(Authors: Michael and Suzanne Belling, Vol. 73, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2018)
EDITOR’S NOTE: Eddy Magid was one of over 800 South Africans (mainly, although not exclusively, from the Jewish community) who volunteered to fight for the new-born Jewish state in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. On his return to South Africa, he went on to successful careers in the business world and in local government politics. He was Mayor of Johannesburg in the years 1984-5. This article is based on extracts from Man of His Word – The Eddy Magid Story by Michael and Suzanne Belling, which appeared in a limited edition for mainly private circulation in 2017. Jewish Affairs thanks Mr Magid and the authors for allowing these to be reproduced in this special ‘Israel: 70 Years’ issue.
Before he left South Africa, Eddy’s aunt Hilda Altshuler gave him the address of some family members with the same surname. He and Morrie [Egdes] were given a pass and they went to find them in Kfar Saba.
They saw a man wearing a kippah cutting his hedge.
“We went up to him and said, ‘We’re looking for Mr Altshuler who has relatives in South Africa.’ He told us he was Altshuler. After introducing ourselves, he asked where we were based. When we told him Tel Litwinski, he said his daughter Batsheva was there.
“We returned to Tel Litwinski and found my ‘new’ cousin. She was slim and petite, working as a trainee nurse. We spent the evening with her, arranging to meet again the next day. But soon after we met up again, an announcement came over the loudspeakers ordering all soldiers to return to their units, as we were going into action the next day.
“We said we were sorry to leave her, but she replied: ‘You are not leaving me. I am going too’.”
Eddy and Morrie felt uncomfortable about a woman being in the front line. “We told her, ‘It’s not right! There are men at the back doing wages and administrative work. They should be in the front line and you should be doing their work. Nurses can’t go into the front line’.”
Her reply took Eddy by surprise. “I shall not go as a nurse. I shall go as a soldier, with the commandos.” Eddy’s protests fell on deaf ears. “Many men have been wounded and killed and more will fall. You are a very thin line against the Arabs. There are no more men to take the place of those who fall. I can. Why shouldn’t I?” she responded firmly, brooking no contradiction.
Eddy returned to his quarters to learn that they were going to attack the village of Lydda the next morning and try to take the adjoining airport, the only international one in the country. When Eddy finally saw action as the brand-new armoured corps joined other Israeli forces moving to attack Lydda, he was not in a tank – the were too few to go around. He was in a convoy of half-tracks. He knew Batsheva was in one of the other half-tracks, among the men.
Eddy learnt just how poorly equipped the Israelis were at that stage. In preparation for the assault, an IDF officer distributed weapons to the force at Tel Litwinski – handing a gun to one man and a clip of ammunition to the next. He handed a Sten gun to Morrie, but gave Eddy only a clip of ammunition.
“What about my weapon?” Eddy asked.
“There are not enough to go around,” came the reply, “Don’t worry, you will pick up a gun from the Arabs.”
The fighting was heavy. Jordanian troops fired mortars at the convoy, but the force with Eddy and his comrades pressed ahead, eventually taking their targets. After a break, they switched vehicles to go into battle again, flies tormenting them as they moved. Eddy found the cause – a pool of dried blood on the floor of the half-track under his seat.
He reached down and found a pair of black shoes below him. They were the shoes worn by a nurse with a small woman’s feet, not a male soldier. He started at the shoes for a long time realising to his horror that he would never meet Batsheva again. They learnt later that a mortar shell fired by the Jordanians had landed in the half-track, killing everyone in it instantly, including Batsheva.
Eddy was devastated and recalled his warning to her not to go. He agonised at having found and lost a blood relation so quickly, and the manner in which this fine, courageous young woman had lost her life.
They finally took Lydda when the Arab forces withdrew from the town. They remained at the airport. It took them weeks to clean up the mess the Arab soldiers had made.
One day, Morrie was walking towards a shed housing one of their few tanks and saw a book lying in the grass. It was covered in grey linen with flowers embroidered on it. It was a book of Hebrew poetry containing pressed flowers in its pages. Batsheva had put her name in the book, with a date, one year before she was killed. At the first opportunity, Eddy hiked the entire distance to Kfar Saba and gave it to her parents.
The Lydda airport was turned into the tank corps base. The newly-established armoured corps set out from there for several other military actions. By the time the next truce was declared just ten days after the fighting restarted, they had taken two nearby villages, Deir Tarif and Beit Naballa.
Eddy Magid with friend Lou Kotzen (standing in bomb crater) in front of the ruined Lydda airport building. The picture was taken in January 1949.
