Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  “The feeling of revulsion which affected every member of the Government and Security Forces in Palestine cannot be adequately described,” Dare Wilson recalled of the day when the discovery of the two sergeants’ bloodstained bodies was announced. At 8:30 that evening a police armored car on patrol in Tel Aviv suddenly opened fire on a passing Jewish-owned bus. Although none of the passengers were injured, the incident was sufficient to trigger a two-hour-long shooting spree during which other police armored vehicles indiscriminately fired upon a taxi, two other buses, and two crowded sidewalk cafés. Police officers then descended upon one of the cafés to rob and beat its patrons. And for good measure, a hand grenade was tossed into the other—completely destroying the premises. All told, five Jews were killed and sixteen others wounded. Extensive damage was caused to at least twenty-five Jewish-owned shops.34

  Although such instances of naked vigilantism were comparatively rare in Palestine, both the incident itself and the subsequent efforts of sworn police officers to shield the perpetrators from prosecution illustrate the profound frustration and unmitigated anger that the sergeants’ deaths unleashed. A court of inquiry ordered by Gray, for instance, ran up against a conspiratorial wall of silence that prevented it from charging seven policemen with murder, assault, theft, vandalism, and other illegal acts because crucial evidence had also been willfully destroyed or tampered with.35

  The Irgun’s brazen attack on an RAF billet at the edge of the Jerusalem security zone the following afternoon lent new urgency to the increasingly fraught discussions still under way between Jerusalem and London concerning an appropriate response to the hangings. Gray reported that the security forces were angry and tense, anxiously awaiting word of the government’s decision. Army intelligence similarly called attention to the “cold fury” suffusing the Palestine garrison. Even so, Gray and MacMillan were confident that there would be no further acts of indiscipline such as had occurred in Tel Aviv the previous night. Cunningham agreed, but he nonetheless was fully cognizant of the urgency to implement some singularly dramatic measure—not least because of the intense pressure from London to do so. Accordingly, both he and his Executive Council had concluded that in the absence of a commitment from the Jewish Agency to cooperate fully “in rooting out the terrorists,” the only viable option was to impose martial law on the entire country.36

  The counterterrorism declaration that emerged from the August 1 conference of Jewish leaders confirmed the high commissioner’s worst fears. Although it called upon the Yishuv to “intensify its efforts with all its organized strength to eradicate terrorism,” the statement specifically stipulated that its assistance be given to the “security forces of the Yishuv,” not to the government. With this, Cunningham’s hopes that martial law could be averted dissolved. “The two terrorist groups have grown perceptibly in actual strength during recent months,” he wrote in his monthly report to Creech Jones, “but more significant perhaps is the growing sympathy with which they have come to be regarded (at least until the murder of the kidnapped sergeants) by large elements of the Yishuv.”37

  The high commissioner’s options, however, were far more limited than he realized. Later that same day MacMillan had informed him that despite a ratio of one British soldier for each adult male Jew in Palestine, there were not enough troops to maintain martial law over Tel Aviv, let alone the rest of the country. Moreover, the additional troop reductions currently under review in London might render even this impossible. Cunningham was incredulous. He immediately sought the assurances of both the new Middle Eastern commander, General Sir John Crocker, and Creech Jones that sufficient troops would be kept in Palestine to maintain order and, should a major terrorist outrage or other contingency require them, additional forces would be made available.38

  Neither man, however, had the authority to make that commitment. With the demobilization timetable already fifteen months behind schedule, the Labour government was determined to avoid any further delay in the planned release of troops from service. Britain’s precarious economic condition simply would not allow it. The cabinet, Creech Jones informed Cunningham, would therefore strongly oppose any proposal that might necessitate the dispatch of additional forces to Palestine—especially in view of the fact that only hours before, it had set a deadline of March 1948 to shrink Britain’s overseas military commitments by a further 200,000 men. With the Royal Navy’s budget having been “already cut almost to the bone,” The Daily Telegraph observed, the only remaining cost savings were to be found in reducing army and RAF expenditure. “Palestine remains the great question mark,” its columnist Lieutenant General H. C. Martin opined. “It is here, above all, that economies are desirable.”39

  Cunningham and Creech Jones now considered all the possible alternatives to martial law. The high commissioner had just acceded to the military’s long-standing request to be granted the authority to punitively demolish any structure from which a terrorist act was committed or where the families of a suspected terrorist dwelled. But neither he nor MacMillan nor Gurney nor anyone else in authority had any fresh ideas, other than martial law throughout the country.40

  This was the option that Crocker favored. He was convinced that martial law was the only practicable means to blunt the terrorist offensive and demonstrate to the Yishuv “the wisdom of their assisting the Government.” During the preceding seventy-two hours a new round of terrorist attacks had struck Palestine’s railways, among other targets, thus increasing the pressure on both the Palestine administration and the army to take decisive action.41

