The Jewish Legion of WWI
Ze’ev Jabotinsky (center) and members of the “Jewish Legion” near the Kotel (Western Wall) shortly after the liberation of Western Jerusalem, 1918.
Joseph Trumpeldor was born to a middle-class, nominally-observant Jewish family in the North Caucus region of the Russian Empire in 1880. Like many young Jewish men in his generation, Joseph was strained between the pressures of assimilation into Russian culture and the realities of pogroms and anti-Semitic violence which made his Jewish distinctiveness unavoidable. To cope with this tension, Joseph enlisted in the Russian army at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war in 1902. He lost his left arm in combat at Port Arthur, but refused to retire from his service, instead demanding that he return to his post in defense of his “motherland” after recovery. After returning to Port Arthur, he was taken as a prisoner-of-war, and spent the remainder of the conflict as a journalist and teacher of Jewish affairs in captivity. After his release at the conclusion of the war, Trumpeldor received several decorations, including the Cross of St. George, making him the most decorated Jewish soldier in the Russian Army. After the war, Joseph began an education in law, but the Zionist movement enthralled him. He made the decision to forego his education and emigrate to the Promised Land in 1911 as part of the Second Aliyah, settling for a time on the original kibbutz in Dagania.
The same year that Joseph Trumpeldor was born in the Russian Caucus, Vladimir Jabotinsky was also born to a middle-class, assimilated Jewish family in the port city of Odessa in modern-day Ukraine. While raised in a nominally-observant home, Jabotinsky would later write that he had "no inner contact with Judaism” as a young man. However, the writings of Theodore Hertzl and other Zionist figures captivated him. He attended the sixth World Zionist Congress as a delegate in 1903. When the successive waves of pogroms spread over the Pale of Settlement between 1903-05, Jabotinsky organized the Jewish Self-Defense Organization, which enlisted Jews across the Pale into militias to defend Jewish lives and property from the anti-Semitic mobs. Vladimir became fluent in Hebrew and changed his given name to Ze’ev (or wolf). A gifted writer and orator, Ze’ev rose to become the leader of the right-wing Zionist movement in Russia, lecturing around the empire and editing the official periodical of the Zionist movement in Russia, Yevreiskaya Zhyzn (Jewish Life). In 1908, he was sent by the World Zionist Organization to Istanbul, acting as its envoy to the Ottoman government, where he advocated on behalf of the Yishuv in Ottoman Palestine.
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The outbreak of The Great War in 1914 was a historical crux for the Zionist movement, and for two of its rising figures, Joseph Trumpeldor and Ze’ev Jabotinski. As a Russian citizen who refused Ottoman citizenship in Palestine, Trumpeldor became an enemy combatant, and along with 11,000 fellow Yishuv of Russian origin, was expelled from the Palestine to British-occupied Egypt. In Alexandria, he met Jabotinsky, who was on assignment as a war correspondent. With the support of a committee of Jewish leadership, they proposed to British General John Maxwell in March, 1915 the formation of a distinctly Jewish fighting force to support the Allied war effort. Although British law forbade the recruitment of foreigners into regular army units, the general instead offered the formation of a support unit. And so the Zionist Mule Corps was commissioned —the first distinctly Jewish military force since the Bar Kochba Revolt ended in 135 AD.
Providentially, British Lieutenant Colonel Henry John Patterson arrived in Egypt around the same time that Jabotinsky and Trumpeldor met with General Maxwell. Patterson was an avid reader of Jewish military history and a sympathizer to the Zionist cause, making him the natural choice to command the Zionist Mule Corps. He recruited Trumpeldor and 260 more from among the Palestinian refugees, swearing them into service near Alexandria. The corps immediately began its preparations to support the British campaign to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war in the Dardanelles straits. Orders were given in both English and Hebrew, and the Chief Rabbi of Alexandria was appointed as the honorary chaplain. After barely four weeks, the Mule Corps set out for the Gallipoli front.
Patterson and his men disembarked under Ottoman artillery fire on April 27, and immediately began resupplying British forces who were desperately short of water, food, and ammunition. Fighting was intense, but Trumpeldor and his compatriots impressed their commanding officer with their gallantry and discipline. Patterson later recounted,
“These brave lads who had never seen shellfire before most competently unloaded the boats and handled the mules whilst shells were bursting in close proximity to them … nor were they in any way discouraged when they had to plod their way to Seddul Bahr, walking over dead bodies while the bullets flew around them … for two days and two nights we marched … thanks to the ZMC [Zionist Mule Corps] the 29th Division did not meet with a sad fate, for the ZMC were the only Army Service Corps in that part of Gallipoli at that time…Many of the Zionists whom I thought somewhat lacking in courage showed themselves fearless to a degree when under heavy fire, while Captain Trumpeldor actually reveled in it, and the hotter it became the more he liked it.”
