New Heavens

by Boris Senior

  Finally, the coast of the Red Sea was in the distance, a refreshing change from the dryness of the environment surrounding us on all sides. We circled low above Umm Rash-rash, forerunner of today’s Eilat. There was little to be seen apart from two elongated gray blocks of the British police post, and there was no sign of life apart from a few camels and some Arabs on horses. After circling the forlorn police post, I was eager to leave the godforsaken stretch of coast and head for home.

  ETZION BLOC

  Sometimes, we flew to Gush Etzion, a group of five kibbutzim in the midst of the large Arab area between Jerusalem and Hebron. There was no other Jewish settlement or village for many kilometers. The kibbutzim were about a kilometer apart, so planned because of the danger from the Arabs surrounding them. The few hundred courageous settlers possessed only a handful of machine guns and rifles for their protection. Already by December 1947, they were surrounded and cut off from the rest of the Yishuv. The only way to them was through Arab villages. An attempt had been made in the middle of January 1948 to reinforce and supply them from Jerusalem, but the thirty-five men in the rescue party, to this day well recorded in Israeli history as the “Lamed Heh”(thirty-five in Hebrew), were butchered to a man by Arab irregulars. By the time I had contact with the kibbutzim, they were under daily attack by Arab irregulars and were short of medical supplies and ammunition. Fortunately, all the children and some of the women had been evacuated.

  A few weeks after the “Lamed Heh” were killed, we received reports that a large force under the guerrilla leader Abdel Kader el Husseini was heading for the group of settlements. A reconnaissance by one of our planes confirmed many vehicles heading toward the area. The gravity of the situation owing to the severe lack of ammunition and medical supplies made it essential to provide urgent assistance. After losing the Lamed Heh platoon, it was clear there was no way of bringing reinforcements or supplies by road. We agreed to try to supply them by air.

  After receiving the order from the GHQ in the afternoon, we made an operational plan using three aircraft, the major part of our air resources. I agreed to fly the Tiger Moth twenty or thirty feet above the target area before and during the proposed drop—quite a dangerous project to fly at low level over firing troops in the tiny Tiger Moth. Eli Eyal in the front cockpit was to fire a Bren gun, and both of us would hurl hand grenades to keep the enemy heads down. Ezer and Hennenson in the Auster and Black and Pussy in the RWD 13 would drop the ammunition and medical supplies.

  On a cold midwinter morning on 15 January 1948, we drove out to the airfield. At that hour Tel Aviv was quiet with virtually no traffic. The calm appearance of the city contrasted with the tension I felt as we drove through the deserted streets. At the field, Eli checked the Bren gun and the hand grenades before we took off just before dawn. With Eli in the front cockpit, the Bren gun on his lap, we climbed to cruising altitude and turned toward the range of mountains to the east. The other two aircraft followed some minutes later as we headed toward the besieged kibbutzim. This was to be their last contact with the Yishuv.

  After a short flight in the freezing open cockpit, the green valleys of the plains gave way to the stony foothills of the ancient forbidding Judean mountains looming over the coastal plain. As we approached Kfar Etzion, we saw the mountains were covered by low cloud. After breaking through a gap in the clouds, we were able to make out the five groups of kibbutz buildings set in a defensive circle. The big Arab city of Hebron is to the south, Bethlehem to the north. Nearer to them but not too close were villages containing thousands of hostile Arabs. The entire area looked dry and inhospitable, the only patches of green being in the kibbutzim. I was full of admiration for the brave settlers with their families who had come to settle those stony hills buttressed by their faith that their return to the land of their fathers was ordained thousands of years ago.

  Eli’s Bren gun jammed after one test round, and because of the lack of communication between us, because I knew almost no Hebrew and Eli knew little English, I couldn’t make out what had happened. We continued to shout loudly to each other through the primitive speaking tube, but I had difficulty in understanding anything apart from the word “kaput.”

