Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

The weather in Tel Aviv on November 14, 1945, was perfect for a protest. Work was suspended at noon, and by dusk a crowd of some fifty thousand people had gathered at the Kiryat Meir parade ground in the city center. The assembly stood with heads bowed in silence as a prayer was recited in memory of Jews who had perished in the Holocaust. A series of speeches followed denouncing the Labour government and Bevin in particular. A proclamation was then read on behalf of the city rejecting the proposed Anglo-American Committee and pledging that “no force would deter the Jewish people in their struggle.” The crowd dispersed, and everyone headed home. As one group passed through the Carmel Market, they were joined by what government and press reports termed a bunch of “hooligans.” The newcomers took control of the procession and steered it in the direction of the cluster of government offices situated on Levontin Street in downtown Tel Aviv. The once orderly parade had now become a seething mob baying for broken glass and eager to mix it up with the few police in their path.1

  Arriving at the district offices, the marchers stormed the building, smashing office furniture, destroying files, and tearing light fixtures from the walls and ceilings that were hurled onto the street below. Police attempting to control the crowd were pelted with stones and forced to withdraw. Someone then set fire to the building, and the mob descended in succession on the offices of the Income Tax Bureau, the Control of Light Industries, and the local branch of the British-owned Barclays Bank. Multiple fires now raged as the crowd headed toward the city’s General Post Office. There, they were met by a cordon of police reinforced by a company of the Eighth Parachute Battalion that had been urgently summoned from their nearby base at Sarafand. Stones, bottles, other objects, and at least two homemade hand grenades were thrown at the security forces. Six baton charges by the police failed to scatter the rioters. The paratroop company commander then gave the order to open fire. Two persons fell dead, and the crowd withdrew.2

  The government’s imposition of a dusk-to-dawn curfew provided only a temporary respite as the disturbances began anew in the morning. Once more, buildings in Tel Aviv were sacked and set on fire, and the paratroops again had to fire upon the rioters to disperse them. The government now ordered the entire Third Paratroop Brigade—numbering four thousand men—into the city to restore order. The unrest finally abated with nightfall. The casualty toll after two days of disorders stood at three Jews killed and scores injured, forty of whom required hospitalization. All but eight of these were under the age of twenty—with the youngest eight years old. Thirty-seven policemen and soldiers had also been hurt, some seriously. Damage and cleanup costs exceeded £200,000.3

  Midway through the unrest, the Palestine government had taken the extraordinary step of issuing a public proclamation. Posted on walls and spread across the front pages of the country’s newspapers, it warned the Yishuv of the severe consequences that would befall it in the event of continued lawlessness. Not since the Arab Rebellion eight years before had the public needed to be reminded that the penalty for unlawful possession of firearms, bombs, grenades, or “other warlike stores” was life imprisonment and for their carriage or use it was death. As had also been the case during the Arab Rebellion, the government resorted to press censorship to control the dissemination of news of the disturbances. In addition, two Hebrew-language papers—Davar, the leftist-leaning mass-circulation Hebrew daily, and its Revisionist Party counterpart, Hamashkif—were charged with intent to “incite public opinion” and ordered to suspend publication for a week as punishment. A political cartoon in Davar, which the censor had in fact passed, had nonetheless drawn the ire of government officials. It depicted a surgeon in an operating theater remarking sarcastically on the accuracy of British marksmanship given the high number of children wounded. Gershon Agron, The Palestine Post’s founder and editor, met with Shaw later in the month to protest, on behalf of his fellow editors, both the censorship and the publication suspensions. During their discussion, Agron also showed the chief secretary a letter that had been sent to the Post by one of the paratroopers deployed to Tel Aviv. It expressed dismay that virtually three-quarters of the author’s fellow soldiers had claimed they had enjoyed “shoot[ing] Jews.” Shaw was visibly shaken by this assertion, Agron reported, but then dismissed it as patently untrue.4