One private in the corps, listed as M. Groushkowsky, was later decorated with a Distinguished Service Medal for preventing the stampede of his mules and delivering his supply of ammunition under heavy Turkish bombardment, despite being wounded in both arms. Trumpeldor, who often exposed himself to Ottoman fire while rallying his troops, was also shot in the shoulder while riding to the aid of a wounded corpsman. Patterson later described Joseph Trumpeldor as “the bravest man I ever knew.”
The Zionist Mule Corps was disbanded in early 1916, having suffered 13 fatalities in their inaugural expedition. Despite the failure of the Gallipoli campaign to defeat the Ottomans, the effectiveness of the unit was recognized by the British high command. Jabotinsky, Trumpeldor and 120 other veterans of the Mule Corps were allowed to serve in the London Regiment. Then in early 1917, the British army began its campaign to capture the Sinai and Palestine from the Ottomans. The campaign ground to a halt near Gaza, and the decision was made to reform the all-Jewish unit as a fighting force. In August, the 38th Battalion of Royal Fusiliers was formed, once again under Lt. Col. Patterson. The colonel recruited heavily from the veterans of the Zionist Mule Corps, augmented by new Jewish volunteers from Britain and Russia, including future Israeli leaders such as David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. They were joined several months later by the 39th Battalion, another all-Jewish Fusilier battalion recruited almost exclusively in the United States and Canada. Thousands of Palestinian Jews, including some who had fought in the Ottoman army prior to being captured by the British, also volunteered, forming the 40th Battalion. Two more support battalions of British Jews were recruited into the 41st and 42nd in England. Altogether, the five battalions of over 5000 Palestinian, Ottoman, Russian, English, American and Canadian Jews came to be known informally as “The Jewish Legion.”
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The 38th Battalion of the Jewish Legion first engaged the Turkish Ottomans in the Jordan Valley just north of Jerusalem in June, 1918. Patterson remarked that his force “assumed a vigorous offensive policy" which "thoroughly scared the Turks, so much so that they never once attempted to come anywhere near our front." Although formidable in battle, the unit suffered greatly at the hands of another, invisible enemy. Malaria swept through the ranks of the 38th, adding 30 more dead to the 20 who had been killed-in-action. One-quarter of the battalion, including half of its officer corps, was too sick to continue marching. After being reinforced by elements of the 39th battalion, the legionnaires continued their campaign to cross the Jordan River and capture both sides of the Umm Shart fords. After a first attempt to cross was repulsed, Jabotinsky’s company was ordered to attempt a second crossing and to take the position at all costs. They did. Then in September, 1918, under a different command, the legionnaires fought in the Battle of Megiddo (which actually took place in multiple locations across the Plain of Sharon and the Galilee), giving what was described by one British commander as “no small measure” of contribution to the success of the British campaign to liberate their ancestral homeland from the remnants of the last Islamic caliphate.
The Jewish Legion was disbanded shortly after the end of the war, but Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and the other veterans of the 38th Battalion were just beginning their saga in the defense of the Jewish homeland. Although he didn’t live to see it, Jabotinsky’s influence in the formation of a conservative, revisionist Zionist political philosophy had an enduring legacy. His closest protegee, Menachem Begin, founded the conservative, secular Likud party before serving as Prime Minister of Israel between 1977-1983. Jabotinsky’s personal secretary was Benzion Netanyahu, whose son Bibi would go on to lead the Likud party to victory in the 1990’s and 2000’s, serving twice as Israel’s prime minister for more than a decade combined.
Joseph Trumpeldor remained in Eretz Yisrael after the war, where he joined the Jewish defense militia Hashomer and lived near the demarcation line between British Mandate Palestine and French Mandate Lebanon. On March 1, 1920, several Shi’a Arab militiamen came to the Jewish settlement of Tel Hai near the modern Israeli city of Metula, looking for French soldiers that were ostensibly hiding there. Although Jewish settlements had striven to remain neutral in the conflict between the Lebanese and their French occupiers, the Hashomer were nonetheless summoned in defense of the town. Trumpeldor arrived shortly afterwards with a contingent of militia, and after what was described as a “series of misunderstandings,” a firefight broke out in which five Lebanese Arabs and seven Jewish Hashomer were killed. Trumpeldor was mortally wounded, and died shortly afterword. becoming the eighth Jewish fatality in the first engagement between Arab and Jewish forces in the Promised Land. His last words were reportedly, “It's nothing, it is good to die for our country.” Joseph Trumpeldor became a hero of both left and right-wing Zionists in the decades leading up to the War of Independence. In 1949, a new Israeli city was incorporated in the northern Galilee on the western slopes of the Hula Valley. It’s founders named it “Kiryat Shmona,” or “Town of the Eight” after Joseph Trumpeldor and his seven Hashomer compatriots who had given their lives nearby in defense of their newborn nation.
