Tom Derek Bowden

Heroic non Jewish cavalry officer who fought in Israel’s War of Independence

TWICE CAPTURED and imprisoned at Bergen-Belsen, Tom Derek Bowden, who later assumed the Israeli nom de guerre David Appel, was brought up in an easy-going Church of England family, but developed an affinity with the Jewish community through participation in London’s Jewish social and intellectual life in London.

It was reinforced while serving in the Royal Scots Greys Cavalry regiment, when he was sent to Mandate Palestine to fight on horseback, armed with a sabre and a First World War rifle, and enhanced by his experience as a prisoner of war in the Second World War. Bowden, who has died aged 98, also came under the spell of Orde Wingate, (the legendary British officer who is considered the father of the Israel Defence Forces), having attended one of his famous courses on counter-terrorism.

The seventh of nine children of a prosperous South London business family, whose best-selling product was Ribena, he left school at 15, eager to play a part in the oncoming war. At its outbreak, he went back to England and then returned to Palestine – with a commission and 30,000 horses. The regiment entered Syria when it declared allegiance to Vichy France in 1942, cavalry charging cavalry in what he calls “an operatic battle,” complete with swords and swirling red cloaks.

During the battle, Bowden’s leg was badly wounded and he spent three months recovering in a Jerusalem hospital. After discharge, Derek recuperated at the home of a Tel Aviv family, later adopting their surname Appel.

During the bitter winter of 1942, the regiment was mechanised and the horses were put down. Bowden volunteered for a parachute brigade being recruited near the Suez Canal. His job was to drop flares ahead of parachute landings along the North African coast and in occupied Europe. At Arnhem his leg was injured again and he was captured and taken to a POW camp hospital near Hanover.

After escape and recapture, he was interrogated, and diaries and letters from Jewish friends and girlfriends in Palestine were found in his possession.

The SS officer who questioned him had until then, treated him well, offering him drinks and cigarettes. “When he saw the papers, he told me he would show me how the Germans treated the Jews. I was sent to Bergen-Belsen.”

He said it was an experience which changed his life. He spent a month carrying corpses from the shocking living quarters, piling them onto carts and tipping them into pits. After that he was returned to Hanover.

The war ended and he was released. He resigned his commission and, unable to settle, went to Yugoslavia where he started a parachute school. Learning of Israel’s Declaration of Independence he reached Haifa via Cyprus, adopting the name David Appel after a previous fiancée, Hannah Appel –“because I could write it.”

He joined the 7th Brigade, surviving the Latrun operations and foughtwith the brigade through the Galilee.

In 1949, after the Armistice, he was asked by Chaim Laskov, a founder of the Israel Defence Forces, to start a parachute school at Tel Nof. Helped by his Jewish secretary, former army nurse Eva (Chava) Heilbronner, whom he later married, he wrote Israel’s first training manual, consulting rabbinical scholars for Hebrew translations of new technical terms. As commander and chief instructor of Israel’s first parachute regiment, Bowden brought army surplus parachutes from England and made four jumps ”before breakfast every day.”He left in 1950. His marriage to Eva, with whom he had four children, ended in amicable divorce.

From the garden of his Norfolk farm house, he recalled without rancour the chaos and the Israeli propensity for holding endless meetings. In the garden stood a light airplane he used to fly, and inside the house memorabilia included a tattered first edition of the Hebrew training manual He is survived by his his fifth wife Irene, four children, David, Robert Judi and Kenni, eight grand-children and eight great grand-children. ELANA OVERS