1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (41 page)

The Palestinian Arabs, though having lost the civil war, continued, with the help of the ALA and other foreign volunteer units, to hold the central Galilee from the Lebanese border southward to (and including) Nazareth; the southern Coastal Plain, including Isdud, Majdal, and the area later known as the Gaza Strip; a somewhat expanded West Bank (Judea and Samaria), which stretched westward to Lydda and Ramla and southward to Beersheba; and the bulk of the Negev Desert, which was inhabited by Bedouin. They also held a small ALA-supported enclave along the coast just south of Haifa, which included the villages of Tira, Ijzim, and Tantura.

Nine Haganah brigades, composed of some 16,5oo troops, defended the Jewish areas.107 The Eleventh, Yiftah (Palmah) Brigade in the Galilee Panhandle and Jordan Valley; the First, Golani, Brigade in the Beit Shean and Jezreel Valleys; the Second, Carmeli, Brigade in Western Galilee and Haifa; the Third, Alexandroni, Brigade in the Coastal Plain; the Fourth, Kiryati, Brigade in the greater Tel Aviv area; the Sixteenth, `Etzioni, Brigade in West Jerusalem; the Tenth, Harel (Palmah), Brigade in the Jerusalem Corridor; the Fifth, Giv'ati, Brigade in the Rehovot-Hulda area, southeast of Tel Aviv; and the Twelfth, Negev (Palmah), Brigade in the northern Negev pocket. Three more brigades-the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth (Oded)-were added in the following weeks.

About half the Haganah's manpower served in service, headquarters, and Home Guard units. On 15 May only 6o percent of Haganah troops had arms.108 But large shipments soon arrived, and by the start of June, according to Ben-Gurion, the IDF had "reached a saturation" in small arms, including thirty-six thousand rifles, sixty-five hundred light machine guns, and more than thirty-three million bullets.'()' The Yishuv's own arms factories also helped out: by the start of June, the weapons plants had produced seven thousand Sten submachine guns; by October, sixteen thousand. The Yishuv's plants also produced Sten gun ammunition, light and medium mortars, antitank projectiles, grenades, mines, and crude bombs.

The Haganah's main problem during the first weeks of the invasion was a lack of heavy weapons. It had managed to steal or buy from the departing British units two or three tanks, twelve armored cars (four of these mounting cannon), three half-tracks, and three coastal patrol vessels. By the end of May, ten additional tanks and a dozen or so half-tracks had arrived, as had forty-five light artillery pieces, twenty-four antiaircraft or antitank cannon, and seventy-five PIATs. Dozens of makeshift armored trucks and cars had been built in Tel Aviv's workshops. By 31 May, the Haganah also had about seven hundred two-inch mortars and one hundred three-inch mortars, plus a dozen or so locally made crude heavy mortars (Davidkas)-all of which compensated, to some degree, for the initial lack of artillery. The Haganah Air Service, which became the Israel Air Force (IAF), had twenty-eight light reconnaissance and transport aircraft but no combat aircraft. By 29 May, Israel had received, assembled, and sent into action four Czech-made Messerschmitt Avia S-199 fighters; seven more arrived, in parts, by ii June. 110

Just as the Arabs tended to exaggerate Jewish strength, the Jews tended to exaggerate Arab strength-and Yishuv strategy cannot be understood without taking account of this. Jewish fears of defeat and possible annihilation were very real, and they began to dissipate only after the Arab armies proved to be much smaller and, by and large, less competent than anticipated. i i i

On paper, according to Haganah estimates, the Arab states possessed armies comprising 165,ooo troops.112 In mid-1947, Ben-Gurion believed that the Arab Legion alone consisted of no less than "15-18,ooo" troops, with "400 tanks."113 (In truth, the Legion had no tanks and only seven to eight thousand soldiers.)

The Arab armies were much smaller and severely underequipped-and they deployed only part of their strength in Palestine, usually leaving large numbers of troops at home to guard against internal upheaval by minorities (for example, Iraq's Kurds) or political opponents. 114 All the same, the Arab states sent their best, and best-equipped, formations, and these were supplied and supported by many thousands of logistical and base camp troops to the rear.

The invading forces consisted, on 15 May, of about twenty thousand combat 115 some fifty-five hundred Egyptians (two brigade groups), fortyfive hundred to sixty-five hundred Arab Legionnaires,'16 2,750 from Syria (one brigade), and twenty-seven hundred from Iraq (one reinforced brigade). To this number one should add air force personnel in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt and some two thousand Lebanese army troops, who applied pressure on, and posed a constant threat along, the northern border, pinning down Haganah troops, and thousands of irregulars (ALA, Muslim Brotherhood, and local militiamen) inside Palestine.' 17 During the following two to three weeks, an additional three to four brigades (one each from Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, with further Jordanian troops organized as a new brigade), numbering at least eight thousand troops, arrived at the fronts.

