The FReeper Foxhole Remembers Colonel David 'Mickey' Marcus - May 5th, 2005

Military History Magazine | April 1998 | David T. Zabecki

[SAMWolf]

Lord,

Keep our Troops forever in Your care

Give them victory over the enemy...

Grant them a safe and swift return...

Bless those who mourn the lost.
.

FReepers from the Foxhole join in prayer
for all those serving their country at this time.

.................................................................. .................... ...........................................

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David 'Mickey' Marcus

Israel's greatest military commander since Judas Maccabeus -- David 'Mickey' Marcus -- was accidentally killed by one of his own troops.

On a warm July day in 1948, a funeral was held at the U.S. Military Academy in New York for David Daniel Marcus, class of 1924. In many ways it was a typical West Point funeral, with a bugler, a firing party and a number of distinguished mourners. In one respect, however, the ceremony was unique. Although an American flag covered his coffin, Marcus was the first soldier buried at West Point who had died fighting under another nation's flag. Only two weeks before his death, he had been appointed the first divisional level field commander in the army of the fledgling state of Israel.

Marcus was born on New York's Lower East Side on February 22, 1902. He was the fifth child of Mordecai and Leah Marcus, who had emigrated from Romania to escape the waves of antisemitism sweeping Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century. Mordecai Marcus sold vegetables from a pushcart and eventually worked his way up to owning his own stall in the Washington Market. That enabled the family to move to Brooklyn, but then Mordecai died suddenly in 1910.

Antisemitism was also very much alive in early-20th-century America. Michael, the oldest of the Marcus children, formed a self-defense group that protected elderly Jews from neighborhood street gangs. "Big Mike," as he was called, worked out daily. When young David started following his older brother around, and even sparring with him at the local gym, people started calling him "Little Mike," which soon was shortened to "Mickey."

Mickey Marcus excelled in high school both as a student and an athlete. To his family's chagrin, he decided somewhere along the line that he wanted to go to the U.S. Military Academy. Marcus entered the academy in 1920, when Brig. Gen. Douglas MacArthur was superintendent. He became a standout athlete, winning letters in boxing and football, and graduated in 1924 as a second lieutenant of infantry. During his first assignment, on Governor's Island in New York Harbor, Marcus studied law at night school in the city and in 1927 married Emma Hertzenberg. His next duty assignment was to be Puerto Rico, but the newlyweds decided that they really did not want to live there. Marcus resigned his Regular commission and went to work as a law clerk in New York.


On a corridor wall in the Jewish Chapel of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point is displayed the above photo layout depicting Col./Commissioner David 'Mickey' Marcus at different stages in his military career. From left: Cadet Marcus, Class of '24. Marcus and roommate Lt. Charles Stevenson on Mickey's Wedding Day, 1927. Col. Marcus, February,1945. Marcus with Israeli Army, 948.

A year after he resigned from the Regular Army, he received a doctorate from Brooklyn Law School. Between 1930 and 1934, Marcus was an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. One of his closest associates was future presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey.

When Fiorello La Guardia became mayor of New York on a reform ticket in 1934, he appointed Marcus deputy commissioner of corrections. One of Marcus' first actions was to personally lead a special police raid on the corruption-ridden and prisoner-controlled penitentiary on Welfare Island. In 1936, La Guardia appointed Marcus a temporary magistrate to help relieve the case backlog in the crowded Manhattan courts. That summer Marcus worked closely with Dewey in an operation that eventually led to the shutdown of Lucky Luciano's crime ring.

Marcus had actually been running the department for five years when La Guardia finally appointed him commissioner of corrections in April 1940. Meanwhile, he had maintained a Reserve commission as a field artillery officer. In 1939, because of his legal experience, he was persuaded to transfer to the Judge Advocate General's Corps.


Then Chief of Department Edward Reilly and Parks Commissioner Henry Stern unveil a biographical plaque at playground ceremonies commemorating U.S. and Israeli military hero David 'Mickey' Marcus who headed Correction under Mayor LaGuardia.

