Past meeting - Johannesburg
Non-combatants can often play as vital a role in a military situation
as the combatants themselves. This was certainly true of the Zion Mule
Corp, whose service at Gallipoli in 1915 was the subject of the curtain
raiser given by Felix Machanik at the society's 13th December meeting.
Russia declared war on Turkey in November 1914, whereupon the Turks
ordered all the Jews of Tel Aviv, who were mostly of Russian origin, to
leave the city immediately or be executed. Around 11 500 Jews fled to Alexandria,
where the British and Egyptian governments offered them refuge. Under the
leadership of Vladimir Zev Jabotinsky, a former journalist, and the one-armed
Josef Trumpledor, the Russian Army's first Jewish officer, the idea was
born to form a regiment to help the British in the conquest of Palestine.
The British rejected the offer of armed assistance, but supported the formation
of a corp of muleteers to help supply the allied armies fighting on the
arid Gallipoli peninsula. Thus was formed the Zion Mule Corp, which eventually
comprised 500 volunteers and did sterling work in that disastrous campaign.
Few of them had ever handled a mule before, lives nor been under fire.
When the campaign ended the respect gained for the service and bravery
of the Mule Corp helped persuade the British Government to allow the formation
of a Jewish unit in the British Army. This eventually expanded to become
the Jewish Legion that fought with General Allenby in the liberation of
Palestine.
Truth is well known to be the first casualty in war. Public attitudes
are deliberately conditioned and frequently manipulated by the varying
stories told and the omissions, selections, deceptions and simple lies
justified on political and strategic grounds. Public emotions are appealed
to through popular songs, poetry and the inspiring pronouncements of political
and military leaders.
The main talk of the evening was given by society member W Murton on the
use of words and music in war. It was lavishly illustrated with extracts
from poems and speeches, and by tape recordings of music from the two world
wars.
Many of the impressions of wartime events prove extremely durable, and
often find a place in history. An example is the story of the seige of
Jericho, when the walls are purported to have came tumbling down to the
sound of trumpets. Thus was extolled the power of Joshua, the instrument
of the Lord, and the fact that the hapless citizens of Jericho were thereupon
slaughtered is conveniently forgotten.
Popular music is particularly evocative of patriotic emotion in wartime,
and along with poetry can express the feelings of self-preservation, the
need for comforting support, and pride in self and nation that dominate
in wartime. Moreover, they are frequently the best indicators of the scale
of these emotions.
The talk ended with a discussion of some of the musical instruments of
war and an extract from an emotional account of the bombing of Hiroshima.
It is one of the consolations of a colonised people that they invariably
make a cultural impact on those who colonise them, and this was certainly
true of the British conquest of the Zulus. In the curtain raiser to the
lecture meeting of 15th January society committee member the Venerable
Russell Campbell explained the impact the Zulus had on the British using
the example of the Reverend George Smith, one of the heroes of Rourke's
Drift.
The Zulus had a dramatic effect on British society in two ways. By convincing
Bishop Colenso that the Bible could not be accepted as literal truth they
influenced religious life in Britain itself, and through their victory
at Isandhlwana in January 1879 they had a direct impact on British military
thinking.
Initially, as an Anglican Priest in the Diocese of Natal, and later as
a Chaplain to the Colonial Volunteers, in which capacity he was at Rourke's
Drift in the famous battle there, the Reverend George Smith had first-hand
experience of how both these Zulu influences worked themselves out. He
is shown in two of the famous painting of the Rourke's Drift battle as
working tirelessly to keep the beseiged supplied with ammunition, although
he himself did not bear arms.
The life and fame of this one man brought home to both sides the reality
of the colonial experience.
The history of codes used in warfare can be traced back at least as
far as the ancient Greeks, although it has only been in the two world wars
this century that their use has been mechanised. The breaking by British
mathematicians of the famous German Enigma coding system was the theme
of the main lecture given by society committee member Colin Dean.
The simplest form of code, taking one alphabetical letter to represent
another, becomes progressively more complicated and subject to error as
the number of alphabets used increases. The solution to this problem has
been to use machines employing rotors to increase the choice of alphabets.
All that is required of the operators is to set up the machines according
to prior instructions and coded messages can be transmitted between them
with a choice of alphabets for each letter "longer by far than the
complete works of Shakespeare, War and Peace, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Don
Quixote, the Canterbury Tales and Paradise Lost, all put together".
This was the capability of the Germans' famous Enigma machine of WW2, a
development of an America invention of 1917, and used in the inter-war
years for conveying commercial traffic. How to break the coded messages
transmitted by Enigma became a matter of survival for Britain when the
U-boats using them were threatening to sever the country's ocean lifelines.
A Codes and Cipher School had been set up in 1930 at Bletchley Park, 80km
north-west of London, and the task of breaking and reading the Enigma messages
was entrusted to a team of brilliant mathematicians, mainly from Cambridge
University, and led by a tragic genius named Alan Turing.
The interception operation was codenamed Ultra. Building on pioneering
work done in pre-war Poland, and using a combination of techniques and
insights, the team was able, throughout the war years, to decipher a high
proportion of Enigma traffic in sufficient time to be of use to the allied
war effort on land and in the air, but especially against the German navy's
U-boats in the Atlantic.
Mrs Eileen Song (011) 432-0582 has a collect of odd volume of The Times History of WW1 which she is prepared to give away free to anybody wanting them. She stresses that these are odd volumes and in some cases there is more than one copy of a particular edition.
George Barrell (Chairman/Scribe) (011) 791-2581
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