Mounting pressure from international media coverage pressed British authorities to find a solution. The passengers, including many orphaned children, forced the issue by declaring a hunger strike which lasted 24 days. When the French authorities refused to forcibly remove the refugees, British authorities, fearing adverse public opinion, sought to wait until the passengers disembarked of their own accord. The ships first landed at Port-de-Bouc, France, where the passengers were ordered to disembark. Dozens suffered bullet wounds and other injuries.Īttempting to make an example of the Exodus 1947, the British towed the ship to Haifa and transferred the passengers onto three navy transports which returned to Europe. A Jewish crew member and two passengers were killed. On July 18 a struggle ensued between British naval forces and passengers on the ship. Even before the ship (by then renamed the Exodus 1947) reached Palestine's territorial waters, British destroyers surrounded it. It carried over 4,500 Jewish men, women, and children, all displaced persons (DPs) or survivors of the Holocaust. In July 1947, the President Warfield left Sète, France, for Palestine. The plight of the ship's passengers would capture the world's attention. Hagana personnel arranged to dock the ship in Europe in order to transport Jews who sought to illegally immigrate into Palestine. Initially sold as scrap for slightly more than $8,000, the ship was acquired by the Hagana (an underground Jewish military organization).
Yet the ship was to take part in one more event which ensured its place in history, symbolizing the struggle for unrestricted immigration into Palestine. After World War II it returned to US waters.
Transferred to the British under the Lend-Lease agreement as part of a group of shallow-draft ships, the President Warfield was later deployed in the Normandy invasion (June 1944). Originally called the SS President Warfield, it sailed the Chesapeake Bay between Baltimore, Maryland, and Norfolk, Virginia, for over a decade. The Exodus 1947 was a worn-out US-owned coastal freight passenger ship launched in 1928.
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