Minneapolis Sunday Tribune · 11 July 1948

CP-1948-110

Newsmen See ‘Real’ Lydda War

By Robert Hewett, Associated Press, Tel Aviv, Israel

Scan 1700 × 1032 pixels

Transcribed from the clipping

“TEL AVIV, ISRAEL—(AP)—It’s only a 25-minute taxi ride from the sunny, quiet streets of Tel Aviv to the hot, dusty battlefield of Lydda airport. But even if you can take a taxi to the front, it is a real war which has broken out again in the Holy Land.

That is what a group of correspondents found out Saturday noon when they rode out to look over the big airbase seized from the Arabs yesterday by Jewish troops. We never got quite into Lydda airport. Instead, we were caught in an Arab counterattack on Wilhelma, tiny German-founded settlement a short way across the fields from the airport.

‘Just like Saipan,’ commented Keith Wheeler, Chicago Sun-Times correspondent who covered wartime landings in the Pacific. We snuggled a little deeper in a hole beside a stone well as Arab mortar shells whammed into the village and machine gun bullets crackled overhead.

Tough young Jewish soldiers wearing American army-type battle dress fired back at Arab positions on a nearby hill. In the pre-dawn darkness the Jews had blasted holes through booby-trapped barbed wire emplacements around Wilhelma.

By 6 a.m., a sturdy Jewish company commander reported, one company of the Arab legion’s crack troops and 200 Arab irregulars had been driven out in house-to-house fighting… ‘The Arabs will never make us give up Lydda now that we have it,’ a Jewish escorting officer said grimly. In just 25 minutes we were back in Tel Aviv.

Sabbath promenaders walked the streets unmindful of the fight only 15 miles away. The fifth air raid alert of the day sounded shortly afterward, but nobody got excited. The people in Tel Aviv seem more worried these days about inflation prices than the few bombs dropped by the Egyptians.”

Context added by this archive

The same week as Lydda, and the story is that the correspondents went out in a taxi and got shot at. Twenty-five minutes each way. The subheadings are “Caught In Attack” and “We’ll Hold Lydda.”

Beside it, an Associated Press item headed “Christian Buildings Hit by Jewish Mortars,” in which an Armenian woman is killed at the convent of Saint James.

Cite this clipping

More from the 1940s

• Jewish Reprisal Raids On Two Arab Villages Take Toll of 8 LivesThe News Journal · 1 January 1948
• Palestine Blasts Rip Arab OfficesThe New York Times · 5 January 1948
• Jews Blow Up Military Post Of Jaffa ArabsMorning Advocate · 5 January 1948
• Ninety Wounded In Truck Blast At HeadquartersThe Beaumont Enterprise · 5 January 1948
• Jews Dynamite HQ of Arabs’ High CommandDaily News · 5 January 1948
• 15 Arabs Die In Jaffa BlastTerre Haute Tribune · 5 January 1948
• All 334 clippings from the 1940s →

In these collections