In 1940, Lt. Col. Marcus' National Guard unit, the 27th Infantry Division, was federalized and sent to Alabama. Marcus was then the unit's judge advocate. Although legal officers were not supposed to command troops in the field, Marcus managed to lead a unit of special troops during maneuvers in Louisiana in 1941. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, the 27th Division deployed to Hawaii. There, Marcus organized and commanded a Ranger school, training some 8,000 men during the next year.

Using his training experience as justification, Marcus tried to talk the Army into giving him a field command with a Ranger unit, but he was unsuccessful. In the spring of 1943, Marcus was posted back to the Pentagon to become chief of planning for the War Department's Civil Affairs Division (CAD), headed by Maj. Gen. John H. Hilldring. For most of the rest of the war, Marcus, now a full colonel, found himself on a whirlwind tour of the corridors of power.

While at CAD, Marcus served as a legal and military government adviser at some of the war's most important Allied conferences. Those included Cairo in November 1943; Dumbarton Oaks, where the United Nations was born; and Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam, where the postwar world order was forged. According to the citation for his Distinguished Service Medal (an unusually high service decoration for a colonel), Marcus played a key role in the "negotiation and drafting of the Italian Surrender Instrument, the Instrument of Unconditional Surrender of Germany, and the international machinery to be used for the control of Germany after her total defeat."


Col. Marcus in Israel, 1948

Although locked into a general staff job, Marcus did figure out a way to make one trip to the front lines. In early May 1944, he convinced Hilldring to send him to London on temporary duty "to provide liaison and act as observer in the implementation of military government policies for France." At first Hilldring was pleased because Marcus managed to answer on the spot most of the civil affairs questions that usually wound up at the Pentagon. Then, in the second week of June, Hilldring realized that he had not heard from Marcus since the end of May. After a few transatlantic phone calls, Hilldring learned from Lt. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith that Marcus was "somewhere in France," having jumped on D-Day, June 6, with the 101st Airborne Division.

Marcus used a very elastic interpretation of his orders from Hilldring, combined with the fact that he had been a fellow cadet at West Point with the 101st's commander, Maj. Gen. Maxwell Taylor (class of 1922), to get himself on a Curtiss C-46 in the first wave. Of all the soldiers who jumped with the 101st that day, only Marcus and one other had never jumped before.

Once on the ground in Normandy, Marcus collected groups of the widely scattered paratroopers and organized them into patrols. He led several of those patrols himself, engaging in firefights with German units and, on one occasion, freeing a group of captured U.S. paratroopers. As the 101st regrouped over the next few days, Marcus finally bumped into Taylor, who asked him, "What the hell are you doing here?" Marcus characteristically replied, "Oh, just looking around." Back in Washington, a frustrated Hilldring finally had to issue the order: "Find Marcus. Arrest him if you have to--but send him back!" Shortly after that, Marcus was on a plane to the United States, still in his dirty field uniform.


Latrun Police Building

Immediately after the end of the fighting in Europe, General Lucius D. Clay, commander of U.S. occupation forces in Germany, requested that Marcus be assigned to his staff. Clay's standing instructions at the time were that all senior officers in Germany were to visit the recently liberated Dachau concentration camp. As a civil affairs officer, Marcus was well-acquainted with Nazi wartime atrocities. But even that knowledge did not prepare him for the horrors he saw at Dachau. He had never been a Zionist, but now he started to rethink his position on a future Jewish state.

During his tour in Germany, Marcus served as executive for internal affairs of the U.S. Group Control Council, then its acting chief of staff, and then the U.S. secretary general in occupied Berlin. Much of his time and energy was devoted to improving conditions for the vast numbers of displaced persons in Europe. Despite his anger over Nazi treatment of the Jews, at a White House conference Marcus argued strongly against adopting the drastic Morganthau Plan, which would have reduced postwar Germany to an agricultural state--one vast farmland.

