Secrets will Out but not necessarily be Publicised

Ships on fire in Bari Harbour

In the middle section of Patsy, the  first novel of ‘The Land of Broken Promises,  Patsy is stationed in Bari, Italy.

While gathering material for this section of the book  in the 1990s I came across references to mustard gas mixed with oil that had been responsible for the deaths of so many merchant seamen following the disastrous air raid of  Dec 2^nd 1943, known as ‘Little Pearl Harbour’.  I assumed it was still a great secret because none of the British ex-servicemen I knew, who had been in Italy at the time, had any inkling that mustard gas had been involved.

The U.S. Liberty ship ‘John Harvey’ had carried a secret cargo of liquid sulphur mustard, When that ship was destroyed in the 1943 air raid, sulfur mustard spilt into waters already contaminated by oil from other damaged vessels. Sailors,  who had jumped into the water from  burning ships, were covered with the oil which proved an ideal solvent.

Other sulfur mustard evaporated and, mingling with clouds of smoke, blew overland containating Italian civilians.

Allied High Command tried to conceal the disaster, fearing the Germans would believe  the Allies intended to use chemical weapons,  but there were too many witnesses, and in February 1944, the U.S. Chiefs of Staff statement owned up to the accident adding that the U.S. wouldn’t use chemical weapons unless the enemy did so first.

 Winston Churchill, however, ordered all mustard gas deaths to be listed as ‘burns due to enemy action’.

U.S. records of the attack on Bari were declassified in 1959, but no one took much notice until an American author, Glenn B. Infield, published ‘Disaster at Bari’ in 1967.  Even so it wasn’t until 1986 that the British government finally admitted that survivors of the Bari raid had been exposed to poison gas and upgraded their pension payments.

Despite all that no one I spoke to in the 1990s knew that people in the Bari air raid had died of mustard gas poisoning.

SS Patria, Operation Exporter and fallible witnesses.

My father in 1941

Today I give two examples of why one the evidence of witnesses to any historical event shouldn’t . 

The first is my own memory of the capsizing of the Patria. Standing by the back wall of  Allenby Park after the capsizing, along with hundreds of others on Mt Carmel I watched the police and army rescue operations. The sight left a permanent impression, but, when  someone asked me the date of that event, I was about to reply,  1939.

Then I paused. Hang on, I told myself, I wasn’t living in Haifa in 1939.  We didn’t return there until January 1940.  So I checked with  the Palestine Post and yes the date is 1940 and late at that, 25^th of November,to be exact.  So why do I keep thinking 1939?  I suspect that if  I had lived continuously in Haifa between 1936 and 1943 and had only been writing a memoir, I would probably still be convinced that the Patria capsized a year before it did. So now,  even if I witnessed an event for myself, I always check dates in the local newspapers of the time and consult reputable histories.

It doesn’t only happen to me. The second example happened only today.   I was online  discussing Operation  Exporter, otherwise known as the Syria/Lebanon campaign with a group of  people who had been born before WW2.  One person, who had watched his father dig defence trenches on Mt Carmel in anticipation of a German invasion from the north, wrote that  Operation Exporter took place in 1942. I would probably have agreed with him if 1941 hadn’t been such a momentous year for me  and I had had to fit several historic bits together looking for cause and effect.

The event I use as background when sorting the  major  events of 1941 in chronological order is of no significance to anyone else but looms large in my memory.   I was eight , and had been catapaulted  away from my friends at the instigation of my mother into  a class where I was by far  the youngest. The only other British girl was twelve and my father was abroad on a mission in the Balkans  and had been missing for three months,  so I couldn’t appeal to him.

At the end of April 1941 my father  returned to Palestine via the last convoy from Athens.  After his adventures in the Balkans he was in  poor physical shape.  Nevertheless the powers that be flew him almost immediately to Iraq where a British base,  Habbaniyah ,was being besieged. I don't know why they wanted him there, but when he returned about a fortnight later, obviously very ill, he refused to consult a doctor because he was too busy preparing for a show in Syria. (I can only presume it was to do with wireless or telephone support for the invasion) My mother was furious.  Anyway the result of his self-neglect was that he collapsed in his office and was rushed to the government hospital with yellow jaundice at the same time as all those nose-to-tail convoys filled with Ozzies rattled through Haifa on the way to the Lebanese border. (Yes, I know yellow jaundice is tautologous but that is what we called it in those days.)   

