Cunningham’s response, predictably, provided a completely diametrical view. He stressed, however, that his rebuttal had been crafted in close consultation with Barker, who, the high commissioner hastened to add, “agrees with all the answers I have given.” Operation Agatha, Cunningham pointed out, had not gained the initiative against the terrorist organizations for the simple reason that it was directed not against them but against the Jewish Agency and the Haganah. In this respect, it had achieved its objective by engineering the resultant collapse of the Hebrew Resistance Movement and what now appeared to be the permanent breach in the Haganah and the Palmach’s relations with the Irgun and Lehi. Moreover, there was evidence of growing agency and Haganah counterterrorist activities. Although most of these initiatives remained confined to public denunciations and attendant information operations meant to undermine popular support for the two terrorist organizations, he was sufficiently encouraged by these reports and others of a Haganah ultimatum issued to both groups that they suspend operations to believe that this approach should be allowed to run its course. But what troubled the high commissioner most was the “outrageous suggestions that I have prevented action being taken if intelligence is received previous to incidents occurring”—which Barker also confirmed was inaccurate. Cunningham also scoffed at any suggestion that there was not the fullest and most effective cooperation between the Palestine government and the army. Indeed, the GOC, Cunningham asserted, “is perfectly satisfied with arrangements as they stand.” Nor had Dempsey ever previously complained to him about them. “It must be realized,” the high commissioner pointed out,
that the whole situation regarding terrorist activities has changed. The outrages are now carried out by 2 or 3 men as opposed to formed bodies of the past and operations against them are really a police rather than a military matter. I, at present, strongly object in principle to reprisals or punishments carried out against the people, numbers of whom are opposed to terrorism, unless some connection with an incident can be shown and feel in fact that by alienating further the populace we would break our only feasible weapon for controlling the terrorists.
Barker agreed with him that punitive measures alone would “not end terrorism” but thought them desirable to strengthen troop morale. “It is my immediate policy, therefore,” Cunningham concluded, “to encourage to the greatest possible extent the growing tendency amongst the Jews to deal with the matter themselves.”68
The high commissioner, however, could not let the matter rest. In a second dispatch to Creech Jones later that day, he reiterated his opposition to punitive measures. Citing Ireland during the 1920s and Palestine during the 1930s, Cunningham argued that the “results of such action only serve to alienate if not to send over to the terrorists those elements of the population who are now showing signs, if not of co-operation, yet of taking action themselves with a view to the same end as ourselves.” Although he was sensitive to the issue of troop morale, the high commissioner believed that reprisals would do more harm than good, not only alienating the Yishuv, but imperiling the “imminent political solution to this thorny problem.” Searches of localities in which terrorist attacks occurred were pointless, because the terrorists now regularly traveled great distances by car to carry out their operations. “I am having police methods examined by an expert at this time,” the high commissioner ended his second communication of the day, “to see whether we cannot get some improvement in our hunting of these men and in catching them when on the job. I have always been clear that the best method of dealing with terrorists is to kill them.”69
Montgomery, however, was intent on blaming Creech Jones and Cunningham for the army’s failure to contain terrorism and maintain order in Palestine. “My view is that the lawless elements or terrorists or whatever one likes to call them have almost complete liberty to do what they like,” Montgomery complained to his deputy. Cunningham, he continued,
seems to think that provided we take no excessive action against lawlessness the Jewish Agency and the Hagana will suppress it and restore the peace. He also seems to think that we could not stop lawlessness by offensive action and that any such offensive action on our part would merely make matters worse and would annoy the Jews. I cannot follow such reasoning. It is tantamount to admitting that we can no longer govern Palestine except on sufferance of the Jews which is in fact exactly what is happening in the country today.70
Had Montgomery and Dempsey paused to consider Barker’s perspective on these issues, they might have drawn a different conclusion. Demonstrating an astuteness and political sophistication that his personal communications to Katy Antonius and the crass wording of his nonfraternization order following the King David Hotel bombing belie, the GOC cut immediately to the heart of the matter in his November 21 message to Dempsey. “It is true,” he wrote, “that militarily we are now on defensive and have not got initiative. On [the] other hand we are not at war with Jews as a whole but only with terrorists.” Barker stressed that Cunningham had never stopped him from carrying out searches when a direct connection to a terrorist incident had been established. Although it was true that the high commissioner prohibited army operations of a purely punitive or retaliatory nature, this restriction was justified, the GOC believed, because of the acute difficulty of targeting only that section of the Yishuv responsible for the violence. “As military are not at war with Jews we consequently have hands very much tied for fear of antagonizing the innocent … we cannot therefore exploit our full military potential.” To Barker, the ineluctable center of gravity in any counterterrorism campaign was the political dimension. “Answer to terrorist problem lies largely in political sphere,” he perceptively argued. “No action that can be taken by the military acting [alone] can stop terrorism. It must be in support of some political policy which is not existent at present.” The only reason that the GOC had advocated intensified searches and the levying of fines was indeed, as Cunningham noted, to maintain troop morale.71
This was a remarkable admission on Barker’s part: that military operations in Palestine were designed less to impact the terrorists and prevent attack than to fortify morale. But Montgomery, as well as Dempsey, ignored the GOC’s assessment. Blinded by his personal animus to Cunningham and wedded to the outmoded, heavy-handed tactics that had succeeded during the Arab Rebellion—but were largely irrelevant to the current conflict—Montgomery persisted in blaming Cunningham rather than realizing that the army’s strategy in Palestine was wrong. On November 28 the CIGS left for Palestine intent on confronting Cunningham and resolving the matter of who would prevail in directing the struggle against terrorism in that country—the army or the Palestine administration.72
Montgomery, Dempsey, and Barker met with Cunningham at Government House the following day. A terse, page-and-a-half memorandum records the salient points discussed—and the absence of any agreement. Among the former was a list of five restrictions that the CIGS was convinced the Palestine administration had placed on the army:
(a) No action to be taken to disarm the population. Note. Possession of arms is illegal and is punishable by death.