In early 1946, Hilldring managed to get Marcus back from General Clay, this time to head the Pentagon's War Crimes Division. Marcus was responsible for selecting the judges, prosecutors and lawyers for the major war crimes trials in Germany and Japan. He attended the Nuremberg Trials, where one of his main concerns was the complete documentation of Nazi atrocities for future generations.

In 1946, the British government made Marcus an honorary officer of the Order of the British Empire, "in recognition of the distinguished service performed…in cooperation with British armed forces during the war." By then, he had been nominated for the rank of brigadier general five times. Nomination No. 6 came in early 1947, along with the offer of a coveted assignment as the military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. He elected instead to return to civilian life and his law practice--but his respite from military service would be short.

[SAMWolf]

That December, Marcus was approached in New York by Major Shlomo Shamir, representing the "Provisional Jewish Government." Shamir had been sent to America to recruit a military expert to help organize and train the army of the soon-to-be-born state. At first Marcus agreed to help Shamir find such an individual, but it quickly became apparent that Marcus himself was the prime candidate. His wife vigorously opposed any such adventure, but Marcus argued that what he would be doing would be no different than what the Marquis de Lafayette, Friedrich von Steuben or Tadeusz Kosciuszko had done during the American Revolution.

Under the nom de guerre "Michael Stone," Marcus flew to Palestine in January 1948. The United Nations had voted to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states effective October 1, 1948. The British were to remain in control of the mandate until then. Since 1945, both sides had engaged in constant guerrilla warfare against each other and against the British. Many of the Arab countries were determined that the state of Israel would never come into existence.

An armoured truck tries to reach Jerusalem from the "Burma Road", during the siege of the city.

The Jewish situation was desperate. The surrounding Arab states comprised about 100 times the territory and 60 times the population of the would-be Jewish state. As soon as the Jews declared their independence, the forces of Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Trans-Jordan (later Jordan) were poised to invade. The Arab forces, however, were a mixed lot, ranging from the Arab Liberation Army--a ragged collection of poorly trained volunteers--to the 6,000-strong Trans-Jordan Arab Legion, a modern, elite fighting force with British officers and commanded by the legendary British Maj. Gen. John Bagot Glubb.

Opposing the Arabs, the Jews had the clandestine Haganah, with a mobilization strength of about 30,000, commanded by Israel Galili. The crack 2,500-man Palmach, under Colonel Yigael Allon, was the only full-time force within the Haganah. The Haganah was short on weapons and had only a few light observation aircraft and no artillery. What passed for its armored force consisted of locally fabricated armored cars made by bolting steel plates onto trucks.

The situation was made worse by the fact that the British maintained a strict arms embargo while they still controlled Palestine. The embargo hurt the Jews but did not affect the Arab forces outside the country. The Jews had just two things going for them. First, although the Arabs were set to attack from all sides, there was no unity of command or synchronization of effort. Second, with the exception of the Legion, the Arab forces were notoriously poor night fighters.

Reporting directly to future Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, Marcus toured the country, visiting Haganah bases, examining troop dispositions and evaluating training programs. He made recommendations that he believed were necessary to transform the largely underground organization into a modern, effective strike force.

June 1948 – "Burma Road"

Marcus recommended that the Haganah adopt the self-contained brigade as its basic combat formation. He also accurately predicted to Ben-Gurion that the southern Negev Desert would be Israel's first theater of war. To assist the Haganah training program, Marcus tried to have U.S. Army field manuals smuggled into the country. When that failed, he attacked the problem in characteristic fashion by sitting down and drafting his own manuals from memory, specifically tailored to the needs of the fledgling Jewish army. Marcus stressed taking initiative and decisive action. He also emphasized solid staff work at higher levels and the importance of logistics.

In April, Marcus returned briefly to the United States when his wife fell ill. The British, meanwhile, tired of being caught in the middle of a no-win situation, decided to withdraw their troops from Palestine early, on May 15. The British officer corps in the region, however, remained with the Trans-Jordan Arab Legion.

