In the months and weeks prior to Independence, the Haganah (and on a more limited scale the Irgun) set up clandestine recruiting centers in major western cities where they could determine the military usefulness and bona fides of the potential volunteers. After being interrogated by Haganah recruiters, those selected would be given secret instructions where to get physicals and shots for every manner of Middle Eastern pestilence known to medical science and even a few that weren't. In England this was often done in some of the local synagogues between Shacharit and Mincha using Jewish doctors with WW2 experience.  

Later, one way tickets to Paris or other European destinations were provided. Once in France or Germany, the volunteers were given tickets and information for the next stage of the 'underground' journey to Marseilles in the South of France. After arriving in Marseilles, the majority of the volunteers were contacted and transferred to Grandes Arenas or St. Jerome, DP holding camps in the area. There the volunteers would undergo Haganah training while awaiting transport to Israel. Some of the volunteers who were considered to have exceptional military skills desperately needed by the New State were flown straight to Israel in Dakotas and C-47s , while the majority of the volunteers waited impatiently in the camps for assignment to the tiny, leaky, overcrowded blockade-running boats that would brave the Mediterranean storms that would take them to Israel.  

The French, who have always loathed the British (the loathing was, and still is, quite mutual, I might add - they still call us 'Limeys' and we still call them 'Frogs') - would always manage to warn the volunteers when the British or the U.N. would be making one of their periodic pilgrimages to the various bases around Marseilles to check for any illegal Haganah activities. Forewarned, the Machal volunteers and the Haganah instructors brought in from Palestine would take off for the hills behind Marseilles and continue military training until the inspection was over.  

During our stay in these D.P. camps, our passports were confiscated and used by the Aliyah Bet people to get the genuinely displaced European Jews and those liberated from the death camps into Palestine. Which brings me to the second best kept secret of the time - Machal's heavy involvement in Aliyah Bet .. Some 240 United States and Canadian volunteers helped man the often decrepit and always overcrowded Aliyah Bet ships which smuggled some 31,000 Holocaust survivors of the nazi death camps past the British blockade into Palestine during the waning days of the Mandate.  

Incidentally, this surrender of passports was particularly galling to the American volunteers who believed it was somehow akin to losing their manhood if not their citizenship. They had visions of never getting their passports back, never being able to return to the United States, remaining stateless and forced to sail the world for the rest of their days like the doomed Dutch sailor in the Flying Dutchman saga.  

When we got to Israel, I'm happy to relate, we all got our passports back although some of them were stamped with places we had never visited and sometimes never heard of. And, Chas VeChalila, not one single American volunteer was forced to sail the seas or wander the earth without passport, unloved and unwanted. Actually, there was a legitimate concern by the American and British volunteers that our passports would not include any entry stamps indicating our presence in Israel, for this could lead to loss of citizenship for the Americans and prison for the Brits. The Israelis complied with our wishes and stamped our entries and exits to and from Israel in a separate document.  

The DP/Haganah Training Camps  

My elder brother Ivor had disappeared from England some months earlier. I learned only recently that he kept a meticulous account of his experiences from the day he left England to the moment just before he was wounded at Faluja in one of the key battles of the war to break the Egyptian siege of the Negev. This is an excerpt of a typical day at Grandes Arenas while he waited for his turn to board the next boat to Israel: