not for nothing and that the citizens on the road appreciated our spirit of self-sacrifice.

* * *

When we returned from leave, the news came in that the fourth con-voy had been attacked near Bab al-Wad. Joseph of the Palmach, our scout before Deir Muheisin, had saved the convoy by an amazingly daring feat. He climbed up, with a few others, to the top of the slope and drove away the attackers. He himself fell and the convoy reached Jerusalem. But the road remained blocked.

Qawuqji’s²² soldiers held the stretch of road near Bab al-Wad and built up a gigantic concrete barrier. The aim of our operation was to clear that barrier. A Palmach unit from the "Hard" brigade was com-ing from Jerusalem to capture the villages of Deir Ayub and Beit Mahsir on the north and south of the road. When this operation was complete we were to advance down the road to the barrier, giving the scouts cover so that they could destroy the barrier, and then accom-pany the next convoy to Jerusalem. The operation bore the name "Maccabi."

17 May 1948

Forward base in Hulda

The first battle for Latrun

Like every large-scale operation, this one is preceded by superfluous activity. For a civilian it may sound ridiculous. But in the life of a sol-dier, the operations that don’t get carried out play as great a role as those that you read about in the newspaper. So for example we were alerted one night, and set off to shock the enemy with enormous fire-power in a particular village - only to learn, a few hundred meters from our target, that the operation had been called off. Hardly had we made it back to our base camp when we were put into trucks and taken off to a forward camp to take part in the capture of another vil-lage. And after a quarter of an hour we learned that our comrades had already taken the village.

After these "successful" operations we got a few hours’ rest. Then another alert, and we were told that this time the real operation was about to begin. Is it any surprise that we were disappointed to hear that we were just a reserve for another unit that had already set out?

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