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Cast A Giant Shadow

Cast A Giant Shadow Exciting, star-studded epic focusing on the life of Mickey Marcus, the American war hero recruited by Israel to help strengthen their army against warring Arabs after the country gained its independence in 1948. Kirk Douglas turns in a steely, charismatic performance as Marcus.

On a warm July day in 1948, a funeral was held at the U.S. Military Academy in New York for David Daniel Marcus, class of 1924. In many ways it was a typical West Point funeral, with a bugler, a firing party and a number of distinguished mourners. In one respect, however, the ceremony was unique. Although an American flag covered his coffin, Marcus was the first soldier buried at West Point who had died fighting under another nation's flag. Only two weeks before his death, he had been appointed the first divisional level field commander in the army of the fledgling state of Israel.

Antisemitism was also very much alive in early-20th-century America. Michael, the oldest of the Marcus children, formed a self-defense group that protected elderly Jews from neighborhood street gangs. "Big Mike," as he was called, worked out daily. When young David started following his older brother around, and even sparring with him at the local gym, people started calling him "Little Mike," which soon was shortened to "Mickey."

A year after he resigned from the Regular Army, he received a doctorate from Brooklyn Law School. Between 1930 and 1934, Marcus was an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. One of his closest associates was future presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey.

In 1940, Lt. Col. Marcus' National Guard unit, the 27th Infantry Division, was federalized and sent to Alabama. Marcus was then the unit's judge advocate. Although legal officers were not supposed to command troops in the field, Marcus managed to lead a unit of special troops during maneuvers in Louisiana in 1941. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, the 27th Division deployed to Hawaii. There, Marcus organized and commanded a Ranger school, training some 8,000 men during the next year.

Although locked into a general staff job, Marcus did figure out a way to make one trip to the front lines. In early May 1944, he was sent to London on temporary duty "to provide liaison and act as observer in the implementation of military government policies for France." In the second week of June, they had not heard from Marcus since the end of May. After a few transatlantic phone calls, Lt. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith said that Marcus was "somewhere in France," having jumped on D-Day, June 6, with the 101st Airborne Division.

Marcus used a very elastic interpretation of his orders, combined with the fact that he had been a fellow cadet at West Point with the 101st's commander, Maj. Gen. Maxwell Taylor (class of 1922), to get himself on a Curtiss C-46 in the first wave. Of all the soldiers who jumped with the 101st that day, only Marcus and one other had never jumped before.

Once on the ground in Normandy, Marcus collected groups of the widely scattered paratroopers and organized them into patrols. He led several of those patrols himself, engaging in firefights with German units and, on one occasion, freeing a group of captured U.S. paratroopers. As the 101st regrouped over the next few days, Marcus finally bumped into Taylor, who asked him, "What the hell are you doing here?" Marcus characteristically replied, "Oh, just looking around." Back in Washington, they finally had to issue the order: "Find Marcus. Arrest him if you have to--but send him back!" Shortly after that, Marcus was on a plane to the United States, still in his dirty field uniform.

In 1946, the British government made Marcus an honorary officer of the Order of the British Empire, "in recognition of the distinguished service performed...in cooperation with British armed forces during the war." By then, he had been nominated for the rank of brigadier general five times. Nomination No. 6 came in early 1947, along with the offer of a coveted assignment as the military attach at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. He elected instead to return to civilian life and his law practice--but his respite from military service would be short.

That December, Marcus was approached in New York by Major Shlomo Shamir, representing the "Provisional Jewish Government." Shamir had been sent to America to recruit a military expert to help organize and train the army of the soon-to-be-born state. At first Marcus agreed to help Shamir find such an individual, but it quickly became apparent that Marcus himself was the prime candidate. His wife vigorously opposed any such adventure, but Marcus argued that what he would be doing would be no different than what the Marquis de Lafayette, Friedrich von Steuben or Tadeusz Kosciuszko had done during the American Revolution.

Under the nom de guerre "Michael Stone," Marcus flew to Palestine in January 1948. The United Nations had voted to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states effective October 1, 1948. The British were to remain in control of the mandate until then. Since 1945, both sides had engaged in constant guerrilla warfare against each other and against the British. Many of the Arab countries were determined that the state of Israel would never come into existence.

The Jewish situation was desperate. The surrounding Arab states comprised about 100 times the territory and 60 times the population of the would-be Jewish state. As soon as the Jews declared their independence, the forces of Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Trans-Jordan (later Jordan) were poised to invade. The Arab forces, however, were a mixed lot, ranging from the Arab Liberation Army--a ragged collection of poorly trained volunteers--to the 6,000-strong Trans-Jordan Arab Legion, a modern, elite fighting force with British officers and commanded by the legendary British Maj. Gen. John Bagot Glubb.

Reporting directly to future Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, Marcus toured the country, visiting Haganah bases, examining troop dispositions and evaluating training programs. He made recommendations that he believed were necessary to transform the largely underground organization into a modern, effective strike force.

Marcus recommended that the Haganah adopt the self-contained brigade as its basic combat formation. He also accurately predicted to Ben-Gurion that the southern Negev Desert would be Israel's first theater of war. To assist the Haganah training program, Marcus tried to have U.S. Army field manuals smuggled into the country. When that failed, he attacked the problem in characteristic fashion by sitting down and drafting his own manuals from memory, specifically tailored to the needs of the fledgling Jewish army. Marcus stressed taking initiative and decisive action. He also emphasized solid staff work at higher levels and the importance of logistics.

