New Heavens

by Boris Senior

  Dizengoff Street was the Champs Elysées of Tel Aviv with wide sidewalks, al fresco restaurants, and fashionable shops, but the most characteristic aspect of Dizengoff was and still is its cafés. During the War of Independence in 1948, one saw the Palmach girls looking scrubbed and wholesome and the more fashionable young crowd in Café Rowal. But the Boheme of Tel Aviv was in Café Kassit, much frequented by actors and writers. Kassit was chosen by the Air Service as the aircrew mess where we had our lunch and paid with chits issued by headquarters.

  The other residents of our billet were young Sabras, mostly members of the Palmach Pilot’s platoon, which had merged with the Air Service on its inception. They accepted me immediately despite my rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew. Fortunately, most of them knew some English, and we managed to communicate in the air without major problems.

  My air experience at the time was relatively extensive, having completed air force training and flown nearly fifty combat missions in World War II. For them, I was an experienced operational pilot, and I soon began to teach them whatever I could despite the limitations imposed upon us by the unsuitable aircraft.

  As most of the Palmach pilots at that time had managed to gain only about a hundred hours’ flying time, they were sorely in need of help and advice. In the Yarden Hotel where I had been moved from the former billets, on many nights after returning from missions and flopping down exhausted on my bed, I was awakened time and again with calls from the field for advice. Those were tough times for me. I was short of sleep after many operational flights under hard conditions, and some nights I was awakened four or five times to make urgent, quick decisions. There was virtually no one to fall back on, for we were desperately short of experienced personnel.

  When our operational flights became more frequent, we needed commanders at the airfield and the squadron. This was done in a way typical of the kibbutz culture: we got together and selected commanders by democratic vote. Eli Feingersh was voted the first airfield commander, because he had been the most senior man among those airmen who had been in the Palmach. Shortly after my arrival and being the most experienced airman in the Air Service at that time, I was asked to take command of the squadron and the base at Sde Dov. There were neither ranks nor badges of any kind. The only way of knowing if someone was an officer or in a position of responsibility was if he carried a revolver—a piece of equipment in perennial demand by all.

  Early on I was approached on two occasions by a man in army intelligence who asked to borrow my revolver as he said he was scheduled to go out on a dangerous night mission, and I gladly complied, for I was not going to fly on those nights. One night I went to the Park Hotel on Hayarkon Street and saw the intelligence officer on the dance floor wearing my gun. I didn’t say a word to him for fear of spoiling the effect of the revolver on his date, but that was the last time he managed to borrow my weapon. On reflection I could have told his girlfriend that he said he borrowed the gun for a dangerous mission that night.

  We carried out many other types of missions for the Air Service, as in the case of Moshe Shertok (later Sharett), who became the first foreign minister of Israel. He had returned from a mission to the United States, and because there had been shooting on the road from the Lydda Airport now known as Lod, it was dangerous for him to travel by car. I was asked to fly to Lydda to meet him and fly him to Tel Aviv. Before leaving for the airfield, which was still in the hands of the British, I was given a hand grenade.

  Being a newcomer to such weapons, I was given only a stun grenade, which I put into my trouser pocket. After landing at Lydda, I was searched by a British policeman. I knew he touched and felt the grenade in my pocket, but he did not react perhaps out of fear of involvement with Irgun “terrorists.” I can well understand the anxiety of the Haganah about all traffic to Lydda, for we had to take care when flying out of the confines of Tel Aviv, and we were regularly shot at from the village of Yahudia near the airport.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  First Missions

  NIGHT FLIGHTS

  OF all the places to which we flew in Israel in early 1948, I found the Dead Sea area the most unusual and the most mysterious. It is named “Dead” because its bitter salt waters cannot support any form of life. It is a large expanse of water more than a thousand feet below sea level, the lowest place on earth, in a wild, dry gash, which is unexpectedly relieved by the sight of the blue water.