(b) No offensive action to be undertaken except as a direct result of intelligence information.
(c) No offensive action to be taken after an outrage unless it is considered that there is a definite connection between the perpetrators and the locality concerned.
(d) No major offensive operation to be undertaken without the permission of the High Commissioner.
(e) The immense defensive task laid on the Army, e.g., twelve battalions guarding the railway.
Under the “Final conclusions” section was a statement declaring that the restrictions placed on the army were so profound as to completely undermine military operations in Palestine and render impossible the formulation of a viable plan to crush the illegal Jewish organizations. The army, it read, was therefore cast irrevocably on the “defensive waiting for the next blow.”73
Cunningham insisted that even if the a
rmy was granted the freedom of action that Montgomery sought, its actions “would still be ineffective against the type of terrorism that we are experiencing.” Further, massive arms search and cordon-and-search operations would antagonize a “major section of the population who are in agreement with us on the question of terrorism.” The meeting adjourned with the CIGS’s having the last word. Above Montgomery’s signature appears the statement “It must be clearly understood that at present strong military action is not repeat not being taken to maintain law and order in Palestine.”74
The chasm separating Cunningham and Montgomery boiled down to one critical issue: whether war was to be indiscriminately waged on the Yishuv or specifically directed against the terrorists. Drawing on his experiences during the final years of the Arab Rebellion, the CIGS clung to a strategy of coercion, whereby the military would in essence function as an army of occupation policing a hostile population. The Jewish community would be compelled through hardship, upheaval, and disruption to divulge information on all three of the illegal organizations, with no distinction made between the Haganah, the Irgun, and Lehi. But, as Cunningham repeatedly argued, this was an apples and oranges comparison. The Arab Rebellion was a mass uprising that enjoyed the widespread support of a large majority of that community. The struggle involving the Jewish terrorists was more nuanced. They were a minority element of the Jewish community with limited popular support. Moreover, the best way to defeat them, he believed, was to secure the Yishuv’s support and the Haganah’s assistance—as had been the case with the Saison. The high commissioner also judged the Irgun and Lehi to be far more sophisticated than the Arab rebels of the 1930s; hence they posed a more complex threat. As he later wrote in an article published in International Affairs,
These were true underground movements which had learnt much and indeed had recruited members from the underground movements which had achieved success in Europe during the war. Their murderous attacks were of the tip and run variety carried out after much reconnaissance and preparation; after them, the perpetrators sank back into the population under whose cover they were dispersed. Here was no formation for the soldiers to attack, but furtive individuals probably widely separated and unknown to each other. It seemed to me, therefore, except that soldiers when attacked should inflict the maximum casualties on the attackers, that it was a police rather than a military affair to deal with these movements; moreover, that the only sure method of stamping out this evil was in co-operation with the local population.75
For Cunningham, the fundamental lesson from Britain’s experiences in Ireland and other dependencies beset with violent insurrection was that terrorism could not be defeated without the public’s help. For Montgomery, the problem was that the army had lost the initiative in Palestine because of the civil administration’s interference. To regain it, the army required a free hand to bring to bear the full weight of its coercive powers against the Yishuv.76
With this impasse, the battle for bureaucratic supremacy in Palestine and the clash of individual wills shifted back to London, where, Montgomery wrote in his diary, “all this will be discussed soon by the Defence Committee; the lines will really be whether His Majesty’s Government is to continue to appease the Jews in the hope of reaching a solution or whether it will decide to impose its authority by force.”77
CHAPTER 16
Blunted Bayonets
Looking out across the Valley of Hinnom from Government House to the demolished wing of the King David Hotel, Cunningham pondered why the government was losing its war against terrorism. There were a hundred thousand troops in Palestine, yet the number of terrorist incidents had quadrupled over the past year. Although the high commissioner was unwavering in his conviction that terrorism was best fought by police and not soldiers, like most of his predecessors he had been frustrated by the PPF’s recurrent manpower deficiencies, anemic intelligence capabilities, and uneven performance. Bodies were still being pulled from the rubble at the King David when Cunningham wrote to Hall on August 1 to propose that an outside expert be brought to Palestine to conduct a thorough evaluation of the police force. The person he had in mind was revered as “one of the Empire’s most experienced policemen.” His name was Sir Charles Wickham.1