Tanks were not the only weaponry obtained from Haifa at the time of Israel’s independence. The British sometimes simply threw items into the Haifa bay, assuming this would both render them useless and save the time and effort of loading them onto the ships going to the United Kingdom.
The Haganah, and later the IDF, felt differently, sending frogmen down to salvage what they could – and there was a lot to bring to the surface, including artillery shells, such as the six-pounders used on the tanks and fuses used in firing the shells.
These were distributed to different IDF units, among them the brand-new armoured corps. Often this was done even before the fuses had a chance to dry – in many cases they remained damp for a long time. Eddy and members of his unit experienced the problems these fuses caused in the heat of battle. It was quite common for Morrie to load a shell, which Eddy would then fire, but the shell remained in the barrel of the gun because the damp fuse did not work.
He remembers it vividly. “Morrie Egdes loads the cannon and I fire with my foot. I was instructed that if it doesn’t go if I have to count to ten. Then I have to open the turret, take the round out as fast as possible and pull it out of the breech. As the six-pounder comes out, I have to take it and throw it out of the tank, fast. Now it can go off at any time during that period.”
Even with a damp fuse, the shell would eventually ignite and explode. There was no way of knowing whether this would happen in a second or two, or whether they had more leisure to dispose of it. The result was that they worked frantically to get it out of the barrel and throw it overboard as far and as quickly as possible.
Sometimes the shell exploded while it was still in the air. On one occasion, it went off just as they had shoved it away from the tank. The blast hit them forcibly, but fortunately neither man was badly hurt.
“This little joke was close enough to sear off half the big beard I had at the time,” Eddy says.
Two rooms at the Lydda airport were converted into the first tank school in Israel during August 1948. Harry MacDonald was their trainer. Eddy points out that it usually took around ten months to become a qualified tank man. It took this group far less time – they could not afford more.
The certificate Eddie received at the end of September attesting to his successful completion of the course was issued in his Hebrew name: Eliyahu Magid.
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The uneasy second truce lasted for almost three months, until 9 October, 1948. By then the IDF was in a better situation, so when the fighting resumed, the initiative was in Israel’s hands.
But in this final phase of Israel’s struggle for independence, the war was still far from over. In the south, the Egyptians held the Negev, the large desert area that today forms over half of all the land in Israel.
Israeli action was focused largely on this section of the country and Eddy took part in several major battles. The first was at the village of Beit Jibrin, a significant objective that served as a district centre for surrounding villages under the British.
This was followed by heavy fighting at Kibbutz Negba, near the Egyptian border. The kibbutz was destroyed in the conflict. A nearby Tegart fort at the Arab village of Iraq Suweidan controlled the route to the Negev. The Egyptians held the police station and the surrounding Arab villages, from where they attacked Israeli forces travelling to Ashkelon on the coast or Hebron on the West Bank.
For Israel to move further south to Beersheba and beyond, the IDF had to drive the Egyptians out of Iraq Suweidan, as part of a broad offensive. Eddy and the new armoured corps were in the front line of the attack. The first attempt to take the fort failed in the face of strong and determined Egyptian resistance, but in the second assault on 9 November, they finally managed to drive the Egyptians out.
The approaches to Beersheba, the “capital of the Negev”, were now open. In contrast with the hard fighting encountered over the previous days, they met little resistance in taking Beersheba. The IDF mounted a six-pounder on a half-track, naming it “the Beersheba tank”, which led the infantry into the town. Three of the six-man crew of the Beersheba tank were South Africans – Eddy was the gunner, Morrie Egdes the gun loader and Stanley Behr the driver.
While most of the Arabs in the town had fled, the Arab troops in the British-built police station put up fierce opposition. Snipers fired at any visible Israeli target. The IDF commanders decided to shell the fort, using the ‘tank’. Under the direction of a former Palmach officer (the Palmach was the elite pre-state Haganah strike force), they drove towards the front door of the fort, its most vulnerable point.
The Palmach officer, who stood sandwiched between Eddy and Morrie suddenly dropped, badly wounded by a sniper’s bullet from the fort. He was evacuated. The Palmachnik was squashed in shoulder to shoulder with them. The fact that both Eddy and Morrie came out unscathed, while their comrade right next to them was badly hurt, was one of the inexplicable vagaries of warfare.
The rest of the crew knew that their target was the door of the Tegart fort. Eddy adds. “I aimed for the door, [knowing that] if I missed it, I could not help striking the building.
