Sold
as Scrap.

The Surplus Property Act of 1944 was approved on 3 October 1944. Its own title says what it was for: “To aid the reconversion from a war to a peace economy through the distribution of Government surplus property.” At the end of the war the United States held somewhere around thirty-four billion dollars of surplus weapons, equipment and supplies, and from 25 March 1946 the agency clearing most of it was the War Assets Administration.

It sold hundreds of thousands of tons as scrap. Mess kits, trucks, tanks, aircraft, machine guns, artillery, warships. Equipment that could still be used as a weapon was supposed to be identified and demilitarised before it left — cut, burned or altered so that it would not work.

On 14 November 1947 the State Department stopped issuing licences for the export of arms, ammunition and other war matériel intended for use in Palestine or the countries around it, and revoked the licences already granted. On 29 May 1948 the Security Council asked every government to stop importing or exporting war material into or to Palestine and seven neighbouring states.

Both sets of rules were in force through 1948. The first asked who was buying and at what price. The second asked where the goods were going. They were written in different statutes, administered by different agencies, and applied at different moments in the life of the same object.

What follows is one lot of it, from the yard to the ship.

What the government had,
and the rule for selling it.

The Surplus Property Board came first, then the Surplus Property Administration, and then on 31 January 1946 President Truman signed Executive Order 9689, which created the War Assets Administration inside the Office for Emergency Management. It took effect on 25 March 1946 under Major General Robert M. Littlejohn, who had been the Army’s chief quartermaster in Europe.

The disposal tests were about the buyer and the price. Federal agencies came first, then state and local governments, then veterans, then everyone else. In one three-month stretch the agency sold 28,489 trucks, 12,075 of them to veterans. One power station went for $2,408,126.55; an artillery factory went for $375,000. Coal, airfields, machine tools, 32,000 tons of it at a time.

Because a great deal of what the services declared surplus was still usable as a weapon, the services were directed to work out a process for identifying those items so that they could be demilitarised before sale. Demilitarising a weapon means destroying its military capability: scrapping, melting, burning or altering the thing so it cannot do what it was built to do. The depot did it, and the depot certified it.

The agency was abolished on 30 June 1949 by the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act, and the General Services Administration took over what was left.

A single object could satisfy all three, in sequence, and never be tested twice for the same thing.

How each depot
cut the guns.

On Sunday 1 July 1945 David Ben-Gurion met seventeen American businessmen in the New York home of Rudolf Sonneborn, who ran an oil and chemicals firm. He asked them to fund the purchase of the means of making war, on the ground that the American government was beginning to sell its military surplus. The fund they set up was known inside the operation as the Sonneborn Institute and operated in public as Materials for Palestine.

The procurement itself turned on a detail of how the surplus was prepared for sale. The fullest published account of it is Ricky-Dale Calhoun’s, in the Journal of Palestine Studies in 2007, built on Federal Bureau of Investigation and Naval Intelligence files now at the National Archives.

A scrap metal dealer named Sam Sloan read the War Assets Administration’s lists of neutralised war material offered for sale as junk and marked what was wanted. A network of scrap dealers across the continent then went to look at the items in person and reported back one thing: the manner in which each weapon had been rendered inoperable.

That was the opening. The depots had not all sabotaged the same weapon in the same way. With reports from several yards in hand, it was possible to work out which lots held which undamaged parts, buy from more than one of them, and assemble weapons that worked out of components that had each been certified as scrap.

Nothing in that sequence required a false statement to the selling agency. The property was surplus, the buyer was eligible, the price was paid, and the item had been demilitarised to the standard the depot applied.

14 November 1947,
and what it tested.

Eight weeks before the licences were suspended, and nine weeks before the General Assembly voted on partition, the head of the State Department’s own Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs set out for the Secretary of State what he expected partition to cost. The memorandum is in the published record.

The decision was taken inside the State Department and announced three weeks later. Licences for the export of arms, ammunition and other war matériel intended for use in Palestine or neighbouring countries were suspended, and the licences already issued were revoked as of the same date. The Department made it public in its press release of 5 December 1947. Six months later the Secretary of State put the date in a circular telegram to every American diplomatic post.