  The chief secretary’s denial, however, ignored the accumulating evidence to the contrary. Only three days earlier, for example, Shaw had received from his staff a summary of a letter sent to Palestine’s chief justice, Sir William Fitzgerald, by a Jewish resident of Tel Aviv. It provided a disturbing account of how “adults and children standing on the verandas of their houses as well as innocent passers-by were shot, wounded and killed by soldiers” during the Tel Aviv disturbances. The writer himself had observed this from the roof of his own apartment building, where he was nearly struck by bullets fired by troops below. Two persons standing beside him, however, were seriously wounded by the gunfire. This was only the latest manifestation of the entrenched hostility toward the Yishuv that was now prevalent among British security forces in Palestine.5

  Only weeks before, a British officer with several years’ service in Palestine had written to the Foreign Office. “Among the British in Palestine,” he began, “suspicion and hatred of the Jew is being widely voiced with the bitterest venom. In some cases the crude surge of anti-semitic passion is worthy of a Nazi.” Such attitudes were shared by both officers and enlisted men and in the police as well as the army, but they were especially prominent among officers of both. “I’m not for the Jews or against them,” one major was quoted, “but I can’t help feeling that Hitler was on the right lines.” Identical opinions were reportedly regularly voiced by other officers. A sampling of comments included statements alleging that the Jews were deliberately exaggerating their persecution for sympathy, that Hitler could hardly be blamed for trying to exterminate European Jewry, and that the Holocaust was “a mere trick of [Jewish] political propaganda.”6

  Similarly anti-Semitic views could be heard from both civilian officials and other Britons resident in Palestine, the letter’s author continued. “The atmosphere of the British community is poisoned by a constant stream of slander freely and vigorously expressed, so that each new entrant whether he knows it or not has his thoughts coloured for him against the Jews.” Such repugnant views, this officer believed, arose from the lack of “deference” shown by the Yishuv to its colonial masters. The Jews refuse to be treated like the “natives” in other British possessions, he observed, and therefore “answer back [and] claim equality.” Because the Arabs were superficially more obsequious and “obliging,” and thus better conformed to the servile mold that these Britons expected, they were treated much better than Jews.7

  But what this officer found most troubling was that these sentiments were progressing beyond mere verbal expressions of opprobrium into threats of physical violence. “Already ‘responsible officers’ are talking with vindictive relish of smashing the settlements to search for arms,” he warned. “The swine must be squashed” had become something of a battle call, with the Yishuv widely described as “The Enemy.” In this respect, the terrorist acts perpetrated by the Irgun and Lehi “played into the hands of the anti-semites, who were quick to blame the whole Jewish population for the political crimes of a few.”8

  Although this letter of course depicts the views and observations of one person only, the attitudes and prejudices described are clearly evident in orders issued by Palestine headquarters just a few weeks later. Under the subheading “Commercial Considerations” is the following statement: “Jews all over the world interest themselves in ‘business.’ Those in PALESTINE are no exception to the rule.” The Yishuv, therefore, was deemed more susceptible to being influenced and manipulated by the disruptions to commerce caused by curfews, searches, and other security measures. A subsequent section, titled “The Jewish Character,” also explains, “Although possessed of great agility of mind, they lack genuine wisdom. They have a strong material side, a lo
ve of business, and a love of preserving their property, on the other hand they have within them a very strong and unpredictable strain of emotionalism. They are often mystics. They still think of the prophets and their deeds as great things.”9

  Further evidence of how ingrained these attitudes had become among soldiers in Palestine may also be discerned from the annual report of Chaplaincy Services, Middle East Command, for 1945. It specifically calls attention to the poor quality of troops arriving in Palestine, expressing concern over their lack of education and generally undisciplined nature. Such men, the deputy chaplain general feared, were particularly receptive to facile racist and religious generalizations and prone to intemperate opinions, if not outright bigotry.10

  The extent to which these anti-Semitic views were either preexisting or situational—or both—is not clear. Certainly, any claims of British bias against the Jews were repeatedly denied.