  While the Palestine administration and its military counterparts dithered and debated, the Irgun’s propagandists were busy trying to demoralize the security forces and undermine confidence in both their political masters and their commanders. “You did not expect it—dirty oppressors?” a Voice of Fighting Zion broadcast crowed on August 3. “But we warned you. We warned you day in and day out, that just as we smashed your whips so would we uproot your gallows—or, if we did not succeed in uprooting them, we would set up next to your gallows, gallows for you … And,” it ominously concluded, “we have not yet settled our hanging accounts with you, Nazo-British enslavers.” A pamphlet distributed shortly afterward took a slightly different tack. Addressed to enlisted men, it sought to sow dissension between them and their officers by comparing the commutation of the flogging sentences the previous December, when British officers had been seized, with the decision to proceed with the death sentences on the Acre raiders when the lives of two mere noncommissioned officers were at stake.42

  All these developments inevitably raised new concerns about the safety of British military and civilian personnel in Palestine. “I am disturbed at the comparative ease with which Jewish terrorists ‘pick up’ our people,” the secretary of state for war, Frederick Bellenger, wrote to the VCIGS on August 4. But Simpson replied that there was nothing more that could reasonably be done beyond the stringent personal security procedures already in place. This was also the message that Cunningham conveyed to Creech Jones hours earlier. “Short of a withdrawal of branches of the Administration, or a reduction of Military and Police activities which would themselves endanger the security position generally, I do not see how the safety of British subjects could be enhanced under present conditions.” Even placing the entire country under martial law, he admitted, would not completely eliminate the threat of terrorists again seizing British soldiers and civilians as hostages.43

  Stymied at every turn and desperate to do something to assert the government’s authority, Cunningham decided to invoke the Emergency Regulations and order the detention without trial of people merely suspected of terrorist sympathies. A long-standing plan to arrest leading Revisionist Party figures and outlaw its youth wing, Betar, was hastily put into effect. Among the thirty-five names on the lists drawn up by the CID were Israel Rokach and Oved Ben Ami, the mayors of Tel Aviv and Netanya, respectively, who, Cunningham explained to Creech Jones, were to be interned on the grou
nds that they “are known to be able to contact the terrorists.”44

  Shortly after 3:00 a.m. on August 5 the roundups began. Awakened in the dead of night, bleary-eyed officials and party functionaries were dragged off to indefinite imprisonment at Latrun. Many of them had only days earlier lent their support to the Jewish Agency’s antiterrorism manifesto. Gale in fact had recently praised Ben Ami both publicly and in his classified after-action report for the assistance that the mayor had provided to the First Infantry during the search for the two sergeants. “Search all you please,” Ben Ami remarked as he was taken from his home, “all that you will find is 20 years of close cooperation with the British.” The government announced an additional security measure later that day. Henceforth, all Palestinian Jews were forbidden to leave the country until further notice.45

  Whatever hopes that Cunningham might have harbored of sending a powerful deterrent message to the terrorists, however, were dashed that same afternoon when an Irgun bomb wrecked the Labour Department office in downtown Jerusalem, killing three British constables. A new series of attacks followed the next day. Six separate incidents, some perpetrated by Lehi, occurred on August 7. In the period leading up to the release of the UNSCOP report at the end of the month, the Irgun and Lehi were clearly intent on depicting Britain’s inability to maintain order in Palestine through a dramatic show of the terrorist organizations’ strength.46

  Cunningham once more pleaded with Creech Jones to ensure that nothing was done to decrease troop strength in Palestine so that martial law would remain a viable option. “This measure now seems the only shot left in our locker,” he explained. “I cannot guarantee that the situation will not deteriorate to such a degree that Civil Government will break down and as you know it is by no means clear how much longer I can keep the Civil Service working under conditions such as exist at present.”47

  Montgomery now flew to Cairo to confer with Crocker and MacMillan about the worsening situation. The consensus that they came to was disheartening. Despite a hundred-thousand-man garrison, there were simply too few troops in Palestine to impose martial law over the entire country. Even a far more modest operation applied to only a geographically limited area, Crocker concluded, was beyond the capacity of the existing forces in Palestine. Accordingly, he now reversed himself and argued that martial law should be avoided if at all possible. Its application even to one location only, the Middle East commander had concluded, would dangerously impact ongoing antiterrorist operations and impinge on routine security duties in addition to diverting units from their main priority—the defense of military installations, the guarding of the rail lines, and the protection of convoys. “Embarking on a line of action which we had not the military strength to see through,” MacMillan agreed, “would be fatal.”48

  It was of course not so long ago that senior commanders in London, Cairo, and Jerusalem had all touted martial law as the ultimate panacea to Britain’s security problems in Palestine. That it was now dismissed and disparaged in equal measure represented nothing less than a stunning volte-face in the military’s thinking. Indeed, for all intents and purposes, martial law was now completely off the table—a point that Trafford Smith reiterated to his colleagues in the Colonial Office on August 12. “The imposition of ‘martial law proper,’ ” he minuted,

  would be tantamount to throwing in our administrative hand in Palestine just at the moment when the United Nations were about to take a decision. Our prestige would suffer, and in particular, that administrative machine, which is now still running, with whatever difficulties and dangers, would probably suffer irremediable damage.

