Naval history
The Mother of the Sixth Fleet: Gila Gerzon and the Haifa USO, 1983
Every fleet that operates far from home has a handful of places that its people remember as being on their side, and for the Sixth Fleet in the last decades of the twentieth century one of those was a building in Haifa, Israel, run by a woman named Gila Gerzon. Sailors and Marines called her the Mother of the Sixth Fleet. The name was not official and did not need to be; it was used by people who had spent months at sea and found, at the top of the gangway in Haifa, someone who had planned their week for them before they arrived.
The Haifa USO
The United Service Organizations has run centres for American service members near bases and ports since 1941. Most are on or next to American installations. The Haifa centre was unusual: it served a fleet rather than a garrison, and its clientele arrived in bursts of several thousand at a time, whenever an amphibious ready group or a carrier and its escorts tied up for a port visit.
Gerzon directed that centre for decades. Accounts from sailors and Marines who passed through it in the late 1980s and 1990s agree on the same points: she arranged tours, organised transport, found places for whole divisions to eat, and treated a ship’s company the way a host treats guests. One officer who visited in 1988 as the head of a small boat detachment recalled that she made sure every one of his men got onto some kind of excursion at the end of a hard deployment. Another, aboard a submarine in 1994, recalled that she and her husband invited his entire division to dinner at their home. A Marine from an amphibious ship in 1991 called it the best USO of his whole cruise.
The Sixth Fleet is the US Navy’s Mediterranean fleet, and from the 1980s onward Israel was one of its regular liberty stops. Haifa is the country’s principal deep-water port, with a large city directly behind the harbour, which made it one of the few places in the eastern Mediterranean where several thousand people could go ashore at once and find something to do. Against that background, a well-run USO was not a convenience but the difference between a port visit that worked and one that did not.
The memorial on Mount Carmel
The reason Gerzon’s name appears in the histories of the Beirut bombing, and the reason this page is cited by them, is a memorial she built above the city.
On 23 October 1983, at about 06:22 on a Sunday morning, a truck loaded with explosives was driven into the building serving as the headquarters of the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines at Beirut International Airport, where the battalion was deployed as part of the Multinational Force in Lebanon. The building collapsed. 241 American service members were killed: 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three soldiers. A near-simultaneous attack on the French paratroop barracks killed 58 French soldiers. It was the deadliest single day for the Marine Corps since Iwo Jima. The Marines had been carried to Beirut by Sixth Fleet amphibious ships, were supplied and supported from those ships throughout the deployment, and were taken out by them in February 1984.
Gerzon, solely on her own initiative, built a memorial park to the Americans killed in that attack. It stands high on Mount Carmel, the ridge that rises directly behind Haifa. The land was donated. A path lined with 241 olive trees, one for each of the dead, runs out to an overlook on the edge of the mountain, and the axis of the path points toward Beirut, roughly a hundred kilometres up the coast. She did this, in the words of the officer who worked with her on one ceremony, only because she valued the Americans who came through Haifa and wanted to make sure that nobody in her own country forgot the men who had died in Lebanon.
The memorial became part of the routine of a Haifa port visit. Whenever ships pulled in, it was standard practice for the visiting unit to hold a small ceremony at the park, and someone aboard had to plan it with her. The account published at this address in July 2006 was written by a Marine officer who had drawn that duty in 1994, as a first lieutenant with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, shortly after the unit had covered the withdrawal from Somalia. He described spending three days of his liberty going around Haifa with her while she attended to the details of the ceremony, resenting the loss of the time at first and regarding it afterwards as a privilege. She later had a tree planted in his name in the Mount Carmel National Forest, a gesture she made for many of the people who worked with her.
Why it was written in July 2006
The original piece was prompted by the news. In July 2006, in the war between Israel and Hezbollah, Haifa came under sustained rocket fire from southern Lebanon, and the author, watching the reports, asked what had become of the Haifa USO and the woman who ran it. The answer he found in the press was a series of profiles of Gerzon from earlier years, one of them titled with the name the fleet had given her, and his own recollection of the memorial. The point of the piece was simple: a friend of the United States was under fire in a city where she had spent decades looking after Americans, and the readers who remembered her should know it.
What the memorial says about the deployment
The Beirut deployment of 1982 to 1984 is usually discussed as a failure of mission definition. The Marines were sent ashore on a mandate of presence, with no military objective and with rules of engagement and physical security that did not match a threat that had turned into combat; the Long Commission, the Defense Department inquiry that followed the bombing, said so bluntly, and the episode became a standing reference in American arguments about open-ended stabilisation missions.
The memorial on Mount Carmel is a different kind of record. It was built by a private citizen of another country, on donated land, to a precise count of the dead, and it was kept in use by the ceremonies of the ships that came through. For the sailors and Marines of the Sixth Fleet, that is what Haifa meant: a port where the losses of the fleet were remembered by someone who had not been asked to remember them.
Questions and answers
Who was called the Mother of the Sixth Fleet?
Gila Gerzon, the long-time director of the USO centre in Haifa, Israel. The name was given to her by the sailors and Marines of the US Sixth Fleet whose ships called at Haifa from the 1980s onward, and it appeared in press profiles of her work well before 2006.
What is the Beirut memorial on Mount Carmel?
A memorial park above Haifa, built on Gerzon's own initiative, to the American service members killed in the Beirut barracks bombing of 23 October 1983. Its path is lined with 241 olive trees, one for each of the 241 Americans killed, and it runs to an overlook whose axis points toward Beirut. Visiting Sixth Fleet units held ceremonies there when their ships were in port.
Why did Sixth Fleet ships call at Haifa so often?
Haifa is a deep-water port on the eastern Mediterranean with a large city behind it, which made it a natural liberty port for a fleet whose operating area ran the length of that sea. For amphibious groups and carrier groups coming off long periods at sea, it was one of the few places in the region where a whole ship's company could go ashore.