He was still in the government  hospital when Moshe Dayan was there having his eye socket treated after taking part in Operation Exporter.  

After  my father came out of hospital he plunged straight into setting up wireless communications against  a probable invasion from the south .

For details of Op Exporter see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria-Lebanon_campaign

From Fantasy to Reality

My Teenage Idea of the Ultimate in Sophistication

When mentioning my own experiences in Palestine, if I have left the  impression that Patsy is thinly veiled autobiography, that is far from the truth.

v Patsy was born in 1921.  I was born  in 1933.

v Patsy is an only child.  I am the eldest of three.

v Patsy is close to her mother and protective of her. My relationship with my mother fractured when I was four.

v Patsy is at boarding school in England during the Arab Rebellion .  I was in Palestine.   
v Patsy, as a young adult, plays an active role in preparations against German invasion. I was a child throughout WW2. 

So what inspired the character, Patsy?

When I was 12, my current school, the British Community in Jerusalem, offered me an  opportunity to sit a scholarship exam to a prestigious English boarding school. My father, however, refused to sign the forms, on the grounds that the daughter of one of his colleagues had won that scholarship before the war but, on returning to Palestine, she had broken her parents' hearts by frequenting night clubs and refusing to go to church.

As, at that age, going to a nightclub and not wasting Sundays at chapel  was the height of my ambition,  I fantasised about the sophisticated young woman I had never met and whose name I knew not. 

 Patsy grew out of that fantasy but when, as an adult with a somewhat different definition of sophistication,   I started on her fictional story,  Patsy became less of a fantasy and more a real woman with concerns similar to my own. Perhaps after all her mental state is slightly autobiographical although her experiences are so different to mine. 

A land of spies and espionage

When the first novel of the series ‘Land of Broken Promises’ opens,  its central character Patsy, aged 21,  is working ostensibly as a civilian typist for a Special Ops outfit based in Cairo. The outfit’s purpose is to co-ordinate guerrilla operations in Palestine in the event of an enemy invasion.

I chose preparations  for a WW2 guerrilla  force in Palestine,  as a starting point for  a series spanning the years 1932-1948 because I was following the advice given to all Newbie authors ‘Write what you know about best.’

Incredible as it seems to many modern parents, as a British child aged  8 and 9, I was  heavily involved, mostly unwittingly, but on occasions knowingly,  in British  preparations to set up Jewish guerrilla groups to resist a likely German occupation of Palestine.

During WW2,  spying in one form or another was the favourite occupation of  Palestine’s residents, whatever their cultural background.  

My father, a British telecommunications engineer,  was recruited by MEIC (Mediterranean East Intelligence Centre) in 1940.  MEIC’s initial assumption  was that Germany would invade Palestine from the north via Bulgaria, Turkey and Vichy-controlled Syria.

Israeli Michael Gottschalk standing in one of the wartime trenches in Haifa his father helped dig on the assumption the Germans would invade from the North.
(Since retirement one of Michael's hobbies has been excavating these trenches)

 In early 1941 my father’s first major espionage task was to ascertain whether the telephone lines the Germans were laying in Bulgaria were genuine or fake.
'Real' meant invasion from the north, 'fake' meant invasion from sea or south. 

My unwitting role in this enterprise was to convey misinformation to our Arab maid of all work, who was suspected of having a Nazi sympathiser brother.

  My father told me  that he was going to neutral Turkey . His special job,  and this was a great secret, would be putting telephones down the chimneys of hotel rooms in Istanbul where German generals were staying.

Over a year later I played a more straight forward role.  The allies had insufficient army and police personnel to patrol the whole of Palestine's Mediterranean coast. Our family spent September camping in Army tents on a restricted area beach near the Crusader Castle at Athlit, pretending to be a military unit guarding against invading spies. We had orders to make our camp as visible as possible despite the blackout in the rest of the country.