On 29 May 1948, two weeks after the state of Israel was declared and the fighting became a war between states, the Security Council adopted resolution 50. Its fourth operative paragraph is an arms embargo on eight countries for the duration of a four-week cease-fire.

Nine weeks after that, the Central Intelligence Agency wrote down what it expected the embargo to be worth. Its assessment of 5 August 1948 was classified secret and is now declassified in the State Department’s own published record.

The Security Council released the parties from the truce and its embargo on 11 August 1949, four months after the last armistice was signed.

3 January 1948,
Jersey City.

Seven weeks after the licences were suspended, a cargo was being loaded onto the freighter Executor at Jersey City for Tel Aviv. The crates were marked as used machinery. One of them was dropped during loading and broke open, and what was in it was TNT — sixty-five thousand pounds of it across the consignment. The shipment was stopped on the pier.

That is the only point in this record at which the export rule actually closed on something inside the United States, and it closed because a box fell.

The seizure also has a Palestinian record. On 12 March 1948 the Arab Higher Committee’s delegation for Palestine, working out of an office in the Empire State Building, submitted a memorandum to the United Nations delegations. Among its charges about the financing and arming of the Jewish Agency, it names this cargo.

The memorandum is a partisan document and says so on its cover. It is also the Palestinian political leadership putting a dated American seizure in front of the United Nations eight weeks after it happened, which makes it a Palestinian-produced record of this traffic rather than a foreign description of one.

Nothing comparable exists on the other side of the ledger. A crate of certified scrap bought at a disposal sale produced no seizure, no memorandum and no file, because nothing about it was unlawful.

A yard at
Iroquois Point.

Nathan Liff was a scrap metal dealer from Indiana who came to Honolulu in 1946 and set up the Universal Airplane Salvage Company at the Iroquois Point naval air station, on hundreds of acres of war surplus. The yard was breaking up decommissioned naval aircraft. Stacked in it were Pratt & Whitney engines, aircraft parts, and the .30- and .50-calibre machine guns that had been stripped out of the planes.

Herman “Hank” Greenspun, a former Army ordnance officer who had been through the Normandy campaign, was sent to look at the engines. What he noticed were the guns. He had no money to pay for them. Liff, in an aloha shirt, told him to take what he needed.

Within weeks there were 42 crates of engines in the yard and 16 more beside them, marked with symbols that meant nothing to anyone reading a manifest. The 16 held the machine guns and at least 500 spare barrels, some of them taken at night from the Navy’s own stock and never surplus at all. On 11 March 1948 all 58 crates — about 35 tons — were loaded aboard a ship for Wilmington, California.

Freight came to $7,000, which nobody in the operation had. Liff put in $1,700 and got the other $5,000 from a dozen other Honolulu businessmen.

Honolulu to Wilmington is not an export. It is a coastwise shipment inside the United States, and no licence was needed for it.

Sold as surplus,
returned as warships.

Canada ran the same experiment with its own war surplus, two years earlier, and wrote down the result. In May 1946 the cabinet adopted rules that refused arms sales to every country but a few close allies. The rules did not reach a warship once its guns were off: a demilitarised hull was not a weapon. The War Assets Corporation put more than a hundred surplus corvettes up for sale.

Haganah agents in New York bought four of them in 1946 through a company called the United Ship Corporation, with money donated to the Jewish Agency: the Beauharnois, Norsyd, Owen Sound and Guelph. Re-registered in Panama, they ran Jewish refugees towards Palestine past the Royal Navy. The Beauharnois, renamed Josiah Wedgwood, sailed from Vado on 19 June 1946 with 1,259 people aboard and was brought into Haifa under British escort on 27 June.

When a Montreal buyer took a fifth, the Arnprior, for $80,000, External Affairs went looking for a way to stop it. Trade and Commerce said demilitarised ships were outside export control. Transport said the ship had never been on the Canadian register, so there was no transfer to refuse. The Deputy Minister of Justice wrote that he knew of “no method under the law of Canada whereby a vessel [could] be sold so that it [could not] be legally used for a certain purpose.” In the end the Arnprior stayed in Halifax because its buyer stopped paying, not because Ottawa could hold it.

