evasive and ambiguous.

  “No attempted air borne invasion of Malta is impending,” an anonymous analyst at Bletchley Park wrote early in May 1942. The Germans had planned to take the island early in the year, the writer deduced, but they’d had to keep more planes in Russia than they had expected. They were likely to attack in Libya late in May. If they took Tobruk, they would be able to route supply convoys from Greece to Cyrenaica, keeping their ships out of range of planes from Malta. Then they would prepare to invade Egypt the next winter.1

  Kesselring had moved his battle headquarters to Derna in Libya, a Joint Intelligence Committee report noted. Artillery was being shipped to Rommel. The German air force was moving a unit of transport planes to Africa for dropping paratroops and pulling gliders. This signaled an airborne attack on Tobruk, the committee’s experts concluded. All the signs of a German offensive had begun after April 24, the day of Kesselring’s report from the “particularly reliable source” about an expected British operation. Ergo, the source’s information had set off “hasty planning and preparation” for Rommel to move before Auchinleck could.2

  From Cairo, Air Marshal Arthur Tedder sent a semi-dissent. The demands of the Russian front would prevent a German invasion of Egypt this summer, the Royal Air Force commander in the Middle East estimated. But Hitler wanted a “headline success” in the Mediterranean. He believed Rommel would indeed attack in Cyrenaica—as the prelude for landings from the air and sea to take Malta.

  The situation on the island was desperate, and British commanders in Egypt were evaluating a plan to send a supply convoy from Alexandria, Tedder wrote. “It is not my habit to be alarmist,” he added, but the attempt would involve “certainty of very heavy losses with only slender chances of affecting anything useful for Malta.”3

  On May 26, the Hut 3 research room tried once more to make sense of the hints. The expected Axis operation had not yet begun. But Enigma messages showed that it would include Italian marines. A flotilla of landing craft was being assembled at Tripoli. General Ugo Cavallero, head of the Italian Supreme Command, had asked for two German ferries, of a type that had been part of the aborted plan to invade Britain. Hut 3’s analysts expected an amphibious attack “behind our lines in Libya or even Egypt.” The Axis codename for the operation was “Hercules.” The codename, suggested the analysts, could allude to Hercules’s mythical “exploits in Egypt.”4

  THIS IS WHAT intercepted radio messages did not reveal:

  Rommel had come to Hitler’s eastern front headquarters in March to ask for more forces. General Franz Halder, the army chief of staff, turned him down and did not bother to note Rommel’s visit in his diary. Halder filled his notebooks with details about the battles in the Soviet Union. By his listing, over a million German soldiers had been killed, wounded, or captured since Barbarossa began.5

  Erwin Rommel did not forgive being slighted. With “a few more divisions” he could win “victories in the Near East, which in their strategic and economic value” would surpass conquests in southern Russia, he believed.6 Nonetheless, Rommel made plans to attack in Cyrenaica, hoping to take Tobruk. He would make his move in June—after the invasion of Malta. Cavallero and Kesselring were planning the airborne and seaborne landings on the island. It was to be mainly an Italian effort, with German help. The codename: Operation Hercules.

  On April 22, Galeazzo Ciano wrote that Hitler had given Kesselring approval for Hercules. Two days later Kesselring sent his message that June would be “too late” for Britain to save the island.

  The Italian Supreme Command produced plans, and doubts, and demands for help on a scale the Germans rejected. Delays resulted. Cavallero “hopes to derive a great deal of personal glory from this operation,” Ciano wrote. “But I believe he will never go through with it.”7

  Yet decisions had to be made, quickly. The “particularly reliable source” had informed German intelligence that the British would attack in Libya in June. By summer, a large part of the German air force in the Mediterranean would be moved to the eastern front for the new offensive there. Rommel wanted to move up his attack in Cyrenaica; Cavallero wanted to delay Hercules.

  Mussolini went to Salzburg at the end of April to meet Hitler. “Hitler talks, talks, talks,” Ciano wrote. “Mussolini suffers, since he is in the habit of talking and, instead, practically has to keep quiet.”

  Still, they came to a decision: Rommel would attack late in May to preempt Auchinleck. His goal would be to take Tobruk and to push the British back to the Egyptian border. After that would come Hercules. Then Rommel could prepare to take Egypt.

  Hitler promised support for Hercules, and immediately had doubts. He remembered the cost of taking Crete. Kesselring received a phone call telling him not to do any more to plan for Hercules. He ignored those instructions. Axis radio messages confused British experts because they accurately reflected confusion and conflict within the Axis high command.8

  “Every war is rich in particular facts,” master theoretician Carl von Clausewitz wrote in his On War, “while at the same time each is an unexplored sea, full of rocks which the general may have suspicion of, but which he has never seen with his eye.”9 Each Enigma message marked more rocks in the sea of Axis plans and disputes. And still, it was mare incognitum.

  JUST BEFORE HE left for Salzburg, Ciano got a letter from Rashid Ali al-Gailani and Hajj Amin el-Husseini.10

  Gailani, the deposed prime minister of Iraq, and Husseini, the former mufti of Jerusalem, had escaped Baghdad a year before, then fled Iran when Britain occupied that country. By November 1941, both were in Berlin, where they became rival leaders in the small circle
of Arab expatriates. Husseini grandiosely claimed to speak for the “entire Arab people,” who wanted, all of them, “to enter into the struggle on the side of the Axis powers,” as he wrote to Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Gailani, by some accounts, was slightly more modest, claiming only to speak for the country he no longer led. They trafficked in delusions; they also seemed to have convinced themselves that Berlin and Rome were interested in liberating nations.

  Husseini had quickly managed to get an audience with Hitler, at which he asked the Führer to declare publicly his backing for “the independence and unity of Palestine, Syria and Iraq.” Such a promise, Husseini said, would ease his “work of secretly organizing the Arabs” for rebellion at the right moment.

  Hitler responded that both the capitalists of Britain and the communists of the Soviet Union were serving the goals of the Jews, so the war was in essence “a battle between National Socialism and the Jews.” He promised Husseini only that this battle included “the struggle against the Jewish national home in Palestine” and that once the German armies in Russia pushed south through the Caucasus mountains into the Middle East, “Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power.”11

  Myths would be created about this meeting. In reality, Hitler gave nothing but a pledge to do what he was already doing—murdering Jews in whatever territory came under Nazi control—and a preview of Germany’s strategy of reaching the Middle East via Russia and Iran.

  The regime did, however, treat Husseini as a useful collaborator and radio propagandist. It gave him a large living allowance and an office. The SS assigned him a liaison and security officer, a thirty-year-old obersturmführer (first lieutenant) named Hans-Joachim Weise.