Crusader Castle at other end of beach from our camp

 Unfortunately after the first fortnight  my father had to rush my mother into  hospital in Haifa, leaving me, aged 9, in charge of  both the camp and my younger sister and brother for two days.  I took my responsibility as the sole obstacle to the Nazi invasion of Palestine very seriously, lighting up kerosene lamps in all the tents at night and along the pathway to the rather posh trench latrine  dug deep into the sand for privacy.

During that month my father frequently left us for two or three days at a time. One day he returned to camp, his knapsack covered in blood and filled with a sheep’s back leg. I have used the cryptic explanation he gave us in the third novel of the series.

In fact I have handed over his wartime role but not necessarily his personality to the fictional character, Jim Shepard, who plays an important part in all the first three novels.

The start of an Obsession

My father and myself in 1939

I have been writing and rewriting a series of novels set in the British Mandate of Palestine  for over 25 years.  The Series is called ‘Land of Broken Promises.’ Last year Bluewood Publishers accepted the three completed novels.   The first one. 'Patsy' will be coming out in both print and ebook form in March this year.

Someone recently asked why I was so obsessed with the subject. I had to travel back  almost 75 years  before identifying the seed of the obsession, an incident that occurred in the spring of 1939.

At the age of six I climbed a ramp to the top of an eight-foot dry-stone wall overlooking a railway line.  Arab patriots had built the ramp, to take pot shots at passing trains.

I  sat high above the railway line, waiting to wave at the train that delivered mail and much else from Jerusalem to Jaffa.  Eventually, I heard a sound, but not the roaring and whistling of a majestic engine preparing to leave Jerusalem station, instead a low rumbling noise as an inspection trolley rounded the curve in the line.

Brown-capped prisoners, with chained ankles, worked levers attached to the sides of the trolley.  In front, two men in railway uniform examined the track.  At the rear, a pair of policemen, wearing midnight blue uniforms topped by astrakhan kalpaks, held tommy guns at the ready.  In the centre of the trolley, a white-bearded man sat on a chair, his hands tied behind his back.  His suit was European, but, on his head, he wore a shepherd’s white keffiyah fastened with a black iqal.  He gazed ahead, chin held high, reminding me of a picture in my olivewood-bound bible of Jesus before Pontius Pilot.

A photo showing a different version  of using rail  hostages 

At the time, I didn’t mention seeing the trolley to my parents in case I got into trouble for climbing the wall so, for twelve years, this memory remained uncontaminated by either photos or other people’s reminiscences.  It was 1950 before I mentioned the incident to my mother, I forget in what context, but she told me, in no uncertain fashion, that the British had never treated Arabic prisoners that way so I must have made it up.

Believing her, as I had never known my mother to tell a deliberate lie, I consigned the incident to a mental cabinet, labelled ‘imaginary memories.’  There it remained until several decades later  I came across a book that referred to the British placing Arab hostages on inspection trolleys during the 1936-39 Rebellion. 

I wondered why my mother, who had valued truth above all virtues, had denied the existence of that hostage with such vigour and  realised that someone so relentlessly honest needed the protection of a robust subconscious.  Looking back,  I discovered other instances of her involuntary self-deception.

In this particular case, however, I knew that early in her life, my mother, like many other British citizens, had acquired the notion that God had created them as a special vehicle for spreading the gospel and to this purpose had endowed them with moral superiority.  In the late nineteen thirties, she would have found nothing amiss in the army or the police  placing  an Arab civilian on humiliating public display.

In the example I witnessed,  public humiliation  was probably the main motive, because there rail officials on the trolley and Palestine police as well as prisoners and Arab patriots had long learned to make sophisticated detonators  that would not be affected by a lightweight trolley.  The photo I saw, however,  looked rather more sinister.

 Like everyone else. My mother’s notions of morality changed over the years.   By the 1950s, she would regard such behaviour as Nazi-like and cruel.  To concede that a British government was capable of such an act would have undermined her belief in God’s choice of the British as his chosen servants.

