By Blood and Fire: July 22, 1946: The Attack On Jerusalem's King David Hotel
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By Blood and Fire: July 22, 1946: The Attack On Jerusalem's King David Hotel
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504029865 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Distribution |
| Publication date: | 01/12/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 177 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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By Blood and Fire
July 22, 1946: The Attack on Jerusalem's King David Hotel
By Thurston Clarke
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1981 Thurston ClarkeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2986-5
CHAPTER 1
5:30 A.M. Isaac Sandler parked his dark blue Plymouth taxi near the intersection of Tel Aviv's Frishman Street and King George V Avenue. Someone had ordered his cab for 5:30, seventeen minutes before daybreak.
For the last three weeks Palestine had suffered a heat wave. Tel Aviv had been hot and humid; Jerusalem hot and dry. To escape the heat, laborers awakened in darkness and worked at first light. Trains and buses started running at 5:30; shops and offices opened between 7:30 and 8:00. Travelers started journeys in the half-light of dawn, so this early call was not surprising.
Two men approached the taxi. One opened the rear door and climbed in, the other drew a revolver and ordered Sandler into the back seat. He was blindfolded and shoved onto the floor. The engine started and the taxi lurched forward. The journey had begun.
Two hours later Sandler was sitting under guard in the walled courtyard of a house in Petah Tikva, a suburb of Tel Aviv. Forty miles to the east, a young blond man was driving Sandler's taxi past the two- and three-story stone villas of Rehavia, a prosperous Jerusalem neighborhood favored by German Jews. He stopped at intersections, yielded at traffic circles and stayed clear of bicyclists, donkeys, and pushcarts. An accident or traffic violation would attract a policeman who might ask why a journalist was driving through Jerusalem in a Tel Aviv taxi registered to Isaac Sandler.
The blond man would have had no answer. His license identified him as a reporter for Davar, a Hebrew-language newspaper published in Tel Aviv, but he was not. The Palestine Police index of terrorists correctly listed him as Yitzhak Avinoam, Jerusalem commander of the Irgun Zvai Leumi.
Avinoam shared the taxi's front seat with a hulking Polish Jew who had chosen the name "Chaim-Toit" — "Alive-Dead." Everyone in the Irgun chose an underground name. Their real identities remained secret, a protection against traitors. Most preferred the names of Old Testament heroes: David, Gideon, Saul.
Chaim-Toit had taken his name during an Irgun training program in the Judean hills. His instructor had told him, "You have joined the Irgun until you die."
"No! I'm going to live!" he said.
"You may be lucky. But we're giving you the chance to die for Eretz Israel."
"All right. Now I'm alive, soon I'll be dead. That'll be my name, 'Alive-Dead.'"
Although he joined in 1938, he did not become active until 1943, the year another Polish Jew, Menahem Begin, became Commander in Chief, and the year the Red Cross reported that Nazis had hanged his sister and brother-in-law in the main square of their Polish village.
Now, three years later, Chaim-Toit was one of four members of the Irgun's National Planning Committee. He selected targets for sabotage from among the government's army camps, airfields, police fortresses and offices. He planned how to enter them and how to destroy them.
While Avinoam drove, Chaim-Toit turned and scrutinized other cars. Rationing had made gasoline expensive and scarce and most private cars belonged to policemen, army officers and government officials. Anyone following would notice that during the last thirty minutes the taxi had picked up only Jewish boys in their late teens and early twenties. The boys waited at street corners and on doorsteps. Each was delivered to the same address, the Beit Aharon religious school on David Yellin Street.
Avinoam braked in front of a two-story house on Rashba Street. A tall, fair-haired German Jew climbed into the back of the taxi. Six months ago "Yanai" had been a corporal in the British Army. Now he was the Irgun's only army-trained explosives expert.
As the taxi started he poked his head over the front seat. "An operation?" he asked.
"Yes, an operation," Avinoam said.
"Good. What's the target?"
"You know the rules. No one knows until the meeting."
"But it means I'll be gone all day, and I told a girl friend I'd meet her at a café at eleven. She's the daughter of an editor of Haaretz. I missed one date with her yesterday and she'll wait all day unless I call. Let me go back and telephone her."
Avinoam continued driving.
"Let him make his call," Chaim-Toit said. He was grooming Yanai to become Chief of Operations in Jerusalem and knew about his reputation with women. There were always dates with two or three different ones; always someone new in love with him.
Avinoam refused to stop. Today he would follow the rules. For five generations his family had lived in Jerusalem and paid taxes to Turkish and British rulers. He was determined that during his lifetime his people would finally govern his city. To this end he had sacrificed his youth, his education, and, perhaps, his future.
An attractive, twenty-six-year-old man, he took pleasure in wearing the finely cut English suit that was part of his disguise as a journalist. And yet he denied himself the pleasure of a girl friend. "I could be arrested tomorrow and hanged a month later," he told one girl who became interested.
Although he had been an excellent student, Avinoam left school to join the Irgun. Now he slipped into Tel Aviv once a week to attend a law class under a false name. The Palestine Police had hunted him since 1941. He lived alone, moved often, and seldom went out at night. "I have to live seven floors underground," he told his comrades.
