Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery

Chapter Eight

Somerton Man is a mystery and he belongs much more now to fiction than to fact – to my father’s domain, rather than my mother’s. But fact should never be abandoned when it is available. When I turned to the newspapers to find out what else was happening in 1948, I read them all and then woke from sleep with a catchcry in my ears: ‘Arms for Israel’.

I first heard that slogan as a child, in relation to the 1967 Six Day War but, of course, the State of Israel was established in 1948 – on 14 May, to be precise. My parents and their old friends Maxie and Shula sat round the radio waiting for the count in the United Nations. They held their breath. They cheered when our representative, Herbert Evatt, said that Australia voted yes. Then England, who had tried so hard to stop the exodus from the concentration camps to Eretz Israel, abstained.

But the State of Israel was proclaimed as soon as the British mandate ended, which was the signal for immediate attack by just about everybody in the Middle East. ‘Drive the Jews into the sea!’ they cried – Egypt and Syria and Jordan and the others, all with Russian armaments and other weapons they had been sold, despite the arms embargo which prevented everyone from legally selling arms to Israel.

When I was a young woman I met an old lady called Rachel, who was a sweet grandma in a pink fuzzy cashmere jumper with jingly pearls around her neck. She was knitting as she told me how she had held out with forty other fighters at a kibbutz on the Jerusalem road. They had fought for their sisters and their children and their goats, all hiding in the basement behind them. A survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto had sneaked out at night and used a Molotov cocktail to blow up a tank and block the road, so the human waves could be picked off as they climbed and fell. Out of forty fighters, seventeen had died but they had bravely held up the advance of the Egyptian army for more than twenty days. Clearly, the Egyptians did not know how to use all those nifty field guns that the Russians had donated; one of them would have wiped all the kibbutz’s resistance.

After the Israeli army came and liberated them, she asked how long they had been fighting, and was amazed to find it was weeks. She had utterly lost count of time. When she looked in a mirror and saw the haunted eyes, the singed hair, the lost eyebrows and the sooty tattooing from the back blast of the Sten on her face, she did not know herself. And she slid to the floor and slept for twelve hours. Then she woke up, washed her face, and slept again, because the Egyptians had retreated and the kibbutz was safe. For the moment.

I asked, ‘Didn’t you feel terrible, killing them all with your Sten gun?’ and Rachel said, ‘Of course, I can still see every one of their faces in my mind. But we would never surrender Israel, just die in her defence, so better take as many enemies with us, nu?’

And she kept knitting. I don’t think I have ever been so disconcerted. I knew about soldiers but Frau Rachel M was something different. That sort of resistance went against the long-held Arab belief that Jews were cowards, which came about because Jews were not allowed to carry arms or serve in Muslim armies, paying a hefty tax for their exemption. In fact, the entire concept of Jewish cowardice was white-anted and the Jews suddenly became cruel oppressors, literally overnight.

Given later political developments, it is hard to envisage 1948 and remember how very alone Israel was, how tiny, how oppressed and powerless – and how very close 1948 was to the time of those films of the liberation of the concentration camps which my mother saw at the cinema. The British filmed the liberation of Bergen Belsen because they had an acute historical sense and they didn’t want anyone to be able to say that it hadn’t happened (which hasn’t stopped the Holocaust deniers). But it did happen. I have spoken to people who were there as prisoners, and to Dennis Pryor, who was a member of a forlorn Friends Ambulance unit, with their five blankets and their packets of aspirin and bottle of iodine, trundling along through the shattered gates into hell.

My mother wept as she watched that film and later I saw it and wept as well. What possible recompense could be offered for such cruelty and deprivation? And where could Jews ever feel safe in the world again? One reason why Hitler was so successful was that many German Jews like the man who told Dennis Pryor about his ‘Deusche Hertz’, his German heart, had thought of themselves as Germans first and then Jews, just as I would feel myself to be Australian and then Anglican. On the extensive list of betrayals in world history, Hitler almost makes it into Stalin’s league where massacring his own people is concerned.