On paper, according to Haganah estimates, the Arab armies had some seventy-five combat aircraft, forty tanks, three hundred armored vehicles, 140 field guns, and 22o antiaircraft and antitank guns. 111 But, in practice, they had far less, much of the equipment (especially the aircraft) being unserviceable. Some of the other weaponry never reached the Palestine theater. 119

Following the invasion, both sides substantially increased their forces, the Israelis handily winning the manpower race. In 1948, twenty-to-forty-fouryear-old males constituted a full 22 percent of the Jewish population. In the end, Israel proved able to put 13 percent of its population into uniform. 1211 By mid-July, the IDF was fielding sixty-five thousand troops; by October, eighty-eight thousand; by January 1949, io8,ooo.121 The Arab armies, joined by contingents from Yemen, Morocco, Saudi Arabia,122 and Sudan, probably had forty to fifty thousand troops in Palestine and Sinai by mid-July and sixty-eight thousand in mid-October,123 the numbers perhaps rising slightly by the end of winter.

A major reason for the relative decline in Arab strength in the course of the war and the concomitant increase in Israeli strength, which by September and October 1948 resulted in clear Israeli superiority, was the Israeli "victory"-and Arab "defeat"-in the handling of the international arms embargo. In line with the UN Security Council decision, the international community imposed a blanket arms embargo on all the combatants from 29 May 1948 until 11 August 1949. (This followed the unilateral American embargo, imposed already from 14 December 1947, and the British curtailment of arms and munitions exports to the Middle East that began in February 1948. )124 The embargo was applied with great rigor by the United States, as well as by Britain, the traditional supplier of Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan, and France, the traditional supplier of Syria and Lebanon. As it turned out, the embargo had an asymmetrical effect-badly hurting the Arabs but hurting the Yishuv only minimally. This was a major factor in the gradual, steady decline of Arab military power and the relative, steady increase in Israeli military power.

The Arab states had not expected the embargo and had tailed to prepare large stockpiles of weaponry, ammunition, and spare parts before 1 S May. Nor had they nurtured alternative sources of supply from Eastern Europe or from private arms dealers or an independent capability to buy and ship arms to the Middle East clandestinely. Once the UN embargo was imposed, the Arab states, for lack of funds and an appropriate procurement apparatus, proved by and large unable to purchase weapons, munitions, and spare parts. And, after expending vast quantities of munitions in the invasion weeks of May and June, the Arab armies, from July onward, increasingly found themselves short of war materiel. For example, in October 1948 the Egyptian air force, which nominally had thirty-six fighters and sixteen bombers, was able to fly less than a dozen fighters and only three or four bombers, and these with ill-trained aircrews and inadequate munitions.125

The embargo also had a dire psychological effect on the Arab world. As Azzam put it, "The Arabs [felt that they] were in fact without a friend in the world." 126

By contrast, the Haganah,-an underground organization well versed in the clandestine arts-fashioned secret arms procurement networks in Europe and the Americas during 1947 and early 1948. Yishuv fundraisers managed to raise some $129 million, in cash and pledges, from Jews abroad to bankroll the war effort. The Yishuv spent some $78.3 million of this on arms purchases between October 1947 and March 1949.127 As we have seen, these networks concluded a series of deals with Czechoslovakia, which was hungry for American dollars, and with private dealers, and shipments began to arrive in Palestine from the end of March 1948, the bulk of the arms, including heavy weaponry, arriving after Israel's declaration of statehood. The arrival of the Czech light weapons in March through May and of artillery pieces and armored vehicles in May through July proved crucial to the Haganah/IDF victories both over the Palestinian Arabs and the invading armies. Obversely, the failure of the Arab states to obtain additional armor, aircraft, guns, and ammunition, particularly for its artillery and mortars, proved crucial in the Arab shift after May and June to the defensive and to the subsequent Arab defeats. Similarly, the embargo-violating arrival in Israel of thousands of trained Jewish and non-Jewish volunteers from abroad, including hundreds of air and ground crew, was not matched by a similar increase in expert military personnel in the Arab armies. (More than three hundred Americans and Canadians-mostly with World War II experience-served in 1948 in the IAF, 198 of them aircrew. )128 By the last months of 1948, the IAF had far more trained aircrew than were needed; the Arabs had far too few. Thus, in October 1948 the Israel Air Force, flying only a dozen or so fighters, proved able to gain immediate air superiority against the Egyptians, flying in Operation Yoav some 240 missions to the Egyptians' thirty to fifty missions. The surfeit of experienced personnel and the availability of spare parts and munitions made all the difference.

