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| ISBN-13: | 9781742242705 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNSW Press |
| Publication date: | 05/19/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 496 |
| File size: | 35 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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Jewish Anzacs
Jews in the Australian Military
By Mark Dapin
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2017 Sydney Jewish MuseumAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-270-5
CHAPTER 1
Birth of a nation
Soldiers, sailors and settlers
There were Jewish soldiers and sailors in Australia even before there was an Australian army and navy. The first Jews arrived in shackles with the First Fleet in 1788. They were a motley collection of convicts, largely of Ashkenazi (East European) descent, but including a clutch of Sephardi (Middle Eastern) felons. But most were British citizens and loyal – if not always honest – servants of the Crown. Among the wretches was milliner Esther Abrahams, a young woman sentenced to seven years' transportation for stealing lace from a London draper. Along with her baby daughter, Rosanna, she was taken on board the Lady Penrhyn to the colony of New South Wales. Somewhere on the oceans, Abrahams began a relationship with Lieutenant George Johnston of the Royal Marines. A son, Robert, was born to Abrahams and Johnston in Sydney in 1790, in the first military barracks built by Governor Arthur Phillip. As the Jewish religion is passed down through the mother's line, Robert and his siblings are considered Jews under Jewish law, although Abrahams and Johnston were finally to marry under Anglican rites in 1814. When Robert was seven years old, his father took him to England and enrolled him at a school in Surrey. At thirteen Robert Johnston became the first native of New South Wales to join the Royal Navy. In his long naval career, Johnston ferried British troops to the Battle of Montevideo in 1807, and fought Napoleon at the Battle of Corunna in 1809. He was present at the French storming of the Spanish naval base of Cadiz, and at the subsequent attack on Cape St Mary's where he was 'in command of a rocket boat and narrowly escaped death through the boat being sunk by a round shot, and those who were not killed [were] left struggling in the water until a rescue could be effected'. He was in Chesapeake Bay when the British captured Washington during the War of 1812 against the United States, and also at the British defeat at Baltimore. In 1816 he took leave to return to Sydney to visit his family. While Robert had been away, his father had led the so-called 'Rum Rebellion' of the NSW Corps, which overthrew Governor William Bligh in 1808. Major Johnston had then become Lieutenant-Governor and Esther, the Jewish drapery thief, performed the duties of first lady.
While in New South Wales, Robert discovered and named the Clyde River and found the source of the Warragamba River. He was about to return to the Royal Navy when his father and eldest brother passed away leaving him duty bound to remain and look after family affairs. He was made a Commander of the Royal Navy in 1865 and died in Sydney in 1882 at the age of ninety-two. At his funeral his coffin was carried to the grave by a party of sailors from HMS Nelson. Esther's children were not raised Jewish, but her grandson by Rosanna, the halachically Jewish parliamentarian George Robert Nicholls, argued hard to win government assistance for Jewish worship – alongside Christian congregations – in the debates that helped cement the separation of church and state in Australia in the 1850s.
The earliest Jewish free settlers followed the convicts in the nineteenth century, and the first military man among them would appear to be John Daniels, who was born in London in about 1818. When Daniels was eighteen years old, he joined his brother in business in South America. A few years later he returned to England and enlisted in the 99th (Lanarkshire) Regiment of Foot, an infantry regiment of the British Army. The 99th sailed out to Australia in 1842. Daniels served as 'sergeant of the regiment in charge of convicts' on Norfolk Island, which was then the most notoriously brutal penal settlement in the British Empire. When the 99th moved to Sydney in 1845, Daniels left the army and made a new home in South Australia. He joined an auctioneering firm run by Emanuel Solomon, an emancipated convict who was later to become the first Jewish member of the South Australian parliament. In 1854 Daniels married Emanuel's niece, Rosetta Solomon. The couple had many children including, in 1860, a son also named John.
Many ruddy and respectable types among Australia's early colonists kept themselves busy – and socially connected – by drilling with part-time volunteer militia units one evening a week. John Daniels Jnr enlisted in South Australia's Volunteer Military Force in 1877. He served four years in D (North Adelaide) Company, and was eventually promoted to lieutenant in the Port Adelaide Company. In 1885 he was posted to the Hindmarsh Company, where he was said to have been appointed to accompany the contingent then being formed for the Sudan.
The NSW Sudan contingent and the extraordinary life of Ernest Simeon de Pass
The Sudan, an arid land in the Nile Valley, was in the throes of a revolt against its Imperial masters, the British-backed Egyptian government. The rebel Sufi 'Dervish' warriors, led by the messianic 'Mahdi' Muhammad Ahmad, hacked their way through various Egyptian forces, and were marching towards Egypt's southern Red Sea ports when the British despatched Major General Charles Gordon, former Governor-General of Sudan, to the Sudanese capital of Khartoum to supervise an evacuation. But Gordon, a hero of the Empire who had quashed a number of earlier uprisings, was not inclined to abandon the territory. Once the majority of British civilians had been returned home, the General, against the express wishes of his government, began to organise the defence of the city. Gordon and his men were besieged for a year until Khartoum finally fell in January 1885. Ten thousand people were massacred as the Dervishes sacked Khartoum, and the General was killed only two days before the arrival of a reluctantly despatched British relief force.
