The Reckoning Read online

  The brutal pragmatism of the British seems partly a reflection of the resentment felt by the Palestine administration and those in London who directed it. ‘[To them] it seemed so unfair,’ wrote one historian of the episode. ‘Britain was engaged in mortal combat against Nazi Germany … why should she be lumbered with other responsibilities, why should she divert valuable manpower and shipping from the war effort?’17

  The position, though, was untenable. The story of the Struma caused deep unease in Britain and outrage among American Jews, whose perceived ability to influence Washington’s attitude was respected and even feared by the government. Once again, Britain’s Palestine policy performed an ungainly volte-face. On 5 March the Cabinet ruled that any Jews who reached Palestine ‘should be treated with humanity’ – although this still meant that they would be penned up in camps until somewhere else could be found for them. A few days later Harold Macmillan, then a minister at the Colonial Office, told the House of Commons that Britain would strive to ensure that there was no repeat of the Struma catastrophe.

  Repentance came too late. The affair burned into the consciousness of the Yishuv. Those who had previously believed in the ultimate benevolence of British rule were forced to think again; those who doubted it had their suspicions confirmed; and those who denied it had their convictions strengthened. In this atmosphere, Avraham Stern’s message did not seem quite so crazy. Events would soon show that were still men around who were determined to act upon it.

  * Levstein, of course, was not present in the room.

  * However, the Germans did try to infiltrate Jewish agents by other means. See reference in note 15.

  THIRTEEN

  ‘Hatred Was Aflame in Their Hearts and the Need for Vengeance Burned’

  Just after eight o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, 22 April 1942, the Deputy Inspector General of the Palestine Police, Michael ‘Mac’ McConnell, stepped out of the front door of his house in the Jerusalem suburbs and walked round to the garage. Spring was well advanced, birds were singing in the trees and the dawn freshness was already wilting under the brassy Palestinian sun. As the veteran policeman, who had served in the force since its earliest days, backed his car out of the garage his servant stood in the drive to see him off. When McConnell drove away an object fell from underneath the vehicle. The servant walked over and picked it up. It exploded instantly, blowing off both his hands. He died soon afterwards.

  Three hours later a little boy was playing by the side of the road near the home of McConnell’s boss, Alan Saunders. An unusual object caught his eye. A policeman happened to be passing and the child pointed it out to him. What the policeman saw was a zinc box, attached to a long wire. The wire stretched for a hundred yards across a neighbouring field and terminated in an electric switch. Later examination revealed that the box contained seventy-three ‘fingers’ of gelignite, wired to detonators and packed around with six pounds of iron rivets.

  Someone, it seemed, was trying to decapitate the high command of the Palestine Police and it was not difficult to guess who. The Public Information Officer informed the local newspapers that ‘the bomb was similar to those used by the murderers of Inspectors Schiff, Turton and Goldman in Tel Aviv’.1 Stern’s master bomber Yaacov Levstein was safely behind bars. It seemed he had left behind a team of adepts to carry on his work.

  Nine days later, at 8.15 a.m. on Friday, 1 May, Geoffrey Morton opened the door of his American saloon car parked outside the bungalow in Sarona and slid his large frame behind the wheel. His wife, Alice, got in beside him. They were joined in the back by Sergeants Alec Stuart and Alex Shand, each carrying a Thompson sub-machine gun. The precaution was clearly justified. Not only had remnants of the band tried to kill the chief of police and his deputy, they had already made what appeared to be one abortive attempt on Morton’s life. Morton’s journey to his headquarters took him past an orange grove surrounded by a stone wall on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. A few weeks previously, he wrote, ‘a sharp-eyed police patrol noticed that the cement surrounding one of the big stones which formed the wall had been carefully chipped out and that the stone could now be quickly removed from inside the wall. The implications were pretty sinister …’2 Since then the route had been kept under surveillance – but not very efficiently, as Morton and his passengers were soon to find out.

