HOW DO YOU FIGHT A WAR WITHOUT BULLETS?
You build a bullet factory!
BEGIN HERE TO READ A LONGER VERSION
Here's some simplified background of 20thcentury European history. At the end of WWI, the longstanding grand empires of Europe collapsed, including the Ottoman, German and Austro-Hungarian.
The optimistic founding of the League of Nations sought to usher in an era of peace. Woodrow Wilson and other world leaders agreed how to solve one problem – that of mixing varied populations within larger empires whose ethnic rivalry had led to unrest and potentially to war. These leaders decided that ethnic groups should live in their own separate nations. So they enunciated the principle of self-determination.
Following WWI, a great exchange of populations occurred; millions of people left places where they were a minority and resettled in the land of their ethnic heritage. For example, Greeks left Turkey; Turks left Greece. After WWII more ethnic separations occurred, for example, in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Massive population exchanges of millions of people took place.
After WWI, several mandates were established by the League of Nations to be administered by various European nations in the hope of preparing new nations for independence after a period of nation building. To Britain fell the task of administering the newly designated Mandate of Palestine and Trans-Jordan.
Against this background, in 1917 British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour proclaimed the right of Jewish people, who had roots in this area dating back three thousand years, to establish their own homeland in the Palestine Mandate. The land was to be divided between a homeland for the Arabs and one for the Jews. But there was and will continue to be a big problem until the Palestinian Arabs, among their own people, accept the right of a Jewish state to exist.
BEGIN HERE FOR THE SHORTER VERSION
So let’s turn to the fascinating tale of the BULLET FACTORY.
During the Mandate, the English prohibited Jewish settlers from purchasing bullets. The settlers knew they needed such weapons, guns WITH BULLETS, for the inevitable struggle for control of territory after the British departed in 1948. The Ayalon Project was the solution to overcome that problem.
This top-secret operation took place directly across the street from a British police station,. The bullet making machinery was originally purchased in Poland in 1938 and was eventually smuggled into Palestine via Beirut in 1942.
From 1945 through 1948, when independence was declared, this machinery became the most significant source of 9mm bullets used in the Sten gun, the primary weapon of the Palmach and Haganah fighters. During the period of clandestine operation the Ayaolon Institute (our bullet factory), produced three to five million bullets (and maybe more)!
Who did it and how did they do it? The leaders established a 45 member kibbutz south of Rehovoth where new Jewish settlers would be oriented to their new homeland and trained to do needed jobs. The kibbutz and the factory were cooperative ventures of the Haganah, Palmach, and HaBonim, the Youth Labor Zionist movement. As a typical kibbutz, it had vegetable gardens, cow sheds, chicken coops, communal dining halls, etc.
But this kibbutz was very special in that in the years prior to 1945, the kibbutzniks designed and dug a 300 square yard factory situated 13 feet below ground level to house this secret project. Above it sat the kibbutz laundry where large laundry mangler machines were sufficiently loud to cover up the noise of the bullet-making operations. Two entrances to this factory space were concealed -- by a large moveable washing machine in the laundry and by bakery ovens at the other end. Pipes and fans with an intake at the laundry and an exhaust at the bakery provided needed ventilation —the appetizing smells from baking disguised the smells of bullet making. Since many kibbutzniks worked in the laundry and the bakery, a lot of people came and went, so the factory workers secretly heading below remained undetected.
After 1945, the kibbutz grew in numbers as it took in Holocaust survivors. Considering the importance of the mission, it was essential to maintain total secrecy. Newly arrived immigrants were called “giraffes” – building on the image of a giraffe on a circus train. A giraffe could look around and see what was happening above ground for its neck and head protruded through the ceiling of the railroad car, but he could not see below. If discovered by the British, all the workers in the bullet factory would be subject to the death penalty—the stakes were very high to keep “giraffes” from knowing what was going on below.
The kibbutz was located next to a British police station. So the bullet makers volunteered to do the British police officers laundry, in order to keep the machines going steadily to hide the noise below! They asked the British to call before coming for a drop-off so that they could have some cold beer ready for them; and they asked the police to call before they picked up the laundry so it would be packaged and ready. During these visits, the factory paused its operations.
The kibbutzniks installed fluorescent lights to reduce heat in the factory thereby making the working conditions more tolerable. Since the actual factory workers got no sun, they installed UV lights to tan the skin of the workers making it appear as if they worked out-of-doors.
The bullets were cleverly smuggled out of the factory in hidden spaces in trucks. Using gasoline tankers was a favorite since the bullets could be hidden in the piping. Dummies were placed in the front seats alongside the driver so there were no available seats for hitchhikers. There was no end to the ingenuity of these early pioneers in concealing their work.
The factory was equipped to cover every aspect of making the 9mm bullet—from the cartridge case, to the powder, to the projectile head. The decibel level of the machines that punched out the cartridge case in multiple stages was ear shattering. Humorously, the person responsible for evening off the roughly hewn cartridge case so it could take a bullet, was called the mohel (the person responsible for ritual circumcision). Those who ran the factory found that women were best at doing the delicate and sensitive work of loading the cartridge with gunpowder -- they had more patience, a finer touch, and were more productive than the men who required more break times. The accuracy and standardization of the bullets were tested by firing random bullets in a short firing range. The noise of the gunfire was concealed by the depth of earth covering the bullet factory and by the clang of the washing machines above.
But best of all, all these heroes of the Ayalon Institute from which the original Israel Military Industries arose were never discovered. And this is how they fought a war without being able to buy bullets on the open market—by secretly building them!
 |
| Washing machine boilers |
 |
| Folded laundry ready for pick-up or delivery |
 |
| Kibbutznik working at the laundry (above ground) |
 |
| Display of underground bullet making |
 |
| Bullet casings ready for explosives |
 |
| Underground firing range to test the accuracy of the bullets. |
