The Jewish Brigade

An Army with Two Masters 1944-45

Morris Beckman

• Publisher: Spellmount
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781862274235
• eBook ISBN: 9780752462417
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A brigade was formed in 1944 as part of the British Army and fought with distinction in Italy. It was the first all Jewish 'army', and knowledge of its existence and its role in defeating the Nazis gave an immense boost to Jews everywhere. After the war the brigade helped Jewish refugees beat the British blockade of Palestine. Having fought in the War, author Morris Beckman was the founder member of the 43 Group of Jewish ex-servicemen who attacked and destroyed Mosley's emergent Fascist party in a protracted campaign in the late 1940s.

Chapter One

This is the story of the odyssey of a people who never gave up hope. It lasted for nearly 2,000 years. It took them through a seemingly endless dark age when rootlessness and persecution was their everyday lot. It began in AD 135, when the Roman legions under Hadrian crushed the Judean rebellion, and it ended in 1948, when the descendants of those defeated Judeans won their War of Independence in that same land.

When the Romans crushed Bar Kochba’s revolt, they vowed it would be the last by their most troublesome subject people who, rather than worship Roman gods instead of their own One God, Jehovah, preferred to die in battle. The Romans were pitiless. They razed towns and villages, and put the people to the sword. They sacked Jerusalem and destroyed its magnificent temple, leaving only the western (Wailing) wall standing. Then they scattered the surviving Jews to the four points of the compass. The long, fraught journey had begun.

Wherever the remnants of the Jewish community landed up, they clung to four things for comfort: their concept of the One God, their ethical beliefs, their traditional family values, and the Hebrew language. Their strange and reclusive behaviour did not go down well with the indigenous peoples among whom they settled. And they quickly became the focus of blame, lies and grotesque propaganda. They made a ready target for anyone who saw advantage in stirring up and exploiting anti-Jewish prejudice. Over the years, that has not changed.

The aggressive spread of Christianity compounded the isolation of the Jews. Because Judaism was at the time the only other monotheistic religion, Christian leaders saw it as a rival, and even a threat to their power and authority. Attempts to convert Jews to Christ ran into the brick wall of Jewish stubbornness. The next logical step was to demonise these strange people in their midst. It worked. To the unsophisticated masses, the persecution of a Jewish minority became an acceptable, even commendable, activity. The deadliest myth of all, and one that never truly died, was that the Jews had killed Jesus. This enormous lie, accusing the Jews of deicide, was so prevalent across the ages that, even in the twentieth century, Jewish students, taking scripture lessons in enlightened schools, would have to suppress the urge to leap to their feet and protest that it was not their people who were responsible for the death of Christ.

As the centuries passed, there was no let up in the scapegoating of Jews. They were used as catspaws and then discarded, even put to death, when their usefulness ended. They were harried and murdered by Crusaders en route to Palestine to fight the Saracens, and for sport. On the whim of rulers, they were incarcerated in ghettos, and expelled from countries where they had lived for generations. In the Iberian peninsula, they were burnt at the stake for refusing to convert to Catholicism. They were subjected to malicious anti-Jewish laws, pogroms, and physical and verbal abuse. They endured an endless flood of anti-semitic literature in every European language. They suffered so many humiliations, it was not surprising that deep in every Jew’s psyche lay the longing that one day the Jewish people would be able to live a normal life in their own land, free of fear and apprehension.

This yearning was found in every Jewish family throughout the world. At gatherings to celebrate the festival of Passover, the final toast of the Seder night services, commemorating Moses leading the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt, was, ‘And, the next year in Jerusalem’. The toast was proclaimed with the most heartfelt emotion. My father, who fled, from Polish pogroms at the turn of the century, would shake his head and say sadly, ‘It’s a pipe-dream. When? Where? How? Forget it.’

