DISOBEYING ORDERS

Michael Ivens remembers

his own moral struggle when a serving soldier

SHOULD a soldier disobey orders if he morally disagrees with them? That was an important issue in some of the post-war trials of Germans and Japanese. The sad stories in the Aldington-Tolstoy legal bat- tle of Yugoslays and Cossacks being ship- ped off to execution and imprisonment by often appalled British soldiers have yet again underlined this predicament.

I experienced it first in Haifa in 1946 when I was a young captain, a military observer in charge of a press launch witnessing the arrest of a Jewish illegal immigrant ship by an army boat as it entered the three-mile zone around what was then the British mandate of Palestine. The immigrants were mostly survivors of concentration camps.

Most immigrants were transferred quiet- ly to the army boat. Three young men, however, threw themselves into fairly rough seas in either a suicide bid or a fruitless attempt to swim ashore. Watched stonily by journalists, a press photographer and the Welsh guardsman driving the launch, I pulled them aboard. They had concentration camp marks stamped on their arms.

I was torn as to what to do. The choice, as I saw it, was to draw my revolver and to order my Welsh guardsman to turn the launch round and head for a lonely part of the shore, get rid of the three immigrants to Haganah, the underground Jewish army — and hand myself in. Alternatively, to continue to obey orders and bring the immigrants back to the Haifa quay and hand them over to the army. To my eternal regret, I chose the latter course.

It was the second operation I had witnes- sed to arrest an illegal ship and convey the inmates to British camps in Cyprus. On the previous occasion violence had broken out on the quay, a colonel had ordered me to march the international press off the dock (an impossible task) and an old Jew had fallen from his ship onto the quay and split his head open, leaving a pattern of red on the stones. When another body fell off the ship into the water I leapt forward, ex- tended a hand and uttered some words of encouragement in the few words of Heb- rew I knew. `I'm not a bloody Yid,' said the head emerging from the water, 'I'm a bleedin' East Surrey, and I've fallen inl' I started to see processions of illegal immigrants in my dreams though the pious officer who shared my tent attempted to reassure me by pointing out that, 'after all, they did crucify our Lord'.

Jewish terrorists rolled the bomb into the King David Hotel and General Barker, who commanded Palestine, declared a fraternisation ban with Jews — at a time when non-fraternisation had been dropped in Germany. I had a Greek girl friend in Haifa who some — but by no means all of my fellow officers thought was Jewish and they cut me in the mess. I was damned if I was going to explain.

Although I reported to GHQ in Cairo, my commanding officer in Haifa was General 'Windy' Gale, hero of Arnhem, and now heading up the First Infantry Division. He spent a lot of his time writing up ancient Israelite battles. As an addition- al problem, I had a Palestinian (Jewish) driver who was just about to be demobbed from the British army. After the atrocity in the King David Hotel, some British sol- diers held him down and put a knife to his throat in a successful attempt to terrify him. And so he refused to stay in barracks. He hailed from a kibbutz about 20 miles away, so I told him to take our Dodge truck and stay at home overnight.

`If there's a British raid on the kibbutz I'll be court-martialled,' he protested. So I suggested that I cover him by staying with `It's not an empty seat — it's Colin Moyni- han.' him at night in the kibbutz for the short time before he left the army. After much discussion the kibbutz — a hive of illegal activity — agreed to put up a British officer complete with revolver. Everyone — espe- cially myself — was very wary at first but eventually we settled down to long political discussions and games of chess in the evenings when I could get to the kibbutz.

Then another illegal immigrant ship was arrested and I made my decision. I sent an unheroic letter to General Gale telling him I wished to be taken off my duties and leave Palestine. A fearsome and hostile colonel with a damaged hand encased in metal marched me into the General's office. I was thinking about court-martials and a tidy prison sentence. To the colonel's fury, General Gale sent him away. He eyed me amiably.

`What's the trouble, my boy?'

I explained my position. I could not stand the illegal immigrant arrests, and I could not agree with government policy. General Gale looked at me steadily. Then, `I quite understand. Where would you like to go? Greece? Austria? Germany?'

An unsuccessful martyr, I chose Vienna. After a hectic farewell party, the president of the Palestine Hunters' Club, a former Austrian, with an air of nostalgia handed me a pair of skis to take with me.

Life being life, nothing turned out as planned. When I reached Cairo my Au- strian posting was cancelled and — despite my plea that I could not take a simple box camera snap — I was made commander of the dissolving Middle East film unit, famous for their film, 'Desert Victory', but now a little preoccupied with pictures of night-club girls. Then, when the British left Cairo, I was drafted to the sands of the Canal zone and when I returned to Britain, I presented my skis to my captured Ger- man batman.

About ten years later, at Christmas, the music of 'I saw three ships come sailing in' triggered off a ballad. It appeared in the New Statesman and has been somewhat anthologised. It began: I saw a ship come sailing in,

Sailing in, sailing in, With a list like a stormtrooper's twisted grin At Haifa Bay in the morning.

My three illegal immigrants are probably in Israel now. General Gale is dead. So is his widow, who, not so long ago, recalling him romantically with candles in a grace and favour home, nearly succeeded in burning down Hampton Court. And I am still stabbed, as I conclude in my poem `Haifa Bay in the Morning':

But my mind it goes back to Haifa Bay And dwells on the words I dared not say And the sorrowful ship that sailed away From the Holy Land in the morning.

Also stabbed no doubt, are many sol- diers who were involved in the Cossack and Yugoslav 'repatriations'. The experi- ence, for me, was indelible. It has made me edgy about obeying orders.