Guy Jactel

Paris, September — An interesting footnote to the creation of the Israel Defense Forces was discovered when letters from a French Christian volunteer in Machal were recently unearthed. They describe how he trained Israel’s very first paratroopers.

These letters were written by Guy Jactel, a veteran of General de Gaulle’s Free French Forces, who came to Israel at the time of the creation of the State, fought in the 75th battalion HaCommando Hatzarfati – the French Commandos – of the Negev Brigade and was one of the creators of the IDF’s first school for paratroopers on Mount Carmel.

Jactel, who held the rank of second lieutenant in the IDF and is now a businessman residing in Switzerland, described the first fatal jumping accident in the IDF, the international character of the jump school’s instructors and their plans to train olim from Arab countries for drops far behind enemy lines.

Reproduction of these letters, found in this correspondent’s own collection, were published in January and September 1949 in the “Bulletin de l’Amicale des Anciens Parachutistes SAS.,” the monthly bulletin published by veterans of Jactel’s wartime unit which still exists today.

Jactel’s first letter was sent through military channels and his name and those of his French comrades are given only partial identification (he is called Guy J.   and no place names are mentioned.

The title given the letter is, “Ici La Palestine” (this is Palestine).  The State of Israel being only a few months old at that time, Jactel indifferently calls the Israeli soldiers he served with “Palestinians”, “Israelites” (Jews in French), or Israelis.  In fact, the title of his last letter (probably written by someone at the former paras’ association who had only a very slight knowledge of the situation) is the SAS. in Israelie”.

Jactel explained why he was in Israel: “To all our SAS. paratroop comrades from our days in Britain and in North Africa, a warm handshake from five of your friends who, in the spirit of justice and solidarity, have left good old France to defend what is right for us. The adventure continues….”

Jactel’s unit in the WW ll was part of the French battalions serving in the British special air service (SAS. Brigade), formed at Kabrit in Egypt early in 1941. Their aim was to carry out raids behind German and Italian lines in the North African campaigns of the British Eighth Army.

The unit had reached peak strength just before D-Day in Europe in June 1944, when it was composed of two British battalions, two French battalions, a Belgian company and a small Greek naval commando unit. The Frenchmen were either volunteers who escaped occupied France to join General de Gaulle in Britain in his fight against the Nazis, or else they were Frenchmen living abroad who rallied to the Free French wherever there were fighting units.

Over half of the Frenchmen who served in the SAS Brigade in World War II were killed or wounded in operations in Libya, Crete, Tunisia, France, Belgium, and Germany. After the war, survivors mainly went back to civilian life, though a number remained  in the French Army and participated in the Indochina and Algeria campaigns (some jumped at Port Said in 1956).  Of the civilians, some rose to become high-ranking government figures, ambassadors or business leaders. Both the director general of the Macel Dassault Aircraft firm, M. Benno Vallieres, who is Jewish, and the firm’s technical director, M. Henry Deplante, were officers in the SAS. Brigade.

Jean de Lipkowski, the very pro-Arab former French cabinet minister, served with the unit, as did Jacque Mercier, the well-known lawyer and friend of pro-Israel causes, (the lawyer for Eli Cohen, Israel’s  Mossad operator in Syria), but many of the young veterans (most joined the Free French when they were 18 or 19, sometimes even younger), had difficulty in adapting to civilian life and many took part in colorful adventures around the world in the years that followed.

For ideological reasons, Guy Jactel was one of those who came to help the newly-born Jewish State.  Many of those who served in the French Machal unit had, like Jactel, been in the Free French or in the underground resistance movement in France itself.  Jactel was 23-years-old in 1948.  He writes in his letter about the commander of the Machal unit, Thades Diffre, whose nom de guerre in Israel was Teddy Eytan, and who was a hero of the Free French Forces where he was a captain with General LeClere’s armored division which liberated Paris.