  Nevertheless, a perceived sense of ingratitude figured in an animus felt by some British troops toward the Jews. It was beyond the comprehension of many to understand why the Yishuv, in the words of the Sixth Airborne’s official historian, “were misguided enough to regard the British army as their oppressor.” Similarly, Major Roy Farran, one of the most highly decorated British officers during World War II, who had fought as a tank commander and then a commando in the elite Special Air Service (SAS) and in 1945 was serving as second-in-command of his old regiment, the Third Hussars, then attached to the Sixth Airborne Division in Palestine, also writes of the “displaced personnel we had seen in Europe, humble in their gratitude to us, their saviours, but I could not identify them with these ungrateful, well-fed whiners. No, rather I thought of the boys who had been urged forward to their death by propaganda about German atrocities to the Jews. Where did these things fit in?” The best explanation perhaps is the ambiguous security conditions that prevailed in Palestine at this time. Brigadier R. N. Anderson, a combat engineer, explained the difficulties of coping in this perplexing environment. “Unlike the war, when one had one’s period of rest (normally amongst liberated peoples who were friendly),” he wrote, “the soldier is always on duty [in Palestine] and alert to the fact that, at any time, he may expect a murderous attack. In conditions where the moderate Jew will not cooperate with the Security Forces it is impossible to know who is friend or who is enemy.”11

  “Of all burdens cast on soldiers by politicians,” the British military historian Gregory Blaxland has written, “surely none ever chafed so painfully as that which grew out of the Balfour Declaration.” Had the Palestine Police Force been capable of maintaining order, this burden would not have fallen on the army. Indeed, the conventional wisdom in British military circles at the time was that “one policeman is equal in value to six or seven soldiers for the kind of work which is required in Palestine.” Shaw himself fully understood this and had again written to the Colonial Office on November 26 to urge a massive new recruiting effort across Britain and the empire in hopes of attracting through higher salaries and improved benefits a new generation of police whose military service during the war would put them in good stead for Palestine’s unique security environment.12

  The problem, however, was that having fought (and survived) one war, few suitable candidates were willing to volunteer for another—no matter how high the pay or excellent the benefits. And, in any event, the starting salary of a PPF constable, at just over £2 per week, was barely more than half that of the entry-level pay rate for police throughout the U.K. Accordingly, although a new drive at the end of November had generated a seemingly healthy number of applicants, only twenty-two had in fact been deemed fit for police service. This was by no means atypical, as the rejection rate generally hovered around 90 percent, prompting some frustrated Colonial Office officials to suggest that the bar for entering the PPF was set too high. But any lowering of standards had long been resisted by Rymer-Jones and emphatically opposed by Gort as well.13

  In the circumstances, the War Office had no choice but to rush the Third Infantry Division from Germany to Palestine. Its arrival, however, provided only a short-lived fillip. The exodus of demobilized soldiers from the First Infantry Division had so enervated it that no sooner had the Third Infantry taken up positions in Jerusalem than the First departed for Egypt to rest and regroup.14

  Playing policeman in Palestine was not a role for which these combat-hardened troops were either trained or prepared. Soldiers are taught to fight and to kill and to make war against an identifiable enemy under rules of engagement where the use of lethal force is axiomatic. Police, on the other hand, are trained in the rules of law and evidence and instructed in the use of lethal force as a last resort only. The operational environment that these troops encountered in Palestine—densely crowded urban areas within which the terrorists concealed themselves, indistinguishable from the surrounding population—was also vastly different from their formative experiences on the battlefields of Europe. There, they engaged a uniformed enemy in demarcated conflict zones, along fronts where the fighting occurred, and whatever civilians were present were noncombatants.

  The restrictive rules of engagement imposed on security operations in Palestine’s populated, built-up areas thus emerged as a major irritant among both soldiers and police in Palestine. Prevented from striking back in the manner they were trained, many soldiers channeled their frustration and anger toward the Yishuv. “We were never allowed to hit back at the terrorists,” Farran groused. According to Major R. Dare Wilson, the Sixth Airborne’s historian, the problem was as much strategic as it was tactical. “In 1945 the Division had reached a standard of training in offensive warfare of which it was justly proud,” he writes. “But the requirements of Internal Security duties necessitate the application of minimum force; and, when the Division had to adapt its ideas from the previous doctrine of the use of maximum force, an entirely fresh approach was clearly needed.”15

