Churchill’s Maccabees

The attempt to raise a Jewish army to fight Hitler

AMONG the nine films nominated for “Best Picture” at this Sunday’s Oscars, two portray the crisis Winston Churchill faced when he became prime minister in May 1940. “Dunkirk” recounted the miraculous evacuation of more than 300,000 soldiers from France, barely ahead of the Nazi forces advancing to annihilate them. “Darkest Hour” portrayed the run-up to Churchill’s historic June 4, 1940, address, which ended with the words that inspired a nation: “We shall never surrender.”

What Churchill did not disclose at the time was that, after Dunkirk, Britain had only 100 tanks remaining. The British had abandoned all their military equipment in the Dunkirk retreat: 475 tanks, 38,000 vehicles, 12,000 motorcycles, 90,000 rifles and 7,000 tons of ammunition. As Britain awaited what was coming next — the Nazi blitz on London — the country was in dire military straits, under-manned and underarmed.

The Americans were still officially sitting out the war.

There’s a third movie that could’ve been made about this historic moment, involving the desperate race by the three greatest Zionist figures of the day — David-Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann and Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leaders of the left, right and center of Zionism — who sought to form a Jewish army to support Britain’s war effort. Each leader came on a months-long mission to America in 1940 to drum up support.

Two days after Churchill assumed office, Weizmann published a proclamation in The Times of London that the Jewish people stood ready to assist Britain, and he proposed a Jewish force of 50,000 men. Jabotinsky cabled Churchill directly, offering to organize an army of 100,000 from the half-million stateless Jews in the world and Jewish volunteers. Ben-Gurion told the British there were “tens of thousands of young Jews” in Palestine eager to fight as British allies.

Ten days after these offers, Churchill directed his cabinet that the Jews in Palestine “be armed in their own defense, and properly organized as speedily as possible,” because Churchill wanted “to liberate the eleven battalions of excellent Regular [British] troops who are now tethered” in Palestine, charged with preventing Arab attacks on the Jews, and move those British battalions elsewhere, where they were desperately needed.

On June 19, 1940, Jabotinsky addressed an overflow audience of more than 4,000 people at the Manhattan Center. The New York Times that morning reported the “complete military and political collapse” of France. The Times published a photograph of Hitler and Mussolini standing triumphantly before a cheering crowd.

Jabotinsky told the crowd that “every division may now prove decisive,” and that an army of 100,000 Jewish soldiers could be formed — “even without counting American Jews.” There was still time, he said, for decisive changes, provided “we all remember the principle by which all great nations live . . . the principle which is the secret of our own Jewish people’s survival through all these centuries of torture: No Surrender.” The Times quoted him as challenging Jewish youth throughout the world to “demand the right of fighting the giant rattlesnake.”

Weizmann, Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion spent a total of 11 months in America during 1940, pursuing support for a Jewish army to join the fight against Hitler. They didn’t succeed, in part because of a fractured Zionist movement; in part because of British bureaucratic resistance; and in part because much of American Jewry was worried — not without cause — about false accusations of “warmongering” and “dual loyalty” from anti-Semites such as Charles Lindbergh, Father Coughlin, Henry Ford and similar influential American figures.

What bears remembering, however, is not the result, but the heroic effort. The 1940 campaign to assist Britain, at the lowest military moment of World War II, to join what the Zionist leaders knew was an existential fight not only for Britain but Jewry as well, and indeed for Western civilization, is an important part of the saga of the war — a little-known story from the time when the Jewish people faced their own darkest hour.