Sinking the Emir Farouk
(October 22, 1948)
When the Jews of Palestine created
an Israeli state in 1948, the neighboring
Arab nations --with more than a million men
under arms-- invaded Israel with the avowed goal of "driving
the Jews in to the sea." In the aftermath
of the Holocaust,
many American
Jews thought Jewish survival depended
on a national homeland. American Jewry contributed
funds to purchase arms for the fledgling Israeli
armed forces, which had fewer than 75,000
soldiers and almost no heavy weapons. A thousand
courageous Americans put their lives directly
on the line fighting for Israel’s survival
and many made indispensable contributions.
West Pointer Mickey
Marcus became Israel’s first commanding
general; Rudy Augarten was the air force’s
leading ace.
Paul Shulman, a twenty-six year old Annapolis
graduate, became the Israeli
navy’s first commander.
David
Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of
Israel, personally recruited the tall and
dark-haired Shulman to serve as naval commander.
A veteran of only three years service in the
U.S. Navy, Shulman, although young, had the
requisite training and experience. While he
did not speak Hebrew,
Shulman was familiar with the struggle for
a Jewish state. The son of committed Zionists,
Shulman had worked closely with the Haganah,
the Jewish underground army in Palestine,
to purchase surplus ships to transport European
Jewish refugees to Palestine in defiance of British
immigration restrictions. This pre-independence
work impressed the Israelis, especially Ben-Gurion.
By the third week of October 1948, the invading
Syrian, Lebanese, and Jordanian armies were
largely repelled and only Egypt remained a
threat. Although true peace was remote, a United Nations-sponsored
truce was scheduled for October 22, 1948.
That morning, Commander Shulman learned that
two Egyptian warships had anchored outside Tel
Aviv harbor including the cruiser Emir
Farouk, flagship of the Egyptian navy.
The Egyptians were clearly trying to prevent
Israel from rearming by sea during the truce.
Ben-Gurion ordered Shulman to evict the intruders.
The Haganah had obtained several armed motorboats that
had been used to great effect by Italian commandos
during World War II as kamikaze-type weapons.
The boats were loaded with explosives and
aimed toward an enemy ship. At the last moment,
the pilot would leap to safety while the boat
continued to its target. These boats became
Shulman’s secret weapon.
Shulman organized a three-boat force to confront the Egyptians. One,
the Ma'oz, carried the Italian motorboats on deck. All three vessels
had been used before the war to bring European Jewish refugees to Palestine.
Upon declaring independence, Israel hastily converted them into warships.
The three vessels pulled alongside the Egyptian ships and Shulman called
out over a loudspeaker: "Truce period or no truce period, if you
don't get the hell out of here, I'm going to shoot!" The two Egyptian
vessels departed for Gaza and the Israeli ships followed closely. An
hour later, Egyptian shore batteries in Gaza opened fire at the Israeli
vessels, as Shulman had hoped. He radioed for permission to attack the
Egyptian vessels. "No," came the response. Shulman radioed
a second time, asking that his request be forwarded directly to Ben
Gurion, who replied, "Paul, if you can sink them, shoot; if you
can't, don't."
Shulman decided on a night attack, positioning the Ma'oz between the
Egyptian ships and the moon. At dark, the Ma'oz crew lowered four small
vessels into the water. It took nearly an hour for them to reach the
Egyptian ships. The pilot of the first vessel gunned his boat toward
the Farouk, explosives armed. At the last moment, he leapt into the
water. He heard an explosion and saw that the Farouk had been hit. Almost
immediately, the second assault boat scored a direct hit on the huge
warship, which erupted in flames and sank within minutes. As the Farouk
slipped below the surface, the retrieval boat plucked the commandos
from the sea.
The sinking of the Farouk was Israel's most
dramatic naval victory in the War
of Independence. Some five hundred Egyptian
sailors perished, many from that nation’s
upper class. However, the event received little
formal publicity at the time: Israel wanted
to draw no attention to its arguable violation
of the truce; the Egyptians hoped to keep
the Israeli triumph a secret. Nonetheless,
news of the enormous loss reached the Egyptian
public and for nearly a year the Egyptian
navy had difficulty recruiting new sailors.
In the aftermath, Egypt complained to the
U.S. State Department that an American citizen
had sunk its navy's flagship. The State Department
asked Shulman to resign his naval reserve
commission. When the war ended in 1949 and
Israel’s independence was established,
Shulman became an Israeli citizen and founded
a major engineering corporation in Haifa.
While only a thousand or so dedicated Americans
--most of whom were, like Shulman, combat
experienced -- fought on the Israeli side,
without their contributions the Israeli
Defense Forces might not have prevailed
against such overwhelming odds.
Sources: American
Jewish Historical Society |