  The sparkling blue of the water seen from the air provides a welcome contrast to the total aridity of the desert surroundings but the blueness is deceptive because the water is saturated with chemicals to such an extent that one can float effortlessly in the water. The dry, hot climate with temperatures reaching 45 degrees Centigrade makes it hard to withstand the conditions for long. I felt a wary respect for the Dead Sea area when I first landed, a respect bordering on uneasiness. This same feeling remains with me to this day, which I find inexplicable and mysterious, possibly because of the biblical warnings about Sodom and Gomorrah.

  The Dead Sea Potash Works are based at Sdom at the southern tip of the Dead Sea. Many of my flights in the early days of my flying operations in Israel were to that area. The founder and main shareholder of the potash company was a former Russian called Novomeysky, small in stature but large in imagination and foresight. Shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, he had foreseen the potential of the salts in the Dead Sea and had formed a pioneer company to extract Potash to sell worldwide. I had to fly him back to Tel Aviv from Sdom. I landed close to the Dead Sea and saw the diminutive Mr. Novomeysky waiting for me. He looked at the decrepit little RWD 13, minus its right-hand door, for we had started throwing packages from our laps to settlements cut off from the rest of the Yishuv. He was clearly not impressed. Fortunately, it was late afternoon, the air was smooth, and I brought him to Tel Aviv after a pleasant flight. He kept glancing down worriedly out of the missing door, however, and I am sure he never forgot that flight with the young pilot who could not even carry on a conversation with him in Hebrew.

  In time I flew many sorties to Sdom to evacuate women and other noncombatants and to fly in various army personnel. The Palmach had a strong presence there, and I was ordered to fly their commander to Sdom. Gen. Yitzhak Sadeh, well known and loved, was the first commander of the Palmach and one of its founders. In World War I, he had served in the Russian army and had been decorated for bravery. His involvement in military affairs in the early days of the Yishuv had been continuous from the time of the 1936 riots. He was a maverick in military thinking, and he was the spirit behind the doctrine of breaking out of strongholds and vigorously attacking the enemy in the open, a tactic not employed before he took command.

  At one time, he had also been the acting chief of the Haganah and was well known as the teacher and commander of most of Israel’s senior officers. I had not met him before. He was later to lead the forces that successfully defended Kibbutz Mishmar Ha’emek in the Jezreel Valley and routed the attacking Arab Liberation Army in April 1948 despite being outnumbered nearly ten to one. Sadeh used brilliant tactics, containing the enemy forces in their frontal attack while deftly cutting all their lines of communication. The stunning victory at Mishmar Ha’emek heartened the people of Israel greatly at that time of deep anxiety. One of Tel Aviv’s main thoroughfares today bears his name.

  Sadeh arrived at Sde Dov shortly before I was to take off for Sdom, a tall, bulky man in his customary khaki shorts and shirt. His spectacles gave him a studious appearance despite his powerful physique, resulting from his past as a wrestler and weight lifter. I seated him next to me and we took off. It was in the early afternoon, and as usual at that time of day it was turbulent with thermals and broken cloud in the Negev area. We were tossed around violently, and we needed our seat belts during the whole flight. I noticed that Sadeh was sitting quietly, from time to time turning away from me with his handkerchief pressed to his face. When we landed, I understood why he had been so silent. He had spent most of the flight vomiting uno
btrusively into his handkerchief without saying a word to me.

  After the United Nations decided to partition Palestine into two separate entities, one Jewish and one Arab, terrorist activities by the Arab irregular forces increased greatly. My squadron at Sde Dov carried the entire load of flight operations. With our limited roster of aircraft and pilots, we flew day and night, trying to keep up with requests for help pouring in from Haganah headquarters. By the end of December 1947, the situation began to heat up further with increased violence from the irregular Arab units. We had to fly many reconnaissance sorties over Arab positions. They began to shoot at our aircraft, at that time only with small arms. Regardless, we continued our flights, often the only method of transport and communication between the settlements and the center of the country. To say that our equipment was unsuited to the missions is a gross understatement; we had badly maintained aircraft, in most cases no radio communication, inadequate instruments, unsuitable maps, and not one parachute. I noted the growing strain on the young pilots, most of whom had only limited flight experience, and saw that some of them were reaching breaking point. Accordingly, I instituted a shift system for all aircrew, twenty-four hours on duty and twenty-four hours rest. It helped.