Marcus returned to Palestine in early May. Israel declared its independence at 4:30 p.m. on May 14. Within hours, as Marcus had predicted, two Egyptian brigades, supported by tanks and artillery, advanced into the Negev. On Marcus' recommendation, Ben-Gurion sent a small element of 30 radio- and machine-gun-equipped jeeps and a company of halftrack-mounted infantry south to reinforce the Haganah defensive outposts and to act as a raiding and harassing force. Marcus accompanied the force as an adviser.

I.D.F Homemade armor advancing to Jerusalem through the Judean Hills, October 1948.

Hindered by a daring combination of hit-and-run attacks and night raids against its flanks and long supply lines, the Egyptian advance slowed to a crawl and eventually halted. In the north of the country, Palmach units under Moshe Dayan checked the Syrian advance toward the Jordan River valley. By the end of May the main crisis point had shifted to Jerusalem. The Arab Legion already held the ancient Holy City, and they were trying to cut off the remainder of the new city before any United Nations–brokered cease-fire took effect.

The key to Jerusalem was a series of hill fortifications and a massively fortified police station at Latrun that dominated the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem Road. So long as the Arab Legion held those positions, Jerusalem was effectively cut off. On May 25, the Jewish forces mounted an attack on Latrun but were driven back with heavy casualties. On close examination of the failure, the Israeli leadership realized that the attack had suffered from the lack of a single unified command.

After consulting with his cabinet, Ben-Gurion decided on a bold and unorthodox move. On May 28, the provisional government issued the following order: "Brigadier General Stone is hereby appointed Commander of the Jerusalem front, with command over the Etzioni, Har-El and 7th Brigades." Mickey Marcus finally had his combat command. Up until that time, brigades were the highest level of field command in the Israeli army. Now Marcus was the equivalent of a division commander. His rank title in Hebrew was aluf, and he was the first Jewish soldier to hold that rank since Judas Maccabeus, 2,100 years before.

Marcus immediately organized another attack on Latrun for May 30. When that attack also failed, he started looking for another way to break the ring around Jerusalem. After a brainstorming session with his staff and a personal ground reconnaissance, Marcus became convinced it would be possible to improve a series of goat trails running through the rocky and tortuous terrain sufficiently to handle truck traffic. Bypassing the dominating, enemy-held heights, the new road would connect with the main highway on either side of Latrun.

Marcus then convinced Ben-Gurion it could be done, and the prime minister committed the bulldozers, manpower and other necessary resources. The crews worked day and night on what Marcus wryly called "The Burma Road." In some sectors they had to work within 500 meters of the Arab positions. To protect the construction, and to keep the Arabs from figuring out what the Israelis were doing, Marcus deployed his fighting forces in an aggressive screen between the new road and the Latrun positions. Marcus also ordered another assault on Latrun, but it was more of a spoiling attack to keep the legion off-guard and to divert attention away from the construction. In planning that third attack, Marcus was assisted by the Palmach's chief of operations, Yitzhak Rabin--who later became Israel's prime minister and was tragically assassinated on November 4, 1995.

By June 7, one week after construction began, the road was open and the first truck convoys made the slow, hazardous passage. United Nations mediator Count Folke Bernadotte, meanwhile, had negotiated the cease-fire time for 10:00 a.m. on June 11, 1948. The siege of Jerusalem had been broken, however, and the Israelis had a credible claim on their land link with the city.

Bags are unloaded from a food convoy driving a ceasefire in Jerusalem, 1948.

The night before the cease-fire took effect, Marcus and his staff held a celebration in the ancient village of Abu Ghosh, some eight miles east of Jerusalem. In the early morning hours, Marcus found himself unable to sleep and went for a walk. On his way out, he was recognized by the sentry, who waved to him. Shortly after, the relief sentry showed up--25 minutes early. Not knowing that his commander was out walking around, the new sentry challenged the blanket-clad figure as soon as he saw him. Marcus replied in English, which confused the sentry, a recent immigrant. The sentry fired a shot in the air, but the figure in the dark kept coming. The sentry lowered his rifle and fired again. Mickey Marcus fell dead at 3:50 a.m. with a bullet through his heart--the last casualty before the cease-fire.

