MACHAL MONUMENT TO FOREIGN VOLUNTEERS

MACHAL MONUMENT TO FOREIGN FIGHTERS

In May, 1948 after Israel declared its independence, it immediately had to deal with an invasion from all the surrounding Arab states: Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan plus others along the N. African coastline.  Although the Jewish population of the Mandate had fought with the British during WW II, the British gave their weaponry and strategic positions to the Egyptians and Jordanians. The Israelis, although able soldiers, had no officer corps to strategically organize the army or to plan for battle. They had no air force, no tank corps, no navy…the situation appeared dire.

To their rescue came foreign fighters -- officers and men -- many of whom had already demonstrated their capacities as they helped transport surviving European Jews escape from displaced persons camps to what was then Palestine. 3500 volunteers came from over 46 countries; 120 heroically died.  Among the 120 were eight non-Jews and 4 women. These volunteers made a truly significant contribution to the Haganah, soon to be renamed the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The officers lent organization and leadership to the nascent army.

Colonel Mickey Marcus, a graduate of West Point, a WWII Pentagon planner and paratrooper who jumped into Normandy, not only wrote the first organizational-training manuals for the IDF, but also played a critical role in the liberation of Jerusalem.  The large Jewish community in East and West Jerusalem were under siege by the Jordanian army.  The Old City with its ancient Jewish Quarter fell after bitter fighting, but the newer part of the City held on tenuously as the war continued.  Supply of this besieged population was a major problem. Multiple attempts to break the siege failed as the only road to Jerusalem from the Mediterranean coast was an easy target as it took a winding path through steep sided ravines controlled by the Jordanians. To this day, as monuments to that effort, burned out trucks and armored vehicles remain on the side of the road. Mickey Marcus saw the futility of the attempt to break the blockade using this road and developed a plan to build an alternate route to bypass the Jordanians and reach the heights of Jerusalem. 

Machal Monument with the names of those foreign fighters who perished

Lee Glassman at the Machal Monument

Hebrew Letters forming a Memorial Candle

He called it the “Burma Road” recalling the successful American effort to build a new road as an alternate supply route to the Chinese in Southeast Asia during WWII.

After the new road to Jerusalem opened, the Jewish fighters were able to end the siege just before they would have had to surrender to the Jordanians. The Israelis now, by their very presence, could truly claim Jerusalem as their capital. Nonetheless, it was not until June 1967 that all of Jerusalem was united during the Six Day War. Mickey Marcus was a true hero in the struggle for Independence.  Sadly, shortly before the armistice, as he walked at night across the barbed wire line to re-enter his base, he was shot by one of his own Haganah soldiers. He did not understand Hebrew and failed to respond to the call for the password. 

Jewish foreign pilots from abroad staffed thenascent Israeli air force. At the very beginning, six piper cub aircraft were acquired as the first planes in the Israeli air force . Machalvolunteers recruited other fliers from all over the world to buy and then fly their planes to Israel...during the conflict. One of these heroes was Al Schwimmer who recruited fliers in the US to take transport planes to Israel. Among his first purchases was a C-46…later, Schwimmer, who stayed in Israel, became head of the Israel Air Force Transport Command.

After Independence, arms came from various sources. Fighter planes used in WWII were bought from Czechoslovakia and other Balkan countries. In one of ironic twists, the Soviet Union released these planes to Israel as they felt that this new nation in the Middle East founded by socialists could be an ally in its struggle against the West. While the British supplied the Arabs, the U.S. embargoed any shipment of arms to the Israelis.

The US under President Truman was the first country in 1948 to recognize the existence of the State of Israel. From the very start David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, identified Israel with free nations of the West and the USSR lost its bet; Israel became and remains a stalwart ally of the United States.  

The Machal monument now stands alongside the new super highway to Jerusalem where it intersects with the remains of Colonel Marcus’s ”Burma Road.” The monument is dedicated to all the volunteers, but especially to those 120 committed heroes who gave their lives in combat and whose names are carved into the erect stone slabs. Yitzhak Rabin said of these men and women, “They came to us when we most needed them, during those hard and uncertain days of our 1948 War of Independence.”