Soon after my arrival in Israel from South Africa, I was sent to a camp near Haifa where I helped to establish a medical first aid post attached to a battalion that had some halftracks and a couple of armored cars. The halftrack vehicles had wheels in front but tracks at the back. Dr. Rosenberg (Kidron) was our M.O. We were a motley crowd of Americans, South Africans, British, and Sabras. All had combat experience so there was a minimum of drill. It was hard to distinguish men from officers.
Early one evening , a few weeks later, our unit left base and drove in a long convoy into the hills of eastern Galilee. When it became dark, all the vehicles in the whole convoy switched on their headlamps and drove along a narrow winding road towards Safed. We stopped and rested for a while at the outskirts of Safed. All the men got out except the drivers — I was one of the drivers. Most of the convoy was ordered to return to base camp in total darkness, not showing any lights whatsoever. It was extremely dark, and the road twisted and turned around the hills; even driving at a snail’s pace, it was very hard to see the edge of the road. Each vehicle had someone walking ahead of it to give directions, but not every vehicle had a co-driver to do that. By morning we were almost back at the base. Several vehicles were lost that night when they tumbled down off the road. I slept for most of that day. Before the sun set, I left with a convoy of empty vehicles, mainly jeeps and other light trucks, with no passengers, and did the identical trip again with lights blazing towards Safed. The whole exercise seemed to me idiotic and a terrible waste of petrol, vehicles and effort. Much later I learned the reason: this was a totally different sort of war. It was confined to narrow roads with steep banks and olive tree groves along the way. Unlike the desert of North Africa, movement was only possible by road and therefore much more dangerous.
The next night our unit went into action. About six halftracks led by a single armored vehicle moved speedily along a flat and narrow road. It was quite dark, but there are no hills there, only olive groves on both sides of the road. We were told on no account to leave our vehicles. I was in a halftrack which was covered completely with thick armor plating along the sides, back and front. The driver could only see through slits, and the top was wide open.
The men in my vehicle were firing furiously from both sides into the groves, as were all the other men in this short convoy. Only the leading car was totally enclosed in armor plate and it also had a cannon in addition to two machine-guns. I did not have a clue where the enemy was, or what the objective was. After a while we stopped, the firing ceased to some extent, and we waited for dawn. I was in a small Arab village with perhaps a dozen stone buildings. We all got out of the halftrack. I was told that there was a wounded man up ahead, beyond a low stone wall. As I ran to look for him, I saw many bodies lying still, either dead or too afraid to move, but they were not our men. Our wounded man was lying well forward, in an exposed position, with no cover at all. There was only one solution as far as I could see: I left my medical side pack, ran to him and managed to lift him on my back and run back with him to an adequate stone shelter. He was badly wounded and unable to speak. I gave him a morphine injection from a ready-to-use ampoule. He and a few others who were lightly-wounded were quickly evacuated. The O.C. ordered his men forward and we all got into our vehicles and continued north.
There were several villages along the route, some abandoned and others not. The Arab folk just stood and watched us drive past. These few days of war for me were more violent and graphic than all the years of WW II. That seemed to be impersonal, you killed or were killed from great distances by some remote enemy. Here the enemy could be paces away, and you actually saw who you were killing, unless it was a night action.
Some incidents I witnessed were so horrific that I have never spoken about them, nor can I write about them. Perhaps the experience in the desert six years previously had conditioned me to accept more of the same.
The next incident was rather strange. This was a more conventional ground action, also somewhere in the eastern Galilee at night. I walked with the rest of the men over fields into plantations and open ground. Another guy and I were told to remain near a road while the rest continued on their way. There was some moonlight, and we remained there for about an hour. The whole operation, as far as I was concerned was total confusion about what we were supposed to do. A vehicle came along the road, stopped, and the driver asked us to look at the wounded in the back, so I climbed on and had a look. The driver said he was going for some supplies to a town not far away where there was also a hospital. He asked me to come with him and tend to the two wounded men, which is what I did. When I spoke to them they seemed not badly hurt, but they needed reassuring. My Hebrew was extremely poor – almost non-existent – and they knew more English than I knew Hebrew.