  Thus the political objections seem to me very strong … The definite view now expressed by the War Office is that the imposition of martial law is not practicable [which] rules out any threat of it.49

  Events in Britain, however, had both superseded and rendered irrelevant these discussions about martial law—much less any other attempt to stabilize Palestine’s worsening security. The reaction back home to the hangings had been pyretic and violent.

  Emblazoned across the front pages of newspapers were photographs of the gruesome death scene, leaving little to the imagination. Describing the lynching as an act of “medieval barbarism,” the Daily Express fumed that “not in the black annals of Nazi wickedness is there a tale of outrage more vile.” The more staid Times was equally unrestrained, commenting that “the bestialities practised by the Nazis themselves could go no farther.” The damage done to the Zionist cause, it lamented, was incalculable. Anglo-American relations over Palestine suffered as well, with the Daily Mail pointing an accusatory finger at the “American women whose dollars helped to buy the rope” used to execute Martin and Paice. “The Palestine situation was poisoning relations between the United States and Britain,” Bevin warned Lewis Douglas, the American ambassador to Britain, a few days later.50

  Demonstrations protesting the sergeants’ deaths quickly turned violent in both Liverpool and Glasgow on Friday, August 1. The windows of Jewish homes and shops were broken, and in Liverpool a synagogue was vandalized with slogans proclaiming “Death to all Jews” painted on its walls. The disturbances resumed the following evening when arsonists torched a Jewish-owned furniture factory. A Jewish cemetery was also vandalized, and the windows of more Jewish shops were broken. Following the arrest of four men on vandalism charges, a mob gathered outside the Liverpool police headquarters and hurled stones at the building. Police reinforcements had to be summoned from around the city, and multiple baton charges were required to disperse the crowd. Meanwhile, the unrest had spread to London, Manchester, Birmingham, Hull, and Brighton. Vandals damaged a synagogue in south London and pillaged a Jewish-owned millinery shop in Brighton, while police in Manchester had to contend with menacing crowds in three separate parts of that city.51

  It was unfortunate that Monday, August 4, was a bank holiday as trouble again flared in Liverpool—for the first time during daylight hours. Police recorded over a hundred acts of vandalism in addition to two more arson cases, including a second fire that completely destroyed the damaged furniture factory set alight on Saturday. There was more violence in Manchester again, where troublemakers brought traffic in the city center to a standstill. The sound of shattered glass could again be heard throughout the evening both there and in neighboring Salford.52

  Army intelligence in Palestine now feared that the “rising wave of anti-Semitism in England” might incite renewed attacks on the Yishuv by disgruntled soldiers and police in Palestine. Their concern was not unfounded. On the night of August 29, a Jewish settlement in the Shomron bloc was once again subjected to sustained indiscriminate gunfire from a nearby army camp—this time killing a nine-year-old child.53

  As inured to the almost daily reports of the death and deprivation suffered by the security forces in Palestine as the British public was, the sergeants’ brutal execution had made a profound impression on the nation’s psyche. “All home comment on that deed,” the renowned British Middle East expert Elizabeth Monroe explained, “is different in tone from that on earlier terrorist acts, many of which caused greater loss of life—for instance, the blowing up of the officers’ club or of the King David Hotel.” This was precisely the point that Gurney, who was then in London, had sought to impress on Creech Jones. “I have tried to get it across to the Secretary of State,” he told Cunningham, “that the two hangings, though more spectacular, are really no worse than the murders that go on every day or will go on, so long as Jewish denunciations stop short of calling for help to the Police.”54

  But this was not how either the public or the press in Britain regarded the slayings. For both, the murders seemed to demonstrate the futility of the situation Britain faced in Palestine by attempting to satisfy the nationalist demands of both Arab and Jew while reaping only the ingratitude and opprobrium of each. “It is time the Government made up its mind to leave Palestine,” an editorial in the left-leaning Manchester Guardian declared on August 1, “not o
nly because we have utterly failed to find a solution but because we cannot afford to stay there. Palestine is already a Jewish tragedy; it must not become also a British disaster.” Nothing short of the immediate abrogation and surrender of the League of Nations mandate was therefore required. “These latest murders are too much,” the conservative Daily Telegraph agreed. “Both assassination and atrophy must be stopped in Palestine, and stopped quickly.” For The Economist, partition was the only solution—“not primarily because it is in the best interests of the Jews or the Arabs, or of the international community in general, it is simply because it is in the best interests of the British.”55

  The opposition Conservative Party now insisted that Palestine be placed on the House of Commons’ agenda before it recessed until autumn. A visibly angry Anthony Eden successfully forced the issue, and a short debate was scheduled for the last day that the House would sit, on August 12. As it happened, the debate took place a day earlier—and lasted for nearly five hours. The Labour government was assailed by backbenchers and Tories alike. Creech Jones attempted to dampen the furor by pointing out that when Britain had in February solicited the UN’s assistance, “we were all conscious, I think, that a very difficult period lay ahead of us before we could expect a decision or recommendation from the United Nations.” Nevertheless, he conceded, the sharp rise in violence that followed had exceeded every expectation. The effect, the colonial secretary was forced to admit, is that “among the British public there is fierce questioning as to the burden and cost to Britain, and the tragedy involved by Britain continuing to shoulder this international liability.”56