WI Britain abandoned military gear intact in Palestine?

In 1948 the British drilled holes in tank gun barrels, drove AFVs over cliffs into the sea and generally wrecked whatever they weren't backloading out during their evacuation of the Mandate.

WI they didn't, instead they just left what they weren't taking with them in their abandoned military bases? Who would get this gear, what difference would it make?
 

Blair152

Banned
In 1948 the British drilled holes in tank gun barrels, drove AFVs over cliffs into the sea and generally wrecked whatever they weren't backloading out during their evacuation of the Mandate.

WI they didn't, instead they just left what they weren't taking with them in their abandoned military bases? Who would get this gear, what difference would it make?
Then the Israelis would get the lion's share. They wouldn't have to rely on surplus Czech-made Mauser K98ks which had been deliberately sabotaged.
They could have relied on the British .303 caliber SMLEs.
 
If the Israelis have more and better weapons, maybe the West Bank and Gaza, all of mandate Palestine, become part of Israel. The battles for the Jerusalem roads, Jerusalem itself, Gaza, and the southern West Bank were all grueling positional fights heavy weaponry would have made a big difference in.


This would mean a larger Nakba for sure, and weaker, angrier Arab states more concerned with dealing with the larger than OTL refugee flood. A much more confident and more heavily armed Israel, which may lead them to either 1) embark earlier on military adventurism to "deal the last blow" or 2) feel less threatened and try to ratchet down the conflict from a position of unquestioned power like a lot of Israelis on the street wanted to do post-1967.

The changes for Palestinian nationalism would be huge, with all of Palestine conquered by the Israelis, there could be a national awakening among the refugee diaspora in 1948 instead of uneasy decades spent trying to be Jordanians.

In general it would move the Arab-Israeli conflict "forward" to something resembling the 1967 power balance. How the Arab states would react to an even harder military defeat- and one given to them with a much larger element of western complicity than OTL 1948- would cause huge butterflies.

All of these reasons, it should be noted, were taken into consideration by the British OTL- they knew the military balance favored the Israelis, and they knew the Israelis (or, well, proto-Israeli militias) were trying to get heavy weaponry from the British, and they didn't want to be seen as basically handing Palestine to the Jewish militias on a plate as they left, so a lot of AFV's got driven off of cliffs, and a lot of guns got holes drilled in them.
 
Whoa! I never heard or read anything K98s being deliberately sabotaged.

What's your source for this?

I have heard some stuff about this, although it was from something I saw on the History Channel, so it's a questionable source that should be taken with a grain of salt.

Anyways, as the story goes (assuming it's accurate:confused:), a number of Czech arms factories, such as the Brno works & Skoda, which had been making 98-type Mausers (the Vz.24) before the German invasion were commandeered by the Nazis & were tweaked so they built Kar. 98Ks for the Germans. In one of the more subtle and successful acts of industrial resistance and sabotage, the factory workers deliberately misadjusted the front sights so the weapons would shoot off-target in both the horizontal and vertical, and the Germans never discovered this.

At the end of WW2, a lot of German military equipment was abandoned in Czechoslovakia, or left unifinished in the factories, and the Czechs made considerable use of it in reconstituting their military along with their own designs, until it started being supplanted by Soviet-designed stuff a couple years later. Fast forward to 1948 and the Israeli War of Independence, and the Czechs were one of the most important arms suppliers to the nascent IDF, providing lots of surplus ex-German gear, including Bf 109G airframes (often with Junkers Jumo engines) and Kar. 98k rifles, and when the Israelis tested their new rifles, they found that almost none of them would shoot straight until they had their sights readjusted, and that's when the sabotage of the rifles by Czech munitions workers came out, or so the story goes, assuming its not more History Channel pseudo-historical sensationalist BS....

The Kar. 98ks, along with some SMLEs were the service rifle of the IDF until the Israelis adopted a FAL variant in the 1950s, and afterwards, the Israelis kept many of their Mausers in service as second-line pieces, rechambering them for 7.62 NATO.
 
How would the Hagganah go incorporating heavy weapons into what was essentially a militia?
 
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