Marcus' troops brought him back to Tel Aviv in a coffin strapped to the hood of a jeep. Robert Capa, the internationally famous war photographer, accompanied the body. When they returned him to New York City, Marcus was escorted by Moshe Dayan and Yosef Hamburger, the Haganah commander of the blockade-running ship Exodus. After a funeral service at Union Temple, they took Marcus back to West Point, where he was buried on July 2, 1948--28 years to the day after he first reported there as a plebe. Among the mourners were Thomas E. Dewey, then governor of New York, and Maxwell Taylor, the superintendent of West Point.

In 1962, author Ted Berkman wrote Marcus' story in Cast a Giant Shadow. Four years later, the book was made into a movie, starring Kirk Douglas. Although the film's story line typified Hollywood's general lack of respect for historical fact, Douglas' portrayal of the irrepressible Marcus vividly captured the fiery spirit of the man.

David Ben-Gurion later said of Marcus: "He was the best man we had." His gravestone at West Point reads: "Colonel David Marcus--A Soldier for All Humanity."

Additional Sources:

www.dean.usma.edu
www.stateofisrael.com
en.wikipedia.org
info.jpost.com
www.jerusalem-archives.org
www.jr.co.il
amichai.com

[SAMWolf]

One of the most visited graves in the West Point Cemetery is that of Colonel David "Mickey" Marcus, Class of 1924, subject of the movie "Cast a Giant Shadow." He is the only West Point graduate buried in the cemetery who died in the service of a foreign government. During World War II he served as a military adviser to President Roosevelt and on Patton's staff, and afterwards he helped set up the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials. His experience with those trials and liberating concentration camps inspired the Jewish Marcus to accept a position with Israel to train their new Defense Forces. During the Israeli War for Independence in 1948 he commanded the Jerusalem Front with the rank of general, the first officer of such rank in a Jewish army in 2000 years. Marcus was mistakenly killed by one of his own sentries six hours before a UN-negotiated cease-fire went into effect. His marker, inscribed "A Soldier for All Humanity," is carved out of rock from the cliffs overlooking Jerusalem, and it is always topped with rocks placed there as a sign of respect by Jewish visitors.

[SAMWolf]

Veterans for Constitution Restoration is a non-profit, non-partisan educational and grassroots activist organization. The primary area of concern to all VetsCoR members is that our national and local educational systems fall short in teaching students and all American citizens the history and underlying principles on which our Constitutional republic-based system of self-government was founded. VetsCoR members are also very concerned that the Federal government long ago over-stepped its limited authority as clearly specified in the United States Constitution, as well as the Founding Fathers' supporting letters, essays, and other public documents.

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Actively seeking volunteers to provide this valuable service to Veterans and their families.

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We here at Blue Stars For A Safe Return are working hard to honor all of our military, past and present, and their families. Inlcuding the veterans, and POW/MIA's. I feel that not enough is done to recognize the past efforts of the veterans, and remember those who have never been found.

I realized that our Veterans have no "official" seal, so we created one as part of that recognition. To see what it looks like and the Star that we have dedicated to you, the Veteran, please check out our site.

Veterans Wall of Honor

Blue Stars for a Safe Return

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UPDATED THROUGH APRIL 2004



The FReeper Foxhole. America's History. America's Soul

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[Wneighbor]

HOWDY!!!

[snippy_about_it]

Sad end to his life.

[snippy_about_it]

First in! Congrats. :-)

[snippy_about_it]

"FALL IN" to the FReeper Foxhole!



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[Wneighbor]

That's another incredible bit of history. Again, I'd only heard little smidgeons before. Fascinating. What a great man!

