{"id":38184,"date":"2022-01-28T01:53:49","date_gmt":"2022-01-28T09:53:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=38184"},"modified":"2022-01-27T17:58:34","modified_gmt":"2022-01-28T01:58:34","slug":"secret-jewish-fighters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2022\/01\/28\/secret-jewish-fighters\/","title":{"rendered":"Secret Jewish fighters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Leah Garrett has pieced together the most comprehensive story yet of a little-known but fascinating footnote to the Second World War, and she shares her findings in her new book, X Troop. (photo by Deb Caponera \/ Hunter College)<\/em><\/p>\n

Using recently declassified military records and interviewing family members, author Leah Garrett has pieced together the most comprehensive story yet of a little-known but fascinating footnote to Second World War history \u2013 and the role that a few score of Jewish men played at pivotal moments in the conflict.<\/p>\n

Garrett is a professor at Hunter College, in New York City. As part of the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, she will speak about her new book, X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War Two<\/em>, in a virtual event on Feb. 6.<\/p>\n

X Troop<\/em> tells of the 87 men \u2013 83 of them Jewish \u2013 who made up the No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando, 3 Troop. The secret weapon X Troop members shared was that most of them were from German-speaking parts of Europe, had escaped occupied countries and, as Jews, had a deeply personal drive to defeat the Nazis.<\/p>\n

Formed officially on July 2, 1942, the unique commando unit would, among other things, allow British forces to expedite interrogation of captured Axis soldiers.<\/p>\n

\u201cX Troop would be Britain\u2019s secret shock troop in the war against Germany,\u201d Garrett writes. \u201cThey would kill and capture Nazis on the battlefield. But that would not be all. They would also immediately interrogate captured Germans, be it in the heat of battle or right afterward. The men\u2019s fluency in German would enable them to get essential intelligence that would guide the next moment\u2019s choices rather than having to wait to interview prisoners until they were back at headquarters.\u201d<\/p>\n

No less than Winston Churchill himself gave the group their nickname.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause they will be unknown warriors \u2026 they must perforce be considered an unknown quantity. Since the algebraic symbol for the unknown is X, let us call them X Troop,\u201d declared the then-prime minister of the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n

One of the many consequential incidents, which could have turned disastrous, was when two troop members, whose anglicized noms de guerre<\/em> were Roy Wooldridge and George Lane, were captured by the Germans and taken to a command post. The next day, they were driven to the French countryside and, instead of being summarily executed as they had feared, found themselves in the ch\u00e2teau that was serving as headquarters for field marshal Erwin Rommel.<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring his training \u2026 Lane had been taught to give only his (fake) name, rank and serial number if he was captured,\u201d writes Garrett. \u201cBut instead he found himself having an extended conversation with the field marshal over tea. Lane fortunately recovered his composure and didn\u2019t say anything that would give him and his comrade away.\u201d<\/p>\n

Later, when they were transferred to a POW camp in central Germany, which was filled with 300 British officers, the pair was able to share their knowledge of Rommel\u2019s location \u2013 information that was surreptitiously conveyed back to London through a hidden homemade wireless radio.<\/p>\n

\u201cA few months later \u2026 during the Normandy campaign, Rommel\u2019s staff car was strafed by RAF Spitfires as he drove from Ch\u00e2teau de La Roche-Guyon to the front near Saint-L\u00f4. The attack left Rommel, one of Germany\u2019s best and most creative generals, with serious injuries, and from that moment on his participation in the war was effectively over,\u201d notes Garrett.<\/p>\n

The irony was that some of the members of X Troop suddenly transformed from prisoners of war \u2013 Jews of German or Austrian origin, who were viewed as \u201cenemy aliens\u201d \u2013 to members of an elite British military troop.<\/p>\n

\"image<\/a>\u201cI found it rather odd that one day I could not be trusted with anything more lethal than a broomstick and the next I was told that I was going to be a spy for the British,\u201d said one member, Tony Firth. \u201cBut who said that the English are logical?\u201d<\/p>\n

The men faced a fourfold risk if captured. Hitler had ordered Allied commandos to be shot on sight. As refugees from Europe who may have still had family in Nazi-occupied areas, they risked not only their own lives, but those of their families. As Jews, they were the explicit target of state-sanctioned murder and, as German or Austrian nationals, they would be considered traitors to their homelands if captured.<\/p>\n

The commandos were trained in a Welsh village and, though each had each created a false persona, it took wilful blindness for the village folk to not realize there was something odd about these particular British soldiers. Recalled one townswoman, \u201c\u2026 when we would ask them what nationality they were, they would say: \u2018Vee are English.\u2019\u201d (A memorial to X Troop in that Welsh village today ostentatiously omits the fact that almost all of them were Jewish.)<\/p>\n

Though trained together and with a tight-knit sense of camaraderie, the troop was deployed not as a group but across the British military. The book follows members of the troop through heroics and horrors at Normandy and in Egypt, Italy, Greece and Yugoslavia. In the end, half of the men would be killed, wounded or forever missing in action.<\/p>\n

Some reviewers have drawn parallels between the real-life exploits of X Troop and a 2009 Hollywood blockbuster, but Garrett contrasts the facts and fictions. \u201cWhenever possible, the X Troopers used their intelligence to outmanoeuvre the Nazis and to capture them before a shot was fired,\u201d she writes. \u201cIn this regard, the X Troopers were the opposite of Quentin Tarantino\u2019s vengeful Jews in his film Inglourious Basterds<\/em>. Rather than wreaking personal revenge on the Germans, they followed the rules of war. They coolly collected battlefield intelligence from the enemy and outwitted them using their intellect rather than brute force. And even in extreme instances, such as when Colin Anson confronted the man who had been responsible for his own father\u2019s death, they refused to compromise their own moral standards.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among the lessons the author aims to convey is the heroism of Jews in the fight against Nazism, adding a new layer to a growing literature on resistance of various forms.<\/p>\n

\u201cThrough their exemplary and courageous service,\u201d Garrett writes, \u201ctheir story challenges the idea that only in Israel did the Jews become armed warriors who fought to try to establish a safe life for themselves and their families.\u201d<\/p>\n

Garrett\u2019s Feb. 6 book festival event starts at 3:30 p.m. For tickets, visit jccgv.com\/jewish-book-festival<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leah Garrett has pieced together the most comprehensive story yet of a little-known but fascinating footnote to the Second World War, and she shares her findings in her new book, X Troop. (photo by Deb Caponera \/ Hunter College) Using recently declassified military records and interviewing family members, author Leah Garrett has pieced together the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38185,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[784],"tags":[4242,53,9857,21126,5412,21197],"class_list":["post-38184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-history","tag-holocaust","tag-jcc-jewish-book-festival","tag-leah-garrett","tag-war","tag-x-troop"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38184\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}