Jerusalem Supply Route Is Top Jewish Secret, Associated Press, San Francisco Chronicle, June 10, 1948.

By JAMES M. LONG Associated Press Staff Writer

THE LATRUN FRONT, Palestine, June 8 (Delayed)-Blood, sweat and blisters are getting supplies through to Jerusalem over a convoy route which a fourth of the Trans-Jordan Arab Legion tried to keep closed.

Details are one of the tightest guarded secrets of Israel at war. The story, however it works out, is heroic.

The quantities of food and arms squeezed through the last five miles of hazard on the 40-mile road from Tel Aviv into Jerusalem do not compare with the 100- and 200- truckload convoys of two months ago.

(Daniel de Luce, reporting from the Trans-Jordan Arab Legion area in Jerusalem, said the Arab Legion turned its heaviest guns Tuesday on a new crude dirt track, built by the Jews through the Judean hills a little south of the blocked main road from Tel Aviv. Direct hits were claimed.)

The supply movements cannot even be described without qualification as convoys. Through the last terribly contested five miles, they cannot go on the only real road.

They cannot always be carried in their original heavy trucks. Sometimes the supplies must be unloaded and carried by night through hundreds of yards of mountain trail on the backs of men.

Such men volunteer in Tel Aviv and other cities of Israel. They are taken by the hundreds to a battle front in terrain so nearly impossible that even the Crusaders of the Middle Ages turned back there.

There, in their old civilian clothes, they toil by darkness and by hand.