NAVY SIGNALS
I.D.F. NO: 74047
Towards the end of April 1948, two friends and I decided we couldn’t sit around any more and listen to the news about the difficult situation of the Jews in Palestine and do nothing. So we decided to volunteer for the Haganah, which was the underground defense forces of the Yishuv at that time.
The Jewish Agency arranged a clandestine meeting for us with a representative of the Haganah in London, who asked us a few questions and gave us a list of instructions. First, we had to have a medical examination. This took place in the private house of a doctor somewhere in Golders Green. When we entered the waiting room we were surprised to see about 25-30 people there, mostly men, but also five or six women. After we had been declared fighting-fit, we were told to see a rabbi who gave us a full Hebrew blessing.
We were also told to buy ourselves some boots and khaki shorts and shirts from the Army and Navy Stores. The next step was to make our way to Paris and report to the Haganah Recruiting Centre, somewhere on the Rue de la Grande Armée. When we arrived, all they did was check our credentials (a letter from the London representative), and then they gave us tickets for the next night train to Marseilles.
For the rest of the day we did a bit of sightseeing, had a meal, and made our way to the station. This was about the most uncomfortable train journey I have ever made. The train was packed and everybody smoked like chimneys. Every time I got up to open a window, someone went and closed it. I came to the conclusion that the French hated fresh air.
On arrival in Marseilles we were met and taken to a large camp on the outskirts of Marseilles. It was called the Grande Arénas and was then used as a displaced persons camp. There were hundreds of Holocaust survivors there, many of whom had been slave workers, and they wandered around, all with just one thing on their minds: they were all waiting for a ship to take them to Palestine.
It was a terribly depressing place. On the fourth day word came to get ready, as our ship had arrived. Four coaches, with about 230 people in all, set out on a terrifying ride to Port de Bouc, a small harbor next to Marseilles. That evening we boarded.
There is a mountainous region between the two ports, and as we traveled in total darkness, all we could see was a black abyss on each side of the bus. After about three hours we felt ourselves descending, a bit like being in an aircraft. We arrived at about midnight: the small harbor was pitch-black.
All we could see at the quayside was a large seagoing trawler, a fishing vessel, with no signs of a passenger liner. We were told to go aboard this trawler and we all squeezed aboard. We remarked to each other that this must be the ferry taking us to the liner outside the harbor. As we slowly made our way outside the harbor, and still no sign of a liner or anything else, it dawned upon us that this trawler was to be our “liner” and would be taking us to Palestine.
There were 230 people, including 30 volunteers aboard. Our leader was Eli, a Haganah officer, who told us to go below and make ourselves as comfortable as possible. Down below there was a passageway with wooden shelves (probably meant for boxes of fish) on each side, with about 18 inches of headroom in between the shelves. Into this space we had to wriggle our way in and lay next to each other like sardines. There were three shelves like this on each side of the passageway. We had been issued with one blanket each. Gradually we all found our little bit of space and settled down for the night.
Eli called the volunteers together and split us into duty watches. Each watch was responsible for keeping lookouts for any ships on the horizon. If they saw anything at all, they had to immediately get everybody down below so that from a distance it looked like a regular fishing vessel going about its business. This instruction was especially important if we sighted a Royal Navy ship, because if they caught us we’d finish up in a British detention camp in Cyprus. It took a day or two to convince the immigrants of this, as they were not too happy at being pushed around. Eventually they understood and co-operated.
Water was strictly rationed and if you wanted to wash, you had to use a bucket of seawater and a tiny bar of special soap we had been issued. Food was also strictly rationed, and consisted mainly of large biscuits which originated from the United Nations rations for “camp people.” Sometimes we had a bit of jam or a few sardines. Up on deck they had built a few latrines.
So we settled down to a routine of keeping watch and finding ways to grin and bear it. Luckily there was a group of young French North Africans from Algeria aboard, and they would burst into song at the slightest opportunity. They were absolutely delightful and kept us from getting really depressed.
