Jewish War Veterans Department of Illinois

Shabbat Shalom and a remembering D-Day.

On June 6th, we commemorate the 82nd anniversary of D-Day when Allied Forces stormed the beaches of Normandy, signaling the beginning of an arduous campaign to end N**i tyranny and the World War in Europe

Originally known as Decoration Day, the Federal holiday is rooted in the post-Civil War era when the graves of fallen soldiers were adorned with flags, flowers and colored ribbons. It's a time to pause and reflect on war’s devastation and pay homage to the memory of all service men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice in defense of our freedom and democracy.

Good story leading up to Memorial Day. Shabbat Shalom & Chag Shavuot Sameach (Day 2).

The Soldier Who Had No Business Being There And Saved a Nation Anyway

How a Brooklyn street kid, West Point graduate, gangster prosecutor, and D-Day paratrooper became the first general in a Jewish army since Judah Maccabee

The sun had not yet risen over the Judean Hills on June 11, 1948, when an eighteen-year-old Israeli sentry named Eliezer Linski spotted a figure moving in the dark. The figure was wrapped in a white sheet or perhaps a blanket, accounts differ…and approaching his post near the abandoned monastery at Abu Ghosh, just west of Jerusalem. Linski challenged the figure in Hebrew.

The figure replied in English.

Linski didn’t understand English. He fired once.

The man who fell was David Daniel “Mickey” Marcus, Colonel, United States Army, and the first general in a Jewish fighting force in two thousand years. He was forty-seven years old. A ceasefire, one he had done more than almost any living person to make possible, was scheduled to take effect in less than six hours.

It was, in almost every measurable sense, the wrong ending to the right story.

Hester Street
Begin at the beginning, because the beginning matters.

Mickey Marcus entered the world on February 22, 1901 on Hester Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. A neighborhood so crowded, so alive, so perpetually on the edge of chaos that it functioned less like a place and more like a pressure cooker. His parents, Mordechai and Leah Marcus had come over from Iași, Romania in part of the great Jewish migration that poured through Ellis Island in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They brought with them the same things every immigrant family carried. They had very little money, very high hopes, and the knowledge that in the old country being Jewish had a way of going badly.

The family eventually settled in Brownsville, Brooklyn. In those years it wasn’t a neighborhood that rewarded timidity. Mickey learned to fight. He boxed. He brawled when he had to. He was bright enough to turn that physical energy into something directed, something purposeful. And by the time he was a teenager, it was clear that Mickey Marcus was not going to be contained by any single category.

He was admitted to West Point in 1920. A Jewish kid from Brooklyn, walking through those gates through an institution that was as white, Protestant, and patrician as any in America. Not a place where boys from Hester Street did not typically end up. He lettered in boxing and football, which helped, because at West Point physical courage was a language everyone spoke. He graduated with the class of 1924, the 7,368th graduate in the Academy’s history, commissioned as an infantry officer. West Point did not make Mickey Marcus. He arrived already formed. It gave him the necessary credential, the network, and the military framework that would define the rest of his life. Every door he walked through afterward had West Point behind it.

What follows across the next two decades is a biography that stretches the imagination. Not because it is embellished (it isn’t). More so because it reads like a screenwriter’s rough draft before someone in development told him to pick a lane.

After his mandatory Army service, Marcus enrolled in Brooklyn Law School. He became an Assistant United States Attorney. In the 1930s he helped prosecute Charles “Lucky” Luciano, the most powerful organized crime figure in American history. When Mayor Fiorello La Guardia wanted someone to clean up the notoriously corrupt and prisoner-controlled penitentiary on Welfare Island, he sent Marcus personally to lead the raid. By 1940 La Guardia had named him Commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction.

He wasn’t even forty yet.

When the war came, Marcus went back into uniform. He served as executive officer to the military governor of Hawaii. He moved to Civil Affairs in Washington, planning occupation governments for liberated territories. He helped draw up the surrender terms for Italy and Germany.

And then in May 1944, he did something that captures the essential Mickey Marcus better than any résumé line ever could.

He got himself sent to England on official Civil Affairs business. Once there, he leveraged his friendship with General Maxwell D. Taylor, who happened to be a West Point classmate, to talk his way into a parachute drop over Normandy with the first wave of Taylor’s 101st Airborne Division. He had no paratrooper training. He jumped anyway, in the dark, into German-occupied France on the night of June 5-6, 1944.

On the ground he collected scattered paratroopers and organized them into combat patrols. He led those patrols himself. On one occasion he personally helped free a group of captured American soldiers. He spent a week in combat before his furious superiors back in Washington finally tracked him down. General Taylor reportedly looked at him and said, “What the hell are you doing here?”

Marcus said he was just looking around.

He was put on a plane back to the United States still wearing his dirty field uniform.