“Morrie loaded the round and I aimed over open sights and fired. I did not manage to hit the door, but the explosion caused a big cloud of dust. When it finally cleared, the door opened. A lot of people poured out of the building – women, children and soldiers, their leaders waving a white flag.”
Eddy pauses for a moment, recollecting how much relief he felt at the scene, rather than triumph. “Had I hit the, I believe a number of whom and children would have been killed. I thank G-d I missed.”
The Beersheba ‘tank’, actually a six-pounder mounted on a half-track, and crew who helped to capture Beersheba. Eddy Magid is top right, in vest.
The loss of Beersheba was a severe blow to the Arabs. It opened the way for Israel to push further south towards the northern tip of the Red Sea, where the town of Eilat was later built, west – in the direction of the Egyptian border – and even east, where the Jordanians had their strongholds.
Reports reached the Israeli command that the Jordanian Arab Legion and Hebron villagers were preparing a counter-attack to retake Beersheba. Only one main route was available to them. Destroying a bridge on the road the attackers would use would hold them back and might even prevent an assault on Beersheba. The road itself was the only way through the rough desert landscape.
The order came from the Israeli commanders to blow up the bridge. It was not a simple assignment and certainly not a case of just driving there.
Eddy and the members of his crew were instructed to “volunteer” to go to the bridge with the Beersheba tank, another half-track and some infantry, including a demolition squad.
“The bridge had to be blown up,” eddy says. “Our half-track was to be used as a tank. The terrain was difficult, with large rocks and high mountains on either side of the road.
“We knew we could meet either the Jordanians or the Egyptians. The road was narrow. On some sections, it was not possible to turn around quickly. We were told we should know what we were letting ourselves in for” – although they actually had no choice in the matter.
Morrie Egdes led the half-track, with Eddy as the gunner. “We set out during the night,” Eddy continues, “It was eerie. I suppose any desert at night is eerie, the Negev even more so. As we approached the bridge, fire poured down on us from the mountains, but we forged ahead. The road itself was clear.
“We arrived at the bridge, still under heavy fire, and crouched against the armour plating. The demolition men jumped out with their high explosives and began wiring the bridge. Someone was hit in the other half-track.
“The officer came running up to me. He said: ‘Fire back!’”
‘”It’s pitch dark,’ I responded. ‘I can’t see them at all.’
‘”Just watch where the little sparks are, where they’re firing from. As soon as you see a spark from their guns, fire!’ the officer yelled.
“I watched for the source of the little flashes on the mountain,” Eddy says. “Without taking aim at anything in particular, I fired, traversing the other side of the road. I am certain I did not hit anything, but the firing died down. We were using high explosives. They are not like armour-piecing shells. The high explosives land with a big bang, throwing out shrapnel in all directions. At night, they are frightening. The enemy must have realised we were firing at their flashes.”
The demolition men succeeded in blowing up the bridge. The driver of Eddy’s vehicle turned around slowly, moving backwards and forwards several times, and making three or four turns before he was able to face back the way they had come. They suffered two more casualties before they could set off for Beersheba again. But there was no counter-attack from the enemy on Beersheba itself.
Eddy Magid (standing) with elder brother and fellow Machalnik David. The brothers were reunited in Beersheba after Israeli forces captured the town.
The final key battle on the southern front was at Al Auja, today the youth village of Nitzana on the Egyptian-Israeli border. The Israeli Eighth Brigade, in which Eddy served, began the assault on 26 December, 1948, finally taking the last two Egyptian positions two days later, after a major engagement.
This battle was one of three in the region that triggered a complete Egyptian withdrawal along the road west from Beersheba and effectively marked the end of the Egyptian campaign in Palestine.
But the Egyptians were still capable of striking Israel, even at that late stage. Returning to their base at Lydda after one action only weeks before the final cease-fire, the Israeli armoured corps troops found that Egyptian planes had carried out a surprise bombing attack on the Lydda airport. Fortunately, only the cookhouse was hit, but some of the buildings were seriously damaged. However, the Israelis suffered no casualties, as the building was unoccupied at the time.
The Israeli War of Independence ended on the Egyptian front in January 1949, setting the armistice lines – not international boundaries – that lasted until the 1967 Six Day War.
Michael Belling is an author, translator, trainer and journalist. He obtained a law degree at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and practised law in Israel, where he was also foreign correspondent for a South African media group. He now lectures in journalism at a Johannesburg college. Suzanne Belling is a veteran journalist, author and Jewish communal professional. Amongst previous positions held, she is a former editor of the SA Jewish Report and Executive Director of the Cape Council, SA Jewish Board of Deputies.