A decorated veteran of the Boer War, World War I, and the postwar military intervention in Siberia, Wickham had joined the Royal Irish Constabulary in 1920. He served two years as a divisional commander in Ulster before being appointed the first inspector general of the newly created Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). Wickham retired in 1945 at age sixty-six and departed for Athens to oversee the training of Greek police as director of the British Police Mission to that country—a post he held until 1952.2
Wickham’s vast experience of policing violently contentious sectarian communities and countering popularly supported subversive terrorist organizations was thus particularly relevant to Palestine. He arrived on November 16. A colleague named William Moffat, the former head of the RUC’s detective branch, preceded Wickham by three weeks so that he could get an early start on the CID assessment.3
Wickham and Moffat submitted their joint report on December 2. It presented a depressing account of incompetence, inefficiency, and a misconstrued mission. As with the Dowbiggin inquiry following the 1929 riots, and Tegart’s at the height of the Arab Rebellion, the most searing criticism was leveled at the CID.
The report also provided a bleak assessment of Palestine’s current security. In this respect, Wickham’s views corresponded exactly with Montgomery’s—whom he had met with in Jerusalem on November 30. Two small Jewish terrorist organizations, Wickham stated, had single-handedly undermined the government’s prestige, caused untold damage to property and considerable injury and loss of life, thrown the security forces on the defensive, and, perhaps most corrosively, resulted in the withdrawal of police from many of their normal duties. No counterterrorist operation or initiative, he observed, had yet succeeded. In fairness to the police, Wickham noted the immense challenges such situations present. He went so far as to argue that “it is impossible completely to suppress [terrorism] unless perhaps 100 percent of [the terrorists’] demands [are] conceded.” The best that could be expected was to contain the violence, which the police in Palestine had proven manifestly unable to do. According to Wickham, this was because the PPF had lost sight of its core mission and had allowed itself to become militarized to the point where it was neither a fully functioning police force nor an army—but a problematic combination of the two. “If it is agreed that the police should do the policing and the army the fighting,” he argued, “then the role of the police is clear.” Here again, Wickham and Montgomery were in complete accord.4
The problem, as the CIGS had also intuited, was that in direct contravention of the most fundamental tenets of policing, the PPF had distanced itself from the public. This, in turn, had deprived the force of the principal information source upon which all effective police work depends—and especially the intelligence needed to successfully fight terrorism. “Present police methods,” Wickham explained, “are confined in most places to armoured car patrols and a reserve of mobile companies on military lines. An armoured car performs no useful police duty and is no substitute for a foot patrol. Its crew have no contact with the public and cannot use their powers of observation.” Moreover, police prowling the streets concealed in menacing-looking vehicles invariably alienate the public and, in Wickham’s view, bore a profoundly disquieting resemblance to the Gestapo and Nazi model of policing, hence ignoring “the first lesson of a policeman—civility to the public.” The Yishuv’s hostile attitude was of course an enormously complicating factor but no excuse for the PPF to have abandoned the cultivation of good relations with the community. The temptation to resort to retaliatory or punitive measures, Wickham also cautioned—in contrast to Montgomery’s view—would only make a bad situation worse.5
Although Wickham deliberately avoided any direct criticism of the PPF’s leadership, the message impl
icit in his assessment was that the Colonial Office had gravely erred in appointing Lieutenant Colonel William Nicol Gray to succeed Rymer-Jones as inspector general. Gray, a distinguished veteran of the Royal Marines Commandos and an expert in training methods, had seemed an ideal choice. Although Cunningham strongly favored the selection of another experienced policeman at the PPF’s helm, senior Colonial Office officials were convinced that a seasoned military officer would be better. The situation in Palestine, they argued, was unique so far as policing was concerned. The military had already assumed the dominant role in maintaining security, and as long as the new man’s deputy was a long-serving PPF senior officer, a soldier was thought to be the better fit given the need for close coordination and cooperation between the army and the police. Moreover, several recent commissioners of Scotland Yard had proven successful despite having no previous experience in law enforcement. Accordingly, the Colonial Office selected Gray, who had arrived in Palestine in April 1946 and assumed command from Rymer-Jones the following month.6
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