  One flight illustrates the conditions under which we operated. Flying the Polish RWD back from a Negev sortie in the late afternoon with my Russian comrade Misha Kenner, I was delayed at Nir Am, the Jewish stronghold near Gaza with its narrow landing strip. After takeoff and while heading for our home base at Sde Dov, it was getting dark. With no equipment for night flying nor even instrument lights, I asked Misha sitting next to me to light a match from time to time near the airspeed indicator. He did so, but when it became completely dark and the matches began to run out, he became very agitated. I managed to fly on a more or less even keel in the darkness by reference to occasional lights on the ground. After a while the lights of Tel Aviv appeared in the distance and when I landed without much difficulty on our strip at Sde Dov, Misha became calmer.

  One morning, Misha failed to return on schedule from a local flight in the Tiger Moth. I went out on a search for him and eventually found the Tiger not very far from Sde Dov. He had made a forced landing after running out of fuel near Sidni Ali, the mosque of an Arab village some twenty-five kilometers from our base. From my vantage point circling above the mosque which is perched on a cliff near the sea, I could see a huge crowd of Arabs, some hundreds clearly identified by their galabiyas and white Kefa headresses, surrounding a seated figure near the wall of the mosque. I knew it was Misha.

  The Tiger appeared undamaged, obviously having made a good forced landing. I continued circling at low altitude in the hope that my presence would discourage any attempt to harm him. When Misha finally stood up and gave a nonchalant wave to me, I had to decide whether to try a landing to try to extricate him or to return to base and request assistance from the ground forces. I decided not to try and fight it out there and then, though I buzzed the crowd by swooping down at ground level. At that time, the military situation was so unsettled that I did not know if our ground forces would manage to reach him. We had no radios, so I decided it would be wiser to return to base and get help.

  My decision proved to be right. The mob had no violent intentions, and a Haganah unit sent to the scene had no difficulty in persuading them to let Misha take off in the Tiger. When I questioned Misha later about the incident, asking him how he communicated with the Arabs, he said, “No problem. When the mob surrounded me, I pointed to the aircraft and motioned the crowd to back away shouting, “Benzine, whoosh!” It worked.

  We made many flights to maintain contact with kibbutzim, sometimes dropping messages. Later we carried army walkie-talkie sets, enabling us to report on Arab troop movements. In many cases we were the sole means of transporting army commanders or reinforcements from kibbutz to kibbutz, and dropping supplies of ammunition.

  An important part of our duties was the supervision of the water pipelines, the only source of water supply to the Negev kibbutzim after having been isolated from the rest of the country by the Arabs. Irregular Arab forces constantly blew up sections of the pipeline. From the air we would see large pools of water in the desert and alerted the Haganah who sent repair teams. Another part of our duties was to drop daily newspapers to the surrounded settlements, along with chocolate bars. We were a great morale booster to the lonely and beleaguered kibbutz settlers, and when necessary, we flew badly wounded kibbutzniks to hospitals.

  In time those kibbutzim cut off from the rest of the Yishuv and devised a system to ensure that their needs were being attended to satisfactorily. They began to appoint “consuls.” One kibbutz member was sent to stay in Tel Aviv and to represent that particular kibbutz. They used to badger us with requests for various kinds of assistance, be it the supply of medications or ammunition or rifles. One or two of the consuls were invariably to be seen at Sde Dov before our takeoff on a mission, and they often tried to join the crew.

  One night at Sde Dov in October 1948 with the moon shining strongly and the stars glittering in the sky, we loaded a DC-3 we had obtained from the South African airline Westair, which I had formed shortly before. We used the aircraft for missions after they landed from Johannesburg on normal flights before flying back to Johannesburg. Revivim had a small strip, which we sometimes used for flying in light supplies and relief personnel but which was too short for landing a large machine like the DC-3. It was the outpost closest to the border with Egypt and far to the south of Beersheba. It was one of the most exposed locations in the country.

