Tom Derek Bowden
British military personnel
Tom Derek Bowden (1921–2019) was a British army officer noted for his role in 1948 Arab–Israeli War and helping create the Israeli Paratroopers Brigade.
Early life and military career
Bowden was born in Surrey, the son of a well-to-do South London family. He married Eva Heilbronner with whom he had four children.
Military career
Bowden enlisted the British cavalry in 1938 at age 17, and serving in Mandatory Palestine with the Royal Scots Greys during the Arab revolt in Palestine. He served under Orde Wingate.
In 1941, Bowden, now an officer, led a British cavalry charge into battle on horseback against Vichy forces in Vichy-held Syria-Lebanon. Bowden was badly wounded in the leg.
After six months recovery at the home of the Appel family in Tel Aviv, Bowden volunteered for the Parachute Regiment (United Kingdom). He trained in Egypt, and fought in Sicily, Italy and on D-Day with the Special Air Service, and parachuted into the Battle of Arnhem, where he was taken prisoner. When his German captors discovered letters from his Israeli girlfriend, kibbutznik, Hannah Appel, in his gear, the officer who examined his papers said to him, "Now you will see how we treat the Jews,'" and sent him to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where he was made to work carting Jewish corpses to disposal pits.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tom Derek Bowden” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.