In April, Marcus returned briefly to the United States when his wife fell ill. The British, meanwhile, tired of being caught in the middle of a no-win situation, decided to withdraw their troops from Palestine early, on May 15. The British officer corps in the region, however, remained with the Trans-Jordan Arab Legion.

Marcus returned to Palestine in early May. Israel declared its independence at 4:30 p.m. on May 14. Within hours, as Marcus had predicted, two Egyptian brigades, supported by tanks and artillery, advanced into the Negev. On Marcus' recommendation, Ben-Gurion sent a small element of 30 radio- and machine-gun-equipped jeeps and a company of halftrack-mounted infantry south to reinforce the Haganah defensive outposts and to act as a raiding and harassing force. Marcus accompanied the force as an adviser.

Hindered by a daring combination of hit-and-run attacks and night raids against its flanks and long supply lines, the Egyptian advance slowed to a crawl and eventually halted. In the north of the country, Palmach units under Moshe Dayan checked the Syrian advance toward the Jordan River valley. By the end of May the main crisis point had shifted to Jerusalem. The Arab Legion already held the ancient Holy City, and they were trying to cut off the remainder of the new city before any United Nations-brokered cease-fire took effect.

The key to Jerusalem was a series of hill fortifications and a massively fortified police station at Latrun that dominated the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem Road. So long as the Arab Legion held those positions, Jerusalem was effectively cut off. On May 25, the Jewish forces mounted an attack on Latrun but were driven back with heavy casualties. On close examination of the failure, the Israeli leadership realized that the attack had suffered from the lack of a single unified command.

After consulting with his cabinet, Ben-Gurion decided on a bold and unorthodox move. On May 28, the provisional government issued the following order: "Brigadier General Stone is hereby appointed Commander of the Jerusalem front, with command over the Etzioni, Har-El and 7th Brigades." Mickey Marcus finally had his combat command. Up until that time, brigades were the highest level of field command in the Israeli army. Now Marcus was the equivalent of a division commander. His rank title in Hebrew was aluf, and he was the first Jewish soldier to hold that rank since Judas Maccabeus, 2,100 years before.

Marcus immediately organized another attack on Latrun for May 30. When that attack also failed, he started looking for another way to break the ring around Jerusalem. After a brainstorming session with his staff and a personal ground reconnaissance, Marcus became convinced it would be possible to improve a series of goat trails running through the rocky and tortuous terrain sufficiently to handle truck traffic. Bypassing the dominating, enemy-held heights, the new road would connect with the main highway on either side of Latrun.

Marcus then convinced Ben-Gurion it could be done, and the prime minister committed the bulldozers, manpower and other necessary resources. The crews worked day and night on what Marcus wryly called "The Burma Road." In some sectors they had to work within 500 meters of the Arab positions. To protect the construction, and to keep the Arabs from figuring out what the Israelis were doing, Marcus deployed his fighting forces in an aggressive screen between the new road and the Latrun positions. Marcus also ordered another assault on Latrun, but it was more of a spoiling attack to keep the legion off-guard and to divert attention away from the construction. In planning that third attack, Marcus was assisted by the Palmach's chief of operations, Yitzhak Rabin--who later became Israel's prime minister and was tragically assassinated on November 4, 1995.

By June 7, one week after construction began, the road was open and the first truck convoys made the slow, hazardous passage. United Nations mediator Count Folke Bernadotte, meanwhile, had negotiated the cease-fire time for 10:00 a.m. on June 11, 1948. The siege of Jerusalem had been broken, however, and the Israelis had a credible claim on their land link with the city.

The night before the cease-fire took effect, Marcus and his staff held a celebration in the ancient village of Abu Ghosh, some eight miles east of Jerusalem. In the early morning hours, Marcus found himself unable to sleep and went for a walk. On his way out, he was recognized by the sentry, who waved to him. Shortly after, the relief sentry showed up--25 minutes early. Not knowing that his commander was out walking around, the new sentry challenged the blanket-clad figure as soon as he saw him. Marcus replied in English, which confused the sentry, a recent immigrant. The sentry fired a shot in the air, but the figure in the dark kept coming. The sentry lowered his rifle and fired again. Mickey Marcus fell dead at 3:50 a.m. with a bullet through his heart--the last casualty before the cease-fire.

Marcus' troops brought him back to Tel Aviv in a coffin strapped to the hood of a jeep. Robert Capa, the internationally famous war photographer, accompanied the body. When they returned him to New York City, Marcus was escorted by Moshe Dayan and Yosef Hamburger, the Haganah commander of the blockade-running ship Exodus. After a funeral service at Union Temple, they took Marcus back to West Point, where he was buried on July 2, 1948--28 years to the day after he first reported there as a plebe. Among the mourners were Thomas E. Dewey, then governor of New York, and Maxwell Taylor, the superintendent of West Point.

In 1962, author Ted Berkman wrote Marcus' story in Cast a Giant Shadow. Four years later, the book was made into a movie, starring Kirk Douglas. Although the film's story line typified Hollywood's general lack of respect for historical fact, Douglas' portrayal of the irrepressible Marcus vividly captured the fiery spirit of the man. David Ben-Gurion later said of Marcus: "He was the best man we had." His gravestone at West Point reads: "Colonel David Marcus--A Soldier for All Humanity."

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