Operation Boatswain was the first of the operational missions carried out by the Palmach as part of the cooperation between the Jewish Yishuv in Mandatory Palestine and the British during World War II. The mission to sabotage oil refineries in Tripoli was unsuccessful, ending with the disappearance of 23 Palmach commandos and British SOE officer Major Sir Anthony Palmer, 4th Baronet after their boat was lost at sea on 18 May 1941.
The Palmach was established by the Haganah High Command on 14 May 1941. Its two primary aims were to protect the Yishuv against attacks by Arabs in the event of a British retreat from Palestine and defence of Palestine against an Axis Powers invasion. Yitzhak Sadeh was named as Palmach commander. Initially the group consisted of around one hundred men.
In the early summer of 1941 the British military authorities agreed to joint operations against Vichy France forces in Lebanon and Syria. The first planned action was a sabotage mission against oil installations at Tripoli, Lebanon. It was feared that the refinery would provide the Wehrmacht aircraft fuel, and help thwart the planned invasion of Lebanon and Syria. The refinery was in an area well fortified by a unit of Senegalese troops from hostile French army.
A plan emerged for a motor launch, carrying 23 Palmach commandos (later known as "the twenty-three who went down with the ship" (Hebrew : כ׳׳ג יורדי הסירה, romanized: kaf-gimel yordei ha-sira) and a Major Palmer acting as an observer, to embark from Haifa. Upon arrival, three of the Palmach would remain aboard while the rest sabotaged the Tripoli refineries. Practice runs in Caesarea had achieved excellent results.
On the night of 18 May 1941, the police were ordered to give up one of their best launches. [1] Palmer and the 23 then took over the Sea Lion (Hebrew : ארי הים, romanized: Ari Hayam), cast off and were never seen again. It has never been determined exactly what happened to them. [2]
A 2000 commission of inquiry suggested that the 24 were killed by an explosion, possibly the result of a submarine attack, or possibly due to accidental detonation of the explosives they carried, and the boat was sunk at sea. [3] According to Israeli military historian Aryeh Yitzhaki, the boat was destroyed by explosives that went off while at sea, killing all aboard, and some of the bodies were found by Yosef Kostika, a Haganah agent then stationed in Tripoli, after they washed up on Tripoli's shore. Kostika allegedly sent a detailed report back to Palestine, but Palmach commanders decided to cover it up so as not to lower morale and motivation to enlist in the Palmach. [4] Other research suggests that the Sea Lion did reach Tripoli, but was intercepted by the local coast guard. [5]
The 24 men lost were:
This was the first act of the Palmach.[ clarification needed ] The failure of the mission and loss of the 23 were blows to morale and delayed the building of a Jewish naval power. However, the legacy of the "23 Who Went Down at Sea" became a source of inspiration to both the Palmach and its naval force, the Palyam, and their memory remains a source of inspiration to IDF soldiers and sailors.
The 23 have been memorialized in various ways. The immigrant ship Kaf Gimel Yordei Ha’Sira, which arrived in Haifa carrying 790 illegal immigrants in 1946, was named after them. They are also honoured by a memorial on Mount Herzl and a memorial where they were last seen, by the Yarkon River. Many streets in Israel have also been named after the 23. However, only in January 2015 did historian and Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women archivist Martin Sugarman manage to persuade the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to formally commemorate the 23 on their website and to inscribe their names on the Memorial to the Missing (the "Brookwood Memorial") at Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey. [6]
The 1948 Arab–Israeli War, also known as the First Arab–Israeli War, followed the civil war in Mandatory Palestine as the second and final stage of the 1948 Palestine war. The civil war became a war of separate states with the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948, the end of the British Mandate for Palestine at midnight, and the entry of a military coalition of Arab states into the territory of Mandatory Palestine the following morning. The war formally ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreements which established the Green Line.
Haganah was the main Zionist paramilitary organization that operated for the Yishuv in the British Mandate for Palestine. It was founded in 1920 to defend the Yishuv's presence in the region, and was formally disbanded in 1948, when it became the core force integrated into the Israel Defense Forces shortly after the Israeli Declaration of Independence.
Shimon Avidan, born Siegbert Koch, was a Palmach soldier and IDF military leader. He was the commander of the Givati Brigade during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
Plan Dalet was a Zionist military plan executed during the 1948 Palestine war for the conquest of territory in Mandatory Palestine in preparation for the establishment of a Jewish state. The plan was the blueprint for Israel's military operations starting in March 1948 until the end of the war in early 1949, and so played a central role in the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight known as the Nakba.
The Yishuv, HaYishuv HaIvri, or HaYishuv HaYehudi Be'Eretz Yisra'el were the Jewish residents in Palestine prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The term came into use in the 1880s, when there were about 25,000 Jews living in that region, and continued to be used until 1948, by which time there were some 630,000 Jews there. The term is still in use to denote the pre-1948 Jewish residents in Palestine, corresponding to the southern part of Ottoman Syria until 1918, OETA South in 1917–1920, and Mandatory Palestine in 1920–1948.