  Britain, however, lacked not only a policy for postwar Palestine but also a strategy for containing Jewish unrest. Instead, the same stale ideas circulated with depressing regularity. The first Hebrew Resistance Movement attacks, for instance, prompted Attlee to request from the Chiefs of Staff an assessment of the available military options in response. Echoing the lengthy deliberations following Moyne’s assassination, the tired arguments for and against arms searches of Jewish settlements were debated and discussed in a series of committee meetings that unfolded throughout November. Bereft of any new ideas, the committee invited the chiefs to “consider whether the time had not come to call for an appreciation from the Commanders-in-Chief in the Middle East of action required to achieve the surrender of illegal weapons in Palestine.”16

  Britain’s Middle East commanders, however, had no new insights to offer either. Although they accepted as inevitable that sooner or later it would be necessary to disarm the entire population of Palestine—Jew and Arab alike—and also arrest senior Haganah and Palmach commanders, they firmly believed that now was not the time. Their reasoning had less to do with the anticipated scale of violence or the uncertainty of success than with the fear that such an operation would “lay [Britain] open to a charge of torpedoeing” the recently announced Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry before it even got started. The matter accordingly once again lapsed into abeyance. The only new wrinkle was the general staff’s disconcerting observation that the difficulties of effectively conducting searches had now become “as great [as], if not greater” than, before, given the combination of precautions and countermeasures that the Haganah had implemented. “Caches of arms,” its report explained, “are spread over a considerable area and buried at some depth, and even when likely areas in which the illegal arms are concealed are known, success in finding them depends on being able to pinpoint their location. Moreover, the use of mechanical means, such as mine detectors, is frustrated by the practice of scattering small pieces of metal in the vicinity of the hidden arms.”17

  Further evidence of the stagnation in Britis
h military thinking may be seen in the discussions that now resumed concerning the use of heavy weapons (for example, artillery fire and aircraft bombardment) in Palestine. With arms searches again ruled out, the Chiefs of Staff lobbied for permission to use “ ‘appropriate weapons’ once the responsibility for quelling any disturbances had passed from the Civil to the Military Authorities.” The policy directive that ultimately emerged in December 1945 from these renewed discussions embraced the same three categories of geographically defined areas and structures and buildings that had first been proposed by the Joint Planning Staff the previous February. Accordingly, any use of such weapons was completely prohibited in Category A, which included the Old City of Jerusalem and important, historical religious shrines and sites elsewhere in Palestine. Category B listed significant cultural sites, like the Jerusalem Museum, that could only be targeted with the express consent of both the high commissioner and the Middle East commander in chief. Finally, Category C defined structures that should not be attacked unless the successful execution of military operations made it “unavoidably necessary” and included some ancient synagogues and crusader castles. Restrictions on attacking populated areas were not, as the staff officer charged with the first draft of the policy had initially feared, “watered down”—but in fact were eliminated completely. At the cabinet Defence Committee meeting that approved the directive, Bevin was quick to recognize the politically explosive repercussions should this policy become public. Hence, the committee agreed that the granting of this authority to the commanders in chief in the Middle East must remain a closely guarded secret.18

  “Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip, and Germans, no less than other peoples, prepare for the last war,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning American historian Barbara Tuchman famously wrote in The Guns of August. Alas, this was no less true for British generals contemplating the Jewish rebellion in 1945. Conditioned by their experiences fighting rural Arab rebels and brigands a decade earlier, they assumed that the same weapons and tactics would succeed against the Jews as well. The Arab Rebellion, however, was very different from the escalating Jewish conflict. It had been both a guerrilla war and a popular uprising. Virtually all of the fighting had occurred in the countryside, where rebel bands had moved and fought in large, discernible formations. Accordingly, the methods that the army used to defeat the rebels were straightforward. The enemy had been easily sighted and engaged in open country well suited to aerial and artillery bombardment. Pitched battles were often fought with the security forces that lasted hours and in one instance an entire day. The Arab guerrillas, moreover, had been almost unanimously supported by the rural Arab populace. Therefore, villages guilty of assisting the rebels had been punished without difficulty: either the houses of specific people implicated in revolutionary activities were destroyed, or a collective fine was levied on the entire village. Artillery and air bombardment were also used against rebel firing positions in houses and other structures without much concern for collateral casualties among civilians close to the fighting.19