  In the back seat Alex Shand was scanning his side of the road for anything suspicious. ‘Suddenly there was an explosion … the car was rocked from one side of the road to the other.’ He jumped out and saw ‘a great hole in the road. It was obvious it had been set off by remote control some hundred yards away.’ His first reaction was ‘great anger … I think I was the only one who spoke. I said “you bastards!”’3

  The car was destroyed. By a miracle, nobody had been hurt. The Mortons appeared extraordinarily composed. As is sometimes the case with narrow escapes from death, the grim scene quickly morphed into bizarre comedy. Shand remembered an Arab taxi driving up and Alec Stuart ordering it to stop. He jumped into the front seat and in doing so put his foot through a mandolin. ‘He got his foot stuck in this thing and he was kicking it off in the road. I thought it was a very funny sight.’

  A police car picked them up and took the party to Jaffa, where Alice insisted on carrying on with her duties at the High School for Girls. ‘After I had cleaned her up a bit, my wife taught all the morning with a splitting headache,’ Morton recorded proudly.4 Everyone had heard the explosion and initially thought it was an enemy air raid. Alice, displaying the coolness that would sustain her throughout her adventurous life with Geoffrey, did not enlighten them and they only learned the true story when they read it in the next day’s newspapers.

  The investigation soon established that the bomb had been dug into a camel track that ran along the side of the road – planting it in the tarmac would have been too conspicuous. The command wire ran into an orange grove over a hundred yards away. The bomb was funnel-shaped to direct the blast. It was made of about sixty sticks of gelignite, packed with iron rivets and tamped inside a length of drainpipe. Human error had saved the Mortons and their bodyguards. Shand believed that if the operator had ‘pressed the plunger when [the bomb] was in line with the front wheel, the full force of the explosion would have hit the centre of the car. As it happened they hit the rear. It happened to be a slope-backed car … and it didn’t get the full force of the explosion. That was our luck.’5

  This bore all the hallmarks of a job by Stern’s men. But which ones exactly and what was their strategy? In Jerusalem, the hunt for the perpetrators of the McConnell bomb outrage produced quick results. The day after the attempt a ‘trusted source’ gave the names of six Stern followers in the city. Two of those named were picked up in a raid, along with another who had not been on the list, a Turkish-born waiter named Nissim Bachmaris, who worked at the Palatin café. Under Dick Catling’s patient interrogation, Bachmaris’s denials of any involvement with the group broke down and he started to gush information. He led them to a house in Givat Shaul, a new quarter still under construction in the north-west of the city, where Moshe Bar Giora, who had been involved in the attack, and another man were living. A search produced bomb-making materials. An ambush was laid and late on the evening of Thursday, 30 April, two men were seen approaching the house. When challenged they ran off. One was shot and wounded in the thigh, the other was captured. The wounded man was identified as Ezra Sharoni. The other was Bar Giora. The combined operations had been very effective. ‘There is little doubt that these arrests broke the back of the organisation in Jerusalem,’ Alan Saunders concluded.6

  In Tel Aviv, events moved equally swiftly. In the early hours of the morning after the attempt on Morton, the police picked up a man named Yosef Nikolaievski wandering shoeless in the north of the city. When questioned he at first claimed he had been taking a nocturnal dip in the nearby Yarkon river. After questioning by Alec Stuart, Alex Shand and Tom Wilkin, he eventually provided a very different explanation. He was, he
confessed, a long-standing follower of Avraham Stern. Four days before, in his room in Tel Hai Street, he and five others had built a pipe bomb packed with rivets and seventy pieces of gelignite. He identified one of the men as Yehoshua Cohen, who had been on the neighbouring roof of 8 Yael Street when Schiff and the others were killed. The job took all day. That evening Nikolaievski delivered the bomb to the flat of one of his confederates, Eliahu Levy, then went to see a film at the Mograbi cinema. As he told Tom Wilkin, he got home just after midnight and was ‘about to retire when I heard the bell ring twice. I opened the door and I saw six or seven men.’7 He tried to slam the door shut but was overpowered, dragged outside, blindfolded and handcuffed, bundled into a car and driven off. After a while the car stopped on some rough ground and Nikolaievski’s mystery captors started to question him.

