"Volunteers in the Alien Force"

- CONTENT -
Volunteers of the settlement in the excavations or excavated companies were volunteers from Palestine who enlisted in the rescue of the British army from September 1939. The soldiers in this unit, who later became part of the Royal Engineers Corps, were engaged in interpersonal engineering activities throughout the first year and a half of World War II. Alongside the soldiers of the IRGC, it is also possible to appoint the volunteers of the settlement to the Royal Navy and the operating company of the ports 1039, Suvars, which was also an Israeli unit of the British Royal Engineering Force.

Many of the volunteers for the various fertilities were Jews from elephants from Germany and Europe. Alongside them, they also volunteered for military service and settlement veterans, east, Ashkenazi, religious, secular, single, married, young, and old, various constituencies and their noble defense and the IDF. At first, the national institutions did not cooperate with the recruitment of the excavations, among other things, because some volunteers for these units were Arab citizens of Israel. Starting in the summer of 1940 with the establishment of transnational and ergical units in the framework of the excavation force began mobilizing these units in encouraging the leadership of the settlement.

Among the volunteers’ motivations to join these units can be counted:
The desire for heat in Nazi Germany
The study of military professions in the hope of bringing them in the time of the Jewish army to the rehabilitation of
The way to make illegal stays in the Land of Israel legal through mobilization
A solution to unemployment and financial problems.
The recruitment for the excavations was halted in 1942 with the closing of the Israeli army.

Many soldiers from the Battle of the IRGC fighters fell in Nazi captivity when the surrender of Greece to Nazi Germany on 29 April 1941, and later on the Battle of Crete on 1 June 1941 in what is called the captivity affair, is not the fall of thousands of prisoners in the Nazi captivity. On the side of the fighters of the occupiers, more fighters from other units of the British army in the Land of Israel, but the fact that most of the prisoners were from the Battle of the Israel Brigades led to the fact that over the years the affair was almost complete.

The background for mobilization and units

Already in May 1939, even before the outbreak of World War II, the leadership of the Jewish community in Israel began a volunteer commander whose goal was to identify those people who would be willing to volunteer for defense missions on the Land of Israel. Although many expressed their desire to volunteer for military service, the leadership of the community decided not to turn them into British military lines as a protest signal for the White Book policy.

At the same time, independent attempts by the British military authorities began to identify those people willing to volunteer for local security missions and recruit people to active service in very low numbers. With the outbreak of the war, the British Mandate authorities turned to the Jewish Agency in a concrete proposal to recruit workers to work divisions to service on the French front, similar to the Labor Division of the First World War. This proposal came when the British army landed in France to help it protect against the possibility of a German invasion of France. The British prime minister in Israel presented the request as a work proposal for unemployed people, in light of the state of unemployment in Israel. The British were very afraid of the “fifth tag” among the Eritrean volunteers, as many of them were of German ancestry or the residents of the settlement and comrades who were promoted against the White Book. This concern led to the decision to allow the volunteers to serve only in engineering and construction positions in the Royal Engineering Force, in the port unit of 1039, Suvars, in the excavations, as well as to various units of the British Army, among them in the transport force, in the contact force, in the Medical Force, in the Medical Force