In 1948 two of the first four were armed again and commissioned into the new Israeli navy: the Norsyd as INS Haganah on 18 July, the Beauharnois as INS Wedgwood. It is the American rule in this volume in a second jurisdiction: the sale asked whether the object was still a weapon, and nobody asked where it was going. Volume XVIII follows the money that bought them.

Tampico
to Tel Aviv.

From California the guns went out of the country on a yacht. The Idalia carried them to Tampico, on the Mexican gulf coast, which is where the material being collected for Palestine was being assembled.

In April 1948 an agent named Elie Schalit bought a 3,800-ton cargo ship, the Kefalos, and registered her in Panama to a company that did not exist. She loaded at Tampico, with sugar stowed on top of the arms, and sailed on 3 August 1948. At sea her name was painted out and she became the M.A. Pinzón, with wooden structures built on deck to make her look like the ship whose name she had taken. She reached Tel Aviv on 8 September 1948.

• 754 tons of war material, under 1,020 tons of sugar
• 75-millimetre field guns and 16,000 shells
• 500 aircraft machine guns and 60 heavy machine guns
• 170 aerial bombs and barrels of high-octane aviation fuel
• between six and ten million rounds of ammunition
• 15,000 helmets and four radar sets

The sugar was unloaded slowly, in daylight, in front of whoever was watching. The arms came out at night.

That was six weeks before the operation they were used in.

15 October to
4 November 1948.

Operation Yoav was fought to drive a wedge between the Egyptian force on the coast and the Beersheba–Hebron–Jerusalem road, and to take the Negev. Four Israeli brigades were committed under Yigal Allon, with a fifth from 18 October. The Israeli operational dates are 15 to 22 October 1948; the fighting and the occupation of the coastal strip ran to 4 November.

It opened on the evening of 15 October with air attacks on Gaza, al-Majdal, Beersheba and Beit Hanoun. Benny Morris records that artillery was used more extensively than in any previous offensive, together with bombers and fighter-bombers, to soften the villages before they were entered.

Thirty-one Palestinian villages are on the record as attacked, occupied or destroyed in the operation. Nine of them, with the populations the Government of Palestine counted in 1945:

Those nine held 38,330 people. Almost none of them remained.

At al-Dawayima on 29 October the killing of civilians after the village was taken is on the record and the count is disputed. The Israeli army’s own investigation concluded that a hundred villagers had been killed. The village mukhtar, Hassan Mahmoud Ihdeib, testified that he found sixty bodies in the mosque, mostly elderly, and eighty-five at the entrance to Iraq al-Zagh, among them women and children. Morris quotes a participant putting the figure at eighty to a hundred killed by the first wave, and has written that the total ran into the hundreds.

The United Nations relief operation reported that the refugee population of the Gaza Strip rose from 100,000 to 230,000 as a result of the operation. When the United Nations Economic Survey Mission filed its final report on 28 December 1949 it put the number of non-Jewish refugees who had left and had not succeeded in returning at 726,000.

What the counts
named.

The United States prosecuted. In 1950, in the Southern District of California, Greenspun and nine others stood trial for the Hawaii shipment; Nathan Liff appeared as a witness for the prosecution. In Florida the United States Attorney in Miami prosecuted Charles Winters for the three B-17 bombers flown out to Czechoslovakia and on to Israel. The convictions are on the Justice Department’s own clemency list, and so is the statement of what each man was convicted of.

Every count is about getting the material out of the country. Conspiracy, and export without a licence. Buying a crate of certified scrap from a federal disposal agency, or taking it for nothing from a yard holding it on the agency’s behalf, is not among the offences charged, because it was not an offence.

• 10 July 1950 · Hank Greenspun

  Pleaded guilty to violating the Neutrality Act. Fined $10,000, no prison, and lost his civil rights, including the right to vote. Pardoned by President Kennedy on 18 October 1961, which restored them.

