“BETWEEN THE CROSS OF LORRAINE AND THE MAGEN DAVID – FRENCH MACHALNIKS REMEMBER”
By Baruch Ben Yaacov (Bernard Edinger) for Maariv, 1998
PARIS: Most Israelis think that the tzanhanim ( paratroopers) and the Armored Corps’ vaunted 7th Brigade are totally home- grown sabra products.
There are probably few people in the country today who know that the IDF’s first long-range reconnaissance unit was made up of about 40 foreigners, not all of them Jews, and that when they carried out their first operations behind Syrian lines in the first months of the War of Independence, the only “real” Israelis amongst them were the two liaison officers sent by Army headquarters. (Editor’s note: The correct figures for volunteers from France can be seen on the Volunteers’ database on the World Machal website).
Two men who do know the subject well are French Jews Raymond Kwort and Norbert Beyrard – each one of them a seren (captain) in TZAHAL (IDF) at its inception. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, one of the IDF’s founders, was referring to such men when he wrote in his memoirs that the newly created State of Israel was “blessed with a flow of Jewish volunteers” when the country came under attack from several Arab armies.
“They were first-class soldiers but their principal contribution was to serve as a reminder that we were not alone,” Rabin wrote in “The Rabin Memoirs” (Weidenfeld, 1979).
Kwort and Beyrard, now greying but still powerfully built, like to recall the past when they meet for lunch every month or so at one of Paris’ most closed private establishments, the “Free French Club” (Club des Francais Libre) in the city’s 13th arondissement (district). They are members of the club because the military experience they brought to the then-fledging TZAHAL was gained fighting under General de Gaulle’s Cross of Lorraine emblem on the battlefields of World War II, after the fall of France in 1940. The Paris-born Kwort, now 74 and the son of Lithuanian immigrants to France, was one of the first volunteers in De Gaulle’s Free French forces in England in June 1940. He fought against the Italians in Eritrea, against the Vichy French in Syria and against the Germans in Libya, Tunisia, Italy, and France.
Beyrard, born in Algeria 70 years ago, was first jailed by the Vichy French there when he was only 16. Later, under De Gaulle’s colors he was parachuted behind Nazi lines in occupied France in 1944 and in Holland in 1945.
Ray served in Israel as an intelligence officer with the 7th Brigade in 1948-49 on the northern front, while Norbert was head of the long-range Yehidat Siyur reconnaissance unit in the same area, before becoming operations officer of the country’s first parachute battalion. “TZAHAL wasn’t the force it is today. The disorganization was such that Pancho Villa’s Mexican bandits were like the Prussian Guard compared to us. Let’s put it this way,” says Ray, “we were lucky we were not fighting against the Germans. There might not be a State of Israel today if we had been pitted against a modern army.”
South African Joe Woolf, who now lives in Israel and served with Kwort in the 7th Brigade, estimates that between 3,000 and 4,000 Western volunteers served in Israel under the Machal (Mitnadvey Hutz l’Aretz) program.
But the confusion was such that Woolf, a member of the World Machal Committee, is certain that quite a few names are missing from the memorial to the fallen foreign volunteers which now stands on the Ben Shemen road near the Sha’ar Hagay intersection of the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway. “There are 118 names there, but Israel was fighting for its life then, things were disorganized, and it is possible that some names will never be known,” he says.
Some 29 of the names on the monument are those of volunteers from France and its-then North African possessions. The biggest foreign contingents were from France and Britain, with about 600 volunteers each, followed closely by the United States, Canada, and South Africa.
Best known of the foreign volunteers, thanks to a Hollywood film starring Kirk Douglas, was American Colonel David “Mickey” Marcus, a West Point graduate who was made an aluf in the IDF but was killed tragically by mistake by a sentry – a newly arrived immigrant who spoke no Hebrew – on a ridge near Jerusalem.
The former Machalniks also recall Canadian Benjamin (Big Ben) Dunkelman, a major in the Canadian Army which fought in northern Europe, and who later commanded the IDF’s 7th Brigade.
The senior Frenchman was Thadee Diffre, a Catholic who as a Rav-Seren under the alias “Teddy Eytan”, formed and commanded a unit called HaCommando Hatzarfati, which was the first IDF unit to enter Beersheba. This unit, whittled down to only 58 men, later lost nine dead and 24 wounded in one night of fighting against a much larger Egyptian force when taking and holding “Hill 13” in the area of what is today Hashalim in the Negev, where a monument to them was unveiled on September 7, 1995.
