Special Night Squads

The Special Night Squads (SNS) were a joint British-Jewish force consisting of British soldiers and Jewish Settlement Police, established by Orde Wingate in Palestine in 1936, during the 1936-1939 Arab revolt.

Wingate hand-picked his men, among them Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan, from the ranks of the "Notrim" and trained them to form mobile ambushes. As practical support from the British was minimal Wingate collaborated illegally with the Haganah, reinforcing his unit with FOSH regulars.

The force was highly successful in bringing attacks by Arab guerillas on the pipeline of the Iraqi Petroleum Company to a halt. However, the squads were known for their ruthless efficiency and brutal methods. According to Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld their training included "... how to kill without compunction, how to interrogate prisoners by shooting every tenth man to make the rest talk; and how to deter future terrorists by pushing the heads of captured ones into pools of oil and then freeing them to tell the story". [van Creveld, 2004, p. 46.]

Yoram Kaniuk writes:

The operations came more frequently and became more ruthless. The Arabs complained to the British about Wingate's brutality and harsh punitive methods. Even members of the field squads complained... that during the raids on Bedouin encampments Wingate would behave with extreme viciousness and fire mercilessly. Wingate believed in the principle of surprise in punishment, which was designed to confine the gangs to their villages. More than once he had lined rioters up in a row and shot them in cold blood. Wingate did not try to justify himself; weapons and war cannot be pure. [Kaniuk, 2001, p. 19.]

The British viewed Wingate as a security risk and the SNS were disbanded in 1938. Wingate was posted out of the country and his passport was stamped "NOT ALLOWED TO ENTER PALESTINE". [Godspeed, 2001, p. 96.]

Field Marshall Montgomery, who as commander of northern Palestine had authorised the SNS, told Dayan in 1966 that he considered Wingate to have "been mentally unbalanced and that the best thing he ever did was to get killed in a plane crash in 1944". [van Creveld, 2004, p. 115.]

The Special Night Squads came to be viewed as the British army's first special forces and the forerunners of the Special Air Service regiments. [Brown and Louis, 1999, p. 193.]

Footnotes

References

*Brown, Judith and Louis, Roger (1999). "The Oxford History of the British Empire". Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-820564-3
*Godspeed, Michael (2001). "When Reason Fails: Portraits of Armies at War: America, Britain, Israel, and the Future". Greenwood. ISBN 0-275-97378-6
*Kaniuk, Yoram (2001). "Commander of the Exodus". Grove Press. ISBN 0-8021-3808-X
*Katz, Sam (1988). "Israeli Units Since 1948". Osprey Publishing. ISBN 0-85045-837-4
*van Creveld, Martin (2004). "Moshe Dayan". Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-84669-8