Before joining the staff of the Mount Carmel parachute school, Jactel describes how he participated in action during the summer of 1948, both in the Jerusalem sector and in the Negev. He was transferred from HaCommando Hatzarfati to the jump school in October 1948.
“I won’t tell you about the numerous difficulties or of the tough work getting the school organized over the past weeks, but I will say with pride that we are among the first paratroop officers of the army of Israel and that in another few days we shall be putting young Palestinians [Israelis] through their first jumps and in a very short time, the State of Israel will be proud to have its first SAS. brigade,”

Jactel wrote.
About the Israelis participating in the fighting further to the south at the height of hostilities against Egypt, he wrote:  “They are fighting with courage in this extraordinary country where everyone ignores the meaning of fear, where women and children also participate in the war.  It is an extraordinary country with contrasts of splendid plantations on one side and the arid desert on the other.” Jactel ended this first letter with the word Shalom, and said how he and his French comrades were greeted with open arms everywhere they went.
In his second letter, apparently sent through a more lenient censor, Jactel identifies the five former Free French paras at the school as Norbet Benchemoul, Albert Schoukroun, Jacques Ourinowsky, Jean Massine and himself.  Another Frenchman there was Gabriel Ducan. Like the numbers of the French Machal unit, the para group appears to have been made up of Jews and Christians in equal numbers.

Jactel says of the school that it has a  breathtaking view over Haifa, the Mediterranean and eastwards towards Nazareth; Haifa’s population at the time was 18,000. “During the five months that I was there, from October 1948 to February 1949, my eyes never tired of this splendid view whose colors changed each month as well as each day, morning, noon, and night, when the sun set and when the moon shone.”

“The jeep which first brought me to the school dropped me in front of the administrative building, where I met the school commander, a Bulgarian who had been a member of the British Intelligence Service during the war and had been parachuted into the Balkans in 1942 and 1943.  I walked out of his office with the title of instructor.

“At the mess that night, I met our old friend, Norbert Benchemoul from the Third Battalion of Free French Paras as well as Albert Schoukroun who was a lieutenant and a jump instructor at PAU after the war. There were also British, Canadian, and Belgian paratroopers, formerly of the SAS. Brigade or the British Sixth Airborne Division.  There were also two Americans who had fought in New Guinea and the Philippines, two Italian officers formerly of the naval paratroops of the Italian Fascist Army as well as a dozen Poles, Russians, Czechs, Hungarians, and more.  Gabriel Ducan, a Frenchman from Algeria and a great fellow, was also there: he had served with the British paras in Burma”.

Jactel wrote that the administrative services were mostly staffed by Haifa residents, while there were only 20 pupil-paratroopers at the start. “At the beginning of November, intensive training began in earnest.  We received a batch of 100 highly-motivated pupils.  Most were Israelites [Jews] from Arab countries, mainly Syria, Iraq, and Transjordan. They all spoke perfect French and Arabic and had the physical traits of the Moslems of the countries where they were born. “With the disorganization reigning on the other side of Jordan, our men, disguised as Arab soldiers, will be a great handicap for the enemy general staff.  Around November 10th, in the presence of the military and civilian notables, we ( the base commander and 20 instructors) carried out the first demonstration jump from a Dakota.  The commander made a little speech from which we learned that we would be the first Israeli paratroops to jump on Israeli territory.  Unfortunately, that night we didn’t get anything extra at mealtime to celebrate.

“The first accident occurred two or three weeks later, when a 22-year-old captain caught his chute in the tail-structure of the plane.  The pilot tried several looping maneuvers over the drop zone, but the poor fellow was still stuck.  Finally, after half-an-hour, the plane flew out over the shore and the captain managed to unhook his chute at a height of 50 or 60 meters.  The coast was only 200-300 meters away, and the port of Haifa just one kilometer from the spot.  In spite of the arrival of naval launches and fishing boats who searched  for him, Captain Itamar was never seen again.

“Army headquarters set up a three-man commission of enquiry, but not one of the members had ever made a parachute jump or possibly had never even flown in an airplane.  Schoukroun, who had been in charge of the fatal jump, was criticized, even though the accident was the pilot’s fault for flying against the wind, and not slowing down from the jump. But then again, the pilot, an American, had never before dropped a paratrooper and, as he explained, he might have plunged downwards if he had lowered his speed with a front wind.
“A second accident occurred later on.  A lieutenant went out of the airplane’s door and fell to the ground in a free fall without his chute opening.  The two Russian instructors – 140 and 100 jumps each – said this happened because there were no safety hooks.  I think the static line was either badly hooked up, or not at all.  There was no commission of enquiry.