He hoped that today would reward his years of sacrifice. In January he had met Menahem Begin for the first time. "I am beginning to believe that soon we are going to succeed," Begin had said. "It will not be long before the British leave Palestine."
At the time Avinoam had been skeptical; now he was not. If they succeeded today, how could Begin's prophecy not be fulfilled?
7:45 A.M. Sir John Shaw strode through the gate of the German Hospice. Sergeant Bill Jennings snapped to attention and saluted. Shaw turned left and strode down the center of Lloyd George Street, a narrow lane lined with single-story stone houses, high stone walls, and metal gates. German pilgrims had built the houses and walls just before the turn of the century. Shaw and his wife lived in a hostel managed by German nuns.
Jennings cradled a Thompson submachine gun. Shaw carried a .38 caliber pistol in a holster under his gray seersucker jacket. He disliked the pistol and never fired it, even in practice. He liked to say, "I only carry this fool thing so that if they attack I can take one of them with us."
On July 22, Shaw was the most important British target in Palestine. Three days earlier his only superior, High Commissioner Sir Alan Cunningham, had gone to London for consultation. As Chief Secretary, Shaw was in charge of the local civil servants and British Colonial officers who administered the country. Now he was also AOC — Acting Officer in Charge — with an additional responsibility for 80,000 British soldiers.
Not only was he the most powerful Briton in Palestine, but at six feet seven inches he was also probably the tallest. His young son told a family friend, "If they wanted to disguise Father they'd have to chop off his legs."
"Any fool could hit me," Shaw said to a British journalist. "Precautions are nonsense."
He knew he could be killed if he chose to drive to work. Jewish terrorists belonging to the Stern Gang had murdered Lord Moyne as he sat in his official car outside his Cairo residence. They had made six attempts to kill High Commissioner Harold MacMichael as he motored around Palestine, even though his car was always preceded by police vans or armored cars.
He could be killed as he walked down a busy city street. The Sternists had shot Tom Wilkin, a Hebrew-speaking Palestine Police inspector, as he walked alone down St. Paul's Road. He died two hundred yards from police headquarters.
He could be killed in an empty field. Inspector Ralph Cairns had stepped on a land mine the Irgun had buried in the middle of a dirt path leading from his house in the German Quarter. He was walking to work.
Shaw and Jennings emerged from the German Colony's claustrophobic lanes and started up a steep hill toward the King David Hotel. People and goats had trod countless paths among its olive trees. Every morning Shaw chose a different path, "varying the route."
Jennings dropped back even farther and turned his head from side to side as he walked. Twenty-five yards to the left traffic struggled up Julian's Way, a two-lane asphalted road that began near the German Colony and ran past the King David's front door. Jennings knew that a burst of Sten gunfire could come from a stolen taxi, or an armored car could stop and turn its machine gun on them. Terrorists often stole army vehicles and masqueraded as soldiers.
Terrorists might be hiding behind olive trees. They could emerge from behind the Montefiore windmill twenty yards to their right, fire, and then disappear down the hill into the narrow streets of Yemin Moshe. One of the Bedouin herders using the slope to feed his goats might pull a Sten from underneath his cloak.
Shaw and Jennings both checked out every Orthodox monk that passed them on the path. Was he carrying anything? Was he wearing his habit properly? Was he really a Holy Father or a Jewish teenager slipping a safety catch off the pistol hidden in the folds of his robes?
A few weeks before, some thieves, it was presumed they were terrorists, had broken into a Greek monastery and stolen a dozen habits. These habits were an informal Jerusalem laissez-passer. Guards at roadblocks and government buildings usually waved on those wearing habits without a search.
Shaw pictured squads of terrorists in stolen habits preparing to dynamite buildings and assassinate officials. "What's the good of telling me," he snapped at the police inspector who called with news of the theft. "Get your damned force out and do something about it."
The police swept through the Old City searching and checking the identity of every monk and priest. They repeated the exercise frequently during the following weeks, but without results. Many of the Christian-Arab police constables were reluctant to disturb the Holy Fathers.
The possibility that a group of "killer monks" was preparing an atrocity haunted Shaw. It was the only thing that had truly frightened him since he had arrived in Palestine two and a half years before.
Shaw stared straight ahead as he walked through the olive grove. When he did glance behind him it was to shout a question about Jennings' wife or infant daughter or to comment on the weather.
For the last two weeks a hot, dry, desert wind, known to the Jews as the "sharav" and to the Arabs as the "hamseen," had blown into Jerusalem from the east. Usually it ended before July, but this year it lingered. It drove temperatures into the nineties by noon, caused necks to stiffen, livers to malfunction, and touched off migraines. It made people quarrelsome and uneasy. Even now, at eight in the morning, the sun had already turned pale white and a haze of dust from the Jordanian desert was forming above the barren hills encircling the city.
Twenty years before British urban planners had designated this olive grove as a park because of its stunning view. To the north Shaw could see Mount Scopus and the Hills of Moab. The soldiers who had died during Allenby's campaign lay buried on Mount Scopus in a military cemetery. Shaw had been a young lieutenant in Allenby's army.