As Jews repeated the toast during the 1930s and ‘40s, the end of the awful odyssey was near. For young Jews, if not for the still cautious and even servile elderly Jews with their appalling memories, the walls of Jericho were within sight. The coming of the Messiah would not take the form of an old, venerably bearded man with a charismatic appeal and the eloquence of a Shakespearean actor, but as young men and women carrying guns, driving tanks and flying warplanes.

Historically, Jews have always taken up arms to defend their countries of birth or adoption. Yet, this has never protected them from anti-semitism, whether intellectual, as in France, brutal, as in Eastern Europe, or psychopathically beyond the pale, as in Nazi Germany.

After the First World War, many Germans, unable to accept that their much-vaunted military machine had been defeated, blamed German Jews for having stabbed the country in the back – a difficult feat for the 22,000 killed fighting for the Fatherland. In Britain, also after the First World War, ugly murmurings needled Rabbi Michael Adler DSO, SCF, BA into compiling The British Jewry Book of Honour, a four-inch thick tome published in 1922 and listing the community’s 9,000 casualties and tally of 1,596 decorations, including five Victoria Crosses.

There were very few instances of Jews in the diaspora forming their own units. The first recorded was in 1794, when Berek Yoselovitch formed a Jewish regiment in Poland as part of General Tadeusz Kosciusko’s army to overthrow the oppressive overlordship of Russia. The regiment fought in Polish uniforms, and under the Polish flag. Most of its officers and men were killed trying to contain successive Russian attacks. The survivors went home to endure the Poles’ endemic hatred of the Jews.

Jewish longing for a National Home has always been a buried seed waiting to germinate. It needed an inspiration to fertilise it. In France, in 1894, that miracle happened. It arrived in the shape of a young Hungarian Jewish journalist, Theodore Herzl, who was covering the Dreyfus trial for a Vienna newspaper.

Although Jews enjoyed full civil rights, France then was a country in which anti-semitism was rife. It broke the surface with a splash when Captain Albert Dreyfus, a Jewish officer on the General Staff, was found guilty of espionage and was sentenced to life imprisonment on the dreaded Devil’s Island. His conviction set off a flurry of anti-semitic articles in the press. Fortunately, however, there were some Frenchmen who thought something about the affair stank. Among these was the famous novelist, Emile Zola. He took up the cudgels on Dreyfus’s behalf and penned his famous piece, ‘J’accuse’. When it was printed in L’Aurore, all hell broke loose as France split into those who damned the Jewish traitor, and those who were convinced of his innocence.

Then, out of the blue, the real traitor, Major Ferdinand Esterhazy, walked into a London newspaper office and confessed his guilt. Even then, the French government was reluctant to reopen the case. Too many prominent people had been involved in the murky business of false accusation. But five years later a new government ordered a new trial. Again the court, part of the establishment, condemned Dreyfus; later, quietly, the court’s findings were set aside. The president pardoned the Jewish officer, and Dreyfus was reinstated into the French army.

The trial of Dreyfus affected Jewish minds as nothing else had. It struck Herzl, the young journalist, like a flash of lightning. Until then, he had considered the assimilation of Jews as a viable solution. Suddenly the ground shifted under his feet. He became completely obsessed with the future of the Jewish people, and he saw that the only real solution was the establishment of a Jewish National Home. From that moment, all of his energy and efforts were concentrated on achieving it. He travelled ceaselessly, seeing anyone and everyone who was prepared to listen. Amazingly, these included presidents, politicians, the pope, the sultan of Turkey, as well as countless Jews, from the influential upper crust to the lowliest worker. He wrote pamplets, the best known of which was ‘The Jewish State’, and a book, Old-New Land. Herzl and his growing band of supporters called themselves ‘Zionists’, and in 1897 he convened the first Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland. The Zionist movement was officially founded. It proclaimed a single aim – the establishment of a legally secure homeland for Jews in Palestine.

Herzl worked tirelessly and literally burned himself out in his endeavours to realise his dream. He died at only 44; 7,000 people attended his funeral on 7 July 1904. Among them, following the cortege, was the famous author, Stefan Zweig, who wrote:

This gigantic outpouring of grief from the depths of millions of souls caused me to realise how much passion and hope this lone and lonesome man had borne into the world through the power of a single idea.