Among the commando survivors was a young Moroccan named Fima Maimon. He was an ordained rabbi but served in the unit as a private. After the war he decided to resume his rabbinical duties but also to stay in the army to perform those duties there. He took a Hebrew name and is known to all Israelis today as Aluf Gad Navon, the IDF’s Chief Chaplain. The volunteers were not all men. Among the volunteers were two young women who had served in the French Resistance, Rose Singer and Rebecca Rosenberg, who both arrived as Machalniks in the first weeks of the State’s creation. “Because I had been in the Maquis (rural guerrillas), I asked to join the Palmach as a fighter,” Singer said. “The officer who received me looked at me with contempt and sent me off to peel potatoes.”
Singer, who has French decorations for her WW II service, was not the kind of person to accept her fate. “I joined what must have been the IDF’s first driving course, certainly the first for women. The only problem was that the course was given in Yiddish, which I didn’t understand, (Singer was from Alsace in eastern France), but which most of the other girls did, coming from America, England, or elsewhere. No one spoke Hebrew. In the end I drove three-ton army trucks in the Galilee.” She now lives in the Tel Aviv area where she is Mrs. Gillon, having later married Colonel (Aluf-Mishne) Eliahu Gillon, then a young medical student who since became the head of the IDF’s Medical Corps, notably before and during the Six-Day War.
Rebecca Rosenberg, known to veteran personnel at Tel Hashomer Hospital as “Dr. Yvette,” was herself a medical student when she was flown into Israel in a rickety arms-laden transport aircraft form Europe, sitting on crates marked with Red Crosses. “I was with my newly-wed husband Maurice Muhlethaler, a Swiss Protestant who believed the Jews were the Chosen People and quite naturally came with me. We were taken to Chaim Sheba, then the IDF’s Chief Medical Officer, who was amazed that two third-year medical students, that is, with no practical medical experience whatsoever, should show up on his doorstep. “Who are you? What do you want? What can I do with you?” he said. Sheba finally instructed them to learn about blood transfusions and after several months at Beilinson Hospital, the young couple created what has since become the blood bank at Sheba-Tel Hashomer, then Military Hospital Number 5.
“Unfortunately, we got a lot of experience in the weeks and months to come, transfusing battle casualties,” said Rosenberg-Muhlethaler, now a respected psychiatrist in Geneva after a first long period as an anesthetist. It was as an anesthetist that she worked at Tel Hashomer when she came back to Israel as a volunteer in three further wars, once with her son, who served at the hospital as a stretcher- bearer.
Although many Machal volunteers were combat specialists, like Kwort and Beyrard, who could utilize specific skills needed by the IDF, some had never ever handled weapons. Parisian George Gasman was sixteen-and-a-half when he sailed into Haifa harbor with a group of 60 other young volunteers on May 21, 1948. “We were members of the French Jewish youth movement Dror. In fact, two of our group were not Jewish at all,” he recalls. On their second night in Israel they were given packs loaded with 30 kg of food, formed into a column of some 500 people, of which only every 10th person was armed, and were marched at night into the hills toward Jerusalem. They were bringing food to its besieged population, skirting numerous hostile Arab villages. “That was just a first taste of what was to come. In the following months we were attached to Palmach Harel’s 4th Battalion in the Jerusalem hills, then down to the Negev and Sinai and finally back to the Eastern Front, where I was shot through the chest during a patrol near Rosh Ha’ayin,” he says.
Gasman, who made aliyah in 1973 and now lives in Holon, says that because of the ages of the volunteers in his group – nearly all were 17 or 18 – the army tried to keep them out of front line major actions, as was its policy with Gadna, as the IDF grew in strength.
He says the most extraordinary person he met was his platoon leader, a blonde-haired girl who spoke no French whom they called “Joan of Arc” because of her tremendous spirit. “I never knew her real name. I think it was Gila, and I heard later that she was killed in the late 1950s, hiking to Petra in Jordan.” IDF historians questioned on the report said the young woman may have been Rachel Svoray.
When they first arrived in Israel, virtually none of the foreign volunteers had ever set foot in the country before. Kwort is an exception, and he delights in telling of his first encounter with Tel Aviv. “It was in 1941 and my unit, the First Free French Division, had already been through extraordinary travels and adventures. We had formed up in England in the summer of 1940 and sailed first to Senegal to try unsuccessfully to wrest French West Africa from Vichy, then around Southern Africa to take Eritrea from the Italians as part of a British force. After that, together with the British and Australians, we took part in the conquest of Syria from the Vichy French.
“We needed a rest, especially since we were earmarked to go off and fight Rommel in Libya, so we were sent to the huge British army camp at Kastina, near what is today Kiryat Malachi, to take it easy for a few weeks. On my first Saturday there, someone popped his head into my platoon’s tent and said there was a lorry going down to Tel Aviv for the day and did anyone want to come?
Hey, I thought, finally a chance to see the world’s first new Jewish city – I was soon to find out how small a city it was then – and I put up my hand. So did another Jewish member of my platoon, and a non-Jew who was curious.” Kwort explains with a twinkle in his eye that they were dropped at around noon just opposite the then-Mugrabi cinema on Allenby Street and told to be at the same place at 6 p.m. to be picked up for the return trip.
