There is exactly one grave in West Point Cemetery for an American killed fighting under the flag of another country. It belongs to Colonel David Daniel "Mickey" Marcus, born February 22, 1901, on Hester Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side, the son of Romanian-Jewish immigrants. In a life that lasted just 47 years, Marcus managed to graduate from West Point, prosecute Lucky Luciano, help plan the occupation of postwar Europe, parachute into Normandy, and become Israel's first general since Judah Maccabee. He was killed by an 18-year-old sentry who could not understand his English.
Marcus's parents, Mordechai and Leah, had emigrated from Iasi, Romania. Their son grew up bright and athletic on the Lower East Side, attended Boys' High School in Brooklyn, and won admission to West Point in 1920, graduating with the class of 1924. After completing his active duty requirement, he attended Brooklyn Law School and spent most of the 1930s as an assistant United States attorney in New York, prosecuting organized crime figures including Lucky Luciano. In 1940, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia named him commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction. Marcus was the kind of man who found one extraordinary career insufficient and kept starting new ones.
When war came, Marcus was a legal officer with the 27th Infantry Division -- technically not supposed to command troops. He wrangled a unit command during the 1941 Louisiana Maneuvers anyway. After Pearl Harbor, he organized a Ranger Combat Training School in Hawaii to teach unarmed defense against Japanese infiltration tactics. But rather than a field command, the Army sent him to Washington in 1943 as chief of planning for civil affairs, designing the frameworks for governing territories liberated from the Axis. He accompanied American delegations to the conferences at Cairo, Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam, and helped draft the 1943 surrender terms for Italy. He also helped organize the war-crimes trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo. On D-Day, he volunteered to parachute into Normandy, took informal command of scattered paratroopers, and fought for a week before being ordered back to Washington.
In 1947, David Ben-Gurion asked Marcus to recruit an American officer to advise the Haganah, the nascent Israeli army. Marcus and Shlomo Shamir approached 24 officers. Every one refused. So Marcus volunteered himself. Traveling under the nom de guerre "Michael Stone," he arrived in Palestine in January 1948 as Arab armies surrounded the territory that would soon declare itself a state. Marcus helped plan operations against the Latrun fortress, held by the Arab Legion, which blocked the road from Tel Aviv to besieged Jerusalem. Both attacks on Latrun failed, but Marcus conceived an alternative: a makeshift road through difficult hill terrain, nicknamed the "Burma Road" after the World War II supply route to China. On June 10, 1948, that road was opened to vehicles, breaking the siege of Jerusalem a day before a United Nations ceasefire was to take effect.
A few hours before the ceasefire, Marcus returned to his Central Front headquarters at the abandoned Monastere Notre Dame de la Nouvelle Alliance in Abu Ghosh. Shortly before 4:00 a.m., 18-year-old Palmach veteran Eliezer Linski spotted a figure in white and challenged him. Marcus, wrapped in a bedsheet against the night chill, responded in English -- a language Linski did not understand. When no password came, Linski fired a warning shot. The figure ran toward the monastery. Linski fired again. Marcus was found dead, still wrapped in his white blanket. He wore no rank insignia and knew very little Hebrew. Upon discovering whom he had killed, the young soldier tried to shoot himself but was disarmed. Ben-Gurion was initially suspicious, suspecting factional elements within the Palmach may have conspired against Marcus, but an investigation concluded the shooting was accidental. The report was never made public.
Marcus's body was returned to the United States accompanied by Moshe Dayan and his wife Ruth. He was buried with full military honors at West Point, attended by Governor Thomas Dewey, former Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, and General Maxwell Taylor. Ben-Gurion wrote to Marcus's wife Emma in Brooklyn: "Marcus was the best man we had." Kirk Douglas later portrayed Marcus in the 1966 film Cast a Giant Shadow. Kibbutz Mishmar David and a neighborhood in Tel Aviv were named in his honor, along with streets throughout Israel. In 2015, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin visited the grave and said Marcus was "the first general of the IDF in every sense of the word." His headstone sits among America's military dead, the solitary marker for a man who gave his life for a country not yet a day old.
Marcus's story connects to multiple New York City locations: born on Hester Street on the Lower East Side, raised in Brooklyn (40.6097N, 73.9696W where his memorial is cataloged), and buried at West Point (41.3915N, 73.9567W). His funeral was held at Union Temple of Brooklyn. Nearest airports: KJFK (13 nm SE), KLGA (8 nm NE), KEWR (12 nm W). For the Brooklyn memorial location, view at 2,000 ft AGL.