On the afternoon of 11 July 1947 a battered American steamship called the President Warfield, registered in Honduras, sailed quietly out of the small port of Sète on the southern coast of France with 4,515 passengers crammed into every available space below decks. The passengers were Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. They had come to Sète from displaced-persons camps across Germany, Austria, Italy, and Eastern Europe, brought to the French coast through a clandestine network organised by the Mossad LeAliyah Bet, the secret Jewish immigration agency that ran the operations to smuggle survivors past the British naval blockade of Mandate Palestine. They had been told only that they were going to a port from which they would sail to Eretz Israel. They had not been told the name of the ship. They had not been told the route. The ship was an old Chesapeake Bay excursion steamer that had been built in 1928 to carry American holidaymakers between Baltimore and Norfolk, requisitioned by the United States Army for D-Day duties in 1944, and acquired in 1947 by an American Zionist organisation for ten thousand dollars at a postwar surplus sale. It had been refitted in Baltimore harbour to take twice its design capacity. The passengers had been issued with a single bunk each, four hundred to a hold, with three foot of headroom between the bunks. They had been issued with one cup of water per person per day for the duration of the voyage. The voyage was to take a week.
The ship was renamed during the voyage. On 17 July, six days out of Sète, the captain Yitzhak Aharonovich, a thirty-four-year-old Polish-born Jewish naval officer who had served in the British navy during the war, climbed onto the upper deck with a bucket of paint, painted out the words President Warfield on the bow, and painted in their place the new name in Hebrew letters: Exodus 1947. The renaming was a calculated political act. It was intended to give the world’s press a name for the ship that would make the political case the operation was intended to make. The name was the case. The 4,515 passengers were taking it to Palestine.
The British policy
The British Mandate authorities in Palestine had operated since the White Paper of May 1939 under a policy that limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 over five years, after which all further immigration would be subject to Arab consent (which was understood to mean stoppage). The policy had been agreed in 1939 in response to the Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939 and had been intended to stabilise the demographic balance in the territory. By 1947 it had become, in the postwar context, a policy of active obstruction of Jewish refugees attempting to reach Palestine from European displaced-persons camps. The British navy maintained a substantial blockade in the eastern Mediterranean. The Royal Navy’s Cyprus station operated approximately fifty ships, including destroyers, frigates and minesweepers, in the blockade role. The blockaded ships, when caught, were diverted to detention camps on Cyprus. By July 1947 approximately 26,000 Jewish refugees were held in the Cyprus camps, behind British wire, in conditions that were not significantly better than the German displaced-persons camps from which most of them had come.
The Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, who had been in office since the Labour victory of July 1945, had inherited the 1939 policy and had reaffirmed it in successive statements. Bevin’s specific position was that Jewish immigration should be restricted to the 1939 quota, that any larger movement would inflame Arab opinion, and that the Mandate could not safely be sustained without Arab cooperation. He maintained the position publicly throughout 1946 and 1947, even as American and international pressure for the admission of survivors mounted. He maintained it specifically in the case of the Exodus.
The voyage
The ship sailed past Algiers, around Sardinia, into the Eastern Mediterranean. British naval reconnaissance aircraft tracked it from the moment of departure. Six Royal Navy destroyers and one cruiser, HMS Ajax (the same ship that had hunted the Graf Spee in 1939), shadowed the Exodus as it approached the Palestine coast. By the morning of 18 July the British naval force had positioned itself approximately twenty nautical miles west of Haifa. The Exodus, at this point, was outside Palestine territorial waters. The British policy until 1947 had been to intercept ships only inside territorial waters; the Exodus operation marked the first time the British navy had boarded a refugee ship in international waters.
The boarding took place at approximately two o’clock in the morning on 18 July. The cruiser HMS Ajax and two of the destroyers came alongside the Exodus and dropped boarding parties of approximately fifty Royal Marines onto the upper deck. The passengers and crew resisted with whatever was to hand: tinned food, lengths of pipe, sticks, and the ship’s fire hoses. The Marines used batons, tear gas, and eventually small arms. The boarding lasted approximately three hours. Three passengers were killed: William Bernstein, an American volunteer crew member from San Francisco, who was struck repeatedly with a club to the head; Mordechai Baumstein, a sixteen-year-old refugee from Hungary; and Hirsh Yakubovitch, a twenty-three-year-old refugee from Poland. Twenty-eight passengers and crew were seriously injured. Several Royal Marines were also injured but none was killed. The ship was forced into Haifa under armed escort.