“No one said anything about food, but hey, we’re French, and lunch is important, so we started looking for a restaurant. Well, it was Shabbos, and everything was closed in those days, certainly as far as restaurants are concerned.” He described how the trio, all big and brawny and very hungry, prowled Allenby Street before heading for Ben Yehuda Street, increasingly desperate to find some place open. Even today, more than half a century later, Kwort has lost none of his gargantuan appetite, and tells the story so animatedly and with such conviction that the taste buds in a listener’s mouth begin to tingle.
“Suddenly,” he says, “we look into a restaurant with a sign that says ‘Closed’ on the door, but there is a family inside eating what looks like a delicious meal, you bet, the restaurant owner’s Shabbos lunch!” The three Frenchmen knocked on the glass-paned door and signaled that they were hungry and were ready to pay for a meal, waving their wallets and cash in the air.
“The guy inside probably thought we were British soldiers who had had too much to drink. After all, the only thing which showed we were French were the Cross of Lorraine patches on the sleeves of our British uniforms. ”
Finally, after making signs to show the place was closed, he came and opened the door just a crack to tell us to go away. Of course, I took advantage of the situation to tell him we were Frenchmen, we’d just conquered Syria and we were starving.
I spoke in Yiddish because it was clear he was from Eastern Europe. His answer was extraordinary “But you are Jewish?” he asked. So I said that I was, and so was the soldier on my left, but the other guy on my right was a goy. But I told him, “You want to know a secret? Goys also get hungry. They too have to eat.”
The restaurant owner ushered the three Frenchmen inside, where they had an Eastern European feast which Kwort still vividly remembers today. “It was even more memorable because we had been eating British army food for more than a year.” Kwort recalls with fondness and emotion that the owner refused all payment. “In fact, afterwards, when it became known that the Free French were in Palestine, the whole Jewish community always greeted us with great warmth. But the funniest thing is that a week later, when the same offer of a ride into Tel Aviv was made, the whole platoon wanted to go as long as I would be coming too,” says Kwort.
At the end of the World War, Kwort was recruited into the DST French Counterespionage Service. Among his duties was keeping an eye on the Haganah arms caches in France, where weapons were gathered for the day when Independence would be declared and they could be sent to Israel. “Of course, I was under orders to be in contact with the Haganah people to tell them when they were becoming too obvious, attracting the attention of British Intelligence. The Haganah asked me if I would come to help when the time came, and I said yes, especially since I was becoming bored being a policeman hunting down minor former Nazi collaborators, ” Kwort said.
When Israel achieved independence, he resigned from the police, thinking his plans were secret. “Take care of yourself in Palestine,” the head of his service told him with a wink. Upon arrival, Kwort was sent to Kibbutz Ein Shemer, where the newly founded IDF was re-organizing the 7th Brigade and weeding out would-be officers amongst the Machal volunteers. He remembers other former French Resistance men, such as Marc Nathan Levy, who fell in battle as a seren (captain) in the French Commando near Beersheba. He also remembered other WW II veterans of the 7th Brigade, such as Bill Shapiro, an ex-US marine officer, and especially ‘David Appel’ whose real name was Thomas Derek Bowden, a non-Jewish former British paratrooper officer who fought at Arnhem in Holland. Bowden, now a farmer in Norfolk, England had resigned from the 6th Airborne Division while on duty in Palestine because he was disgusted with his anti-Jewish duties in Palestine after the war. “He was one of the three foreign company commanders in my battalion, the 72nd Brigade of Hativat Sheva. The others were both Americans, Norman Schutzman and Larry Groll, who was later killed in Korea.” Kwort headed a 28-man reconnaissance platoon as the battalion intelligence officer. “He, Bowden, was either very brave or very crazy. The first time I met him he had gone walking alone with a walking cane to see ‘where the Arabs were’. A retired IDF tat aluf (lieutenant general) had said a document now at the IDF Archives records that that “the 7th’s Reconnaissance Unit was avid to go to war.”
Kwort, who had faced the Afrika Corps at El Alamein, was not overly impressed by Fauzi-el-Kaujki’s Arab Irregulars: “The 2,000 to 3,000 men of the 7th Brigade, including some 300 English-speaking Machalniks “drew” Israel’s northern border without too much trouble. We took Nazareth, Sasa, Malkiya, and the only place where there was a real tough fight was for Meron, near Safed,” he recalls.
Kwort, called “Ray” by everyone in the brigade, remembers his furious complaint about a young pilot who was taking him over the Syrian lines for a makeshift aerial reconnaissance who would not fly below 1000 meters because the UN set of rules of the then shaky truce forbade flying lower. “So I asked for another pilot with betzim(balls). They said the guy they were sending had “watermelons.” He looked like a slob, but he flew so low that we nearly clipped the leaves from the trees and I saw all that we needed to see,” he recalls. After the war, Ray stayed on and was transferred to the IDF Planning Section at the General Staff Operations Branch. “We planned such operations as an attack on Beirut Airport. I always wondered when it really took place twenty years later if our original plan was used in any way.”