After the genocide of the camps, no one could think of themselves as any nationality first. The survivors had to think of themselves as Jews. A Jewish homeland became the only way the world could possibly try to make sure that this atrocity never happened again. But as soon as the Jews got there, it seemed that they were about to be ‘swept into the sea in forty-eight hours’, as the demagogues boasted.

Let us examine the timeline of the War of Independence. It was not exactly a declared war. It just happened because armies invaded. If you look out of your door and find the street full of soldiers who mean to kill you, you can reasonably assume that you are at war. In this case, the war could be said to have started in March 1948 with the siege of Jerusalem and it lasted for almost a year, with intermittent truces brokered by Britain or America. The first Czech arms arrived in April and the war continued until the first truce, 11 June to 9 July, then blew up again until 17 September. That truce did not last long either and the next ceasefire did not come about until 7 January 1949. Armistice agreements followed – on 24 February with Egypt, on 23 March with Lebanon, 3 April with Jordan and 20 July with Syria.

In other words, on the relevant date for the death of Somerton Man, 30 November 1948, there was a war in the Middle East for which Israel still desperately needed arms. Thus many non-Jewish people felt it was not only righteous, but potentially exciting to help Israel. At the beginning of the war Israel had no air force and no navy and it was buying a lot of ordnance from anyone who was willing to risk British disapproval, then employing the captain of any ship willing to run the blockade.

Nineteen forty-eight was the time of Operation Balak, an arms smuggling operation, named after a biblical king of the Moabites whose name means, roughly, Destroyer. The Zionist military organisation Haganah recruited pilots and sailors in Europe for Operation Balak, including an English pilot, Gordon Levett, who flew Avia S-199 fighters, supplied by Czechoslovakia, from that country to Rehovot airfield in Israel. Repeatedly. He flew many missions, bringing in new planes, people, arms and ammunition. This admirable man was not a Jew and he was certainly not in it for the money. He was in it for the thrill, and because he had a strong sense of justice and felt for the underdog Israel. He said, ‘I shall leave the world a better place than when I entered it because I helped to found the state of Israel’.

Czechoslovakia supplied a lot of arms to Israel and Australia sold them at least four planes. Australia had voted ‘yes’ to the establishment of the nation, so someone selling arms to Israel from Australia was breaking no laws. A lot of people might easily have done so. Amongst my father’s friends, there were a reasonable number of smugglers, although smuggling in the innocent old days just meant evading the government duty on clothes, silk, perfume, tobacco, alcohol and jewellery, especially watches. I never met drug smugglers until I started my career in the Magistrates’ Court – and they were a different kettle of fish altogether.

Large amounts of ‘uncustomed goods’ used to come through Melbourne Port in the days before containerisation. (And now too, of course, but it isn’t anything as interesting.) Some of the old smuggling methods were very ingenious. There is a space between the inner and outer hull of a ship and Portland Bill (that couldn’t have been his real name) tied his watches onto a long thin line, slipped the necklace of watches down into the hollow between the two hulls and secured the end to a porthole window sill, which he had holed and then patched. No one ever found them.

I thought the old-style smugglers were very exotic. Some of them had rings in both ears and they all had that sparkle in their eyes that identifies the risk taker, the downhill skier, the parachute jumper. You can see it in athletes and in con men. It’s very attractive and totally unreliable but, as Phryne would say, inadvisable has never meant undesirable. Like my clients in the Magistrates’ Court, the smugglers put the sort of effort and brains into evading the law, which would have made them a good career if they had been obeying the law. But that always misses the point. They liked the danger, they loved the risk, they were adrenaline junkies. They told me three separate ways to slip into Melbourne Port without attracting notice from the authorities, all of them dangerous. A man called Rene, pronounced Reen, told my father how he had run the Rip at its height in a small boat. My dad asked, ‘Why run it? Why didn’t you wait until the tide turned?’ and I remember the flash of white teeth as Rene grinned and replied ‘Oh, but that wouldn’t be any fun!’

