So, I watched a good little documentary called “Above and Beyond” about the American WWII veteran pilots who volunteered to break the US neutrality acts and international arms embargoes during the Israeli War of Independence to smuggle aircraft and serve as combat pilots for the then non-existent Israeli air force.
It was a good mix of historical narration and entertaining interviews with surviving pilots decades later. They come off like the real-world "Expendables", macho grandpas reminiscing and kibbitzing.
It was obviously one-sided, and may well have overplayed the importance of the volunteers and air effort for the Israeli cause, but they made a case for the importance of the international underground smuggling ring and American volunteers (nearly all jewish) in making the difference between Israel having a small operational air force or no air force at all.
IMDB link here:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2704752/?ref_=nv_sr_1
So, it got me thinking about the plausibility of outside volunteers and smugglers providing a counter-capability for the Palestinian & Arab coalition side.
If any of the Arab leaderships in Palestine or the Arab capitals had anticipated that the Zionists had gained an advantage through underground arms supplies and volunteers, and that the armed forces of the Arab states would not be sufficient to totally defeat the Zionists (especially if faced with an arms embargo once the conflict escalated), could they have established their own volunteer & arms smuggling ring to counter that of their enemies.
And if so, what might such a network have looked like, and where should the Palestinian/Arab side have looked for resources?
To review the assets the Zionist side had, they had at the outset of the war no air force or armor, and did not get them until they were smuggled in from the black market or Czechoslovakia. They had no training ground in the country. For human resources, the Israelis relied on jewish veterans of the British Commonwealth forces and American forces mainly (and probably some other European and Latin American militaries) who had served in air or land combat arms as pilots, drivers, gunners, etc.
Palestinian Arabs, unless they joined the military of another Arab state, were not given the training and experience operating advanced military hardware matching that available in the jewish settler community and among jewish foreign volunteers.
There seem to have been sharp limits on the training and practical experience of the armies of Arab states as well, even though they were British equipped and could legally purchase arms internationally until the UN called an arms embargo in 1947.
If I recall correctly, although Syria, Egypt and Iraq were the most populous of the Arab coalition states, the Jordanians and Lebanese were better trained and more combat effective.
My guess as to why this was so is that Egyptian, Syrian and Iraqi nationalism and political agitation against French and British control was more advanced than Lebanese or Jordanian.
The British and French knew they were very unpopular in those countries (as they were among Palestinians west of the Jordan river, especially after the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt), so they probably took great care to not train or equip forces too well that would be used against them if they ever lined up with the more popular political opinions in their countries.
Meanwhile, the French and British probably thought the Lebanese and Jordanian military forces were more reliable clients, and they trained and equipped them to a higher professional standard. Or, to consider it from the flip side, it was easier in Lebanon and Jordan for quality people to accept being committed members of their French and British sponsored militaries than it was in Egypt, Palestine, Syria or Iraq.
In addition to forces from “front-line” countries, there were some volunteers from all Arabic speaking countries in the Middle East and North Africa. There were also small groups of volunteers from Iran & Pakistan. Some deserters from British forces and Nazi German or Nazi-sponsored forces fought on the Arab side. These included most notably Bosnian Muslim ex-Waffen SS troops. I heard a rumor that some volunteers from Franco’s Spain served on the Arab side too.
They all don’t seem to have had much effect though.
It seems to me that to recruit a volunteer force with the requisite military training, experience and access to equipment to overmatch volunteers from the Jewish Diaspora, the Arab coalition side would have needed to reach out more heavily beyond the Middle East.
The best recruiting grounds for Muslim soldiers would likely have been among veterans of the armies of the Raj and Morroccans and Algerians with experience in French forces. They are the main ones from majority Muslim countries who had experiences with high-intensity combined arms combat in WWII in large numbers that probably exceeded the numbers of diaspora jews who were veterans.
One question though is how many of them had WWII experience in the air or armor or artillery arms, and how many had logistics or war industry experience and contacts, needed to organize, man and supply an international Muslim volunteer effort? To an extent, there was war industry Maghreb and South Asia, even if very, very small compared to Europe, northeast Asia and North America.
There were of course many Muslims who were veterans of Soviet service, but emigration and smuggling of all kinds were uniquely challenging for Soviet citizens.
Another recruiting pool, although a much smaller one, would have been among Arab-born or descended citizens of the US, UK, British Commonwealth and France. This pool would have been overwhelmingly Christian rather than Muslim, but could have found common cause with the Palestinian irregulars, Lebanese, or Syrian forces without sticking out too much.
Thoughts?