The sea was fairly calm for the first few days and we had no serious alarms. On the fifth day we could see one of the Greek Islands in the distance and the sea started to get quite rough, and by the late afternoon there was a sudden silence. The chug-chugging of the engine had stopped.
The two Frenchmen whose boat it was tried hard but couldn’t get it started, so to everyone’s disbelief they put up a sail which made the boat even slower than with the engine. Very late in the evening we entered a small harbor in the Island of Crete. By then we had managed to get everyone below and out of sight. However, my watch (five of us) stayed on deck and lounged around, pretending to be fishermen. We even looked and smelled like fishermen!
As soon as we entered the harbor, a small boat with two men on board approached us. One of them came aboard and I saw him speak to Eli. After a minute or two Eli put his hand in his pocket and produced what looked like some banknotes and handed them to the man, who promptly went back to his boat and went off. He must have been a port official.
During the night they managed to get the engine going, and early in the morning we carried on with our journey. Nothing very exciting happened in the next few days, apart from a few sightings of ships in the far distance, but they were not near enough to worry us.
Very early on the 12th day (I had been on duty during the night and had just started to doze off), I heard a loud commotion up on the deck. On deck I saw people cheering, clapping, and some were actually in tears. The reason for all this was in the distance: the Carmel Mountains were just about visible. We had actually reached our destination. However, we then had a slight setback. A message had been received which told us to stay put and make ourselves inconspicuous till darkness fell. This meant that everybody had to stay down below all day as our boat had to look like an ordinary trawler.
This was the most dangerous time for us, because at any moment a British warship could appear, but we were lucky and none did. All of a sudden the irony of the situation hit me. I thought, here we were playing hide and seek with the Royal Navy, when less than two years previously, I was in the Royal Navy in the same area.
Three other ex-Royal Navy telegraphists with us had served their time in the Pacific area. So we wallowed below deck all day (very uncomfortably) until dusk, and then we started to approach the coast. Very late in the evening we saw several motor boats approaching. Soon the boats started to take all of us off the trawler and put us ashore. They dropped us somewhere on the old Haifa-Tel Aviv road, south of Haifa, where buses were waiting for us in the pitch-darkness.
The refugees were taken to a reception area at Beit Lid. The rest of us were taken to Tel Litvinsky, an abandoned British army camp, where we were greeted with hot tea (no milk) and freshly-baked bread with jam. After our experience of the previous 12 days, this tasted like food from the Gods, absolutely delicious.
The next morning we were sorted into groups of army, navy, and air force, and dispatched to the appropriate places. Unfortunately, I had to say goodbye to my two friends from London, as they went off to the army.
Our small group of five was taken to the HQ of the Israel Navy in a place called Stella Maris on the French Carmel in Haifa. In this group were four ex-Royal Navy telegraphists and one telegraphist who was a deserter from the Dutch Navy. One of the Royal Navy telegraphists was my friend Stanley Summers who lives in Thorpe Bay, and we’ve been friends ever since.
It appears that we arrived there just in time to be part of a brand new service (Shin Memshtayim). This Information Service 2 or MI2, is in fact a miniature version of the British GCHQ (Government Communication Headquarters in Cheltenham), which listens in to everybody and everything. Our job was to monitor all enemy transmissions.
So with a small number of operators, and an unknown number of Iraqi and Persian Jews who were code breakers, we started a brand-new secret department, the Intelligence Service (“Sheroot Modiyin”), of which approximately half were Machal volunteers. In the course of time this department grew and grew, until I was told a few years ago that it was almost as big as the British GCHQ.
Again we settled down into six-hour watches, as we had to cover all 24 hours of the day. In October 1948 I had a couple of days off. On the first morning I decided to walk up to an area of the Carmel known as Ahuza. I hadn’t walked very far when I saw an army camp and I decided to go in and try to find out what had happened to my two friends. As I approach the guard at the gate to my (pleasant) shock there was one of my friends, Jack Meiseles, walking towards me with a big grin on his face. He had joined the 72nd Battalion which was mostly Machal and had just come back from a spell in the Galilee.
