The Sergeants affair (Hebrew: פרשת הסרג'נטים) was a terrorist attack that took place in July 1947 during Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine, in which the Zionist paramilitary organization Irgun abducted two British Army Intelligence Corps NCOs, Sergeant Clifford Martin and Sergeant Mervyn Paice, and threatened to hang them if the death sentences passed on three Irgun militants—Avshalom Haviv, Meir Nakar, and Yaakov Weiss—were carried out. The three had been captured by the British during the Acre Prison break, tried, and convicted on charges of illegal possession of arms, and with "intent to kill or cause other harm to a large number of people". When the three men were executed by hanging, the Irgun killed the two sergeants and hung their booby-trapped bodies in a eucalyptus grove near Netanya. When the bodies were found, the booby trap injured a British officer as they were cut down.
The crime was widely condemned in both Palestine and the United Kingdom. After news of the deaths became widely known, enraged British security forces rampaged in Tel Aviv, in which five Jews were killed and another 15 were wounded. Instances of anti-Jewish rioting and looting broke out in several British cities.
There is general consensus that the incident heavily contributed to Prime Minister Attlee's decision to permanently evacuate all British Forces until the end of the Jewish insurgency and the civil war between Jews and Arabs. The permanent evacuation of all British Forces in Palestine, along with the Palestine Police Force, created a power vacuum in the area, from which the 1948 Arab–Israeli War ensued after David Ben-Gurion declared Israeli independence the same day on which the British abandoned the area. Menachem Begin, the commander of Irgun, was barred from entry to the United Kingdom and rejected for a visa to the United States for many years afterwards.
Background
In the late 1940s, as the third decade of British Mandate over Palestine was ending, many within and outside of Britain were calling to end the Mandate. They were led by opposition leader Winston Churchill, who denounced Britain's costly occupation of Palestine for no economic benefit.
Trying to maintain control and civil order (a Mandate requirement if nothing else), the British enacted the Defence Emergency Regulations in September 1945. These regulations suspended Habeas Corpus and established military courts. They prescribed the death penalty for various offences, including carrying weapons or ammunition illegally and membership in an organisation whose members commit these offences. As World War II ended, a Jewish insurgency began, with the Zionist groups Irgun and Lehi attacking British targets in order to compel the British to leave Palestine. The insurgency was a response to Britain's implementation of the White Paper of 1939, which greatly restricted Jewish immigration and land purchases.
The British authorities began applying the death penalty against captured Jewish militants. The first member of a Jewish underground group, Shlomo Ben-Yosef, was executed in 1938 for his part in an unsuccessful shooting attack on Arab civilians who were travelling on a bus.
During an Irgun attack on a British military base, Irgun fighters Michael Ashbel and Yosef Simchon were arrested. They were sentenced to death on 13 June 1946. There were many pleas and petitions for clemency by various institutes and Jewish leaders, which were not effective. Irgun decided to threaten to carry out its own "gallows regime", declaring a policy of reprisal killings. Five days later, Irgun kidnapped five British officers in Tel Aviv, and another one the following day in Jerusalem. The Irgun then threatened to hang its hostages if Ashbel and Simchoni were executed. Two weeks later, following intense and secret negotiations, Ashbel and Simchon's sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. The officers were released the next day.
In January 1947 another Irgun militant, Dov Gruner, was sentenced to death for shooting and placing explosives with intent to kill during an Irgun raid on a Palestine Police Force station in Ramat Gan in April 1946. On 26 January, two days before Gruner's scheduled execution, Irgun kidnapped a British intelligence officer in Jerusalem. The next day, on 27 January, Irgun men also kidnapped a British judge, Ralph Windham, who was president of the Tel Aviv District Court. 16 hours before the scheduled execution, the British forces commander announced an "indefinite delay" of the sentence, and Irgun released its hostages.
Meanwhile in Britain, Churchill, now the leader of the Opposition, demanded a special meeting on the subject, and on 31 January 1947, a four-hour discussion in the British Parliament took place, with Churchill demanding the suppression of the "terrorists in Palestine".
On 16 April 1947, Gruner and three other Irgun militants, Yehiel Dresner, Mordechai Alkahi and Eliezer Kashani, who were caught during the Night of the Beatings, were executed. Five days later two other prisoners, Meir Feinstein of Irgun and Moshe Barazani of Lehi, were scheduled to be hanged for, respectively, the bombing of a Jerusalem railway station in which a policeman was killed and the attempted assassination of a senior British officer. However, a few hours before they were due to be executed they committed suicide using an improvised grenade smuggled to them by their colleagues. Irgun commander Menachem Begin was enraged by the executions, and ordered his men to abduct and hang British soldiers in retaliation. However, the British Army, well aware of possible retaliation, took precautions. As Begin would later recall, "our units went out on the roads, on to the streets in the towns. But the military were literally not to be found."
4 May 1947 saw the Acre Prison break: the Irgun engineered a mass escape from Acre Prison, with the aim of freeing 41 Irgun and Lehi prisoners. Some 28 Jews and almost 200 Arabs managed to escape. However, nine Jewish fighters (both escapees and perpetrators of the prison break) were killed. Among the attacking party, three were killed and five were captured. While two of those arrested, Amnon Michaelov and Nachman Zitterbaum, were minors, and thus too young to be executed under British law, the other three, Avshalom Haviv, Yaakov Weiss and Meir Nakar, were not. The Irgun High Command had no doubt that they would be tried and convicted of capital offences, and the Irgun immediately set out to find British hostages. All of the arrested Irgun militants refused to accept British judicial authority. However they were tried by a military court and Haviv, Weiss, and Nakar were sentenced to death.
