8TH BRIGADE – 89TH MECHANIZED COMMANDO BATTALION
From his 89th Machal comrades, it is known that Cooper, declaring his age as 18 when he was still 17, had enlisted in the Middlesex Regiment in 1942. He and his regiment had reached the 8th Army in North Africa at the end of the fighting there. They then moved to participate in the Italian campaign until the end of the war. In spite of a number of short periods in military detention camps for infringements of army rules and discipline, Paddy had an excellent combat record as a competent Vickers gun operator. After discharge in 1946 he found it difficult adjusting to civilian life and he re-enlisted into the British army as a driver/mechanic of a transport unit, and within a month he was sent to serve in mandated Palestine.
Paddy Cooper’s sister, Veronica Kreuzer, researching their family history, and thirsty for every scrap of information about her brother, found British records which showed that he had officially been declared a deserter on 9th June, 1948. The IDF file that she examined showed that he was first assigned as an instructor to the Gadna, under Hagana control, which prepared young people for military service. The documents describe Cooper as having a high school education and being a capable professional soldier. The Gadna made use of his skills as a driver and mechanic, as well as his combat experience.
Mike Isaacson, a South African Machalnik, today a businessman in South Africa, comrade and friend in the 89th, often described Cooper as a specialist Vickers medium machine gunner in World War II, and one of the best soldiers in their group.
Cooper was formally inducted into the IDF on 2nd July, 1948, assigned to “B” Company of the 89th Mechanized Command Battalion which was part of the 8th Brigade under Yitzhak Sadeh. This “B” Company consisted of young former Gadna personnel from the Emek Shefer and Sharon districts, including a platoon of English-speaking volunteers from overseas. These men hailed from Rhodesia, South Africa, U.K., USA, Scotland, and Holland.
Cooper had told his first company commander, Akiva Saar, that his witnessing the Hadassah convoy massacre had aroused his feelings to desert and join the Jewish cause.
Paddy had been driver of the commander’s half-track during Operation Dani to capture the villages of Kula and Tira, as well as participating in the raid on Lydda (Lod). The commander of the battalion at that time was Moshe Dayan. Dayan’s deputy, Yohanan Piltz, recalls that “Paddy was a lone-wolf type, and by adopting the Jewish cause he sometimes was more patriotic than the Israelis. He was good-looking, had learned Hebrew and had many female admirers. He did not like the English, considered them as the occupiers of Ireland, a true soldier who loved army life and its discipline. He was attached to his family in the U.K., especially his mother, but his emotional life was rooted here in Israel”.
He apparently once told his girlfriend Dalia Lamdani, “I know what it was like to suffer discrimination as an Irishman, like the Jews”.
Naphtali Arbel, who succeeded Saar in July 1948 as commander of “B” Company at the age of 19, states “I cannot use the word ‘deserter’ in reference to John Patrick Cooper. He simply left the British Army”.
Arbel relates that when Paddy was introduced to the soldiers (including the volunteers from overseas by Zvi Hazan, an Israeli, Zvi told them that this impressive man, tall and handsome man, known as Paddy, was his good friend and the most Israeli Irishman that he knew.
Arbel recalls “I was given to understand that he had recently joined our forces. Hazan also told me that once I got to know Cooper, I would discover what a great soul he has”.
According to Arbel, when Cooper was asked why he joined our cause, he would reply “God”, pointing skywards. He said that he could never forget that when they embarked on the war against the Germans, they were told that they would fight until the Nazi monster was annihilated. Then there was the holocaust, and European Jewry was exterminated. Cooper expressed how this had affected him. When he came to Mandated Palestine as a British soldier he was surprised. He did not understand why “they had gone to war against Nazi Germany in 1941, and returned alive, to be sent to the Middle East to fight the Nazi’s victims”.