  I decided to continue the mission with the intention of at least buzzing the enemy troops during the drop. Eli continued shouting to me through the tube intercom, but with the buffeting of the wind I could not make out what he was trying to tell me. Fortunately, there were no hostile forces at that hour in the immediate vicinity of the kibbutzim, and the other two aircraft were able to drop their supplies on the rubber tires, which had been spread out to receive them.

  As we flew over at low level, the kibbutzniks rushed out to wave in relief and gratitude. I felt satisfaction and a closeness to our embattled brethren down below encircled and lonely but not forsaken, with us as their only contact with the rest of the Yishuv and perhaps their sole instrument of survival. The depth of emotion I felt during the missions to help them has not been matched before or since. I have helped other beseiged kibbutzim, but Kfar Etzion remains etched in my memory, secured by some bond perhaps because of the hopelessness of their situation and their lonely stand against overwhelming odds.

  After making the drop, we saw another aircraft that had joined us over Kfar Etzion. It did not take long for us to realize it was a British reconnaissance Auster. We beat a hasty retreat, making for Kibbutz Be’erot Yitzhak while throwing out all incriminating evidence, and from there we made for Sde Dov. Later we heard that the British pilot reported that he had been fired on by “Jewish aircraft.” What had happened was that he had seen a puff of exhaust smoke from one of our engines and thought we had fired at him. After our return and hearing that we were supposed to have fired on the British aircraft, we decided that for the investigation by the British police authorities we would admit to having been flying near Kfar Etzion while dropping medical supplies to the wounded settlers.

  We met that evening and discussed the pros and cons of what might happen to whoever said they had been in the air above Etzion. Having recently been an officer in an RAF squadron, it would have been unwise for me to have even divulged that I was flying in Palestine at that time. Each one of us had one problem or another. Some had spent time in British detention camps while others were on the British black list as members of the underground movements.

  We agreed unanimously that Ezer should say that he had been flying there at that time. He was one of the few local pilots who had a valid flying license and he carried the name Weizman, certainly an acceptable name to the British because of his uncle Chaim Weizmann.

  A few hours later, Ezer reported to the police and spent the night in custody. I was worried about him and visited the Tel Aviv police station in Rehov Hashahar the next morning. I found him sitting and chatting contentedly with the police guards, a cup of Turkish coffee in his hand. He was released the next day. An amusing sequel to the incident was that one of the English newspapers printed a headline to the effect that “Dr. Chaim Weizmann had fired on a British officer from a Jewish plane in Palestine.” Chaim Weizmann threatened to sue the paper, which retracted its report and paid libel damages. Kfar Etzion continued to withstand heavy attacks, but the situation was hopeless. On 14 May 1948, the Arab Legion breached the defenses, and the mobs of irregulars who followed the troops into the settlements butchered most of the men and women settlers. The final chapter of their heroic resistance ended in a bloodbath. The wounded together with most of the women, eighty in all, were sheltering in a bunker. The officers of the Arab Legion did not try to control their troops, who swarmed into the kibbutz for the final slaughter. They grabbed one of the girls in the bunker and pushed a grenade into her hand. After pulling out the pin, they tried to make her throw it into the bunker. She refused, so one of the mob threw the grenade into the bunker below them, killing most of the remaining kibbutzniks.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Airplanes and Volunteers

  DOUBLE PUSHKIN

  THE Kfar
Etzion mission was our first real “combined operation,” and though limited both in its scope and effectiveness, it was the first of a number of military air actions that we carried out under the difficult conditions of the time.

  Already in December 1947, Arab guerrillas had started crossing the borders of Palestine in preparation for the ending of the British mandate. More than 600 crossed in December from Syria and Lebanon, and a Syrian army regiment departed from Damascus in preparation for the border crossing. In this threatening climate, the air service took desperate measures to support the ill-equipped kibbutzim and settlements.