The decision to send them back
The British Cabinet, meeting in London on the afternoon of 18 July, took the decision that turned the operation from a routine interception into the most important political event in the history of the Mandate. The previous practice had been to take refugees from intercepted ships to the Cyprus camps. The Cabinet decided in this case to send them back: not to Cyprus but to France, the country from which they had sailed. Bevin’s calculation was that the high public profile the Exodus had achieved by the time of its arrival at Haifa made the standard Cyprus disposition politically unsustainable, and that the only way to make the political point would be a return to the country of origin. The intent was to demonstrate that the British policy could not be subverted by clandestine immigration operations.
The 4,512 surviving passengers were transferred from the Exodus to three British naval transport ships, the Empire Rival, the Ocean Vigour, and the Runnymede Park, on the morning of 19 July, and sailed from Haifa for the southern French coast on 22 July. The transport conditions were reported by international press correspondents who had boarded the ships at Haifa. Conditions in the holds of the transports were reported as being substantially worse than those on the Exodus had been: bare metal compartments, no ventilation, inadequate water, no medical facilities, and no privacy of any kind for personal hygiene.
The three ships arrived off Port-de-Bouc, near Marseille, on 29 July 1947. The French government, under pressure from Bevin and from the wider British policy, had agreed to receive the passengers. The passengers refused to disembark. They had been sent back to the country from which they had sailed, on the British calculation, to demonstrate the futility of the operation; they refused to demonstrate any such thing. They sat in the holds of the British transports for twenty-four days, in temperatures that reached forty-three degrees Celsius in the metal compartments, with the international press taking pictures and filing despatches by the hour. The French authorities offered to admit them to France as refugees with full legal status; the passengers refused unless they could be admitted to Palestine. The British attempted to disembark them by force; the French authorities prohibited the use of force on French soil and the British did not press the matter.
The decision to send them to Hamburg
Bevin made the second decision that turned the operation into a moral catastrophe for British policy on 21 August 1947. Faced with the refusal to disembark in France, the Cabinet authorised the transport of the passengers to the British zone of occupation in Germany. The destination was the port of Hamburg. The passengers, on this calculation, would be disembarked in Germany under British military supervision, since British military authority in occupied Germany was not subject to the constraints that applied in Mandate Palestine or in metropolitan France.
The decision to send Jewish Holocaust survivors back to Germany was the decision that broke the political case for the British policy. The international press understood the symbolism immediately. The London Times itself, generally supportive of British policy, wrote on 22 August that the decision had been a serious error in judgment. The American press was substantially more critical. The President Truman expressed private concern through diplomatic channels.
The three transport ships arrived at Hamburg on 8 September 1947. The passengers refused to disembark voluntarily. The British military authorities used force, including water cannon, batons and tear gas, to remove them from the ships. The disembarkation was photographed extensively by international press correspondents. The photographs of British soldiers using water cannon to force concentration-camp survivors off ships and back into the German territory from which most of them had been deported during the war became the defining images of the late Mandate period. They were reproduced in newspapers across the world. They effectively foreclosed any further argument in favour of the British policy.
The passengers were taken to two camps in northern Germany: Pöppendorf and Am Stau, near Lübeck. They were held there under British military administration. The conditions were reported by Red Cross observers as being significantly worse than those at the displaced-persons camps from which the passengers had come. The British administration of the camps over the subsequent six months did little to address the conditions. By the spring of 1948 most of the passengers had been moved to the Cyprus detention camps under a quiet revision of the original British policy. By the summer of 1948, after the establishment of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, almost all of them had reached Israel through the new legal channels that the establishment of the state had opened.
The political consequences
The Exodus 1947 affair was, by general subsequent assessment, the single event that did the most damage to the British case in the closing months of the Mandate. The British government had referred the Palestine question to the United Nations on 14 February 1947. The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) had been established on 15 May 1947 to investigate and report. UNSCOP had eleven members and had toured Palestine, Cyprus, and the displaced-persons camps in Europe through the summer of 1947. Several of the UNSCOP members were at the Haifa quayside on 18 July when the Exodus passengers were transferred to the transports for the return to France. The Yugoslav delegate Vladimir Simic, the Czech delegate Karel Lisicky, and the Indian delegate Sir Abdur Rahman were photographed watching the transfer. They subsequently described the experience as decisive in their assessment of the British policy.