As the son of an Irishwoman, Agnes Collins, he was raised as a Catholic and supported independence for Ireland. Arbel continues, “Paddy often told me that he understood the Jews in Israel. As a soldier he did not know the meaning of fear”.
Paddy Cooper was the second known British soldier who had witnessed the Mount Scopus medical convoy massacre on 13th April 1948. Some 80 civilians, most of them from the medical faculty of the Hadassah Hospital, were massacred.
Disgusted by the behavior of the British Army personnel who controlled the road and were ordered not to act and interfere with this wild action, they eventually deserted and joined the Haganah.
Ben Gurion had declared it as a “British Massacre”.
In June “Paddy” joined the English-speaking Machal platoon of the 89th Battalion. Amongst them he was known as a fearless soldier. During Operation “Yoav” the battalion was engaged against Trans-Jordan’s British officered Arab Legion in the area around Beit Jubrin. Manning a Piat (projectile infantry anti tank) weapon and accompanied by Reg Sagar, a South African volunteer from Rhodesia, moved to stop some Legion armored cars. Luckily for them the enemy vehicles moved too close to a stone fence. For a Piat to be effective, the operators’ have to use it some thirty yards from their target. Paddy fired and successfully destroyed one of the armored cars.
During Operation “Hiram” in the north 28th to 31st October, “B” Company of the 89th was sent up as support. Moving in the Beit Netofa valley with their half tracks, they were fired on from the village of Kfar Manda, hitting two of their men, one seriously in the head. Paddy Cooper led two comrades – British Bert Fagin and South African Leslie Marcus, to locate the sniper. Fagin and Marcus outflanked the sniper who had continued to fire. While Cooper crept up and silenced him.
On 9th November, after five unsuccessful previous attacks causing many Israeli casualties, the police fortress of Iraq-el-Suweidan (known as the Monster on the Hill) was finally captured by units of the 8th Brigade. It was softened up by the heaviest artillery concentration the Israelis had yet managed in the war, including newly acquired 75 mm guns, light and heavy mortars and machine gun fire. After two hours of concentrated non-stop fire, infantry half tracks and two tanks reached the fortress wall and breached it. Paddy and the volunteers of his platoon were the first to storm into the breach. He turned a captured British Vickers medium machine gun on the retreating Egyptians.
Israelis on the hill heard the crackle of a machine gun burst, then a lull. Three Egyptians fell within the fortress, the fighting stopped. The Egyptians had surrendered.
Having been on Christmas leave, Paddy was absent when the 89th captured Auja-el-Hafir. He had handed over his half track to South African Mike Isaacson (dubbed “the Fighting Tiger” by their Battalion commander), who had a harrowing experience. His half track was hit, disabled, and exposed to heavy fire. Reg Sagar, having knocked out the Egyptian mortar position, and in spite of a shrapnel wound in his chest, ran a considerable distance to alert another South African, Ralph Yodaiken, of Isaacson’s predicament. Ralph immediately returned with his half-track under the same heavy fire and towed Isaacson’s vehicle to safety.
Cooper frequently voiced admiration of his comrades in the 89th, both Israelis and the Machalniks, as being the “bravest and craziest fighters he had ever served with”.
After the war, Paddy remained in Israel. For some years he was partners with his Israeli comrade of the 89th, Zvi Hazan, running a kiosk at a busy Negev junction. He then became green-keeper at Israel’s first bowling green in Ramat Hasharon. In September 1969, in his mid-40s he collapsed and died as he was leaving his apartment.
He was buried at the Jaffa Catholic cemetery, escorted by 20 former comrades of the 89h Battalion.
Sources:
(a) “The Arab-Israeli Wars’ by Chaim Herzog.
(b) “South Africa’s 80” by Henry Katzew
(c) An article on Paddy Cooper in “Ha’aretz” newspaper dated 10th December, 2010 (www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/the-irish-rover-1.331149
(d) Numerous discussions by Joe Woolf over the years with Machal friends of the 89th Battalion.