  We formed a unit to drop bombs by hand from our aircraft. At first we used 15-kilo and 20-kilo bombs, but later 25-kilo and 50-kilo bombs. Our nickname for the 25-kilo model was “Pushkin,” and the 50-kilo bombs, “Double Pushkin.” The origin of these strange names may be from the shouted pilot’s instructions in English to “push” them out. The bombs were fitted with a sturdy iron handle and in some cases were armed by pulling a fuse before throwing them out of the aircraft, often from our laps.

  This was accompanied with a bang and a smell of cordite, an unpleasant experience especially when flying alone in a small airplane at night. The bombing campaign was directed mostly at the enemy’s morale and was effective especially at night when, after the bombing, we dropped empty soft-drink bottles, which made an eerie whistle followed by a deathly silence when landing on sandy soil.

  In time, we improved our methods of dropping supplies to beleaguered settlements by using small parachutes and cardboard containers with winglets that opened during their descent. Although some of the drops were successful, however, many missed their targets.

  In early 1948 we succeeded in buying nineteen surplus Austers from local British army stock. These aircraft were not in flying condition and were transported by road from the RAF base in Aqir to a hideout in Sarona in Tel Aviv. They were regarded as scrap, so when we managed by cannibalization to get some of them into flying condition, illegally of course, we painted the same registration number of our sole official Auster VQ-PAS on all of them. Under each machine’s tail, we painted our own small registration number, for example, VQ-PAS 1 or 2, and so on.

  PURCHASE AND RECRUIT

  After the Kfar Etzion operation, I became desperate to do something to improve our aircraft situation, knowing, too, that our ground troops and naval forces were in a similar situation. In January 1948 Air Service headquarters agreed to my urging that I should go at my own expense to South Africa to try to buy aircraft and to recruit experienced pilots. I left for Johannesburg on 15 February 1948, confident the committed Jewish community in South Africa would do all in its power to assist.

  It was strange for me to return to my parents’ home. I was back in the environment in which I had grown up, and everything was just as it had been before I left. Yet, I was now only a visitor, my roots already replanted 10,000 miles away in Palestine.

  In Johannesburg I went to the Zionist Federation offices armed with an imposing letter from the General Council for Jewish Aviation, a mythical organization which neither I or anyone else had heard of. Coming from a well-known Zionist family that was for many years a major supporter of the cause of a national home, doors were opened and I was immediately offered help.

  My problem was not so much finding people ready and qualified to serve with us but to buy aircraft and deliver them to Palestine secretly in the face of the British arms embargo. That would let us survive until the hoped-for illegal armada of aircraft arrived from the United States.

  I, therefore, worked at breakneck pace and exhorted everyone else to do the same so that we could survive until then. The pressure I felt to get some aircraft quickly to Palestine in time for the expected ending of the mandate guided my every waking moment and left me no time for any other activity. Shortly after starting my work there I insisted that the federation offices go on to a quasi-wartime schedule working seven days a week, and no one raised any objection. I made it clear to them that if the planes did not get to Palestine almost immediately, we would not survive.

  Evidently, the Jewish authorities in Palestine heard complaints about my insisting on the introduction of emergency measures in the daily routine at the Zionist Federation in Johannesburg. South African Jewry, committed though it was to the cause of Israel, was quite unaware of the desperate situation of the Yishuv and, in particular, of the Air Service. After a few days of frantic activity, the head of the Zionist Federation in Johannesburg told me he had received a message from Ben Gurion in Palestine complaining about the problems my activities were causing the Jewish community in Johannesburg. I was hauled over the coals by Ben Gurion after my arrival back in Tel Aviv, but nothing further was done about the so-called tension I caused for the Jewish community.

  In the Zionist Federation offices in Johannesburg, I was astonished to find a recruiting section operating with the names of thousands of volunteers who were ready to go to Palestine to help in the battle we all knew was coming. There were pilots, navigators, and air gunners, as well as technical personnel with experience in engines and airframes, radar, and electronics. There were others who had no military experience but were keen to help in the defense of the coming Jewish State.