Dachau
After the German surrender in May 1945, General Lucius D. Clay requested Marcus for his staff in the occupation of Germany. Marcus was put in charge of the displaced persons problem… the millions of liberated prisoners, refugees, and survivors scattered across a shattered continent, most of them with nowhere to go.

Clay required all his subordinates to tour the Dachau concentration camp.

Marcus had not been a Zionist. He was an American, deeply and completely. He wore his Judaism lightly, the way an assimilated New Yorker of his generation often did. He had never spent significant energy thinking about a Jewish homeland. He was too busy being an American success story…lawyer, soldier, prosecutor, public servant.

Dachau changed something in him. The historical record doesn’t preserve exactly what he thought while walking through those gates but the trajectory of his life afterward makes the answer clear enough. Something shifted. Something that had been more of an abstract became deeply personal.

In 1946 Marcus was named chief of the Army’s War Crimes Division in Washington, planning the legal and security architecture for the Nuremberg Trials and the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. He attended Nuremberg and one of his primary concerns there was ensuring that the full documentation of N**i atrocities was preserved, not just for the verdicts but for history. For memory. For the generations that would come after and would need to know what had happened.

He was nominated for brigadier general six times. Six times something intervened. In early 1947 the Army offered him a coveted post as military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

He turned it down and went home to his law practice instead.

He was forty-six years old, apparently done with the extraordinary life, ready at last to be ordinary.

He had approximately eight months of ordinary left.

In late 1947 the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. The Arab world rejected the plan immediately and entirely. War was not a possibility, it was a certainty. And everyone knew it.

David Ben-Gurion (the man who would become Israel’s first Prime Minister, of course) was under no illusions about what he was facing. The Haganah, the main Jewish paramilitary organization in Palestine was brave and battle-hardened in its way. But it was not an army. It had no unified command structure, no established ranks, no coherent military doctrine. It was a collection of factions and militias that agreed on the goal of a Jewish state but not always on the same page for achieving it. When the Arab armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon crossed the border the morning after Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, what stood against them was something that needed to become an army very quickly.

Ben-Gurion sent an envoy named Shlomo Shamir to New York to find an American general officer willing to come to Palestine and organize the Haganah into a professional fighting force. Shamir was well-connected and credible. He reached out to twenty-four officers. All twenty-four said no.

He eventually found himself sitting across from Mickey Marcus. Not because Marcus was his first choice, but because Marcus might know somebody. Marcus was a decorated veteran with a sterling reputation. Maybe he could recommend a candidate.

Marcus listened. He thought about it. Maybe he thought about Dachau though he didn’t say so.

Then he volunteered himself.

The U.S. War Department quietly acquiesced. Marcus was technically a reservist. There were conditions, however. He couldn’t use his own name and he could not reveal his military rank or record. The British, who still administered Mandatory Palestine, would not look kindly on an American colonel openly advising Jewish forces.

In January 1948, one “Michael Stone” landed in Tel Aviv.

What Michael Stone found when he arrived was, by any conventional military assessment, a nightmare.

Jerusalem was already under siege. Arab forces controlled the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem…the only supply line to 100,000 Jewish residents who were running out of food, water, and ammunition. The Haganah’s various factions…the Haganah proper, the Palmach, the Irgun all had different commanders, different doctrines, different loyalties, and a mutual suspicion that sometimes seemed to consume more energy than fighting the actual enemy.

Marcus began immediately. He designed a command-and-control structure for Israel’s new army drawing on everything he had learned about American military organization, adapting it to the human and geographic terrain he found in Palestine. He wrote training manuals. He identified the two most critical vulnerabilities: the scattered Jewish settlements in the Negev Desert in the south, and Jerusalem. He began working on both.

He was an outsider which was the point. He had no stake in the internal politics of any Haganah faction. He could give an order and expect it to be followed not because of who he was loyal to, but because he was clearly the most competent military mind in the room. Ben-Gurion had chosen well, even if the choosing had been accidental.

On May 14, 1948 Ben-Gurion stood before a gathering in Tel Aviv and read the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. Within hours, the armies of five Arab nations crossed the borders.

Within days, it was clear that Jerusalem might fall.

The Latrun fortress sat at the top of a ridge commanding the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road. Whoever held Latrun held the road. The Arab Legion held Latrun.

Two Israeli assaults on Latrun, Operations Bin Nun Bet and Yoram failed with serious casualties. The road stayed closed. Jerusalem stayed besieged.

Marcus looked at the maps. He looked at the terrain…the impossible, rocky, steep terrain of the Judean Hills. And he proposed something that military engineers would have called inadvisable, probably unprecedented, and absolutely necessary.

Build a road around Latrun. Through the hills. Through terrain that had no road because no reasonable person had ever thought to put one there.

They called it the Burma Road after the supply route Allied forces had hacked through the jungles of Southeast Asia during World War II. Marcus oversaw the construction with the same relentless energy he had brought to everything else in his life. It was built by hand, in secret, mostly at night, by soldiers and civilians working side by side. Every vehicle that tried to traverse the first rough tracks got stuck, and people pushed them through by hand. Then they cleared more rock, widened more switchbacks, and tried again.

