Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  Although Wickham might have been reluctant to criticize the new inspector general, Montgomery showed no such hesitation. The thirty-seven-year-old former farmer and surveyor was not even a professional soldier, the CIGS sneered, let alone an experienced policeman. As events would shortly prove, Montgomery’s reservations were well-founded.7

  Wickham identified the PPF’s continuing personnel shortages and the poor quality of recruits entering the force as having utterly compromised its effectiveness. With the end of the war, young men in Britain reporting to fulfill their National Service obligation had the option of enlisting in the PPF. Although by July 1946 this change had resulted in an impressive surge of 13,500 requests for more information about service in the PPF, for one reason or another the majority of prospective candidates were found unsuitable. This proved to be a mixed blessing in another key respect: although the pool of potential recruits certainly was expanded, they were younger, less mature, and considerably less experienced than the types of men who had joined the force in the past. Further, whatever compensation might have been provided by a rigorous training regimen had been negated by the manpower shortage that in turn resulted in a reduction of the time allocated to training and instruction from six months to just one.8

  The British section nonetheless remained woefully undermanned—functioning with half as many police as were authorized. Moreover, from January to October 1946, nearly 500 British policemen had returned home upon the expiration of their contracts, with an additional 518 men having simply resigned and left the force of their own accord.9

  The dearth of experienced policemen had, in turn, created two more problems. One was the lack of knowledgeable, seasoned instructors, thus accounting for the poor training that Wickham thought recruits received. Instruction was so cursory, Wickham reported, that everyone who had passed through the training depot in the past year or so would need to be brought back and properly trained. The second problem was that there were too few veteran police left in the PPF to guide and mentor their younger, inexperienced colleagues once they had completed training. In fact, nearly half of the British section had served in the PPF for less than a year, and no more than a quarter had been in uniform for more than five years. Morale had suffered commensurately.10

  Wickham was unreservedly critical of the Police Mobile Force. It epitomized to him precisely what was wrong with the PPF. The brainchild of the previous inspector general, Rymer-Jones, the PMF had been conceived two years earlier as an elite, rapid-reaction, counterterrorist force that would also be available to support other police operations when additional manpower was required. It received an initial infusion of £2 million to facilitate both recruitment and construction of special depots at Jenin and Sarona. The PMF had also been given priority in the allocation of weapons, equipment, and vehicles from military stocks.

  The elite force’s authorized strength was fixed at two thousand men, and volunteers were solicited from serving officers and enlisted men in the regular army. At the PMF training depot, they were provided with detailed instruction in the handling of heavier weapons than the revolvers ordinarily carried by police in Palestine and also in commando tactics not normally associated with police operations. Wearing army khaki battle dress and with nearly fifty armored vehicles at its disposal, the PMF resembled a military armored formation more than a British colonial constabulary. According to U.S. intelligence, the PMF was conceived by Rymer-Jones to be “capable of coping with any situation that might arise.” In this respect, he hoped that the mobile force would eliminate the understrength PPF’s dependence on the army and thus pass the initiative back to the police.11

  But in reality the PMF neither fulfilled any of the lofty goals set for it nor did it eradicate the PPF’s reliance on the army. Like the mainstream force’s British section, the PMF was also chronically undermanned. Rather than the nearly two-thousand-man force organized into eight companies originally envisaged, it possessed fewer than a thousand men divided into four companies—each of which was deficient some forty personnel. Moreover, its standard of training, so far as Montgomery could tell, was pitiful. The PMF, he believed, “could never be any better than third class soldiers.” In fact, by 1946 the paucity of suitable volunteers for the PMF had necessitated a lowering of the minimum age requirement to join. Hence, 75 percent of recruits that year were between the ages of eighteen and nineteen with a commensurate lack of both maturity and experience of prior police or military service. Nearly a decade earlier, while in command of the Eighth Division in Haifa at the end of the Arab Rebellion, the future CIGS had expressed similar concerns about the police. He had warned that if these problems were not corrected, troops in Palestine would inevitably remain saddled with internal security duties—which is exactly what had happened.12

  Because the PMF had clearly failed its primary mission of reversing the PPF’s dependence on the military, Wickham questioned both its entire raison d’être and the value it brought to the police force as a whole. The tasks routinely assigned to the PMF—static guard duties, convoy escorts, armored car patrols, and manning roadblocks—he believed could be better performed by regular police. In perhaps his most damning critique of the PMF, Wickham explained that “the personnel would make a better contribution to the common cause if employed as police proper in stations when at least each man would perform daily some active and useful police function.”