Calls for vengeance rang throughout the mother country and her colonies, but there was also a terrible sadness, felt in the Australian Jewish community as keenly as other reaches of the Empire. News of the General's death did not reach Sydney until Wednesday 11 February. On Friday 13 February, pupils at the Melbourne Hebrew School were lectured about Gordon's life by their head teacher, who spoke at length of the General's heroism, patriotic self-sacrifice and confidence in God. A tablet in Gordon's memory was to be placed in the schoolroom. The next day Rabbi Abrahams of the Bourke Street Synagogue promised that Jews would join in with any 'movement made by their fellow-citizens to perpetuate the memory of the gallant soldier'.
The British resolved to crush the Mahdi, and the colonies were eager to play their part. New South Wales' offer to raise a contingent of men to send to the Sudan was accepted by the government in London, but approaches by Victoria, Queensland and South Australia to join the force were rebuffed, and therefore the services of John Daniels Jnr were never called upon. A contingent of 758 infantry and artillerymen steamed out of Sydney for the Sudan on 3 March 1885 to join a large British force despatched to protect a railway under construction at Sudan's Red Sea port at Suakin, from which it was hoped the Empire would push into Mahdi territory. The ranks of the Australians included the man who was probably the first Jewish Australian soldier to actually go to war, an extraordinary character by the name of Ernest Simeon de Pass.
Ernest was the son of prominent Victorian squatter Michael de Pass, who in November 1863 came into possession of a large run at Wild Duck Creek, southeast of Bendigo. Michael was the child of Daniel de Pass and Rachel Davis, and the brother of Elliot de Pass. He was born into a distinguished Sephardic family that traced its roots to Portugal but which had spread its branches around the world, from London to the West Indies, South Africa and India. Wherever the de Pass family settled, they seemed to produce military men and adventurers, as well as businessmen and traders. Michael de Pass married Simmy Bensusan. The couple had five daughters and one son, Ernest, who was born in 1861 in Highbury, London, before the family came to Australia. Ernest was twenty-three years old when, in the heady summer of 1885, he enlisted as a private soldier in the Colonial Military Forces bound for the Sudan. He was a single man, who claimed his trade as 'silver refiner' and his religion as 'Hebrew'. He joined B Company of the infantry, in a proud uniform of red tunic, white helmet and blue trousers. He and his comrades boarded the SS Iberia to Suakin before huge, cheering crowds, anxious for the men from New South Wales to go overseas and prove that Australians would fight and die for the Empire. Two of the first 'substantial' men of the colony to put down a large sum of money towards financing the contingent were Benn Wolfe Levy and his brother-in-law George Judah Cohen. The Melbourne Argus published with approval a patriotic sermon sent from Chief Rabbi Nathan Marcus Adler in London to be read out at synagogues throughout Victoria, and pronounced it 'not a little touching and impressive' that Jews were to beg, with great poetry and passion, for the Lord's blessing on the British soldiers in the Sudan. Melbourne's Jewish Herald reprinted a remarkable piece from London's Jewish World newspaper which claimed the Jews were 'old enemies of the Soudanese' since 2500 years earlier when 'Asa, King of Judah, chased the dark-skinned hordes pell-mell from the land they had invaded under Zerah, the Kushite'.
THE SUDAN CAMPAIGN SET A HOST OF PRECEDENTS THAT were to be followed in subsequent Australian military engagements: patriotic rabbis, anxious to display the loyalty of their community, declared their support for the war from the bimah; strong men volunteered to fight; wealthy men paid for their arms. Sometimes eccentric arguments were mustered by Jews to claim the conflict as one in which they might have a stake, so as to firmly identify their interests with the British Empire. Antisemites denounced the war as being the fault of the Jews – in this case 'the Jews of the Stock Exchange'for having crushed Egyptian patriots and encouraged the scoundrels who replaced them. The insinuation that the Sudan Campaign was a 'Jewish war' had little resonance with the public, who tended to either embrace the adventure or ridicule the adventurers: a certain Corporal John Monash of the 4th Victorian Rifles wrote of his frustration that the lives of his battalion had been 'made a burden' by the campaign, as their appearance in uniform acted as 'the signal for the display of all the wit of which unwashed Melbourne seems possessed'. However, the idea that wars were fought primarily to further Jewish interests echoed tragically down the next century.