• 1949 · Charles Winters

  Convicted of conspiring to export aircraft to a foreign country in violation of the Neutrality Act of 1939. Fined $5,000 and sentenced to eighteen months; served it in Atlanta and was released on 17 November 1949. He is the only one of the three who went to prison. Pardoned by President George W. Bush on 23 December 2008, twenty-four years after his death — the second posthumous pardon on record.

• 1950 · Al Schwimmer

  Convicted on the counts quoted above for moving some thirty surplus aircraft out of the country. Fined $10,000, no prison, stripped of his voting rights and his veterans’ benefits. Pardoned by President Clinton on 20 January 2001, his last day in office.

Three convictions, three pardons, spread across sixty years and three presidents of both parties. The last of the three was granted sixty years after the shipment and twenty-four years after the man who made it died.

One object,
eleven classifications.

Take one gun out of that yard and follow it. Nothing about the object changes between the first step and the last. What changes is the name the paperwork gives it, and with the name, the question anybody is required to ask.

The three steps that test the destination are all after the object has left the government. The eight that do not include every step at which the United States still owned it.

What the record
holds.

• 3 October 1944 – 30 June 1949

  A disposal statute and the agency that ran it cleared about thirty-four billion dollars of war material. Its tests were whether the property was still needed, who had priority, what the price was, and whether a depot had certified the item demilitarised. Where it went after the sale was not one of them.

• 14 November 1947

  A second rule did test destination. It applied to exports, it was administered by a different department, and it was announced to the public on 5 December 1947. On 29 May 1948 the Security Council asked every government to do the same thing for eight named countries.

• 3 January 1948

  A cargo of sixty-five thousand pounds of TNT marked as used machinery was stopped on a pier at Jersey City when a crate was dropped and broke open. It is the only point in this record at which the export rule closed on anything inside the United States. On 12 March the Arab Higher Committee’s delegation put the seizure before the United Nations delegations in a memorandum of its own.

• Early 1948

  A yard holding certified scrap at a naval air station in Hawaii contained machine guns that still worked, and at least 500 barrels that had never been surplus. Fifty-eight crates left Honolulu on 11 March 1948 as domestic freight and were charged no licence, because none was required.

• 8 September 1948

  Seven hundred and fifty-four tons of war material came ashore at Tel Aviv under a thousand tons of sugar: field guns, sixteen thousand shells, five hundred aircraft machine guns, sixty heavy machine guns, a hundred and seventy aerial bombs, aviation fuel, and between six and ten million rounds.

• 15 October – 4 November 1948

  Thirty-one Palestinian villages were attacked, occupied or destroyed in one operation in the south. Nine of them held 38,330 people at the 1945 count, and almost none of them remained. The relief operation reported the Gaza Strip’s refugee population rising from 100,000 to 230,000. On 28 December 1949 the United Nations Economic Survey Mission put the number who had left and not returned at 726,000.

• 1949–1950, then 1961, 2001 and 2008

  Three men were convicted. Every count was about export. All three convictions were pardoned, by three presidents, the last of them sixty years after the shipment.

What that establishes is narrow, and it is about the American side of it. A government that had decided the destination of arms mattered was at the same time operating a clearance programme in which the destination was not a question anyone was required to ask, over material that a depot had certified would not fire. The certification was the only barrier between the two rules, and it was applied by the seller, to its own satisfaction, with no re-test at any later step.

The Department also knew what it was looking at. On 22 September 1947 its own Near East director told the Secretary of State that an imposed solution would mean loss of property and bloodshed, and that the United States would be expected to contribute force, materials and money to it. That is eight weeks before the licences were suspended.

What it does not establish is a decision to arm one side. The embargo was real, the licences were revoked, the prosecutions were brought, and no document here shows anyone in authority choosing to let this material go. The Agency’s assessment of 5 August 1948 is a forecast of what would happen, not a permission for it.

The record is of two rules over one object, with a criminal penalty attached to only one of them, and the dates on both sides of the sequence are above.