When U.S. Naval Academy Midshipman Paul N. Shulman met David Ben-Gurion during a 1941 home leave he told the leader of the future state of Israel that he planned “a long career in the U.S. Navy.” Yet six years later Shulman—then a civilian—answered the call to Palestine: Ben-Gurion needed the ex-lieutenant—who had seen combat with the U.S. Pacific Fleet—to train officers for the new Israeli Naval Service. Just 26, Shulman set up an academy. But realizing that few Israeli naval officers were trained in command and control, Kvarnit (Commander) Shulman led the fledgling Israeli squadron into action against the Egyptian Navy.
In the diffused half-light of dusk that spread across the Mediterranean Sea on Thursday, 21 October 1948, the two Israeli corvettes maneuvered closer in toward Gaza City. Lashed to the main deck of each ship were two motorboats. The wood-hulled craft were 17 feet long with a beam of 6 feet. Each was powered by a Ferrari marine engine, powerful enough to drive the speedboats at up to 30 knots. Israeli sailors stood at the davits, ready to lower the motorboats into the Mediterranean. Standing off a few hundred yards, another Israeli warship kept a radar eye on two Egyptian vessels anchored in Gaza’s bay. Farther out, a fourth Israeli vessel steamed slowly in circles to warn of any approaching enemy ships. Only a few hours before, at 1400 local time—2 o’clock in the afternoon—the United Nations Truce Commission–brokered truce—the third such stand-down between Israeli and Arab forces since May 1948—had begun. Like the other truce periods, this one was ignored by Israeli and enemy forces.
On the bridge of one corvette, designated K-18 Josiah Wedgwood, was the squadron leader, an American who had graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and had seen combat duty during World War II. Paul N. Shulman turned to his radio operator, another ex-U.S. Navy Sailor. He ordered him to again contact the Israeli Defense Force High Command. “Get them to tell Ben-Gurion,” Shulman urged. “Tell him that there are four of us and two of them.” Only static emerged from the war surplus army field radio; the attack would have to wait.
The Wedgwood and three other Israeli ships had been shadowing the Egyptian warships for two days, and Paul Shulman was getting anxious. He kept his binoculars trained on the two vessels. Israeli intelligence had identified one as a wood-hulled minesweeper. The larger vessel was a 1,440-ton sloop, Al Emir Farouq. She was armed with a pair of three-inch cannon and several 20-mm antiaircraft guns. More important, the warship had some 500 soldiers embarked, waiting to go ashore to reinforce Egyptian ground units ringing Gaza City. Kvarnit Shulman paced. What was taking Ben-Gurion so long to give the order to attack?
In the six months since 14 May 1948, when David Ben-Gurion had proclaimed the State of Israel and was appointed prime minister of the provisional government, Israeli forces had chalked up impressive victories against five Arab armies that invaded Israel the day after the British Mandatory government quit Palestine. Indeed, Israel had done more than survive. The Arab invaders had not, as one Egyptian propagandist boasted in a radio broadcast, driven “the criminal Zionist bands into the sea.”
Ben-Gurion’s Israeli Defense Force began with not more than 22,000 combatants. Most shouldered not much more than machine guns and homemade mortars. Only a few thousand of these combatants were in the highly trained Palmach Strike Force. Though outgunned, Israel’s brigades repulsed the Syrian-Iraqi “Army of Liberation” that invaded Israel’s Galilee region in the north. Jewish battalions had repulsed the British-trained Arab Legion that attacked from Trans-Jordan to the east. In the arid Negev region in the south, Israeli units pushed back the poorly led Egyptian units. The Jews, bitterly remembering the Arab blockade of Jerusalem months earlier, which came within days of starving its citizens into surrendering, were in no mood to give up even a square meter of hard-won ground.
United Nations Truce Commission observers in Gaza City reported: “SITUATION GAZA SO BAD SUPPLY BY SEA NECESSARY.” The U.N. observers were concerned that Gaza’s civilians would run out of food, water, and medical supplies. They seemed not overly bothered that the Egyptian warships waiting in the bay were evidence that Egypt was not observing the truce. Nor was Israel, for that matter. During an earlier truce, in July, the fledgling Israeli navy had thwarted an Egyptian troop carrier that was trying to land troops near Tel Aviv. Now, off the coast at Gaza, Paul Shulman waited for the order to attack. Finally, around 2030, the Wedgwood’s radio came to life. It was the voice of Ben-Gurion himself, speaking in English: “Paul, if you can sink them, shoot; if you can’t, don’t!”
