Operation Boatswain

The mission to sabotage oil refineries in Tripoli was unsuccessful, ending with the disappearance of 23 Palmach commandos and British SOE officer Major Sir Anthony Palmer, 4th Baronet after their boat was lost at sea on 18 May 1941.

In the early summer of 1941 the British military authorities agreed to joint operations against Vichy France forces in Lebanon and Syria.

A plan emerged for a motor launch, carrying 23 Palmach commandos (later known as "the twenty-three who went down with the ship" (Hebrew: כ׳׳ג יורדי הסירה, romanized: kaf-gimel yordei ha-sira) and a Major Palmer acting as an observer, to embark from Haifa.

[clarification needed] The failure of the mission and loss of the 23 were blows to morale and delayed the building of a Jewish naval power.

However, only in January 2015 did historian and Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women archivist Martin Sugarman manage to persuade the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to formally commemorate the 23 on their website and to inscribe their names on the Memorial to the Missing (the "Brookwood Memorial") at Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey.