It is incredible to think that the IDF in 1948 consisted of three tanks, and two of them stolen.
Posted on 07/14/2006 6:03:12 PM PDT by managusta
Some time ago I received an email from someone in Australia who had visited my web page. He was inquiring about his father. A web page called MACHAL is the story of the volunteers who came to Palestine to help the Jews fight for their independence and the ultimate establishment of the State of Israel. This photo is from that web page and it shows two British Cromwell Tanks that were stolen by two members of the Parachute Regiment.
He Thought that he could identify his father as one of the two soldiers. He was very involved with computer graphics and was able to tweak the photograph and identified his father. His question to me was "Did I know anything about the photograph or the theft "
I contacted a fellow officer who was a brigade intelligence officer at the time. The story was that two members of the 6th Airborne Division had stolen two tanks. It was not easy to steal the tanks.
They were driven off through the fence and left tracks that were easy to follow. Despite this the tanks just vanished. About the same time an Irish Guardsman drove off in a Staghound armoured car.
The assumption was that the soldiers were involved with Jewish women. This was not very credible since contact between troops and the civilian population was limited.
There certainly was not enough contact for the soldiers to meet and court jewish women. How the contact between the troops and the Jewish army was initiated and brought to fruition will probably never be known. The theft of the armoured car was a lot easier, it was driven out of the veichle park and could easily be driven to any jewish settlement where it could be handed over and easily hidden. The tanks were a different story but the theft was successful.
These two tanks and their crews played a pivotal role in the battles that resulted in the establishment of the State of Israel. Until this time the only armoured veichles were trucks protected with sheets of steel plate 1/4 or 1/2 inches thick. In Latrun today there is a memorial dedicated to those people who gave their lives trying to fight their way through to Jerusalem in 1948 in these flimsy trucks.
When the war was won these soldiers were given the option of staying in Israel as Israeli citizens or they could be given a new identity as Canadian citizens and go to Canada. His father stayed in Israel for a few years but eventually his loyalty and ties to England overcame his ties to Israel, for he was not a jew so he decided to return to England .
He returned and surrendered to the military authorities. He was court martialed and found guilty of desertion and theft of army property and sentenced to a term in the Military Prison at Brookwood, commonly called the Glasshouse.
He wrote a letter to Queen Elizabeth asking for clemency. The Queen in reply gave him a Royal Unconditional Pardon. He was released from prison and he rejoined his unit. He went on to complete his military service and retired as as Regimental Sergeant Major.
He moved to Australia with his wife and family. Unfortunately that was not the end of the story, he committed suicide. His son was trying to fill in the gaps in the life of his father.
He now knew that he played a key role in the battle for the state of Israel. He and a few others were the forerunners of the magnificent armoured units of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Why is this a story that I say must be told. It is a story of two very different people one a soldier who risked everything for a cause he believed in, the other a Queen who listened to a story and understood.
Epilogue I did try to find his name and had some interesting emails from a number of Americans and Canadians who fought for Israel in 1948. Recntly I was contacted by Arik Bender , a journalist for a Hebrew newspaper, he had read the story and was interested in it. He eventually came up with the name.
He was John Burrows the son of a policeman from Biggleswade.In 1944 he lied about his age, he was fifteen, and joined the Coldstream Guards. This really hit home for me because I was at the Guards Depot around the same time also as a Coldstream Guardsman as he was. I looked at my passing out photo to see if he was in my platoon, he was not.
When he completed his training he was posted to a Coldstream Guards infantry battalion with the Guards Armoured Division. At this time he was probably just sixteen, a boy despite his training.
Within a couple of weeks the division liberated Bergen Belsen one of the worst concentration camps in the Third Reich. How this affected him we will never know but this is probably the reason for stealing the tank.
He later transferred to the Parachute Regiment and was probably posted to the First Bn which was then becoming a Guards Bn.When he retired from the army he emigrated to Australia with his family, he was forty seven years old when he took his own life.
One final point we do know the name of the Irish Guardsman who stole the Staghound armoured car was Michael O'Flaherty. We still do not know the name of the second member of the Parachute Regiment.
It is incredible to think that the IDF in 1948 consisted of three tanks, and two of them stolen.
It is incredible to think that there was not an Israel State before 1948!
Eretz Israel!
ping
Hope this kind of thing doesn't plague the American army.
(Go Israel, Go! Slap Down Em Hezbullies!)
Weren't purchased-from-the-Czechs Bf-109s the initial aircraft of the IAF?
Treadhead ping; interesting bit of history on the genesis of the IDF's armor.
The Machal web page details" There is a wonderful, but true story of the successful purchase of three British Beaufighter bombers by agents of Rekhesh but with no way of smuggling them out of England.
The planes were then 'sold' to a movie company that supposedly needed them for a film it was producing about WWII. It was shooting some flying scenes at a small airfield in southern England when the three Bristol Beaufighters took off in perfect formation while the cameras rolled, and, like those copper-top batteries in the TV ads, they just kept going and going and going.
Later that evening, three Bristol Beaufighters, with their tired but jubilant crews, landed at an airfield in Israel ready to take to the skies to defend Israel and its people."
The Jewish Virtual Library shows us that "Israeli aquisition agents managed to purchase 4 surplus U.S. Air Force B-17 Flying Fortresses, veterans of World War II, and these slipped from watchful American eyes to Ezion, the Israeli name for an air base in Czechoslovakia which aided Israel with weapon sales and shipment.
One Fortress was seized on its way in Portugal and so only 3 arrived in Ezion. Having been neglected for a long time, they were devoid of guns and navigational gear, with turret holes gaping open or sealed with wood or plaster.
The Fortresses landed in Ezion on June 17th, 1948 and received the most rudimentry of treatments before leaving for Israel on July 15th. On the way home one B-17 bombed Cairo, surprising the Egyptians who thought they were immune to such attacks and so left their capital undefended (Egyptian attacks on Israeli civilian targets stopped after this).
The other two bombed Egyptian forces in Gaza and Rafiah. For the rest of the war the B-17 were stationed in Ramat David AFB and participated in operations on all fronts, even against the Egyptian navy.The Fortresses were also the founders of the IAF's 69th squadron, the "Patishim" (Hammers) which exists to this day."
i think youre right,spitfires and hurris came a little later.the check built 109s actually went up against egyptian spitfires
5.56mm
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