If long life is a reward for a life well lived, even 100 years feels too short for Jack Mann. Tributes to the centenarian, who died on August 15, have recounted his service in the Long Range Desert Group, a special forces outfit tasked with performing secret operations against the Nazis in North Africa during the Second World War.
His unit, of which he was the last surviving member, was skilled at working behind enemy lines to frustrate the Third Reich’s campaigns and sabotage their hard power as well as their routes of supply and communication. It has been credited with aiding in efforts against Rommel’s men and preventing him capturing the pivotal region, not least the Suez Canal.
Yet Mann was the very model of British modesty common to men of his generation. The radio operator once said: “I can’t say I’m a hero. My job was communications, and that’s what I did.” With respect to Mann, who later served in the SAS and SBS, this statement is plainly untrue. He was a hero whose service took place in the thick of it, under threat of certain execution if captured, and without his skills any number of assignments could well have ended in disaster.
Mann credited his decision to volunteer for these most dangerous of duties to an uncle who told him what was being done to Jews in Germany. “I joined the Army, and British intelligence soon heard I had skills with languages and came to me,” he explained.
In doing so, Mann placed himself within a long and storied tradition of British Jewish military heroism. It is a tradition which we tend to associate primarily with the Jewish Brigade and the daring feats of the thousands who answered Churchill’s call for volunteers for the British war effort from pre-state Israel.
However, there are others from that era, before, and later whose stories are not as well known.
Squadron Leader Lawrence Goodman was one of 20,000 Jews who served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. The RAF Museum notes that he volunteered upon hearing the news that Britain was joining the war against Nazi Germany and, initially sent to Canada as a flight instructor, requested a transfer back to the frontlines. He was assigned to Squadron 617, one year after the operation that earned them the name The Dambusters, and flew 30 sorties, including a raid that demolished the Arnsberg rail viaduct, and even turned his artillery on Kehlsteinhaus – better known as Eagle’s Nest. Squadron Leader Goodman, whose mates called him “Benny”, was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in 2017 and died four years later, aged 100.
It has been estimated that 50,000 Jews enlisted to fight for Britain in the Great War, one of the bravest of which was surely Issy Smith, who was born Ishroulch Shmeilowitz in Egypt in 1890. The Victoria Cross Association narrates how Smith, of the Manchester Regiment, was wounded at Givenchy in 1914 and Neuve Chapelle the following year, gassed at Ypres, and later survived a torpedo attack while being shipped to the Middle East. It was at Ypres where he displayed the selfless courage that earned him his VC, with the citation describing how he “left his company on his own initiative” and ran toward the enemy to rescue a wounded comrade and carry the injured man to safety while under constant threat from machine-gun fire. According to the Victorian Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women Australia, Smith emigrated to Melbourne, where he died, aged 52, in 1940.
Many decades later, Private Jason Burt, from Hackney, became another British Jewish military hero, in his case in the Falklands conflict, where he served in the 3rd battalion of the Parachute Regiment. The South Atlantic Medal Association records that Burt concealed his trench foot to take part in battle at Mount Longdon and, after helping a comrade wounded by a landmine, joined his sergeant in “the attempt to take out a 50-cal machine gun position that won his platoon sergeant a posthumous Victoria Cross”. Burt joined in the subsequent attack and was killed by a sniper operating the 50-cal, two days before the war ended. He was only 17.
British Jewish heroism like that of Mann, Goodman, Smith and Burt deserves to be remembered in its own right, for the courage, endurance, sacrifice and patriotism embodied by men who answered this country’s call. And without wishing to downplay the contribution made to the Jewish women who have enlisted in the armed forces, it is important that the heroes we are talking about were men.
Masculinity is in the dog house of late, the word itself more often than not shackled to the adjective “toxic”, and retelling the feats of ordinary men thrown into extraordinary circumstances can remind us that manliness in service of noble ends is a virtue to be admired and emulated.
If you fear the influence of the “manosphere” on boys, the answer isn’t to wheel a television into every classroom and make them sit through the government-approved scolding exercise that is Adolescence. The answer is to teach them about men like Jack Mann.
There is another reason to venerate British Jewish heroism. British Jews are under assault on all fronts, by Islamists, leftists and fascists.
They are attacked in the streets and in their synagogues. They are demonised for their attachment to the honourable cause of Zionism. They are accused of dual loyalty by people whose own fidelity to Britain would have been sorely tested during the period 1939-1945.
British Jews owe their enemies nothing but contempt, but remembering Jewish valour, passing on stories of those who fought and bled and died under the Union Jack, can be a powerful rejoinder to the calumnies of the antisemites. This is what our people have done for this country. How about yours?
But Jewish heroes must never become a mere trump card against the haters of the Jews. They are worth so much more than that. Jewish life has not endured only to defy their foes’ prejudices. The derring-do of British Jews is a testament to the individual grit of soldiers and sailors and airmen but also to the customs of service and justice engrained in Jewish tradition.
The memories of Jack Mann and other Jewish war heroes, what they stood for, how they fell, and the world they helped shape, are a treasure and an example for their children and grandchildren and the generations on down, and for Klal Yisrael.
These are the men you come from. This is what Jewish bravery looks like. Though you might never be called as they were to take a stand on the battlefield, in the stands you do take in life, carry yourself in the spirit of the last hero of the Long Range Desert Group and men like him.
Be brave. Be Jewish. Be a Mann.
Stephen Daisley is a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail and a regular contributor to The Spectator
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