Eight days later, the last three men to leave the plane were injured by static lines, the rail being on the inside left in the plane, and the static lines blocking the door partially as the men jumped.  The next day we placed the rail in the middle of the aircraft. During that time we instructed 200 men, not only in jumping but also in weaponry and explosives.  In December we had to halt jump training because of bad weather.”

Shortly afterwards, the French-British group was sent to the Syrian front to give the new paras their baptism of fire.  It was more a series of small patrol clashes than a real war at the time, with reconnaissance patrols wading through mud and snow.  During one of these patrols, Massine was seriously wounded: “Jacques Ourinowsky and Jean Massine had gone behind enemy lines, where they hit a booby trap.  After struggling for two hours, Ourinowsky managed to bring Massine back to our lines under the very eyes of the Arabs, who, we learned later, had taken them to be U.N. officers. At the hospital in Tiberias, we discovered that Massine had been lucky:  his arm was broken, and he had shrapnel in his thigh.  The coins in his pocket were twisted, and without them he would have suffered a broken thigh as well.”

Jactel wrote that he had tried to get to Bethlehem at Christmas-time, together with French officers who were serving with the U.N. Observers, but this was not possible.  He finally attended Christmas mass at the French Catholic Hospital in Jaffa. It was here that he had a run-in with French diplomatic officers, who refused to shake his hand although they had invited French Jewish officers to a New Year celebration at the Consulate. “Apparently, these gentlemen were unhappy that a French non-Jewish officer had come to fight for the Jews, while the French Army lacked volunteers in Indochina,” he wrote. Jactel added, however, that he was very well received by the French Vice-Consul in Jerusalem, M. Duruelle, when he visited him in August 1948 while fighting on the Jerusalem front.

In January, Jactel asked for leave from the school to join the French Machal unit in the Negev for an attack on Gaza, called off at the last moment. “So, for three weeks I traveled from regiment to regiment, visiting the shore of the Dead Sea and the Red Sea, and I went 40 kilometers into Egyptian-held areas with the Palmach Negev Brigade,” wrote Jactel. He asked to return to the Machal unit in February, because the staff of the jump school had grown and there were nearly as many instructors as pupils.

With the end of the War of Independence, most of the French Machal volunteers returned to Europe, though a number of them settled in Israel for good. The head of the French commando unit, Teddy Eytan, returned to the French Government service and held several top posts, including that of chief of cabinet to Senior Minister Rene Pleven before being seconded to French-speaking Africa, where he served as the long-time secretary-general of the presidency of the Ivory Coast. It was on his return from years of service as a close aide to President Houphoueet-Boigny that he was killed in a car accident near Tarbes in France in December 1971. A plaque commemorating this French officer and other members of his unit was placed on a military monument near Beersheba in December 1975.

Guy Jactel remained in Israel until November 1950, working on several kibbutzim and on various civilian projects in the Negev.  His craving for adventure led him to volunteer for the French battalion which fought in the Korean War, where he served for 18 months.  He later left the army, but asked to be called back to service in Algeria in 1956 as an officer in a paratroop regiment.  Demobilized after a year’s service, he became a civilian government officer working in small villages in the hilly Kabylia region of the former French territory.
He explained: “In 1962, I got into trouble, like other people who had served in Algeria.”  It seems he sided with the settlers and officers who opposed General de Gaulle’s Algerian policies and landed up in jail, from which he rapidly escaped.  Unable to return to France for several years, he settled in Switzerland where he is to this day.

The next time he came to Israel was in April and May of this year (1976), when he traveled throughout the country. “Everything has developed so fantastically that I didn’t recognize anything.  The last time I had been in Beersheba, the population was about 350 and there were no roads.  Now it’s a city,” he said.

M. Jactel chuckled as he explained how incredulous Israelis were when he told them that he, a French Christian, had been an officer in the IDF.  “They thought I was a phenomenon,” he recalled.

But Jactel was not the only veteran of the Free French paras to serve with distinction in Israel.  In July 1976, Maariv carried a story about Major Loic Raufast, a French officer serving with the United Nations observers who had received a letter of congratulations from General Haim Bar-Lev for saving a wounded Israeli liaison officer on the banks of the Suez Canal. Today, Major Raufast, a veteran of Indochina and Algeria, is a colonel in the French paras.

Many citizens remember that among the multitude of volunteers who poured into Israel following the Six-Day-War to work on kibbutzim, there were   thousands of young Frenchmen, many of them non-Jewish.