[Wneighbor]

First in! Congrats. :-)

~grin~

That's what happens when I stay up too late Snippy! :-)

[snippy_about_it]

I'm about to turn in. We had an early start to our day and I'm whooped.

Good night.

[Wneighbor]

Night Snippy! Have a wonderful day tomorrow if I don't see ya!

[A Jovial Cad]

Good morning SAM, snippy.

Though I was aware of the vaguest outlines of this story, I didn't know the details in depth until this post. Once again, the Foxhole is a treasure trove of historical information--thank you both.

Fascinating to me is the wonderful juxtaposition of two fulfilled duties, both with honor: a hero fighting on behalf of the fledgling state of Israel circa 1948, and buried at West Point for his distinctive service to the United States of America during World War II.

What a life! Not just to witness so many of the disparate Tides of History in that era, but to be such a positive part of it at the same time; that's something else, again.

May he Rest In Peace.

[Iris7]

The post made me think, to "turn back the pages of yesteryear", as they used to say on The Lone Ranger.

I told the story of getting mortared by the Marines. Purely unintentional on their part, foolishness on mine.

The Army kept shooting up Navy vessels from their helicopters. One night I saw the Army keep 21 aerial flares burning about a mile offshore. The flares burned for three or four minutes and cost $3,500 each. Could buy a new car for that then. What they were so interested in, turned out, was a Navy LST, a Landing Ship Tank. Great huge ship, lots of American flags painted all over it, etc. Perhaps the Army did not know there was a US Navy.

Anyway, the Army had shot up several Navy craft, like mine, and so we were issued a very cool boat-to-helicopter radio, which was also a boat-to-attack aircraft radio. Neat gadget which never worked.

Not just the Army guys, here. The Air Force dropped a bomb that just missed me. Fragments put holes through the steel every six inches or so. At the time we were tied up to shore at an Army base, 1st Cav, so it was not as if it wasn't obvious we were good guys.

As far as Marcus getting killed, he was acting very unprofessionally indeed. I am using restrained language. I cannot imagine being so, so, so, suicidal.

[E.G.C.]

Good morning, snippy and everyone at the Foxhole.

[GailA]

Good morning all, promising to be a BEAUTIFUL 78 and sunny today.

[The Mayor]

May 5, 2005

Only One Door

Read:
John 10:7-10

I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved. -John 10:9

Bible In One Year: Psalm 73-75

Old Testament scholar Sir George Adam Smith says that when he visited the Holy Land he came upon a shepherd and his sheep standing before a stockade. There was no door in that protective enclosure, only an opening the width of a man's body.

Smith asked the shepherd why there was no door, and he explained: "I am the way in. I stand in the opening, and the sheep pass under me into the stockade. When they are all safely inside, I lie down across that opening. No thief can get in and no sheep can get out except over my body. I am the entrance."

We are like sheep who need a Shepherd (1 Peter 2:25). For entrance into heaven, a place of eternal bliss, Jesus gave this amazing claim: "I am the door of the sheep. . . . If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved" (John 10:7-9). The people listening to Him that day didn't think of a wooden gate swinging on hinges. They understood that He was really saying, "I am the entrance into the homeland of God." He could claim to be the way into that eternal blessedness, the exclusive way into God's glory, because He is the incarnate Son of God.

Jesus is the only way into heaven (John 14:6). We gain entrance only by putting our faith in Him. -Vernon Grounds

Come to the Savior, make no delay-
Here in His Word He's shown us the way;
Here in our midst He's standing today,
Tenderly saying, "Come!" -Root

There are many ways to hell, but only one way to heaven.

FOR FURTHER STUDY
Religion Or Christ: What's The Difference?

[alfa6]

Thursday AM bump for an interesting Freeper Foxhole

Regards

alfa6 ;>}

[SJackson]

If you'd like to be on this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

[Soaring Feather]

Good morning everyone.

[dennisw]

Btttttttttt Good one. Fighting Jewboy bump!!!