It could be argued that Herzl was as great a leader of the Jewish people as Moses who led the Hebrew slaves from Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land. Over 2,000 years later, Herzl established that this same Promised Land had to be the new Jewish National Home, and he founded the movement that united Jews to achieve this goal. Furthermore, he persuaded them that they could and would achieve it.

In 1905 the Tsar’s troops crushed a revolt in Russia and vicious, widespread pogroms followed. Disillusioned Jews, with no bread to eat nor a kopek in their pockets, decided to leave Russia. Herzl’s Zionism now proved its worth. It gave them direction, a sense of where to go. Between 1905 and 1914, some 35,000 made the trek to Palestine. They burned with the zeal of pioneers and planned to create a socialist paradise. They were desperately poor, inured to hardship, and ready to work their fingers to the bone to build new lives for themselves. They settled on land purchased for them by the Jewish Agency. They found the going harsh. From sunrise to sunset and beyond, they drained swamps and cleared desert of stones and scrub. They dropped from heatstroke and malaria. They died of exhaustion and malnutrition. A doctor advised a young Polish student to return to Europe or he would die. That student, David Ben-Gurion, ignored the advice, and forty years later became Israel’s first prime minister.

In 1909 Tel Aviv was founded on the dunes of Jaffa beach. Kibbutz Degania was built. Herzl’s dream was becoming reality. The two vital ingredients needed to make a country are land and the people to work it. Until the First World War, Jewish colonisation in Palestine took place with Arab cooperation. Arab effendi and landowners sold their land to the Jewish Agency, demanding exorbitantly high prices for what they considered barren areas – and to their gratification they were paid.

Inevitably the determined efforts of the settlers meant they began to enjoy a standard of living denied their Arab neighbours. New orchards produced fruit and olives. Well-planned irrigation systems and good husbandry saw grass grow on new soil. There were cattle, chicken runs, and a range of produce. But the settlers were sniped at. Their vehicles were ambushed. Those required to work in the open carried rifles along with their spades and sieves. The Hashomer (watchmen) erected tall observation towers manned round the clock, and encircled the settlements with barbed-wire stockades. Here lay the beginnings of what would one day develop into the powerful Israeli armed forces. In the late 1930s, the British introduced legislation to reduce the sale of land. But still the Arabs sold and the Jewish Agency bought, and European refugees and idealistic Zionists from the western democracies and South Africa continued to trickle in.

In 1914 war broke out. Jews in the countries involved donned their national uniforms and fought alongside their fellow citizens. The Tsar, however, took it into his head to accuse the Jews of disloyalty. Thousands were deported to Siberia. Few returned. Palestine Jews felt an affinity with Britain and the Allies, and offered to form Jewish units to support them. Their offer was turned down. A leading writer and orator, Vladimir Jabotinsky, refused to accept the Allies’ denial of a Jewish regiment to fight the Turks. Later, he swung to the extreme right and founded the Zionist Revisionist Party. An energetic dreamer with a cause, Jabotinsky sat down at a meeting with other Zionist leaders in Egypt in March 1915. Among these was a Russian Jew, Joseph Trumpeldor, who had lost an arm fighting for Russia against Japan in the war of 1905. He had been awarded the Gold Order of St George four times for gallantry, and had been taken prisoner by the Japanese. He was killed in 1920 defending the kibbutz of Tel Hai.

