Excerpts from
Cast A Giant Shadow
The Story of Mickey Marcus
Who Died to Save Jerusalem

In the West Point military cemetery, America's oldest and proudest gallery of military immortals, one burial plot is unique. It marks the resting place of a soldier killed fighting under a foreign flag. Its headstone might have said: "American to the core, he served his country with distinction in Normandy and the Pacific; then, because he felt democracy had unfinished business overseas, flew to Israel, where he built the secret road that broke the Arab siege of Jerusalem." Instead it bears the quiet legend: "Colonel David Marcus-a Soldier for All Humanity."

Late in 1947 "Michael Stone," an ostensible "foundry worker" with meaty arms, a booming laugh but no sign of his West Point ring, bounced into the Tel Aviv office of David Ben-Gurion. "We're in trouble, Boss."

The Israeli Chief of Provisional Government looked up. "How bad?"

"This bad . . ." Mickey Marcus chose his words carefully. "If the Arabs had a decent campaign plan — and they could attack in force tomorrow — collectively they have the military potential to take Tel Aviv in ten days."

Ben-Gurion slammed shut the huge Bible open on his desk.

"As things stand now they could swarm all over you. Slice off the Negev in the south, overrun your Galilee settlements in the north, maybe punch through to the coast around Natanya; that's where I'd make my main push if I were in their shoes. As for Jerusalem..."

"Yes?"

"Jerusalem could be strangled."

The massive head snapped back. "Never!"

"I didn't say they'd do it. There are a lot of factors involved."

Ben-Gurion was puzzled by Mickey Marcus. His manner was too engaging to be strictly military. How seriously should he be taken?

"You haven't seen our boys fight," he said finally. "Nothing can defeat them."

"I have seen them. And man for man, they're the best I"ve ever seen. A tremendous guerrilla force. But not an army."

Mickey dragged a chair over to Ben-Gurion's desk. "The Haganah is an underground force. With the British running the country, its main job has been to defend the settlements. So it's been organized as a body of irregulars operating in small units.

"What we face now is a very different business. The minute the British pull out in the spring, we're going to be hit on every border by modern professional armies: heavily equipped, numerically superior, and organized for large-scale actions."

Mickey held up his left hand, fingers spread well apart, before the older man's face. "Haganah is like my hand," he said. "A collection of separate, independent fingers. You can't knock anybody out with one finger" - he gestured to illustrate, "or even with five fingers, used one at a time. What we have to do is knit the separate fingers together", the fingers tightened into a massive ball, "into one striking fist."

The knuckles of Mickey's left hand crashed with an emphatic "splat!" into his right palm.

"We need a training program. And a staff structure. Supplies, communications . . . and reserves."

"With our shortage of manpower?"

"Wars aren't won by just hanging on. You've got to be able to throw in the haymaker."

Ben-Gurion studied the younger man's mobile, olive-skinned face: firm chin, football-flattened nose, thick dark brows rising above the intense, glowing black eyes. "Can you help us hammer out an army, Mickey?"

"I couldn't guarantee anything, but I can give it a hell of a whirl."

Three years earlier, with D-Day looming, the Pentagon's Civil Affairs Division had faced the prospect of administering three hundred million people in newly liberated territories. Reluctantly, C.A.D. chief John Hilldring agreed to have his chief trouble-shooter, Mickey Marcus, "observe" the occupation scene from London. D-Day passed, with no word from Mickey. Finally General Hilldring was able to reach Lt. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, allied commander in France.

"I'm looking for one of my boys who was detached in London, Colonel Marcus."

"Mickey Marcus? He's over here somewhere, John. Landed with the 101st Airborne."

"He did what?"

"Came in with Max Taylor's outfit, the first day."

"The first? But that was three weeks ago. Where is he now?"

"I wouldn't know, John. He's been all over the lot. But I've got a war on my hands. I can't go playing wet nurse to your colonels."

Capitalizing on old West Point acquaintance with Airborne General Maxwell Taylor, Mickey had bluffed his way aboard a C-46 and, innocent of previous jump experience, joined 10,000 paratroopers descending on France. Landing safely, he assembled a combat team and never stopped, running into an astonished Max Taylor, who confessed to "a sneaking admiration for a guy who could have been parked in a comfortable hotel room."

Back home in 1947, from France and Yalta and Nuremberg, Mickey was looking forward to a peaceful life as a Brooklyn lawyer when an emissary from Israel knocked on his door. The new state desperately needed a senior military adviser. Mickey scoured the landscape; the only door that was open was his own.

Mickey had faced many challenges, as intercollegiate welterweight champion, New York Commissioner of Corrections, but never one where the stakes were so high. With a cease-fire imminent, the powerful Transjordan Arab Legion sat virtually astride the main road to Jerusalem, cutting off the capital. Late in May, 1948, Ben-Gurion appointed the American colonel to command of the entire central front, making him the first "Aluf", or General of Israel in two thousand years.

Mickey gambled everything on forging a new link to the Biblical heart of Jewry.

He radioed Ben-Gurion for bulldozers, compressors, stonecutters and builders. Grizzled stonecutters and laborers came swarming into the area.

The secret road Mickey was carving, across terrain that would have given pause to a mountain lion, would have to be built literally under the noses of the enemy. There were Arabs to his left at Latrun, less than five hundred yards away; and Arabs on his right. Enemy patrols were constantly poking at the Israeli positions. To make detection more difficult, work would have to be done mainly at night.

Hammers clanged; engines roared; masons grunted; foremen cursed. At strong points in the hills, sun-baked young riflemen crouched through the night. Towering over the entire turbulent scene was the sturdy figure of the brigadier from America, shaping the path hewn through rock and shellfire that was to be popularly hailed as the "Marcus Road."

Jerusalemites were hungry, often homeless. But above all craved guns to pay back the merciless Arab artillery. On his first convoy trip along the new road, Mickey brought them mortars. As cheering crowds welcomed his jeeps, the brigadier from America stood smilingly aside. Jerusalem would no longer be helpless under Arab onslaught.

A few days later Mickey Marcus was dead, victim of a random shot by a panicky Israeli sentry. A nation not given to weeping, wept. David Ben-Gurion said, "He was the best man we had."

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