  A consul named Michael, a blue-eyed German Jew, his fair complexion burned red by the harsh sun of Israel, approached me. He was a member of Kibbutz Revivim in the southern part of the Negev near the Egyptian border. While we loaded the aircraft and briefed the crew, Michael begged me to let him join the flight. He wouldn’t be able to speak to his family or his friends in the kibbutz, but he would at least be able to see the settlement and gauge their chances of surviving the attack we knew would come from the Egyptian army after the end of the mandate. We knew that Revivim was a prime target they had to overcome in their advance into Palestine. I had misgivings, but Michael begged to go, trying to persuade me that he knew the area and could help the crew find the settlement as well as the best point at which to drop the supplies. Finally, I agreed.

  After takeoff I remained at the field awaiting their return. We waited for more than two hours, but the DC-3 did not arrive. Long after its estimated time of arrival back at Sde Dov, we began to worry. Eventually we received a communication from Southern Command that the aircraft was shot down by ground fire in the northern Negev, and the occupants, including Michael, perished. The exact circumstances remain unknown to this day, but I still see him in my mind’s eye as night after night he followed the crews tirelessly while they prepared their craft for the flights to the Negev.

  UMM RASHRASH

  In December 1947 I made the longest flight I have ever flown in a small aircraft in one day. The tiny British Auster is no bigger than the better-known Piper Cub and was our workhorse at Sde Dov. My mission was to survey the southern and southeastern borders as far as the Red Sea. I took a former Soviet army tank expert, who was to examine the feasibility of introducing an armored column from the Far East via the Red Sea, then advance from the far south to the center of the country. I believe there was a plan to equip a unit in the Far East with World War II war-surplus tanks from the Philippines, and after docking at the shore near the present port of Eilat, it was to make its way up the Arava Valley to the north.

  From Tel Aviv we flew to Kibbutz Revivim in the Negev to refuel from jerry-cans carried in the aircraft, and from there to the extreme south along the border with Transjordan. In the southern Negev in 1947, we held only five positions: the kibbutzim of Gvulot, Beit Eshel, Tse’elim, Hatserim, and Revivim. Revivim was the most southern, near the Egyptian border. The kibbutzniks had cleared a short strip in the desert.

  I sp
otted the kibbutz easily, the only green area in a landscape burned brown by the sun and no moisture. Rain falls rarely in the cruel desert of the southern Negev.

  I spent some time studying the nearly featureless maps of the uninhabited deep south of Palestine. After taking off we climbed to cross the escarpment before descending down below sea level to the desolate valley of the Arava.

  As soon as we saw Ein Husub (now Ein Hatseva) the first of the oases in the Arava, I descended and flew low above the dry stony desert ground. From Ein Husub we followed the track that vaguely marked the route from Aqaba to the Dead Sea. In biblical times, long before the sea route through the Suez Canal, this was the main route from the Red Sea through Palestine to Europe. On the way we examined and made notes of the location and appearance of the five existing oases, whose points were not well marked. Only a few date palms and a hint of green indicated their location. We continued at low level to Aqaba near present-day Eilat. I am not sure whether my passenger was unfamiliar with Hebrew or if he was just a silent type, but whatever the reason we hardly exchanged a word during the nine-hour flight.

  All that could be seen in the Arava was the stony landscape with a little scrub vegetation and an occasional oasis. Our only company for more than three hours was the mountain range of Moab and Edom on our left, brooding over us as we made our way along the Arava. On the right, the sharp, high crags of the Sinai Mountains added to the wild and inhospitable feel of a landscape stark and devoid of any sign of human habitation. I wondered at the courage of Moses and his flock, wandering for forty years in that terrible terrain to escape Egyptian slavery more than 2,000 years ago.