  It is surprising that there were so many volunteers in a small community totaling just over a hundred thousand Jews in South Africa. In the 1948 War of Independence, this community provided more than 800 volunteers, not many less than those who came from the great Jewish community of 5.5 million in the United States. My explanation is the deep roots of the South African Jews in their strongly Zionist Lithuanian past, whereas the Jews of the United States tended to focus more around the synagogue and Judaism.

  There were so many volunteers that I found it hard to make a selection. I made it clear that there would be no pay, only board and lodging and a few pounds a month for pocket money. I believe this policy obviated many of the problems that later arose among volunteers from other countries who had erroneously been promised substantial salaries.

  From the many suitable applicants, I chose several pilots and two navigators, all with distinguished records from World War II. As the priority was the purchase of aircraft—and it was no use bringing large numbers of aircrew and other personnel until we had enough aircraft—I kept the numbers down to fewer than twenty. I could easily have recruited more than a thousand if we could have found use for them. Some of those I selected arrived in Palestine by flying the aircraft I had purchased, and the rest came later by airliner.

  The difficulties of buying aircraft and getting them to Palestine were enormous because of South African law and the United States and British arms embargo. As a start I rented a Cessna and flew to the strips where surplus wartime aircraft were being auctioned by the South African Department of Defence.

  I took a mechanic named Haim with me to check whatever we would find. On arrival at an air base near the city of Kimberley, I was astonished to see for sale fifty Kittyhawk fighters identical to the ones I flew in 250 Squadron, all in good condition with their engines cocooned. Not having seen a Kittyhawk since the squadron in Italy three years before, I was moved speechless with nostalgia. The aircraft were lined up almost surrealistically in precise rows and looked as if they were ready to take off for a raid on a target in northern Italy.

  The buyers at the auction were mostly Jewish scrap dealers who guessed what I was up to. Some of them came to me clearly moved and told me that they had arranged the bidding so as to let me buy the aircraft cheaply. The planes were considered scrap metal by the government. After Haim and I made a cursory inspection, I entered the bidding and in no time was the owner of fifty fine wartime fighters at a price of six pounds each!

  Now came the difficult part, how to smuggle them into Palestine in the face of the embargo or, even more difficult, how to fly or to transport them to Palestine. I was well aware that there would be no help on the long, hard flight of 10,000 kilometers up Africa through the Islamic nations of Suda
n and Egypt.

  I explored all possible avenues, including one involving dismantling the Kittyhawks and loading them into large cargo Bristol Wayfarers in which we could fly them to Palestine illegally. This idea had its roots in the job I had done a year before, transporting the Irgun bomb expert Yoel illegally to England from Paris via unannounced landings on the way.

  In retrospect I feel that I gave up on the Kittyhawk project too soon, but I was overwhelmed by the difficulties and realized that the whole undertaking would involve more time than we had. Our immediate needs in the squadron at Sde Dov were so pressing that it was vital to bring reinforcements of some kind to the squadron immediately. Even light civilian aircraft that would be much simpler to get through to Palestine would help to save the day. In the end, the difficulties proved to be insurmountable for we could find no way to load the fighters onto a ship under the noses of the police, and we had to leave the P-40s to the scrap dealers. How changed the map of Israel might have been if I had succeeded in getting those fifty modern Kittyhawk fighters to Palestine by May 1948 at the start of the war!

  I felt that the problem of obtaining real military aircraft was longer term. I was convinced—wrongly as it turned out—that military aircraft would be arriving in quantity from the United States as soon as the British left Palestine. I knew that whatever arrangements I made for the Kitty-hawks would involve much time and would probably end up as a nonstarter. My worry about the comrades I had left behind in the squadron virtually without airworthy planes made it imperative to get even civilian aircraft to Palestine. They would have to fly out of South Africa, ostensibly to Europe, and somehow disappear on their way to Palestine.