THE JORDANIAN FRONT

The army the Yishuv (rightly) feared most was the Arab Legion. The Jews had come to respect it during the months its units had served with the British army in Palestine. It was professional and efficient. Its strength in May 1948 was around nine thousand, of whom some twelve to thirteen hundred were tribal auxiliaries.12' The Legion was highly mechanized, with effective service units, and was led by a complement of some fifty to seventy-five experienced British officers and noncommissioned officers, mostly seconded from the British army or mercenaries. 130 They included Glubb, the Legion's commander, and most of the senior staff-his deputy, Norman Lash, the brigade commanders Teal Ashton and Desmond Goldie, and most battalion OCs. The Legion-officially renamed the Jordan Arab Army-had a highly professional artillery arm.

Most of the Legion's combat troops-Glubb says "4,Soo"1 -"-crossed into Palestine on 15 May. But a number of Legion companies had been left behind in Palestine when the bulk of the Legion, which had been seconded to the British army, withdrew to Jordan as part of the general British withdrawal from the country in late April and early May. The British had promised the Jewish Agency and United Nations that all of the Legionnaires would withdraw by the end of April. But in the second week of May, the British conceded that several Legion companies, for technical reasons, had not been able to pull out. These units, in Jericho, 'Ein Karim, Latrun, Ramallah, Nablus, and Hebron, "greeted" the Legion as it crossed the Jordan westward and facilitated its smooth entry into parts of Palestine on 15-17 May.132

The British had established the Arab Legion in 1921 as a small, mobile border patrol unit. Glubb reorganized it in the 1930S when he became its deputy commander, and he was named commander on 21 March 1939. During World War II the Legion was considerably expanded to assist the British campaigns in Iraq and Syria in 1941. By war's end it numbered some eight thousand troops, mostly organized in garrison companies guarding British bases.

The Legion underwent a substantial reorganization during October 1947early May 1948. It absorbed many of the two thousand troopers of the Transjordan Frontier Force (TJFF), the Palestine Mandate's border patrol force, and its manpower was otherwise expanded. Additional arms were acquired, and new units were created with an eye to establishing a force that could either help Britain and the United States should there be a showdown with the Soviet Union or, alternatively, occupy parts of Palestine after the British withdrew. By mid-May 1948, the original, single mechanized brigade, along with some independent guard companies, was reconstituted as two truckborne mechanized brigades, the First and Third, each consisting of two onebattalion regiments. The brigades were run by a divisional headquarters commanded by Glubb's deputy, Lash. Each brigade had two four-gun artillery batteries of twenty-five-pounders. Each battalion had twelve to fourteen Marmon Harrington or Humber IV armored cars, each mounting a two-pounder gun. The Legion also had several dozen armored cars armed with machine guns, twenty-four six-pounder antitank guns, and forty threeinch mortars, all dispersed among the battalions.' 11 During the second half of May and into early June, nine of the remaining "garrison companies" were reorganized into a third infantry brigade, the Fourth, consisting of the Fifth and Sixth regiments. This brigade, with two batteries of twenty-five-pounders, was largely unmechanized and underequipped, and was composed of recruits drawn largely from the kingdom's villages and towns rather than from the bedouin tribes, which were the mainstay of the Legion's original infantry battalions.134 The Legion had no tanks or aircraft. By May 1949 it consisted of fourteen thousand soldiers.

The Legion was short of ammunition, especially for its artillery and mortars, and suffered severely from the British arms embargo.' 11 A large, lastminute supply of artillery shells and mortar bombs-altogether some 3So tons-was confiscated by the Egyptians at Suez on 22 May.136 But during the initial weeks of the invasion, the Legion's officers, perhaps unaware of the supply problem, were profligate in their use of artillery and mortars. On 30 May, the Fourth Battalion, fighting in Latrun, ran out of artillery shells. 1.37 During the following months, especially in the fighting in mid-July, Glubb pleaded with Whitehall for resupply, only to be rebuffed with the argument that if Britain violated the embargo, the Americans would do likewise and supply arms and ammunition to Israel in even more significant quantities. Nonetheless, during September and October Britain surreptitiously supplied the Legion with limited quantities of spare parts and ammunition, including artillery shells. 1 39