by Gavin Scott
Now, with the possibility of leaving France tantalisingly close, the prospect of capture began to loom large. As he saw the entrance to the ferry ahead of him, he glanced in the mirror and saw a police car a hundred yards behind.
For a split second the instinct to flee flooded through him and he was tempted to jam his foot on the accelerator, but he mastered it and pulled into the kerb to let the police car pass – and sure enough it raced obliviously into the distance. He realised he had stopped beside a bureau de poste and glanced at his watch: he just had time. And this might be his last chance. He decided to take the risk.
Inside the post office he used the thick pencil attached to a grubby piece of string to compose a telegram to Gillian, care of the United Nations Organisation Translation Bureau, telling her he was fine, that he was headed back to Britain and would tell her the full story when he could. He hesitated for a moment before signing the telegram Love, Duncan. As he handed it in another man came into the post office, and as he turned away from the counter he saw it was a gendarme. As their eyes met Forrester nodded politely and walked past him, cursing himself for having risked everything to send a message he didn’t really have to send, a message which might be misunderstood, a message which quite conceivably might result in him being taken off the ferry in handcuffs before he ever left France.
And then the night’s sense of freedom returned to him, and he felt the tension drain away. He had wanted – no, he had to admit, needed – to reach out to Gillian Lytton. He had wanted to write the words Love, Duncan. He had wanted to, and he had done it.
He was a free man.
To his relief the car restarted easily, he reached the ferry in good time, and drove aboard unmolested. Half an hour later he was in the bar, looking out at the estuary of the Gironde, and letting the best brandy the barman could provide slide down his throat. Then he stretched out on a bench and fell sound asleep.
* * *
As he slept word reached Foreign Minister Georges Bidault in Paris of the explosion in the dock at Sète and the arrest of the two would-be British saboteurs, and Bidault invited the British Foreign Secretary to visit him for talks which perfectly exemplified the phrase un mauvais quart d’heure.
Bevin knew that the French, or some of the French, had been secretly assisting the escaping Jews, and resented it, but he also knew he could not admit to authorising sabotage operations on French territory. He asked if the two men had claimed to be working for the British government, and was told to his relief that they had said they were employed by a private organisation based in New York called Industrialists International. How long this cover story would last he did not know, but it would do for the time being. He stalled, obfuscated, and promised to make inquiries, but the main point was that he was no longer in a position to insist the French detain the blockade runner. He tried, of course, and through sheer force of personality nearly prevailed – but while he and Bidault argued, Doran Arontowitz decided to try the almost impossible feat of getting the President Garfield out of Sète’s intricate harbour without either pilot or tugboat. Bernie Cohn lowered himself from the ship into the harbour, swam to the mole and slipped the stern lines from the bollards until only a single strand held the President Garfield to the shores of France. Then, back aboard, he axed through that last wire and Arontowitz ordered the engines to be started. At which point the real drama began.
The President Garfield had to rotate herself ninety degrees to starboard to get out of her berth – immediately followed by a hundred and twenty degree turn, with the opposite side of the basin directly ahead and any number of small boats clustered under her bow and stern. To say nothing of a large area of shallow water to starboard.
It would have been difficult enough with tugs, but without them it was almost impossible, and suddenly the President Garfield’s bow was just yards away from the far side of the basin. With a collision imminent Arontowitz had to order the engines full astern and within seconds the ship slewed into the shallows and ran aground. It was full daylight by then and anyone on shore could see that blockade runner was making a break for freedom and take whatever action was required to stop her.
Arontowitz, knowing he faced disaster, now took an enormous risk. The engines were designed to run at a hundred and five revolutions per minute, generating two and a half thousand horsepower. To try to force the ship free he ordered the engineer to kick that up to a hundred and ten revolutions. Terrible vibrations began to run through the vessel from stem to stern, but she stayed stuck.
Arontowitz then ordered a hundred and fifteen revolutions, and as the water seethed and frothed beneath her the entire ship began to shake as if it was experiencing a seizure. But at last, like some Biblical miracle, her propeller dug into the mud and her bow began to swing to the right – and suddenly she was free and sliding past the Saint-Louis lighthouse, along the length of the Epi de l’Est and into the open Mediterranean.
Packed below decks, the men, women and children began to cheer. Half an hour later Arontowitz ordered the name President Garfield to be painted out, and replaced with the ship’s new designation.
It had become the Exodus, and its voyage would change the course of history.
* * *
From the moment Forrester stepped off the ferry and back onto English soil things seemed to fall into place. The Citroën started again smoothly, the passport officials did no more than glance at his new documents, and the London road was almost empty as he speeded through the night. London itself seemed asleep as Forrester drove through its empty streets, and not long after midnight he was lugging the radio transmitter into the Foreign Office to present to a surprised night duty officer. When he gave Lanchester as his reference the man picked up the phone, spoke briefly and then listened hard. Forrester watched his expression closely: he knew the man’s face would reveal at once whether Forrester was to be placed under immediate arrest.