At that meeting in March 1915 Trumpeldor displayed his forceful personality. General Maxwell of Cairo HQ Staff would not accept Palestine Jews as fighting troops because they were foreign and not Empire nationals, though he was prepared to use them as a mule corps, for specific purposes. All the delegates at the meeting turned down this suggestion, declaring that they did not wish to join a donkey battalion. Trumpeldor took a different line. With passion he declared, ‘On which front we start is a matter of tactics. Any and every front leads to Zion. We have to smash the Turks.’ He prevailed and the Zion Mule Corps (ZMC) was formed. With 737 volunteers, mostly Russian Jews who had been expelled to Egypt, it was equipped with twenty horses and 750 pack mules. The men had rifles, bayonets and ammunition. For three weeks before embarking for Gallipoli, they underwent intensive training. Their commander was Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Patterson DSO, a tall and elegant veteran of the Boer War. He was of Irish Protestant origin, and immediately established a sympathetic rapport with his men. He even fought against unfriendly attitudes in high places to secure for them kosher food and matzo (unleavened bread) for Passover.

On 15 April 1915, the ZMC on HMT Dundrennon approached Cape Helles at the extreme southern tip of Gallipoli. Under intense enemy artillery and machine-gun fire they landed and went straight to work. They were officially classified as a line-of-communication unit. Two hundred mules were unloaded at W Beach, and the others at V Beach. Then they were continuously in action under fire supplying the line troops with food, water and ammunition. On one occasion, terrified mules with their chains clanking panicked and careered into Turks creeping forward for a surprise attack. This alerted the British, who halted the attack with intense fire. On 5 May Private M. Groushkowsky exposed himself under fire to prevent his mules stampeding. Although wounded in both arms, he delivered his ammunition to the trenches. General Stopford personally awarded Groushkowsky the Distinguished Conduct Medal.

Three days later the ZMC reached the Inniskilling Fusiliers with supplies as they, depleted in numbers by many casualties, prepared for a counter-attack. The ZMC fixed bayonets to their rifles and, led by Corporal Hildesheim, joined in the charge. On 20 May the ZMC suffered losses – men killed and wounded, horses and mules – under intense Turkish artillery fire. Private Nissel Rosenberg brought his laden mules through to the front line under intense fire and was recommended for a DCM and promoted sergeant. Sergeant-Major Erchkovitz was awarded the DCM.

By the end of July the ZMC was down to half its original strength owing to casualties and sickness. Over a hundred mules had been killed. On 25 July Patterson and Trumpeldor sailed for Egypt, and in the main Cairo synagogue raised 150 volunteers for the Corps. They were referred to as the Cairo troop of the ZMC. By now, news about the ZMC had aroused great interest among Jews everywhere and generated pride that they were performing so well. Patterson recorded that he had received dozens of letters from senior officers testifying to the fearless work of his men. On 29 November Patterson had to be evacuated to Alexandria with an illness that laid him low. Trumpeldor was appointed CO in his place, was wounded by a bullet in the shoulder, but refused to be evacuated and stayed with the ZMC until it was pulled out in January 1916.

In Egypt the ZMC were told that they were to be ordered to Ireland to help to quell a revolt. To a man they refused, declaring they had joined up to fight Turks not Irish patriots. The ZMC was disbanded.

Patterson, whose name is still revered in Israel, fought like a tiger to secure for the ZMC its name, Star of David badge, and flag. It is suggested that his resistance to the views of higher-ranking army prejudice did his career no good. The ZMC soldiers volunteered for one simple reason. Most had been driven from Palestine by the Turks, and wanted to help defeat them so as to be able to return to their homes and farms.

Enter another remarkable Jewish patriot, Dr Chaim Weizmann. Born in Pinsk, Russia in 1874, he was a brilliant chemist who lived in England during the First World War. In 1916 the British army in France faced a serious crisis. It ran short of shells and, during battle, it had to ration the number they fired. This led to higher casualties and a dangerous situation for the British. The shortage was partly due to the drying up of supplies of acetone, essential in the manufacturing of explosives.

Weizmann was called upon to help. He speedily discovered a new formula for producing acetone cheaply and in large quantities. His was such an important contribution to the war effort that Britain offered Weizmann anything he wanted. Payment? Honours? Anything. He refused them all. Instead he asked that, if Britain regained control of Palestine, Jews should be ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• List of Illustrations
• Prologue
• Map of Northern Italy
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Appendices
• Copyright
• Plates