  Implementing this change would thus free personnel to perform proper police work, such as walking a beat. This meshed with the thinking of the CIGS, who similarly argued that the PPF required a complete overhaul and reorganization to transform it back into “a proper civil police force doing its proper job” as opposed to the “quite ineffective” force it had become.13

  The remedial measures that Wickham advocated, he readily conceded, “amount to a reversal of the role of the force from a military to a police conception.” This could be quickly accomplished, he argued, simply by abolishing the PMF and transferring its personnel to the regular police. Given the continued difficulties in attracting qualified recruits, Wickham saw no other option to compensate for the British section’s acute manpower shortage. The restructured police establishment, he believed, would effectively ameliorate the conditions that had contributed to the force’s operational and morale problems. In conclusion Wickham reiterated, “Police are civilians and are extremely jealous of their civilian status. They resent a military atmosphere, military discipline or military units where their efficiency inevitably must be judged as soldiers and not as police. They joined to do police duty and not to be soldiers.” Pursuant to Wickham’s recommendations, the PMF was gradually disbanded and its personnel eventually transferred to regular police duties. The target date set for the completion of this process was February 1, 1947.14

  Moffat’s evaluation of the CID was nearly as long as Wickham’s report on the entire PPF. The problems that afflicted the uniformed branch also plagued its plainclothes division: a scarcity of experienced, properly trained detectives; thoroughly inadequate training; and the heavy burden shouldered by its British personnel. The main problem was that terrorism, surprisingly, did not appear to be a priority for the CID as a whole and was instead considered to be solely the provenance of its political department. Moffat thought this was wrong because, in his experience, the entire police intelligence apparatus needed to be mobilized to effectively contend with any terrorist threat. Moffat also urged that the salaries of CID detectives be increased to ensure the retention of these highly trained personnel. These changes were absolutely imperative, he argued, if the CID were to have even “a reasonable chance of handling the terrorism problem effectively.”15

  Moffat also found the British CID officers’ lack of knowledge of the Hebrew language appalling. Only three senior British detectives, for instance, could speak and understand Hebrew, and less than 6 percent of the entire force had achieved even the most basic competency in the language (by comparison, well over a quarter had obtained the basic A
rabic qualification). Perhaps the most damning aspect of Moffat’s critique was his recommendation that CID personnel be sent back to England for training at Scotland Yard or the headquarters of another experienced metropolitan British police force. “In London, at any rate,” he caustically noted, “there would also be opportunities for acquiring a knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic.”16

  All these problems led Moffat to conclude that greater reliance must be placed on the department’s Palestinian personnel. But this recommendation in particular was anathema to British CID officers in the Jewish Affairs section. Because the loyalty of Jews serving in the PPF was suspect, the CID’s policy was to bar Jewish detectives from serving in the unit. Nonetheless, Moffat stressed that in the course of his inquiries he had yet to encounter any British officers who believed that the police force could function effectively without the contributions made by Jewish police and detectives; in fact, he said, many had praised the work of their Jewish colleagues. Wickham made the same point about the uniform branch in his report.17

  Moffat was similarly astonished by the antiquated and thoroughly inadequate condition of the CID’s forensic capabilities, especially the police force’s laboratory. Both required prompt attention, including the provision of suitable facilities and much-needed upgrades to state-of-the-art technologies. By themselves, all these changes would not significantly improve the CID’s intelligence capability, Moffat believed, unless they were accompanied by a drastic reordering of the department’s priorities. He thought that the CID was not aggressive enough in going out into the field to obtain intelligence and was especially troubled by the department’s poor handling of informants. Moffat specifically urged that more money be allocated to this crucial aspect of intelligence acquisition. Out of a total budget of £6 million for the 1946–47 fiscal year, for instance, only a paltry £50,000 had been allocated to informant payments.18

  Finally, both Moffat and Wickham commented on the low wages paid to British and Palestinian officers alike, the absence of sufficient incentives given the dangers that service in the PPF entailed, and the equally miserly pay scales for officers with specialized skills.19

  The Colonial Office had already successfully appealed to the Treasury to redress the wide variation in salary between the PPF and the metropolitan police forces. But even so, the crown agents responsible for police recruitment reported in December 1946 that they were able to enlist just over seven hundred men—a figure nearly two hundred short of their target quota. This was despite significantly increased outreach efforts, including the production of a glossy brochure titled Palestine Police as a Career and a nineteen-minute film, Palestine Police, that the Palestine government had commissioned army filmmakers to produce; the film was widely shown throughout the U.K. during 1946, especially at secondary schools and boys’ clubs. The situation was sufficiently desperate that the inspector general was prepared, if necessary, to send up to twenty British officers—whom he could hardly spare—back to the U.K. to take charge of recruitment.20

  The 1946 holiday season brought to Palestine little bonhomie, peace, or goodwill toward men. December had begun badly when, twice in two days, army vehicles struck Irgun road mines. One incident had claimed the lives of four soldiers. This brought the total number of military casualties for 1946 to forty-five killed and ninety-three wounded in addition to the deaths of twenty-eight policemen and injuries to thirty-five others. To the beleaguered Palestine government, it was also becoming clear that, reflexive expressions of reproach apart, the Jewish Agency was unwilling to do anything more against terrorism. As Cunningham himself understood, nothing short of a “radical gesture on immigration” by the government would secure the Jewish Agency’s cooperation.21