But when the duty officer put the phone down and turned back to Forrester he was still perfectly cheerful and asked him politely to go up to the third floor and take the radio set with him. He had not been expecting this, but of course if an operation had gone wrong in France it was not surprising Toby Lanchester was working overnight.
In fact, it seemed as if the entire Foreign Office was on duty, and the first people he saw as he reached the third floor were Crispin Priestley and Richard Thornham. He had expected, at the very least, that they would look at him askance, and indeed it was clear that they were furious – but their anger was not directed at him.
“Bloody Broadway!” said Priestley as he came up the stairs. “Trust them to screw it up.”
“We should have known,” said Thornham, “as soon as they codenamed it ‘Embarrass’.”
“I didn’t mind the codename,” said Priestley, “but they don’t seem to have grasped that the idea was to embarrass the Jews, not HMG.” He turned to Forrester as though he had last seen him five minutes ago. “Hello, old chap. What have you got there? It looks awfully heavy.”
“A transmitter the SIS boys managed to lose in France,” said Forrester, picking up the mood. “I just got it out before the gendarmerie got their hands on it.”
“Oh my God,” said Thornham. “Dealing with Six is like handing British foreign policy to a bunch of schoolboys. What were you doing in France, anyway? The last time we saw you was in the bar at the Waldorf Astoria.”
“Long story,” said Forrester. “And I really ought to tell it to Lanchester first. Besides, this bloody thing is far too big to stand around chatting with idlers like you.”
And then he was in the operations room, and it seemed as if half the Foreign Office was working the phones. Toby Lanchester looked from Forrester to the radio and shook his head.
“I can’t believe those idiots,” he said. “Thank goodness there was a grown-up about. Put the damn thing down and come and talk to me.”
At least the Foreign Office, it seemed, had not yet realised that the man who was really responsible
for the night’s disaster was Forrester.
As he gave Lanchester his carefully edited version of events, Forrester gradually discovered what lay behind the operation, though he didn’t have the full story until some time later. It seemed that earlier that year, as the number of Jewish refugees being smuggled into Palestine increased, MI6 chief Stewart Menzies had responded to a proposal “for action to deter ship’s masters and crews from engaging in illegal Jewish immigration and traffic”.
Among his suggestions was a programme for either sabotaging would-be blockade runners to prevent them from sailing, or disabling them after they left port by intimidating crews, tampering with water supplies, poisoning food, starting fires and attaching limpet mines. Ex-Special Operations Executive agents were to be recruited for the job, and given various cover as businessmen, holidaymakers and wealthy travellers enjoying yachting holidays in the Mediterranean. If they were caught they were to say either that they were working for a shadowy Muslim organisation called The Defenders of Arab Palestine or a fanatical anti-communist American group called Industrialists International that was apparently bent on preventing Marxist Jews from getting into Palestine.
Menzies’ paper had horrified the Foreign Office, where the Eastern Department said actions like this might be justified during wartime, but were unacceptable in times of peace – on top of which they were far too likely to be discovered.
But the Secret Service now had the bit between its teeth, and when Menzies met with representatives of the armed forces (who had to deal with the illegal immigrants when they landed in Palestine) and the Colonial Office (always oriented to keeping unruly imperial subjects in order), the Foreign Office was eventually persuaded to agree to a limited campaign, known as Operation Embarrass, though they insisted no one should be killed and ships should not be disabled after sailing, food or water was not to be tampered with and arson attacks would only be permitted when the ships were empty.
There was some dissatisfaction among the ranks of the Secret Intelligence Service at these restrictions, but a unit was set up at their Broadway headquarters opposite St James’ Park Underground Station, operatives were recruited and a dedicated communications system, codenamed Ocean, was set up to co-ordinate activities. It was one of these Ocean transmitters that Forrester had successfully brought back to England.
In fact despite Foreign Office fears, Operation Embarrass had at first, from the point of view of Her Majesty’s government, gone very well. Would-be blockade runners in several Italian ports had been blown up before sailing and though the limpet mines were of British origin, so many of them had been dropped to resistance groups during the war it was impossible to prove when and how they had been provided.
Sir Jack Casement had been asked, while he was in New York on aviation business, to meet with various American tycoons to give some semblance of reality to the cover organisation Industrialists International. Apparently he had found no difficulty in finding powerful figures in the world of business who were both anti-communist and anti-Semitic, and indeed the organisation had begun to take on a life of its own.
But then the President Garfield had successfully slipped out of New York and the SIS, pointing out that the ship had the capacity to carry more refugees than had ever entered Palestine at any one time, pressed for the chance to disable it. Because Bevin was at that moment in France, however, in delicate negotiations with the French, the Foreign Office had firmly said no. At which point a series of coded messages had gone out to British agents up and down the coast, some of which, apparently, had failed to get through.