Australian sympathy has always been with the underdog and Australia, the Jewish Encyclopedia informs me, has never had a pogrom – one of the very few countries to be so distinguished. Australian soldiers in Palestine during General Allenby’s 1917 campaign made friends with the kibbutzim. They didn’t see the Israelis as major threats to world peace but as people who offered them tea and allowed them to join in the kibbutz feasts. One returned soldier I knew was very proud of his ability to dance the hora. The Jewish authorities in Jerusalem furthered the general good will by warning shopkeepers not to overcharge Australian soldiers for their souvenirs. By 1948 there were plenty of disaffected and bored unemployed Aussie soldiers, airmen and sailors who might not have minded stepping a little way over the line for a good cause.

I do not mean to say that Australian politics were clearly pro-Zionist or anything as simple as that. Chanan Reich’s instructive and thorough book Australia and Israel: An Ambiguous Relationship details the endless bickering which went on in the United Nations, as well as domestically. Some of the denunciations of Israel by the Catholic church are disquieting to read, since this is soon after Hitler and they knew what the end product of such demagoguery could be. But basically, as a country, we came down in favour of the establishment of a Jewish state. Meanwhile, no one in Israel thought that the ‘sea of enemies’ was going to ebb any time soon, so there was a market, and where there is a market, there is a seller.

For a price. And for the delicious danger.

If I had been around at the time, for instance, I might have bought a biggish tramp steamer, say 900 tons – that’s a reasonable burden. For the purposes of this narrative I will call her Deborah, the name of a very strong-minded biblical general. I would take my SS Deborah up to New Guinea, where a word in the right ear might get me a lot of abandoned American army hardware for a song or two, which I would stow in the hold in crates marked ‘scrap iron’. (As a wartime souvenir, a friend of my dad’s brought back a complete Bren gun, broken down into components and shipped as ‘bicycle parts’. He said that he had captured it and therefore it was his.)

My SS Deborah would sail through most inspections because if Customs opened the top crates, all they would find would be oily bits of unidentifiable iron. Besides, Customs wouldn’t bother searching a tramp too thoroughly, because there were so many of them. Until recently, tramp steamers were the mail boats, carriers of small luxuries and cargo runners to many islands. When I got a job on one in the seventies, we carried mail and also videotapes, books, cosmetics, whisky, pharmaceuticals (like aspirin, insect repellant, disinfectants, not prescription or illegal drugs) and lots of not strictly necessary things, such as oil paints, pencils, ribbons, embroidery thread, dyes, pins and needles. Tramp steamers were like the pack peddlers of old, making life easier for the inhabitants of islands too small to merit visits from official ships. Now I believe that those islanders are supplied from planes but tramps were a fact of the sea for a long time and not, perhaps, excessively scrupulous about what they were carrying, or for whom.

After that I would take my SS Deborah down the coast and around Australia, then past Fremantle to Africa and thence to Israel. I would sniggle my way through the blockade and arrive in Haifa, which was under Haganah control from 22 April, where I would donate my armaments and my ship, starting the nucleus of an Israeli Navy. And I wouldn’t have been the only Gentile to do so. If the Adelaide Jews knew that Somerton Man had been smuggling arms to Israel, for instance, they would certainly have put the little commemorative pebbles on the grave of a righteous Gentile.

So could our Somerton Man have been a smuggler? That would explain the sand in the cuffs of his other trousers and confirm the idea that he might have been landed by dinghy, avoiding official attention, and walked ashore. It would explain his cargo master’s gear and the way his hands were unmarked, even though he was definitely connected to the sea. It would explain why he was sitting and waiting on Somerton Beach. He was waiting for a boat to fetch him. Like any smoker who is faced with an uncertain wait, he lit a cigarette to beguile the time and died, so gently that the cigarette went out in his mouth, and didn’t even singe his cheek or the collar of his expensive, snazzy coat.

