When good men who did great things pass into the next life, they leave an example for this one. Tom Derek Bowden was 17 when he first set foot in the land that once was – and would again be – Israel.
It was 1938 and he was stationed in Palestine under the mercurial British officer Orde Wingate, an ardent Zionist. Bowden was awed by Wingate and his commitment to training local Jews to defend themselves from their Arab tormenters. While there, Bowden fell in love with a young kibbutznik, Hannah Appel, but the outbreak of war frustrated their plans to marry.
In 1941, he was despatched to Vichy-held Syria-Lebanon, where he was badly injured and his sergeant, Moshe Dayan, lost an eye, 26 years before becoming Israel’s defence minister.
Bowden, invalided, demanded a new commission and spent three years as a paratrooper before being wounded again and captured dropping into Arnhem.
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