Ray went home to get married in 1950, before his involvement in other adventures, including undercover work for De Gaulle against the extreme rightist Secret Army Organization (OAS) at the end of the Algerian War. His name was also mentioned, wrongly he says, when Moroccan leftist leader Mehdi Ben Barka disappeared in Paris in 1965.
Norbert Beyrard, Ray’s close friend, was one of the first Machal officers brought to Israel after Independence. “I was in a Free French Battalion of the British Special Air Service (SAS), and was a weapons specialist, so the Haganah was very interested in my skills. When I left the French Army after the war and began university studies in Paris, I spent weekends testing weapons the Haganah had bought – or stolen – in Europe. The situation was so uncertain in late May 1948 when I was flown in by a Dakota to an airstrip just north of Herzliya; the pilot had to swerve sharply at the end of the runway because there were armed Arabs there,” he says. Beyrard and a few other SAS types proposed to Yigael Yadin, one of the highest officers in the IDF, that they form a unit to work behind enemy lines, just as many had just done only years earlier. “There were 40 of us, Americans, British, South Africans and several members of my Free French Paratroop Unit, including non-Jews out for adventure and the quest for a good cause.”
Beyrard took command of the group in August 1948, and was made a seren (captain) later the same year. “It was called the Yehidat Siyur – Reconnaissance Unit, and was independent until integrated into the Paratrooper Unit commanded by Yoel Palgi, whose Operations Officer I became,” he said. “The Parachute Battalion numbered about 700 men, mostly from the Palmach and included some 60 Machalniks. The Reconnaissance Unit I led worked mostly across the Jordan River, gathering information on the Syrians between the Huleh and Lake Tiberias. Our main enemy was the mines and two of my Free French comrades were seriously wounded between the lines going off to tap telephones and jot down the disposition of the Syrians.” Beyrard also notes that grandiose plans for a parachute assault on El Arish were abandoned because the number of aircraft was barely sufficient, and the navy did not have enough ships to pull the unit out at the end of the operation.
Beyrard also returned to France after the war, opening an office to advise on industrial techniques and process engineering, and was particularly active in Africa, but was also called upon as a consultant in Israel when the country began setting up military industries in the early 1950s. Like Kwort, Beyrard has visited Israel several times since and he notes that the role of the Machalniks is virtually unknown to the public at large. The role of those who were on the ground is far less known, although Yitzhak Rabin says in his memoirs that “foreign volunteers….figured prominently in our infantry units.” “When I was in Israel this year, a woman officer, the daughter-in-law of one of my friends, dismissed the idea that I had been an IDF officer, saying the first IDF paras were formed only in 1951. My friend was embarrassed and retorted that he knew me from earlier than that, but I was really surprised. There have been so many wars in Israel since” Beyrard said.
“The former French Machal volunteers were just as ignored in their home Jewish communities, possibly because today’s community leaders were then of an age where they too could have come, but left the fighting to those they saw somewhat as ‘footloose adventurers.’ Why did we come?” says Beyrard in the comfortable living room of his spacious apartment in the chic Paris suburb of Neuilly. “It may shock you, but I’m always unhappy when I hear Jews who accept martyrdom and glorify the Shoah. I think there is a time to fight even if it’s just for honor. I’m proud that in my battalion of Free French Paratroopers in WW II there were perhaps 100 Jews, including 15 officers, from a total of 400 men. The Free French volunteers and the Machalniks had the same spirit – they were ready to fight against all odds. We were not anti -Arab, we just thought we could do something to prevent another genocide. No one came to gain any advantage, material or otherwise. I remember one guy wanted to come and fight for Israel after fighting the good war for France, but was worried because he had a wife and child to support. He asked the Haganah people if they could send his pay back to his family in France while he was in Israel. The answer was, “Pay, what pay?”
Aluf Gad Navon especially remembers Teddy Eytan, the aristocratic Catholic French officer who had been an officer in the Free French and commanded the French Commandos in the Negev. Eytan (real name Thadee Diffre) was killed in a road accident in France in 1970.
“He was a great man and a great soldier. We often spoke, and he told me that his motivation was to help Israel because we Jews had suffered enough. He was not the only gentile in the unit, and we were especially grateful that he, and others like him, came to share our fate.”
“Some were religious and wanted holy symbols and other religious artifacts to put around their necks before they went into battle. You might be surprised to learn that I’m the one who made it my business to obtain these for them. In fact, I made it an IDF tradition to make sure that all our Moslem soldiers receive a Koran, and our Christian soldiers, a Bible,” he said.