The Sudan Contingent dropped anchor en route to Suakin at the Yemeni sea port of Aden, where the men amused themselves in 'bantering a host of Jews, who offered ostrich feathers for sale'. The Australians arrived in Suakin on 29 March, one week after a bloodbath at the staging post of Tofrek, in which the Empire had lost about 300 men and the Dervishes perhaps 2000. The contingent, however, did little fighting. The infantry were issued with light khaki jackets and trousers in place of their impractically colourful uniforms and had a brief skirmish, in which three men were lightly wounded, on 3 April, but spent most of their time camped around the railway. By 17 May, the survivors of the contingent were safely on board the SS Arab, ready for the next day's return journey to Australia. They had lost only nine men – to typhoid and dysentery, rather than enemy action – and acquired a donkey as a mascot.
Throughout all this excitement John Daniels Jnr continued his successful career in the South Australian military unhampered by his remoteness from any war. In 1887 he became captain in charge of A (East Adelaide) Company. He was later quartermaster of the First Regiment and in December 1900 reached the rank of major. Meanwhile, the rather unsatisfactory Sudan episode had done nothing to dampen Ernest de Pass's martial ardour. He left Australia to settle back in England, where in 1890 he married Lizzie Maria Roe of Market Harborough, Leicestershire, and later took over her family's brush-making business. In January 1900 he signed up as a private soldier in a volunteer cavalry regiment, the Imperial Yeomanry, to go to South Africa and fight the Boers. He gave his age as thirty-nine, his trade as 'nil', and said he had never before been in the military, including the militia. He was 5ft 8in tall and 161 lbs, with a 40-inch chest, a tattoo of his initials on his right arm, a 'wound' on his knee and claimed his religion as 'Church of England'. Although de Pass may have converted to marry Roe, it was not unusual for a Jewish soldier to enlist in the Imperial forces as a Christian – particularly, perhaps, a man such as de Pass, who rarely filled out similar forms in the same way. He fought for two years in South Africa, where a Frederick Charles de Pass was also serving with the Canadian Mounted Rifles, and a John de Pass with Warren's Mounted Infantry. Ernest Simeon returned home in March 1902, whereupon he was granted a commission as quartermaster with the temporary rank of lieutenant, and paid a war gratuity of £15. De Pass was next heard of in June 1905, when he was described in a press report, rather startlingly, as a man who had 'fought through five wars and holds the record for volunteer service in the British Empire'. He was living in Naphill, Buckinghamshire, near the town of High Wycombe, when it was reported that his servant Jack Simla, a 'negro', had run away to the workhouse at nearby Saunderton on 'the foolish advice of his neighbour, who thought he saw in the presence of a black servant the beginning of an effort to introduce slavery into Buckinghamshire'. According to the report: 'When Mr de Pass arrived at the workhouse and claimed his "slave" back again, Jack's eyes glistened, and his face lit up with smiles.' It had all been a mistake. Simla was not de Pass's slave, but a boy de Pass had met during a trade expedition two years before, in what is now Ghana. 'The statement made at a meeting of the High Wycombe guardians that I brought him from his parents is an absolute fabrication,' said de Pass, who promised to send Simla 'back to West Africa ... with every penny of his accumulated wages'.
Extraordinarily, Ernest Simeon de Pass, who must have been at least fifty-two years old, next enlisted in His Majesty's armed forces on 9 September 1914, when he joined the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, one month after Britain declared war on Germany. He gave his age as forty-eight, and cited prior military service with the Australian Sudan Contingent, and the Imperial Yeomanry in South Africa. He had now lost both height and weight, standing at 5ft 7in and 154 lbs. His son Geoffrey Pamrial Barbe de Pass joined the same regiment and went to France as a lieutenant on 10 April 1916, but Ernest Simeon was discharged due to sickness on 1 March 1916. He had been appointed the regimental quartermaster sergeant but had begun to feel nervous and irritable. The Medical Board noted that 'the most marked nervous symptoms were loss of voice, weakness of vision and sleeplessness'. This was held to be caused by the 'stress and strain of work due to ordinary military service of a most exacting nature, leading to nervous breakdown' and was 'largely the result of active service with local volunteer corps and climate of Africa and Australia both as civilian and volunteer'. It was also recognised that he was 'old for his position and worked very hard'. By the time of his discharge, de Pass was claiming to have also served in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 and the First Boer War of 1880–81. He was a loss to the regiment. His commanding officer described him as being of 'very good' military character, 'thoroughly trustworthy and fitted for any responsible work'. He was granted a pension but, astonishingly, he appears to have joined the British Army again before the end of World War One. On 22 October 1918, according to the London Gazette, an Ernest Simeon de Pass was granted a commission as a temporary second lieutenant.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Jewish Anzacs by Mark Dapin. Copyright © 2017 Sydney Jewish Museum. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword,Preface,
Prologue,
1 Birth of a nation,
2 Australia's armed forces emerge,
3 World War One: 1914 to 1918,
4 Between the wars,
5 World War Two: 1939 to 1945,
6 Cold War conflicts,
7 The Vietnam years: 1962 to 1972,
8 After Vietnam,
9 The War on Terror,
Epilogue,
Notes,
Glossary,
Picture credits,
Acknowledgments,
Appendixes,
Appendix 1: Memorial Roll,
Appendix 2: Those who served,
Index,