In an attempt to forestall the likely death sentences, the Irgun kidnapped two British military policemen, a sergeant and a private, at a swimming pool in Ramat Gan on 9 June. However, the attempt to use them as hostages failed, as 19 hours later British troops found the hiding place and rescued them. Two days later the three Irgun militants were sentenced to death. All that was needed for the sentences to be carried out was approval from the Commander in Chief. Irgun resumed, with increased urgency, its kidnapping attempts, which proved difficult due to British precautions against abductions: British soldiers were largely confined to heavily-guarded security zones that had been established throughout Palestine, and standing orders required troops to move around in groups of at least four. Matters were further complicated by Lehi's actions in retaliation to the killing of one of their members, Alexander Rubowitz, who was allegedly murdered in captivity by Major Roy Farran. Lehi decided to carry out revenge attacks and the Irgun was concerned over the fact that it would be even more difficult to find hostages if Lehi began gun battles in the streets. Lehi agreed to hold off its attacks for a week, and Irgun carried out two unsuccessful abduction attempts. The first, on 22 June, saw Assistant Superintendent of Police C.J.C. Pound escape from his would-be captors in Jerusalem. On 25 June, an abduction squad in Jerusalem attempted to seize administrative officer Alan Major and hit him on the head with a hammer, but Major managed to struggle free. After the week passed, Lehi carried out two attacks in Tel Aviv and Haifa which killed two British soldiers and wounded five. These attacks resulted in even tighter security precautions.
UNSCOP (the United Nations committee which was asked to recommend the future government of Palestine) visited the region and an appeal was made to the committee to intervene on the convicted men's behalf. On 2 July, an appeal by UNSCOP on behalf of the condemned men was rejected, and on 8 July, three weeks after the sentences were passed, they were confirmed by the commander. Due to the concurrent visit of UNSCOP the executions were postponed.
Kidnapping
Several weeks earlier, Irgun had learned about a Jewish refugee from Vienna named Aaron Weinberg, who had fled to Palestine and was working as a clerk at a British military resort camp in north Netanya. This information was already known to the local SHAI (the intelligence arm of the Haganah) commander, Yehoshua Bar-Ziv. Weinberg, who was a SHAI agent, was entrusted by Bar-Ziv with striking up a relationship with two sergeants from the British Army Intelligence Corps, Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice, who used to spend a lot of time in the camp.
The sergeants were of interest to SHAI since they belonged to the field security unit and worked with the Tulkarm police, which was in charge of the Sharon district. Their mission was to circulate within the local population and pick up information on the Irgun and Lehi and their supporters. They often operated in civilian clothes and were not subject to standing orders intended to prevent abduction attempts. Notably, they did not have to leave camp in groups of four, and sometimes went unarmed. Weinberg was very successful in his task, and occasionally got the sergeants to go out to the Netanya beach.
On one of those visits, on the night of Saturday, 4 July, they were noted by an Irgun member sitting in the Gan Vered café who heard them speaking English and who followed them back to the camp. Based on his information, a week later Irgun made arrangements to kidnap them in the hope that they would return to the café.
On 11 July 1947, a group of Irgun men retrieved weapons, chloroform, cloths and ropes from a hidden cache. After the recent failures, the Irgun militants in Netanya were sceptical regarding the chances of this kidnapping attempt. Because of this they did not go to any great lengths to cover their tracks, considering the complicated operation they were planning: they did not steal or borrow a vehicle or bring in non-local members who were less likely to be recognised. Furthermore, Yosef Meller, a longtime Netanya resident and newly recruited Irgun member, volunteered to use his black taxi cab, which was well known around town, for the kidnapping. The abduction operation was led by Benjamin Kaplan, who had been freed in the Acre Prison break. At nightfall one basic precaution was taken; the taxi's licence plates were changed in an attempt to prevent it being recognised in the course of the abduction.
That evening Weinberg and the intended victims showed up once more at the café. Martin and Paice were in civilian clothes, were unarmed, were outside their camp at hours typically forbidden for British soldiers to be outside camp, and were not part of a group of four. After being informed that his intended victims were there, Kaplan posted his men around the coffee shop and along the road leading north to the camp and waited for an opportunity to perform the abduction. Weinberg and the two sergeants did not leave the coffee shop until after midnight. The two sergeants had decided to walk Weinberg home before returning to camp. Meller's cab, with Kaplan and three others inside, started after them. It pulled over and the four men emerged, masked and holding guns, and assaulted their targets. After resistance by one of the sergeants, they were forced into the car and Meller drove off. Weinberg was left, under guard, in an orchard in north Netanya, from where he was later taken to another orchard and released.
The hostages were taken to the inactive "Feldman" diamond polishing plant in the industrial area on the south side of Netanya, and were held in a specially-built underground chamber that had been built in the plant's cellar. It was sealed with an aluminium-ringed airtight hatch that was hidden by a thick layer of sand, and there were sandbags under the hatch to prevent any hollow sound if it were tapped. Inside was a canvas bucket, a week's supply of food and two cylinders of oxygen which the sergeants were instructed to use to refresh the air in their cell. Every few days while they were there, the bucket was emptied and the food restocked.
The search for Paice and Martin
Weinberg remained in the orchard until daybreak, and was found by a watchman at 5:30 AM. He reported the kidnapping to the British Army. Shortly afterwards he was interviewed by the Palestine Police Force, and gave them the details of what had happened. Reports of the kidnapping also reached the Haganah in Netanya. Oved Ben-Ami, the mayor of Netanya, called an emergency council meeting. He did not invite the Revisionist party members, who were identified with the Irgun. The decision was made in accordance with the Yishuv's position, which was published the next day, calling the kidnapping a provocation that might jeopardise what hope was left for clemency for the Irgun members condemned to death. It pleaded for every decent civilian to assist in the search for the hostages.