On a warm July day in 1948, a funeral was held at the U.S. Military Academy in New York for David Daniel Marcus, class of 1924. In many ways it was a typical West Point funeral, with a bugler, a firing party and a number of distinguished mourners. In one respect, however, the ceremony was unique. Although an American flag covered his coffin, Marcus was the first soldier buried at West Point who had died fighting under another nation’s flag. Only two weeks before his death, he had been appointed the first divisional level field commander in the army of the fledgling state of Israel.

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Marcus was born on New York’s Lower East Side on February 22, 1902. He was the fifth child of Mordecai and Leah Marcus, who had emigrated from Romania to escape the waves of antisemitism sweeping Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century. Mordecai Marcus sold vegetables from a pushcart and eventually worked his way up to owning his own stall in the Washington Market. That enabled the family to move to Brooklyn, but then Mordecai died suddenly in 1910.

Antisemitism was also very much alive in early-20th-century America. Michael, the oldest of the Marcus children, formed a self-defense group that protected elderly Jews from neighborhood street gangs. ‘Big Mike,’ as he was called, worked out daily. When young David started following his older brother around, and even sparring with him at the local gym, people started calling him ‘Little Mike,’ which soon was shortened to ‘Mickey.’

Mickey Marcus excelled in high school both as a student and an athlete. To his family’s chagrin, he decided somewhere along the line that he wanted to go to the U.S. Military Academy. Marcus entered the academy in 1920, when Brig. Gen. Douglas MacArthur was superintendent. He became a standout athlete, winning letters in boxing and football, and graduated in 1924 as a second lieutenant of infantry. During his first assignment, on Governor’s Island in New York Harbor, Marcus studied law at night school in the city and in 1927 married Emma Hertzenberg. His next duty assignment was to be Puerto Rico, but the newlyweds decided that they really did not want to live there. Marcus resigned his Regular commission and went to work as a law clerk in New York.

A year after he resigned from the Regular Army, he received a doctorate from Brooklyn Law School. Between 1930 and 1934, Marcus was an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. One of his closest associates was future presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey.

When Fiorello La Guardia became mayor of New York on a reform ticket in 1934, he appointed Marcus deputy commissioner of corrections. One of Marcus’ first actions was to personally lead a special police raid on the corruption-ridden and prisoner-controlled penitentiary on Welfare Island. In 1936, La Guardia appointed Marcus a temporary magistrate to help relieve the case backlog in the crowded Manhattan courts. That summer Marcus worked closely with Dewey in an operation that eventually led to the shutdown of Lucky Luciano’s crime ring.

Marcus had actually been running the department for five years when La Guardia finally appointed him commissioner of corrections in April 1940. Meanwhile, he had maintained a Reserve commission as a field artillery officer. In 1939, because of his legal experience, he was persuaded to transfer to the Judge Advocate General’s Corps.

In 1940, Lt. Col. Marcus’ National Guard unit, the 27th Infantry Division, was federalized and sent to Alabama. Marcus was then the unit’s judge advocate. Although legal officers were not supposed to command troops in the field, Marcus managed to lead a unit of special troops during maneuvers in Louisiana in 1941. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, the 27th Division deployed to Hawaii. There, Marcus organized and commanded a Ranger school, training some 8,000 men during the next year.

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