The Davidka Mortar: The Homemade Cannon That Saved Israel
In the spring of 1948, one of the loudest weapons in the Jewish fight for survival could not actually hit anything. Its shells tumbled through the air with almost no guidance. Its own crews sometimes ducked for cover the moment they fired it. And yet this clumsy, improvised mortar may have saved more Jewish homes than almost any rifle carried in that war. The fighters called it the Davidka, which means little David, and its story is one of the most remarkable things I know in all of modern Israeli history.
When the British were packing up to leave the land in 1947 and 1948, the Jewish community faced a terrifying problem. Five Arab armies were preparing to invade the instant the state was declared. The Haganah and the Palmach had faith and raw courage, but they were desperately short of real artillery. There was almost nothing heavy to answer the cannons and armored cars rolling toward them. There was no choice. If nobody would sell them weapons, they would build their own in sheds and workshops, the way the chalutzim had already learned to coax bread out of swamp and stone.
The Davidka Mortar, Built From Scrap in a Schoolyard
The man behind the Davidka was an immigrant engineer named David Leibowitch, and he put the thing together in the winter of 1947 and 1948 at Mikveh Israel, the old agricultural school near Holon. There is something very Jewish about that. The first school where young pioneers had been taught to plow their own soil became the place where they now learned to defend it.
What Leibowitch produced was not pretty. Only six of them were ever made, two handed to each of the three Palmach brigades, Harel, Yiftach, and HaNegev. The tube was roughly three inches across at the mouth, but the bomb it threw was far bigger than any normal mortar of that size would carry. Each shell weighed around forty kilograms, a fat canister stuffed with explosive and then packed with nails and whatever scrap metal was lying around. Because the oversized bomb did not sit properly inside the barrel, it flew out wobbling and unstable, with no one able to say with any confidence where it would land.
So the Davidka was, by any honest measure, a terrible weapon. You could not aim it. You could barely predict its range. Fire it twice at the same target and the two shells might land a city block apart. But it had one quality that turned out to matter more than accuracy, and that quality was noise. When a Davidka went off, it produced a shattering, earth shaking roar and a huge pillar of smoke and fire. The explosion sounded like the end of the world even when the shell did very little damage. The Jewish fighters first used it in combat on March 13, 1948, in the attack on the Abu Kabir area near Jaffa, and very quickly they understood that the terror it created was its real ammunition.
The Night Safed Emptied
The place where the Davidka earned its legend was Tzfat, the ancient hill city of Safed in the Galilee. This is holy ground for our people, the city of the great kabbalists, the home of the Arizal and of Lecha Dodi, with a Jewish presence reaching back many centuries. In the spring of 1948 the small Jewish quarter there was surrounded and badly outnumbered by Arab irregulars who held the high ground and the fortress above the town. During Operation Yiftach, under a young commander named Yigal Allon, the Palmach fought its way in to relieve them, and one of the Davidkas came along for the battle.
When that mortar began to roar over Safed, something broke in the defenders of the city. A rumor had already been spreading through the Arab world that the Jews, with brilliant scientists like Einstein and Oppenheimer among them, had somehow built an atomic bomb. The deafening blasts of the Davidka seemed to confirm the worst of it. The story that Israelis still love to tell is that a sudden out of season rain began to fall on Safed that night, and that panicked fighters whispered the rain itself was poison from a Jewish super weapon. True or exaggerated, the effect was real. Morale collapsed, and the city fell to Jewish forces around the tenth of May, 1948, days before the state was even declared. A Davidka stands in a square in Safed to this day.
A sister weapon served with the Harel Brigade in the brutal battle for Jerusalem, and that is why Davidka Square sits in the heart of the city now, with a mortar mounted on a pillar. The inscription carved there is from the Book of Kings, the promise that God would defend this city and save it for His own sake and for the sake of David His servant. I cannot think of a better verse for a weapon named little David.
Here is what moves me most about this strange old cannon. Our enemies have always told the world that Israel wins only through overwhelming American power and endless modern machines. The Davidka is the plain answer to that lie. When we had nothing, when the odds were rabim b'yad me'atim, the many delivered into the hands of the few, a handful of refugees in a farm school welded together a cannon that could not aim and still turned the tide. It was stubborn faith and creativity standing in for the firepower we simply did not have. That is the real secret of this nation, and it has not changed in all the years since. Am Yisrael Chai.
Comments