  ‘They asked me where the landmine was which was in my house the previous day. I told them that I didn’t know what they wanted from me.’ His memory clearly needed jogging. Now they ‘handcuffed me behind the back, placed a rope through the handcuffs and hoisted me in the air so that my feet were off the ground. They again demanded that I should tell them where the landmine was. As I was in great pain I told them to let me down and I would tell them everything.’

  Nikolaievski gave them half the story, admitting his part in the bomb-making but giving phony names for his confederates. He was set free but the following night he received another visit from the same men. The torture was repeated and this time he gave up the name of Eliahu Levy. They returned for a third time in the early hours of the morning and, after handcuffing and driving him around for half an hour, cut him loose for the police to find.

  Who were Nikolaievski’s night callers? According to Shand they were members of the Haganah. The wave of arrests that followed suggests the CID were being given valuable help from very well-informed Jewish sources. By 12 May, nine men and a woman had been arrested. They included Shimon Lokshin, who had planted the bomb intended for Morton, and Nehemia Torenberg, who had passed on to Stern the Irgun’s offer of salvation. Some had given themselves up, including Yitzhak Tselnik, the man closest to Yair in his last days and his effective deputy. A few other significant figures were still at large, however, notably Yehoshua Cohen, who it was thought had triggered the bomb aimed at Morton.

  Most of those in detention kept their mouths shut but some spoke quite freely. One, Yitzhak Reznitsky, who had been part of the plot to kill Morton, gave an interesting account of the dynamic that had driven the group’s survivors to attack the British establishment head on. Alan Saunders’ report on the round-up operations says that Reznitsky told his interrogators that the killing of Schiff and his colleagues at Yael Street ‘produced a state of turmoil within the Stern Group. Members were shocked and displeased by the action and the movement was in danger of liquidation.’ However, the police actions that followed brought them back into line. ‘The severe methods employed by the police … including the shooting of Zak, Amper, Sevorai [sic], Levshtein [sic] and Stern himself … convinced the members of the Group of Government’s intention to crush their organisation at any cost, and it was decided to fight back.’8

  Saunders judged that the Jerusalem bombs and the attempted killing of Morton were ‘intended to advertise this fact and … to indicate the Group’s determination to eradicate its particular enemies in the CID’. Stern’s death certainly sparked a thirst for revenge among the boldest of his followers. ‘Heavy darkness descended on their hearts and minds,’ wrote Yaacov Banai, an early chronicler of the group. ‘Hatred was aflame in their hearts and the need for vengeance burned.’9 Ezra Sharoni was sitting with Nehemia Torenberg in a café in King George V Street, Tel Aviv, when they heard the news. They struggled ‘to avoid crying’, he remembered, years later. ‘We sat in shock and shortly afterwards parted, determined to prepare a plan of attack.’10

  According to Nathan Yellin-Mor, who would be one of the triumvirate who revived the group’s fortunes, hatred was focused on one man in particular. ‘The first goal for a revenge attack was perfectly clear – Geoffrey Morton, the murderer of Yair.’11 The problem was how to get at him as ‘he took strict precautionary measures … there was no chance of harming him in a direct attack’. He confirmed that a first attempt to plant a mine in the wall of an orange grove had been foiled when the device was discovered.

  The vendetta against Morton was personal. By killing Stern he had put not only himself but those around him in mortal danger. Having scoped out his route to work, the would-be assassins knew very well that Alice was always at his side. The Jerusalem bomb had been more in the nature of business. After the initial discovery, more mines were discovered in the area around Saunders’ house. The planned operation, it turned out, had not been aimed specifically at him: the police chief’s house happened to be on the way to the Mount Zion cemetery, where McConnell would have been buried had the car bomb hit its intended target. The mines, wrote Yellin-Mor, ‘were intended for the heads of government and senior ranks of the police and C.I.D.’ who would have come to McConnell’s funeral. Thus, a child’s discovery averted a spectacular outrage that might have wiped out a sizeable number of the British elite in Palestine, from Sir Harold MacMichael downwards. By going after Morton and the Mandate’s top brass, the plotters believed they would have at least the tacit approval of the Yishuv. ‘In the minds of those seeking vengeance,’ wrote Yellin-Mor, ‘the Struma disaster had created the right climate of opinion among the public.’ It was a judgement that was shared at least in part by those responsible for Palestine’s security.