Operation Agatha, sometimes called Black Sabbath or Black Saturday because it began on the Jewish sabbath, was a police and military operation conducted by the British authorities in Mandatory Palestine. Soldiers and police searched for arms and made arrests in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and several dozen settlements; the Jewish Agency was raided. The total number of British security forces involved is variously reported as 10,000, 17,000, and 25,000. About 2,700 individuals were arrested, among them future Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett. The officially given purpose of the operation was to end "the state of anarchy" then existing in Palestine. Other objectives included obtaining documentary proof of Jewish Agency approval of sabotage operations by the Palmach and of an alliance between the Haganah and the more violent Lehi and Irgun, destroying the Haganah's military power, boosting army morale and preventing a coup d'état being mounted by the Lehi and Irgun.
The Palmach was the elite combined strike forces and sayeret unit of the Haganah, the underground army of the Yishuv during the period of the British Mandate for Palestine. The Palmach was established in May 1941. By the outbreak of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, it consisted of over 2,000 men and women in three fighting brigades and auxiliary aerial, naval and intelligence units. With the creation of Israel's army, the three Palmach Brigades were disbanded. This and political reasons compelled many of the senior Palmach officers to resign in 1950.
Mount Herzl, also Har ha-Zikaron, is the site of Israel's national cemetery and other memorial and educational facilities, found on the west side of Jerusalem beside the Jerusalem Forest.
Avraham "Bren" Adan was an Israeli major-general and author. Prior to Israel's independence, he served with the Palmach, an elite formation within the Haganah paramilitary force of the Yishuv community in British Mandatory Palestine. Adan fought under the Haganah and later under the newly formed Israel Defense Forces during the First Arab–Israeli War, and was photographed while raising the Israeli Ink Flag at the site of what is now Eilat to mark the end of the war. He served with the Israel Defense Forces from 1948 to 1977, and fought in all of the major Arab–Israeli wars that occurred during that period.
The Notrim were Jewish auxiliaries, mainly police, set up in 1936 by the British in Mandatory Palestine during the 1936–39 Arab revolt. The British authorities maintained, financed and armed the Notrim until the end of the Mandate in 1948. The Notrim were nominally answerable to the Palestine Police Force, but were in fact controlled by the Haganah.
The 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine was the first phase of the 1947–1949 Palestine war. It broke out after the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution on 29 November 1947 recommending the adoption of the Partition Plan for Palestine.
The Jewish Resistance Movement, also called the United Resistance Movement (URM), was an alliance of the Zionist paramilitary organizations Haganah, Irgun and Lehi in the British Mandate of Palestine. It was established in October 1945 by the Jewish Agency and operated for some ten months, until August 1946. The alliance coordinated acts of sabotage to undermine the British authority in Mandatory Palestine.
The Night of the Trains was a sabotage operation of the British railways in Palestine on November 1, 1945. The operation was one of the first carried out by the Jewish Resistance Movement, before its official establishment, and symbolized its founding.
Balad al-Sheikh or Balad ash-Shaykh was a Palestinian Arab village located just north of Mount Carmel, 7 kilometers (4.3 mi) southeast of Haifa. Currently the town's land is located within the jurisdiction of the Israeli city, Nesher.
The Saison was the name given to the Haganah's attempt, as ordered by the official bodies of the pre-state Yishuv, to suppress the Irgun's insurgency against the government of the British Mandate in Palestine, from November 1944 to March 1945.
A successful paramilitary campaign, sometimes referred to as the Palestine Emergency, was carried out by Zionist underground groups against British rule in Mandatory Palestine from 1944 to 1948. The tensions between the Zionist underground and the British mandatory authorities rose from 1938 and intensified with the publication of the White Paper of 1939. The Paper outlined new government policies to place further restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchases, and declared the intention of giving independence to Palestine, with an Arab majority, within ten years. Though World War II brought relative calm, tensions again escalated into an armed struggle towards the end of the war, when it became clear that the Axis powers were close to defeat.
The Night of the Bridges was a Haganah venture on the night of 16 to 17 June 1946 in the British Mandate of Palestine, as part of the Jewish insurgency in Palestine (1944–47). Its aim was to destroy eleven bridges linking Mandatory Palestine to the neighboring countries Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan and Egypt, in order to suspend the transportation routes used by the British Army. Attacks on a further three bridges had been considered, but were not executed.
The 1948 Palestine war was fought in the territory of what had been, at the start of the war, British-ruled Mandatory Palestine. During the war, the British withdrew from Palestine, Zionist forces conquered territory and established the State of Israel, and over 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled. It was the first war of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the broader Arab–Israeli conflict.
Joseph "Yosefle" Tabenkin was an Israeli commander of the Fourth Battalion of the Palmach's Harel Brigade in the years leading up to and during the 1948 Palestine war, also known as Israel's "War of Independence."
Jacob (Yankele), Eugen, Jean Salomon was a member of the Haganah and Palmach. He commanded the Palmach's Fourth Battalion and served as commander of the Haganah in Eastern Europe.