Which meant that Forrester, far from being interrogated as to his exact role in the affair, was praised for keeping a key piece of evidence of British involvement out of French hands. In the circumstances, he decided not to mention the fact that he was still in possession of a slightly damaged 1939 Citroën Traction Avant, and indeed nobody gave the car a thought. He was warned, though, not to hang about in the foreseeable future in the vicinity of Broadway House, and especially not to accept any invitation to visit the offices of Sir Stewart Menzies, however welcomingly the famous green light over his office door was blinking.
If Forrester had left Sète feeling like a free man, he left the Foreign Office in the early hours of that morning, when most of the political damage from the affair seemed to have been contained, with a sensation of being truly liberated.
* * *
For the first time in his life, instead of consigning himself to the tender mercies of the Great Western Railway, Forrester drove back to Oxford – and when he got there took the Citroën straight to a garage specialising in what they enticingly called “Continental Models”. When Jock, the head mechanic, said that it would take some time to find replacements for the busted windows, Forrester said he had no objection. In fact, if the Citroën had to stay tucked away in the back of Jock’s workshop for some time to come, that seemed to him entirely satisfactory.
With that piece of business out of the way he walked through the city back to the college, left a message at the Porter’s Lodge for the Master announcing his return, climbed the stairs to his rooms, got into bed and fell fast asleep.
As the Exodus ploughed its way across the Mediterranean towards Palestine.
* * *
Huge navy kettles were used to heat up barley soup to feed the thousands of hungry mouths aboard the ship, but the staple diet was a glutinous mixture of beef, suet, raisins and sugar known as pemmican. Water was in short supply and had to be carefully rationed – most of the immigrants carried their own bottles.
As they approached Palestine more and more British navy vessels gathered around the ship like a wolf pack, including a cruiser, four destroyers, a frigate and two minesweepers. The rail of each warship was manned by white uniformed sailors spaced at exact intervals, and the awed refugees found themselves looking up at the very embodiment of the might of the British Empire.
To avoid being accused of breaking international maritime law, the Foreign Office had refused to give permission for the Navy to board the ship on the high seas: the task force was ordered to wait until the Exodus was inside Palestinian waters before taking action. Doran Arontowitz’s strategy was to stay outside the three-mile limit for as long as possible, and then to make a dash for the beach at Tel Aviv.
Preparing for battle, the men, women and children aboard the Exodus rigged wire netting around the decks to prevent boarding, oil pipes to make the decks slippery and steam pipes to repel anyone who got through the wire netting.
The British attacked before these preparations had been completed and, according to the Jews, just before they crossed the three-mile limit. Loudspeakers on the Navy ships ordered the Exodus to stop. Arontowitz ordered the engine room to give him maximum power and shot away at thirteen knots, zigzagging wildly, making it as difficult as possible for the British to get close enough to board.
The British responded by sending two destroyers to trap the Exodus between them, while huge searchlights blinded the crew. As the massive thump of the collision reverberated through the ship, the children began to scream. The British ships then dropped boarding platforms onto the deck of the Exodus to smash through the wire netting, and threw strings of firecrackers and teargas grenades as marines leapt aboard.
The steam pipes prepared for their reception broke within minutes and the oil pipes designed to make the deck too slippery operated only on one side of the ship. While the younger children cowered below deck, everyone else came out, armed with oranges and food and potatoes, and pelted them at the marines. One boy, throwing an orange, was shot in the face. Another took a bullet in the stomach – but most of the damage was done by the marines’ steel-tipped truncheons, vigorously applied.
The marines’ objective was the wheelhouse from which they could take control of the ship. When they reached it they emptied their pistols through the door and smashed their way in. One man was shot in the jaw and Bernstein’s skull was fractured by a club. The rest, blinded b
y teargas, were overcome, and the marines took control of the wheel.
But Doran Arontowitz had prepared for this. Below decks, he made for the stern, where he and Cohn disconnected the steering cable and took direct control of the rudder. Other refugees barricaded the corridors leading to the stern and prevented the British reaching them, while another man managed to trap five marines in his cabin. Others were thrown overboard. With Arontowitz sending the Exodus once more veering wildly about the sea, the British were unable to land any more boarding parties.
Instead, they began ramming the Exodus, one after another. Within thirty minutes the sea was pouring in below the waterline.
Faced with the prospect of condemning more than four thousand people to death by drowning, and with more and more casualties who would die without immediate medical aid, Arontowitz knew he had no option but to surrender. Finally, the Exodus, looking as if it had just fought a war all by itself, limped under heavy escort into Haifa harbour.
But by this time the ship was big news around the world, and the pitiful sight of the frightened children and former concentration camp victims, to say nothing of the dead and the wounded being taken off as prisoners by British sailors, undermined everything Ernest Bevin had been claiming about the justice of his policy on the Jewish homeland.
Aubrey Eban arranged for the members of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, then taking evidence in Jerusalem, to drive down to Haifa to see the Exodus for themselves.