To the east, steeples, domes and minarets rose above the medieval walls of the Old City, home of most of Jerusalem's 60,000 Arabs. These eight miles of walls, over thirty feet high, encircled the most sought after, fought over and bloody square kilometer in human history.
Half a mile to the west Shaw could see the tops of modern office blocks and villas. This part of the city contained the Jewish cafés, cinemas and stores, most of the banks and modern commercial enterprises, and the majority of the city's 100,000 Jews.
A few hundred yards north, directly ahead of him, a massive, stone building rose from the like-colored earth to dominate the city's skyline. It was the King David Hotel.
Shaw preferred to walk to work at the hotel. The police had tried to dissuade him, but he insisted. It was his only physical exercise and he thought it important for everyone to see that Britain's senior civil servant in Palestine walked the streets unafraid.
Symbols and prestige had played a central part in the career Shaw had followed for half his fifty-two years. After the First World War he had spent fourteen years as a Colonial officer in West Africa. He was in Palestine between 1935 and 1940 and then in Cyprus until Christmas Day, 1943, when he returned to Palestine as Chief Secretary.
Since then he had often told Arab and Jewish leaders: "I am not pro-Arab or pro-Jewish; I am pro-British." Neither believed him. To the Arabs, being pro-British meant being a Zionist; to the Zionists it was a clever way of disguising anti-Semitism. For Shaw it simply meant viewing events in Palestine through the prism of British interests.
At one time being pro-British had indeed meant supporting Zionist aims. As Shaw put it, "If you beat an enemy into a cocked hat, as we had done with Turkey, you could more or less do as you liked with their territories. We conquered Palestine. It was ours to administer, or give away. We had a perfect right to say, 'Since we have conquered this little insignificant country the size of Wales, this country that was nothing under the Turkish Empire — just a district in the Vilayet of Damascus — then we have a perfect right to promise the Jews a national home in it.'"
Later on, as British policy changed, being pro-British meant enforcing the White Paper. It also meant preserving the symbols and prestige of the Empire and keeping the King David functioning as a civilian hotel. In Shaw's view, closing it to guests would have been a symbolic victory for terrorism, a blow to Britain's prestige and, given the shortage of hotel rooms in Jerusalem, "damned inconvenient."
At 8 A.M. Shaw climbed the six wooden steps over the wall separating Julian's Way from the King David's south wing. Since 1939 this wing had housed the headquarters of the British government in Palestine. It was known as the "Secretariat."
A British Palestine policeman emerged from a stone guardhouse on the other side of the wall, saluted, and demanded Shaw's security card. The year before, one of the young assistant securities had put a picture of a dog on his security card. In the space provided for "any peculiarities," he had written, "walks and talks like a dog." For weeks he had used this card to enter the Secretariat, but under Shaw such laxity was no longer the rule.
Shaw handed over an orange card. The officer checked it carefully. Even though he recognized the Chief Secretary, he knew the importance Shaw attached to security. A few months before, Shaw had written to the army security officer complaining that soldiers were entering the building without showing their passes:
My officers and I take a great deal of time and trouble by personal daily supervision to ensure the security of this building as far as possible. I myself invariably show my pass twice daily at the entrance — and I suppose I am not less well known than private soldiers and A.T.S. [Auxiliary Territorial Services]. ... If such personnel are allowed to come and go freely without checking of passes, it is futile for me to attempt to ensure the security of the building (which, incidentally, affects your headquarters as much as it does mine since bombs or fire would not discriminate).
Shaw stepped into one of three compartments in a wooden turnstile. The policeman pushed a pedal and he swung through into the hotel grounds.
He walked twenty yards along the path flanked and covered with coils of barbed wire. To his left, huge nets designed to catch grenades tossed from the street hung over the first-floor windows of the government offices. To his right, telephone poles supported high-intensity searchlights that lit the hotel grounds at night.
Shaw's arrival in Palestine had coincided with a rise in Jewish attacks on the government and he had personally suggested many of the security features that protected the Secretariat. At his request the number of searchlights was doubled. Sappers with mine detectors swept the hotel grounds every week. Electricians installed a silent alarm system. Guards, as well as the hotel's cashiers and manager, could summon the police simply by pushing a pedal or leaning against a hidden button.
The procedure for entering the Secretariat was also tightened. Two sets of guards searched every visitor. There were complaints that it took forty-five minutes just to enter and leave.
Two extra coils of barbed wire were added to the necklaces that already surrounded the garden and rear of the hotel. Army engineers strung trip wires through the wire and buried mines that rang bells and triggered magnesium flares.
The devices worked. Stray cats sent flares rocketing. When the son of the hotel manager trained a flashlight on the hotel walls, police cars raced to the King David.
In addition to its own police and military guards, the hotel was protected by frequent army foot patrols along Julian's Way, police radio vans cruising the neighborhood, the two hundred soldiers who worked in army offices in the hotel, and the four hundred soldiers stationed in an army camp three hundred yards away. The perimeter fence of this camp intersected with the wall of the King David's garden, giving these soldiers easy access to the hotel.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from By Blood and Fire by Thurston Clarke. Copyright © 1981 Thurston Clarke. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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