Howard Blum - The Brigade

T his is a true story.

It is an account of the activities of the Jewish Brigade, an army of five thousand men from Palestine sent by the British to fight in Europe during the last months of the Second World War.

It is also the story of three soldiersIsrael Carmi, Johanan Peltz, and Arie Pinchukwho volunteered to serve in this force. They were men whose lives were transformed by the times in which they lived; and, more consequentially, they were men whose actions transformed the world around them.

To accomplish these two intertwined narrative ambitions, one thread historical, the other personal, I have employed a variety of sources: 114 separate interviews; government archives in Britain, Israel, and the United States; and a small mountain of reference books, published in both English and Hebrew. A detailed chapter-by-chapter sourcing follows at the end of this book.

However, since The Brigade is so much a story about these three menhow they lived their lives, and how the resolutions of their own internal conflicts had an effect on larger eventsit is important for the reader to know from the outset how I can write about them with such knowledge and authority.

I had a reporters most valuable substantiating resource: eyewitness testimony. Not only did all three men sit for a series of lengthy interviewsI have their words on tape, on video, and on the pages of the yellow legal pads I filled at each of our sessionsbut they also made available their own unpublished memoirs. These were thoughtful and detailed works (Carmis went on for 239 single-spaced pages, while Peltzs was more than twice that), exciting to read and remarkably candid.

In the Note on Sources that appears at the end of this book I will document chapter-by-chapter how these memoirs, as well as Leah Pinchuk Zeigers own reminiscences, were unique and invaluable sources. But for now it should be sufficient to say that to a significant degree these unpublished autobiographical works were a resource that enabled me to report accurately what people were thinking, feeling, and saying sixty years ago. Without them, I could not have written this true story in such a fashion.

I t was only a hundred days since the invasion at Normandy, but as the first cool nights of fall arrived, the Allied command was confident the war in Europe would soon be over. Paris had been liberated. The lights were back on in London. The Russians were fighting in Tallinn, Riga, and the streets of Warsaw. And the Allied troopsthe largest army in the history of the worldwere moving rapidly to cross the Rhine. There would be more combat, and more deaths, but by September 1944, the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt.

Meeting with correspondents as his troops pushed through France, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, exuberantly declared that Germanys military situation was hopeless. Many in the Nazi high command had also come to a similar conclusion. There comes an evening in every campaign, Lt. Gen. Frederick Heim, commander of the captured garrison at Boulogne and veteran of two previous encirclements at Kiev and Stalingrad, conceded on that same day in September. This is the twilight.

It was in this twilight that Prime Minister Winston Churchill realized he had to act on the petitions from the Jewish Agency in Palestine, or soon it would be too late. Since the start of the war the Jews in this British Mandate territory had been lobbying for the opportunity to fight the Nazis as a separate unit in His Majestys army. For five years, the British had found excusesshortages of equipment, training problems, recruitment difficultiesto justify their long reviews and ultimate refusals. The truth, however, was bluntly expressed by the British secretary of state for war. We have not asked the Jews for these units, he wrote to the colonial secretary, and we do not want them for our war purposes. On the contrary, the War Office have always made it quite clear that they would regard them as an embarrassment rather than a help.

There was reason for this animosity: the British government knew they were dealing with men who had fought against them in the past, and very likely would be their enemies in the future.