  Nonetheless, on the afternoon following the latest land mine incident, Cunningham summoned Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, a member of the Histadrut Executive, to Government House to plead again for the Yishuv’s assistance. Since Arthur Creech Jones had taken office nearly two months earlier, the government had freed the remaining Operation Agatha detainees, lifted the order banning Ben-Gurion and Sneh from returning to Palestine, and allowed Jewish illegal immigrants who had been deported to Cyprus back into Palestine so long as their number did not exceed the legal monthly immigration quota of fifteen hundred persons. Yet the killings of soldiers and police continued without respite—undercutting Creech Jones’s attempts to accommodate the Yishuv’s various demands and Cunningham’s efforts to restrain the army from instituting the harsh measures that Montgomery and other senior commanders demanded. The meeting ended inconclusively, however, with Ben-Zvi only promising to convey to his colleagues the high commissioner’s concerns.22

  Ben-Zvi was back at Government House two days later. A terrorist attack had occurred the morning after he and Cunningham had met when an Irgun truck bomb exploded inside the massive Sarafand army camp, killing two soldiers and wounding thirty others. This had been followed that same evening by a series of Irgun attacks on military targets throughout Jerusalem. Alarmed by this escalation of terrorist activity, both the Jewish Agency Executive and the Vaad Le’umi had quickly issued yet another statement denouncing terrorism. But such measures, Cunningham complained to Ben-Zvi, had no impact on the terrorists, and actions as well as words were therefore required. The Jewish Agency leader was again noncommittal. However, in his report to Creech Jones of the meeting, Cunningham expressed satisfaction that both the Irgun and Lehi had succumbed to Jewish Agency pressure and agreed to suspend operations for the duration of the Zionist Congress, which was to begin four days hence in Basel, Switzerland. He even hazarded a cautious prediction that this demonstration of the agency’s ability to influence both groups might yet translate into something more tangible than its current ineffectual policy of “re-education and ostracism.”23

  No such optimism, however, remained in Britain. The past several months of heightened violence and bloodshed in Palestine had exhausted the patience of the British public. Constituent letters asked MPs why, more than a year after World War II had ended, British boys were still in uniform, dying and suffering for what was already a lost cause. “So Monty leaves Palestine,” one diarist, enlisted as part of the nationwide Mass Observation project to record the contemporaneous views of ordinary Britons, wrote on December 3. “I had hoped he’d stay a bit and do something definite,” this forty-four-year-old Sheffield housewife continued,

  as it seems we just go on and on there without doing a thing to get matters straight.

  As more and more lads are killed there, I begin to wish we had started the war a bit later, so that Hitler would have exterminated a few more Jews. All very well for good Jews to write to the papers saying ALL Jews aren’t bad—oh yeah? Why don’t the good Jews, then, use their influence with the bad Jews? Our benevolent attitude doesn’t seem to stop their murderous deeds.

  Though offensive even as a diary entry, such views were not isolated. Morale reports of units serving in Palestine that December evidence similar sentiments. “The feeling of all ranks in Palestine,” a typical entry relates, “was one of loathing and contempt for all Jews.”24

  Dempsey’s patience had also been sapped. The lesson he drew was that only outright coercion of the Yishuv would succeed. Montgomery agreed completely; it was also the Foreign Office’s position. “I do not agree that stronger action would ‘further alienate the populace,’ ” Harold Beeley, Bevin’s adviser on Palestine, noted with respect to Wickham’s report. “There is no hope that the Jewish population, or any part of it, will actively cooperate with the Administration against terrorism until they are convinced that the Administration itself means business. Sooner or later a strong police becomes unavoidable, unless we are to evacuate Palestine altogether.”25

  A military court sitting in Jerusalem had recently provided exactly the type of stern measure that Beeley believed was required to bring the Yishuv to heel. On December 11 it had convicted Abraham Kimchin, a sixteen-year-old Irgun fighter who had been arrested during the botched robbery of t
he Jaffa branch of the Ottoman Bank in September, of illegally discharging a firearm and possessing both that weapon and five rounds of ammunition; all three charges were capital offenses. In view of Kimchin’s age, however, the court instead imposed sentences for the first offense of eighteen years’ imprisonment and eighteen strokes of the cane with an additional twelve years in jail for the second and third.26

  With the indelible image of whips wielded by Nazi storm troopers and snarling concentration camp guards still fresh in the minds of Jews everywhere, the British had inadvertently handed the Irgun a public relations gift—an issue that elicited widespread condemnation among even those who had no time for the organization and abhorred its tactics. Although flogging had not been part of the Ottoman penal code, it had been adopted for politically related offenses in the final months of the Arab Rebellion, when another British military court had imposed a similar penalty on a fourteen-year-old Arab boy found in possession of a handgun. A Jewish youth convicted in 1940 of charges stemming from a disorderly protest march in Tel Aviv appears to have been the last person to have received this punishment for a politically motivated offense. The caning sentence imposed on Kimchin was therefore meant to send a powerful and unmistakable message to the restive Yishuv.27