On this day in 1947, 4,500 Jewish refugees sailed on board the SS Exodus. All displaced persons who were Holocaust survivors emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine. The Haganah (the (Jewish Resistance in the British Mandate of Palestine) and the ship’s passengers held a 24-day hunger strike which forced the world to pay attention to the plight of the Jewish people. Originally named the SS President Warfield, the ship was built in the United States in 1928 and cruised the Chesapeake Bay between Maryland and Virginia for nearly 10 years before she was used to transfer personnel on D-Day and the invasion of Normandy in June of 1944, during the height of World War II. After the War, the ship was returned to the U.S., but fate had yet another role for it to play on the world stage when the Warfield was purchased by the Haganah. Their goal was to illegally transport thousands of Jews, all of whom were Holocaust survivors with little to no families or homes to return to in Europe, into the Land of Israel.In July of 1947, the ship carried over 4,500 Jewish men, women, and children setting out from Sete, France towards the port of Haifa, Israel. But before they could reach Palestine, British naval forces captured the ship on July 18, surrounding it and engaging both crew and passengers in a firefight that claimed the lives of one Jewish crew member and two passengers. The British towed the ship into the port of Haifa, where passengers were forcibly removed and transferred to three British transport ships, which took the refugees back to Europe. Once back in France, the British ordered the passengers to disembark. The passengers, many of them orphans, refused to do so and declared a hunger strike. Both the French and British forces were afraid of public opinion, so they decided to wait. The ships sat in the Port de Bouc, France, for 24 days in the intense summer heat, while the passengers still held onto their hunger strike. The British navy then towed the ships to Hamburg, Germany where the Holocaust survivors were forcibly removed and interned in camps once more. The British decision to put Jewish Holocaust survivors in German camps was met with outrage and mass protests from all over the world. There were hunger strikes and calls of sympathy for the Jews from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.