UNSCOP’s report, delivered on 31 August 1947, recommended the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. The report’s reasoning included specific reference to the Exodus 1947 affair as evidence that the British administration could not sustainably manage the question of Jewish refugees. The United Nations General Assembly adopted the partition plan as Resolution 181 (II) on 29 November 1947. The British government announced its intention to withdraw from Palestine on 11 December 1947. The Mandate ended on 14 May 1948. The State of Israel was declared the same day.
The Exodus 1947 had not, in the strict operational sense, been successful: its passengers had been blocked, beaten, returned to France, returned to Germany, and held for months in camps. In the wider political sense, the operation had been the most successful of the postwar Aliyah Bet missions. It had made the British policy untenable. It had moved international opinion decisively in favour of partition. It had brought down the Mandate. The 4,515 passengers, taken collectively, had achieved more in their fifty-six-day voyage than thirty years of British policy had managed to suppress.
Captain Aharonovich and the crew
Yitzhak Aharonovich, the captain, returned to Israel after the Mandate ended and joined the new Israeli navy. He served until 1968, retiring with the rank of captain. He died in Haifa in 2009 at the age of ninety-six. The Exodus crew of approximately thirty-five men had been a mixture of American Jewish volunteers, Israeli Mossad LeAliyah Bet operatives, and British and American merchant marine professionals. Several wrote memoirs in the subsequent decades. The American crew member Bernie Marks, who had been the radio operator and the youngest crew member at age twenty, became a Sacramento city councilman and lived until 2003. The American volunteer cook Lou Brettschneider returned to a career in American Jewish communal work. The American second officer Cyrus Weintraub returned to merchant marine work. None of the crew had been on the original American military service of the President Warfield; they had all been recruited specifically for the Aliyah Bet operation.
The novel and the film
The American novelist Leon Uris, who had been a Marine Corps veteran of Tarawa and Iwo Jima and who had begun his postwar literary career with the novel Battle Cry (1953), travelled to Israel in 1956 to research a major novel on the founding of the Jewish state. He spent eighteen months in Israel and toured the displaced-persons camps in Cyprus and Europe. The resulting novel Exodus, published by Doubleday in 1958, was the popular American account of the founding of Israel. It became one of the bestselling American novels of the postwar period; the first edition sold over seven million copies in its first decade. The 1960 film adaptation by Otto Preminger, with Paul Newman as the fictional Mossad operative Ari Ben Canaan and Eva Marie Saint as the American nurse Kitty Fremont, was based on Uris’s novel and was the largest international box-office success in Israeli-themed cinema until that date. The novel and the film together were the principal vehicles by which the story of the Exodus 1947 reached a worldwide popular audience.
The novel has been criticised, including by Israeli historians, for its romanticisation of certain elements of the founding-of-Israel narrative and for its sometimes unflattering portrayal of Palestinian Arab characters. The criticism has been substantial and is fair on its merits. The novel’s contribution to the popular knowledge of the Exodus 1947 affair has nonetheless been substantial and durable. The ship’s name in popular memory is the name Uris gave it. The political case the operation made is the case the novel and the film carried to the widest international audience.
The ship
The Exodus 1947 itself was towed back to Haifa harbour after the boarding of 18 July and lay alongside a Haifa quay through the period of the Mandate. After the Mandate ended in May 1948, the ship was transferred to the Israeli navy and used briefly as a troop transport. In August 1952 it was destroyed by a fire of unknown origin while moored at Haifa. The hulk was scrapped over the following two years. A small section of the bow with the painted Hebrew lettering was preserved and is now displayed at the Naval Museum at Haifa. The original Hebrew letters Yitzhak Aharonovich painted on the morning of 17 July 1947 are still legible.
See also
Sources
- Ruth Gruber, Exodus 1947: The Ship That Launched a Nation, Times Books, 1948 (revised 1999)
- Aviva Halamish, The Exodus Affair: Holocaust Survivors and the Struggle for Palestine, Syracuse University Press, 1998
- Yoram Kaniuk, Commander of the Exodus, Grove Press, 1999 (biography of Yitzhak Aharonovich)
- Ze’ev V. Hadari and Ze’ev Tsahor, Voyage to Freedom: An Episode in the Illegal Immigration to Palestine, Vallentine Mitchell, 1985
- Idith Zertal, From Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel, University of California Press, 1998
- Christian Streit, Aufbruch ins Ungewisse: Jüdische Displaced Persons in Hamburg, Hamburger Edition, 2018 (on the Pöppendorf and Am Stau camps)
- Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Hill and Wang, 1993
- British Cabinet papers on the Exodus 1947 affair, CAB 128/10, The National Archives, Kew