I asked him about my other friend, Marcus Stemmer, and he told me that Marcus had been put in a company that was sent to Jerusalem. He also told me that Marcus had an older brother who was married and lived somewhere in Ahuza. We made a lot of enquiries and found out where the brother lived and a couple of weeks later we set out to visit him.
We found his flat and a woman came to the door. She couldn’t speak English, only Hebrew. With the few words of Hebrew I had learnt I asked her “Eifo Marcus?” (Where’s Marcus?) She immediately burst into tears and kept repeating “Marcus neherag, neherag!” (Marcus has been killed!) Suddenly it hit me like a sledgehammer: Marcus had been killed in Jerusalem. Both Jack and I were shattered, absolutely shattered. We left after a few minutes, I back to my camp and Jack to his.
Two weeks later our whole department was transferred to Jaffa where they had prepared a larger office with more equipment and more staff. All the messages we intercepted were Morse code, sometimes five-letter groups and sometimes plain language, but Arabic. We just wrote down English letters and let the coding officers do the rest.
Eventually something happened which made all our hardships in coming to Israel and all our hard work there worthwhile. One day I was asked to listen to the mercantile wavelength which was used by all ships and ports, and was often in plain English, although still in Morse. I did this for a couple of days and nothing very interesting came up. On the third day, after a little while I suddenly sat bolt upright; somebody was sending an S.O.S. – S.OS., S.O.S., S.O.S. – this is SS Richard-Borchard, we have been stopped by an Egyptian destroyer named the “Emir Farouk” – they are sending a boarding party over, our position is … latitude,.. longitude, and so on.
I called the officer in charge who took one look at the message, grabbed it, and shot off into the next room, the coding office. In the meantime, the same message was being repeated, and I promptly gave it to the officer when he returned. The message was repeated three times, and then silence, no more messages.
Presumably the Egyptian boarding party had arrived. The SS Richard-Borchard was a merchant ship chartered by the Israeli government. For the next couple of days I tried to find out what happened without success, but nobody seemed to know (or wouldn’t say).
A few days later one of my friends and I were off-duty, and went into Tel Aviv. There was a serviceman’s club on Hayarkon Street where we used to go for coffee and cakes, made for us by the lovely ladies of Tel Aviv, and to hear the latest news. Jack Pockroy, a friend who used to live in a flat in Stamford Hill, picked up a news-sheet and after a while turned to me and said “Sidney, you’re in the news!”
I grabbed the newssheet from him and read the following: “Intelligence was received that the Egyptian destroyer “Emir Farouk” was attacking the merchant ship Richard-Borchard. The Israel Navy immediately put to sea and by nightfall caught up with the “Emir Farouk” and sank it.” I could never find out how they managed to do that, no matter how hard I tried. That is, not until about 30 years later. A friend called Harry Olofsky who had stayed in Israel and married an Israeli girl, told me how they did it.
Apparently two motor boats set out. One of them was packed with high explosives. When they caught up with the “Emir Farouk” late in the evening off the coast of Gaza, the man in the explosives boat set the steering wheel directly towards the destroyer and dived overboard, and was picked up by the other boat. After a short while there was a huge explosion and that is how they sank the “Emir Farouk”, the flagship of the Egyptian Navy.
Life went on as usual, but once again we moved to a very much larger building with more equipment, which now included wire recorders which are ideal for Morse. We also gained quite a number of newly-trained staff.
By November 1949, I decided to call it a day and go home, where a certain girl with whom I had been corresponding all the time I was in Israel was waiting for me. This time I traveled in style, on a passenger liner, a “real” one, at the expense of the Israeli government.
Shortly after arriving home, we got engaged, and in June 1950 we were married. We celebrated our Golden Wedding anniversary in June 2000. She has always called herself a “Machal Bride.”
Author: Sidney Graham