On June 10, 1948, one day before the United Nations ceasefire was scheduled to take effect, the Burma Road opened to vehicle traffic. Supplies began moving toward Jerusalem. The siege was broken.

Ben-Gurion, who did not use words carelessly, said of Marcus: “He was the best man we had.”

On May 28, 1948, Marcus had been formally appointed Commander of the Jerusalem front and given the rank of Aluf (general). It made him the first general in a Jewish army since Judah Maccabee had led the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid Empire in the second century BCE. The last time a Jewish general had held command in the Land of Israel, the Romans had not yet destroyed the Temple.

The ceasefire was coming. The war wasn’t over. It wouldn’t truly be over for months. But the first phase was ending and the supply line to Jerusalem was open. Israel had survived its first week of existence against all reasonable expectation.

Marcus and his commanders were billeted at the abandoned Monastere Notre Dame de la Nouvelle Alliance, a stone monastery near the village of Abu Ghosh. It was the early hours of June 11, 1948.

Marcus couldn’t sleep.

He wrapped himself in a white sheet and went outside to walk. The night was dark. He wandered away from the monastery and then turned back toward it.

The sentry who had been on duty when Marcus left had been replaced by Eliezer Linski, eighteen years old recent immigrant who had been in the country barely a year, a veteran of the Palmach for the same brief time. He saw a figure in white approaching in the darkness. He called out in Hebrew. The figure replied in a language he didn’t understand.

Linski fired.

Mickey Marcus died before sunrise on June 11, 1948. The ceasefire took effect at ten o’clock that morning.

His body was flown back to the United States. The funeral service was held at the Union Temple of Brooklyn, the neighborhood where it had all started — the kid from the Lower East Side who had boxed and studied and clawed his way to West Point, who had put Lucky Luciano away, who had jumped into Normandy without knowing how to jump, who had walked into Dachau and come back changed.

The burial was at West Point. Governor of New York Thomas Dewey attended. Former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau attended. General Maxwell Taylor, the classmate who had let him jump into France was there serving as superintendent of the Military Academy.

Accompanying the body from Israel were Moshe Dayan, then a battalion commander, and his wife Ruth. The young officer who would go on to become one of Israel’s most legendary generals made the trip personally to see Mickey Marcus home.

His is the only grave in the West Point Cemetery for an American killed fighting under the flag of another country. The inscription reads:

“Colonel David Marcus — A Soldier for All Humanity.”

Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin visited the grave in 2015 and said“For me, he was the first general of the IDF in every sense of the word. He had a sense of purpose and mission, in the establishment of the Israel Defense Forces, he taught us how to act as an army in our early days, and was one of Ben-Gurion’s greatest military advisors. There is no one who better illustrates the strong bond between Israel and the United States.”

Ben-Gurion, suspicious to his death that the shooting had not been an accident, ordered an investigation. The report was cursory. It was never made public.

In 1966 United Artists released Cast a Giant Shadow, with Kirk Douglas as Mickey Marcus, and a supporting cast that included John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, and Yul Brynner. It was a Hollywood movie which is to say it took liberties. But it wasn’t wrong about the essential thing…this was a man who had lived several extraordinary lives in sequence and then, at the moment his country of birth had no more use for him, gave everything he had to a country that barely existed yet.

He was not a Zionist ideologue. He certainly wasn’t chasing glory. He was a pragmatist, a problem-solver, a man who looked at an impossible situation and saw engineering challenges where others saw only catastrophe. He built the Burma Road the same way he had prosecuted Lucky Luciano and jumped into Normandy without a parachute license by deciding that the obstacle was real but not terminal and then working until it wasn’t.

Israel named streets and neighborhoods after him. Kibbutz Mishmar David. The Neve David neighborhood of Tel Aviv. A playground in Brooklyn on Avenue P not far from where he had grown up.

His paratrooper helmet and his pistol are displayed at the West Point Museum in the building where they train the officers of the country that once upon a time quietly looked away while a Colonel named Mickey Marcus went off to help a people build an army from nothing.

He was forty-seven years old. He had been in Israel for less than six months.

He was, in the words of the man who sent him there, the best man they had.

*crossposted to Substack

Wishing everyone a pleasant Shavuot / Memorial Day weekend ✡️🧀🫡 🇺🇸 🪖💐

Image courtesy of AI and the fertile mind of Chaplain Grossman formerly of our Department.

Getting ready for Memorial Day.

Saturday is Armed Forces Day. The Jewish War Veterans salute members of all branches of America's mighty military who defend our Constitution and freedoms. Thank you!

Shabbat Shalom

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Today, we pause to reflect on this dark chapter of history and to reaffirm our commitment to a world where hatred and intolerance have no place. [Corrected image]