Word was passed to the other corvette, the K-20 Haganah. Both ships began moving slowly inshore toward Gaza City and the Egyptian warships. The corvettes’ deck crews, which included several U.S. Navy veterans who had volunteered to serve Israel, lowered the motor torpedo boats into the water. Each boat was armed with a 300-kilogram (660-pound) high-explosive warhead, the size of an oil drum, mounted in the bow. The fourth motorboat was unarmed; its mission was to recover the Israeli raiders from the sea.
Into each boat climbed a specially trained commando, clad in a primitive, handmade wet suit. Each boat driver eased the throttle forward. At half speed each steered toward their assigned targets at a 45-degree angle in the hope that they would not be spotted. They were. Guards on Al Emir Farouq, alarmed by the roar of the motorboats’ engines, switched on a searchlight and panned the water, looking for the attackers. Machine-gun fire from the sloop began to pockmark the dark waters. The Israeli ships returned fire with their 20-mm antiaircraft guns, which had been installed only weeks before. At 300 meters out, the motorboats turned. Pushing the throttles all the way forward, each commando steered straight for his target. At the 100-meter mark and traveling at top speed, each boat driver armed the warhead, locked the rudder, and then bailed out into the water. Each commando tightly clutched special gear designed to protect him against concussion from underwater explosions.
At about 2130, a dull orange explosion lit up Al Emir Farouq. The Egyptian sloop began to settle. A minute later, a second motor-torpedo boat slammed into her hull and a bright orange mushroom lit up the sky. The ship broke in two and sank. The third motor-torpedo boat, locked on course and minus its driver, slammed into the minesweeper. She, too, exploded and sank. The driver of the fourth motorboat, scanning the waters lit by fires, picked up the commandos and returned them to an Israeli auxiliary ship. In addition to more than 500 Egyptian soldiers who went down with the sloop, the Egyptian navy had lost its flagship. The Israeli naval squadron steamed back to its base at Haifa.
The raid was supposed to have been a secret. A few days later, however, the English-language Palestine Post reported obliquely: “The Jewish vessel’s anti-aircraft guns . . . poured fire into the enemy craft. The enemy was prevented from landing its cargo.” Nonetheless, within days, word of the Israeli navy’s astonishing success was all over the streets and cafés. Foreign ears carried the news all the way to Cairo. At the time, Shulman probably was not much concerned with what Egypt thought of the action; it was only years later that he considered the possibility that it could have cost him his American civil rights and a huge fine and landed him in prison.
In a private ceremony at IDF headquarters, Ben-Gurion awarded Israel’s highest military award to the commandos and their leader, Yochai Bin-Nun. A week later, on 26 October 1948, in a public ceremony at naval headquarters in Haifa, Ben-Gurion appointed Kvarnit Shulman to the position of commander-in-chief of the Israeli Naval Service. He could now assume the title of aluf, or admiral. Shulman was just 26½ years old. He would joke later that he was the first and only U.S. Navy officer he knew of to advance from lieutenant to admiral in three years.
It would not be unrealistic to imagine a jubilant Paul Shulman looking down from Israeli naval headquarters atop Haifa’s Mount Carmel as he considered the Israeli navy’s success. The U.S. Naval Academy graduate had served with distinction on board a U.S. Navy destroyer during World War II and survived a typhoon and kamikaze aircraft attack. Now, he might well have wondered just how in the hell he had wound up “commanding” the Israeli navy, when very little in his life up to then had prepared him for this phase of his naval career.
The final phase of Paul Shulman’s naval career found him consigned to the backwaters of Israel’s high command, as Ben-Gurion appointed a former army major—a political apparatchik—commander-in-chief of the Israeli Naval Service. “Kicked upstairs” as Ben-Gurion’s “special naval adviser,” Shulman resigned in 1949. He could have returned home, as most American volunteers in the 1948 war did, but he and his family remained in Israel for 40 years. A year after he died in 1994, a memorial service was held in his honor at the U.S. Naval Academy. There, his widow, Rose, said her husband, “the Aluf,” belonged to “the pages of Israel’s history.”