I spent the next few years researching what had really happened in Palestine during the thirties and forties, conversing with people from many cultures who had lived there during the Mandate era and reading memoirs written not only by the British but by Arabs and Jews.  In more cases than I had expected, my own memories were confirmed.

Sequencing events proved more difficult. My memory there was far less accurate.  but the more I learned, the more I realised that sequencing was vital to understanding cause and effect.

The daily English language newspaper the Palestine Post proved the most useful tool for sequencing major events . A journalist is unlikely to write a description of a bombing before it has happened.  At the same time I became aware that censorship ensured some events went unrecorded, especially during WW2.

I learnt to distrust official reports  written for a government back in England that issued orders with no idea of the situation on the ground. I realised, too,  that all official documents were  composed in the knowledge that agents of Haganah, the Irgun and the Stern gang worked in every department of the Mandate government.  acquiring copies of even the most top secret documents on the same day that they were written.

 With so much  research under my belt I was disturbed at the ignorance of political activists on all sides of the Middle East spectrum .  Irritation as much as anything else  instigated the decision to write chronologically accurate novels depicting  events in Palestine during the British Mandate from the viewpoints of characters from four cultures.

A Job Well Done

I heard today that the Palestine Police Old Comrade's Association has digitised 'A Job Well Done' by Edward Horne. This is  the authoritive history  on Palestine Policing from the end of WW1 until the end of the British Mandate in May 1948.  The paper edition is now out of print with second hand prices being advertised from £194.  The news has given me a great deal of pleasure since  I now don't have to keep on offering to  loan out my copy, which I bought over ten years ago for a much more modest sum.

 Unfortunately at present there seems to be  only one outlet at  https://go.epublish4me.com/a_job_well_done_-_edward_horne/10021694, which is a long typing job 

The history of the British Mandate for Palestine seems to be below the radar of most people I know. They are often surprised that Britain for well over 20 years administered Palestine, which included the present territories of Israel, the West Bank Gaza strip and, until 1926,  Transjordan. During this period they governed it very much like a colony. 

Instead of treating the history of the Palestine Police in a purely chronological order, Mr Horne divides his material into subject areas,  So, for instance, there are separate sections for 13 specialist units including the Band, Dogs and Traffic Police , while World War 2 And the Jewish Troubles 1943-1948, although overlapping, warrant separate chapters.

The title refers to King George VI congratulating the British Section of the Palestine Police on a Job well Done. The same compliment should be paid to Mr Horne for producing the book and to PPOCA for ensuring its survival.

Thieves in the Night

I have just finished reading Arthur Koestler’s novel ‘Thieves in the Night’ published in 1946 and set in the British Mandate of Palestine during the late 1930s.

The view point in this novel contrasts strongly with those of  Elias  S Srouji’s  in his memoir ‘Cyclamens of Galilee’  and with  flashbacks in  Michelle Cohen Corasanti’s  novel ‘The Almond Tree, ’ which I read earlier in the year.  

I hadn’t expected to enjoy this novel as much as I did.  The reason it appealed to me was that it put into words aspects of my own behaviour that have long troubled me, but I haven't been able to define properly.

The protagonist Joseph is a character who can’t settle for the axiom ‘moderation is best’.  In any strongly  emotional or dangerous situation he stands back from himself  and critiques his own or others’ corny cliché ridden words and exaggerated actions as if he were a member of an audience watching a tragedy that ought to be given more gravitas.  He can’t enjoy praise, without the embarrassed feeling that people wouldn’t feel the same about his accomplishments if they realised his true egotistical motivation.

Perhaps these character traits are more common in writers than in other people.  Any comments?

With regards to ultra-Zionism, an issue at the centre of the novel, the following conversation Joseph has with an Irgun member he admires, probably sums up the situation in 2013 as well as it did in 1938.

"I wish my Arabic was as good as yours," said Joseph. "What was the old Sheikh explaining so solemnly?"

"He explained that every nation has the right to live according to its own fashion, right or wrong, without outside interference. He explained that money corrupts, fertilizers stink and tractors make a noise, all of which he dislikes."

"And what did you answer?"

"Nothing."

"But you saw his point?"

"We cannot afford to see the other man's point."