CHAPTER ONE: THE LOST WAR
EPISODE TWO
I was
opposed to a formal war in Palestine and said so at every opportunity.
There was nothing to be gained and much to be lost by demonstrating our
military weakness. We would have done better, in my opinion, to confine
ourselves to guerrilla operations in support of the internal Arab resistance
movement. Jewish immigration would have been discouraged, and there would
have been no excuse, in the absence of formal intervention, for either
recognizing Israel or imposing an embargo on the sale of arms to the various
Arab states. We might not have won the war, but at least we would not have
lost it as decisively as we did. All we achieved by intervening openly
in Palestine was to make it possible for the Zionists to assume the fictional
but effective role of a persecuted minority fighting for its life.
The
war itself was largely a series of truces interspersed with minor battles.
Time and again I was forced to hold my fire while the Jews delivered munitions
to the front in the guise of supplies for isolated settlements of colonists.
I particularly remember a shipment of "cosmetics" that turned out to be
mines and hand grenades. Once, during a truce, I insisted on inspecting
a convoy of forty-two trucks that was supposed to be carrying legitimate
supplies to a settlement in southern al-Naqab.. Each truck carried
half a dozen "spare" tires and as many drums of "spare" gasoline. Two officers
representing the United Nations, an American and a Frenchman, were present.
It was easy enough to tell from the size, shape, and weight of some of
the boxes in the trucks that they contained munitions. But the UN officers
refused to halt the convoy, and I was forbidden to seize its contents while
the truce was in effect. I reported back to my superiors, who formally
protested to the United Nations, but to no avail. Hardly a day passed without
a truce violation of the sort that I have described. The enemy was also
allowed to receive munitions by air.
Between
truces we fought as well as we could with the limited amounts of poor equipment
at our disposal. Many of our British guns and mortars could not be use
a for lack of shells. Many of our American tanks were crippled for lack
of spare parts. The hand grenades that we received from Italy were so poorly
made that many of them blew up in our soldiers' faces. A belated shipment
of Spanish field guns turned out to be rejects that could not have been
used effectively even if they had arrived in time. The rifles that we received
from Spain were " Mausers" dating from 1912 (1)They
were all right for training purposes, but they were of little use against
the automatic Czech, Russian, and American weapons with which the enemy
was supplied.
In
September
1949 a series of mysterious explosions destroyed our ammunition dumps
in the Muqattam Hills outside of Cairo. The explosions
confirmed what we had suspected all along namely, that several of our supply
officers, in league with the King and his cronies, had been buying substandard
munitions and pocketing the difference between what they had charged the
government and what they had actually paid.
Is
it any wonder that the Egyptian Army made such a poor showing in Palestine?
It
is not my purpose to make excuses for anyone but the Egyptian soldier.
I am sure that, given the proper training and leadership, he will fight
as well as any soldier in the world, as indeed he did, a century ago, when
the Egyptian Army under Ibrahiym Pasha succeeded in conquering
half the Ottoman Empire (2).
Our defeat in Palestine was due, first, to international political
factors that we could not control, and second, to a corrupt internal regime
that we had tolerated far too long. It was not due to any lack of
courage on the part of the Egyptian soldier.
Early
in 1948, before we had officially entered the war, I was a colonel
in command of the 2nd Machine Gun Battalion at al-`Ariysh
on the Mediterranean coast of Sinai. One day I was ordered to assemble
a platoon of volunteers for service with the Arab guerrillas in Palestine.
I paraded my battalion and ordered all who wished to volunteer to step
four paces forward. Every man but one responded. Some even threw
themselves at my feet in gratitude for the opportunity I offered them to
serve the Arab cause. The one man who failed to step forward was an Albanian,
a professional gambler who had been making a good thing of his army life.
| "Why are you
standing there all alone?" I asked
"I'm not a fool,
sir. Why should I fight until I have to?"
I can think of
one reason," I said. "To show that Albanians are still brave men.
"Oh, in that case,
sir, I'd better volunteer ." |
We
all laughed as he, too, stepped four paces forward. The joke was that King
Faruwq was by way of being an Albanian too. His great-great-grandfather,
Muhammad
`Aliy, the founder of modern Egypt, was an Albanian who started
out as a tobacco merchant in Greece and ended up as an autonomous
Turkish Viceroy with all the powers of a king.
I
dismissed my men and informed Cairo that, instead Of the thirty-one
volunteers requested, my whole battalion of thirty five officers and 817
men had volunteered.
It
was not long afterward that I was promoted to the rank of brigadier and
warned that the Egyptian Army would soon be entering Palestine in
force. My task would be to act as second in command of the invading forces
under Major General Ahmad `Aliy al-Mawawiyy, a short,
fat man who spoke with a lisp. I called his attention to the fact that
only four of our battalions could be considered fit for battle. Mawawiyy,
shrugged.
| "We have our
orders," he said. "Our duty is to carry them out, not to question
them."
"On the contrary,
sir,'' I said. "Our duty is to question every order that can't be
carried out. We're preparing to invade Palestine in force.
You and I both know that it can't be done successfully with the men and
materials at our disposal. Why court disaster?" |
Mawawiyy,
reminded me that it was he and not I who was the GOC. I saluted and stalked
out of his office. There was nothing more that I could do except to see
that our soldiers fought as well as possible in the circumstances.
Palestinian volunteers
[1]
"Mauser" = A German riffle
[2] Time
and again the newly trained Egyptian armies under Ibrahiym Pasha
defeated the `Uthmanliy (Ottoman) armies in Syria and Anatolia.
Finally, In 1833, the `Uthmanliy conceded defeat after
their prime minister was captured in the fighting. The Egyptian armies
came to within marching distance of the capital Istanbul. Subsequently
the `Uthmanliy were forced to sign the peace treaty of "Kutahiyah".
When the `Uthmanliy broke the peace in 1840, fighting
resumed and the Egyptian armies once more crushed them at the battle of
Nisbiyn
(Nezib) in Anatolia.
(To be continued)
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