  As it was, these operations used up the last reserves of strength of an exhausted and enfeebled organization. Almost all the key figures and most of the veterans were now locked up − 150 of them by the police count. For those who remained on the outside, further attacks on the British were too hazardous. The main aim now was to free their comrades, detained in Mazra’a and the other main compound holding emergency regulations prisoners at Latroun, halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. For the time being, escape plans would absorb most of their time and resources.

  Geoffrey Morton had been gratified by the avalanche of letters and telegrams he received from Palestine’s notables, Jewish and Arab, congratulating him on his lucky escape. One, from a fellow officer, Assistant Superintendent Henry Bennett Shaw, who would go on to become third in command of the PPF, mentions some act of kindness Morton had shown him. It gives an idea of his standing with his peers, not merely as a policeman but as a human being. ‘My Dear Geoff,’ he wrote. ‘First of all I should like to congratulate you on your recent miraculous escape but also to thank you for your very nice and sincere letter as real friends are few and far between, but believe me old boy, it is at times like these that one appreciates them to the full. I do hope that for our sake and your dear wife that they shift you from Jaffa soon …’12 Other correspondence came from people he had never met. One letter arrived from someone he knew only too well – Max Seligman, counsel to some of Palestine’s leading Jewish desperados and a formidable courtroom foe. ‘My sincere congratulations on your happy escape,’ he wrote. ‘Although this sort of thing may mean business for me professionally, you know that I deplore and abhor it.’ He went on to pay Morton a considerable compliment. ‘There is no need to tell you that with all our clashings, I do really appreciate your attitude and courtesy in regard to the various matters in regard to which I have had to approach you, and I am glad of your escape and hope that you will be spared to win the laurels which you deserve.’13 This was all very gratifying and carried the ring of sincerity. But the tone was that of a respectful and even affectionate adversary. No one assumed that the battle between the Stern group and the British powers was over, least of all Morton’s chief, Alan Saunders.

  Saunders was worried that two major regional dramas, coming within a few weeks of each other, had had a toxic effect on mainstream Jewish public opinion. He quoted the opinion of a ‘leading member of the Revisionist Party’ who ‘stated
recently that whereas the original Group enjoyed little, if any, public support, the circumstances of the shooting of Stern, coupled with the feeling aroused by the “Struma” tragedy had caused some people to wonder if Stern’s “idealism” was not, after all, worthy of serious thought’. He concluded that ‘mere arrests and administrative detention is not likely to deter the fanatics from the present Stern group’ and that ‘further acts of terrorism are to be expected’.14

  It was clear by now that MacMichael’s solution of deporting the problem en masse to some remote corner of the empire was not going to work. London was sympathetic. The problem was that there were simply not enough ships to spare, even if some colonial governor could be persuaded to take in a boatload of hardened and violent hotheads. ‘Much as I should like to help the High Commissioner it seems the practical difficulties are too great at the moment,’ sighed Sir Cosmo Parkinson, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Colonial Office. He did not rule out the measure for ever for ‘the situation might so develop that we should have to move these ruffians, whatever the inconveniences involved’.15

  So what was to be done? MacMichael’s room for manoeuvre was circumscribed by the fact that the Struma affair had grabbed the attention of public figures in London who were now keen to know more about what was happening in Palestine. They were led by the tireless Josiah Wedgwood, whose support in 1939 for armed insurrection against colonialist oppression had so gratified the Irgun. Wedgwood had reacted to the news of the shooting in Mizrachi Bet Street by dropping a note to Viscount Cranborne – ‘Bobbety’ to his intimates – who had taken over from Moyne as Colonial Secretary at the end of February. ‘Dear Bobbety,’ he wrote. ‘Who on earth (and off it) is Stern and what have your Palestinian rulers done now?’16 Now a peer, he tabled a question in the House of Lords on 2 June publicly asking Cranborne ‘when and under what circumstances a Palestinian Jew named Stern was killed while attempting to escape?’ The minister replied by listing the group’s crimes and repeating the formula that Stern and ‘two other terrorists’ had been killed ‘while attempting to escape’.