The Wallis Simpson story: Another surprising link
An update on the story of Wallis Simpson and her connections to Israel.
Further to Gavin Silbert’s interesting article on the Israeli son of Ernest Simpson (AJN 10/12), a bizarre sequel to the toxically antisemitic Hitleradmiring Duchess of Windsor (born Wallis Warfield) concerned her family’s unintended contribution to the State of Israel.
The Warfields were an old United States East Coast family of industrialists, Wallace being the niece of S Davies Warfield, president between 1918 and 1927 of the Baltimore Steam Packet Company, a shipping line which plied the East coast of the US primarily between its headquarters on Chesapeake Bay and ports in Virginia and elsewhere.
In 1928, soon after his death, the company commissioned a new ship named the SS President Warfield for its littoral operations as a mail, passenger and cargo liner.
Shortly after its entry into World War II, the US Government requisitioned this among other ships for the war effort and she was duly converted into a general service naval vessel bearing the name USS President Warfield. As such, she saw service in the European theatre including being stationed off Omaha beach during the D-Day landings in 1944.
The ship was repatriated to mainland USA after the war, but because of damage sustained during her war service was struck from the Naval Register and ultimately sold off.
Unbeknown to American authorities, the purchaser was a clandestine offshoot of the Jewish Agency and Haganah which sailed her back to the Mediterranean where she was fitted out for an altogether different purpose – the running of the Royal Navy blockade off the coast of Palestine.
This resulted in spectacular international attention and press coverage most adverse to the British.
Renamed the SS Exodus 1947 and crammed with more than 4000 refugees from the camps, she was boarded off the Israeli coast with some level of violence and resistance and ultimately the passengers were forcibly shipped by British forces to the southern French port from where they had disembarked.
They were then taken back to Germany into camps controlled by British occupation forces, not exactly the smartest public relations exercise by the then British Government. By 1948, most had managed to come to the new State of Israel.
The SS Exodus itself, damaged to the point of uselessness, was scuttled off the coast of Haifa in 1952 where its remains lie in a watery grave to this day.