Fighting that 'illegal' escape to Palestine brought the plotters in
the Colonial Office together with those in the Foreign Office, and
they called for the armed forces to implement their cruel policy. In
a House of Commons debate on July 20, 1939, Mr. Malcolm MacDonald,
the Colonial Secretary, had to admit that a 'Division of Destroyers'
supported by five smaller launches was being employed to ascertain
that those who had escaped Hitler did not escape the British capture
as they approached Palestine. [PRO House of Commons Debates, July
20, 1939] Those who had fled the German destroyer and his cohorts
were now hunted down by four destroyers of His Majesty's Royal Navy:
HMS Hero (flagship), HMS Havock, HMS Henward, and HMS Hotspur. These
were among Britain's newest and fastest fighting ships -- all four
commissioned just two years earlier. At least one other destroyer,
the Ivanhoe was also used in that lopsided warfare. Those conspiring
in London to block the saving gate of Palestine really meant
business. The ships had been authorized to open fire 'at or into any
ship that was suspected of having illegal immigrants on board and
that did not obey the warning to stand by. [Palestine Gazette,
Extraordinary Issue, April 27, 1939]
They had been authorized to shoot, and shoot they did. Thus it
happened that on the very first day of World War II, on September 1,
1939, while German dive bombers rained death on Warsaw and a dozen
other Polish cities, His Majesty's ship Lorna opened fire on a
rickety overcrowded refugee ship, Tiger Hill, as she approached the
Palestine Coast to unload her cargo of misery, 1417 survivors of
man's inhumanity against man. She did not, could not, heed the order
to turn back toward Germany. The encounter between HMS Lorna and the
Tiger Hill ended with a victory for the Royal Navy. Killed in the
encounter were Dr. Robert Schneider, a young man who had been a
physician in Czechoslovakia before he had been deprived of human
dignity and all possessions; and Zwi Binder, a young pioneer from
Poland whose hopes to till the land peacefully in a Kibbutz died
within sight of the land he had been longing for years to reach.
The first two persons killed by British bullets during World War II
were not Germans but Jewish escapees from the German hell."