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Posted on 05/04/2005 10:02:16 PM PDT by SAMWolf
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 are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
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Israel's greatest military commander since Judas Maccabeus -- David 'Mickey' Marcus -- was accidentally killed by one of his own troops.  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.
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Good Morning Feather!
The Jews also had American Indians who fought for Israel in 1948.
Feeling pressure to finish in time for the anniversary, the Weisses spent three years poring through military records, archives, personal letters and diaries. They spoke to veterans living in the United States, Canada and Israel, most of whom were in their 70s. With so much material at hand, and so many heroes to honor, choosing what to leave out was more challenging than deciding what to leave in.
Cast of heroes
The authors' cast of characters includes:
Mickey Marcus, an American Jew and a graduate of West Point, who had been a colonel in the U.S. Army during World War II. He became the first general in the Israeli Army. Tragically, Marcus was killed by a sentry when, asked to give the password, he was unable to understand the Hebrew command and was shot as he fled.
Shapira, who in the 1960s commandeered a Russian-made MiG fighter jet taken from an Iraqi who had defected to Israel. Shapira studied the MiG and learned its weaknesses, information he then passed along to other Israeli pilots during the 1968 Six Day War.
American Indian Jesse Slade. When asked by Life magazine photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White what an American Indian was doing fighting an Israeli war, he replied, "Well, ma'am, I reckon it was the Christian thing to do."
Chris Magee, a Chicago man who had heard of, and was moved by, the tragedy dubbed the "voyage of the damned." The steamship St. Louis, full of Jewish refugees, had sailed from Europe seeking sanctuary in another country. It was turned away at every stop, including the United States. Most of the passengers later perished in concentration camps. Magee, a member of Pappy Boyington's Black Sheep Squadron in World War II, volunteered as a pilot in the War for Independence.
Rudy Augarten, who left Harvard to fly for Israel after serving courageously in World War II, during which he was shot down and survived 63 days behind enemy lines.
George "Buzz" Beurling, Canada's leading World War II flying ace, a non-Jew who wanted to recapture his glory years. Beurling and his British co-pilot were killed in a plane crash before they could actually enter the War for Independence. Sabotage of their plane has always been suspected, the Weisses say.
Jerry "Tiny" Balkin, six feet tall and 200 pounds, who had lost 85 relatives during the Holocaust and was nostalgic for the camaraderie he had enjoyed while fighting with the Marines in World War II. Balkin needed little coaxing to join the Jewish cause.
Colonel Marcus, a hero of the USA and of Israel!
BTTT
WARNING: This is a high volume ping list
You know something P.E? That flag-o-gram would make a really cool paint job on a Harley. Hmmm... My brother that rides is a Marine vet. I think that would be perfect for his bike. :-)
Morning Snippy.
Someone was up late last night, Wneighbor. :-)
Bad enough that you have to dodge enemy fire without worrying about you own side.
I suppose that "blue on blue" has happened throughout history, though it doesn't make it any easier to accept.
Morning PE. Very Nice!!
Guilty as charged. Lazy this mornin' though. LOL
G'mornin'
I'm in.
free dixie HUGS,sw
I knew about him through the book and Movie "Cast A Giant Shadow". Read a lot of books and novels about the Israeli War of independence, it stirs in me the same feelings I get when reading about our history.
Morning E.G.C.
Chance of rain today.
Lots of activity doen the block, seems our Fire Station caught fire last night and the News Chopper has been flying overhead all morning.
Sure, go ahead, rub it in. ;-)
Morning Mayor.
Morning alfa6.
IIRC, the first fighters the IAF had were old German Messerschmidts. Some sort of poetic justice in there.
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