But even if we conclude that Somerton Man was a smuggler, how likely is it that he was smuggling arms to Israel? He may, of course, just have been moving various precious cargoes through various dutiable ports but that theory doesn’t seem to be consistent with the manner of his death. Certainly, smugglers are sometimes killed because a crate of watches has gone suspiciously astray or because they are suspected of being a nark but Somerton Man wasn’t tortured or even roughly handled, which tends to be the first recourse of scoundrels. He was simply killed, efficiently and cleanly, in a manner more consistent with politics than criminality. In smuggling terms, that would seem to define him as an arms smuggler and if he was selling arms, where else other than Israel could he sell them in 1948?

Let us survey that rather grim and depressing year. In terms of conflicts, it began with the attacks on Jews in Palestine and their appeal to the United Nation leading to the 14 May declaration of the state and the consequent war. In February there was the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia but since the Czechoslovakians were selling arms to Israel, no one was likely to be smuggling them into that country. There was a civil war in Costa Rica and Tito had finally split with Stalin, so the Russian advisors were recalled from Yugoslavia, but in both cases there is not a lot of connection with Australia.

For most of 1948, the Russians blockaded Berlin and the Berlin airlift kept the city going. Dennis Pryor told me that the planes flew in one continuous stream, approaching, landing, unloading, refuelling and taking off. If a plane missed it’s landing it could not go around and try again. It had to land elsewhere because the planes never stopped. A remarkable effort. It lasted for eleven months, after which the Russians gave up and lifted the blockade. Again, an interesting story but not something that would have been considered terribly important down in the Antipodes.

Greece was having a terrible civil war but Greek affairs mostly involved Greeks – and still do, whereas Jewish affairs involve Jews, who are much more widespread than Greeks. Any Greeks in Australia were probably so thankful to be out of Greece that the idea of supporting either side would not have struck them as a possibility. That, at least, is what the Greeks I knew in the fifties said to me.

Meanwhile, President Truman was re-elected. The US Marshall Plan (or the European Recovery Program) went ahead providing monetary support. Europe was being repaired, settling into the new world order. South Africa had embraced apartheid, which was unpleasant but not relevant to this enquiry. The Phillipines had a rebellion. There was an oncoming war between South Korea and North Korea, exacerbated by Russia, China and America putting their oars in as usual. The Dutch were in trouble in Indonesia, which is closer to Australia but already had a lot of unclaimed ordnance, both Japanese and American, so neither the Dutch nor the Indonesians would have needed to buy extra from Australia. And as 1948 shaded into 1949, Ireland became independent of Britain, the Communists defeated the Nationalists in China and the Soviets detonated their first A-bomb. Makes you feel privileged to live in the present, doesn’t it?

In short, if we decide that Somerton Man was an arms smuggler, the only likely destinations from Australia would seem to be Ireland or Israel. In a Phryne Fisher short story (see page 176) I considered the possibility that Somerton Man had been involved in smuggling armaments to Ireland, so I shall concentrate on Israel here. If Somerton Man was supplying arms to Israel, why would his associates or masters or enemies decide to kill him? Who would want to intercept his cargo? The British? Any local Arabs? Possibly the Catholics, who had opposed the establishment of Israel very fiercely? Or perhaps our very own security service?

Let us see how that might play. By going against the blockade, Somerton Man had offended the spooks’ sensibilities. They didn’t want to hurt him or bruise him. They just want him dead and they must have hoped that the death would be marked ‘natural’ and not investigated. But they didn’t know that Somerton Man had already disposed of all his identifying documents, right down to his luggage labels, and purged his baggage of all those incidental coins and stamps and talismans of home. As a result, the very solitude and peace of Somerton Man’s death attracted the attention that it was designed to avoid.

In which case, that satisfied expression which so haunts me might be caused by the fact that his boatload of armaments had sailed, that the crates in its hold were on their way to defend Israel, and it was too late, far too late, for it to be intercepted. Those arms might have been abstracted from an ammunition dump in Adelaide or from Woomera, where my father worked briefly. During the war and in its aftermath, there were always those quartermasters who improved the shining hour by selling their stock.

But for Somerton Man, the fight was over.