New Heavens

by Boris Senior

  I replied, “I don’t know and I don’t care, but do you know who I am? I am the commander of this base, and I tell you to shut up. You are causing panic.”

  A fourth raid that morning followed shortly with more damage to our fleet. During the raid I saw a telltale stream of Glycol coolant pouring from one of the attacking Spitfires, a clear sign it had been hit and would have to crash-land. It had been hit by one of the 20mm anti-aircraft guns placed at three points around the airfield. I watched the Egyptian aircraft lose height as it headed away from the field to the north.

  After checking that more Egyptian fighters were not about to appear, I took off hurriedly in the remaining Bonanza in the direction of the Spit. It had force-landed on Herzlia beach fifteen kilometers north of Sde Dov. Apart from one wing, which had been torn off during the landing, it looked as though the pilot should have gotten out all right. After circling it once, I landed on a satellite strip on what is now Rehov Shalvah in the suburb of Herzlia Pituah, drew my pistol, and ran toward the beach. On the way I was stopped by a soldier in a command car, who told me the pilot was in our hands. He drove me to where he was being held.

  In an abandoned factory near the seafront, I found the Egyptian pilot nursing a wound on the back of his head, obviously in a state of shock and fear. Realizing his mental state, I somewhat pompously said to him in English, “You have no need to fear. You will be treated according to the Geneva Convention,” though I had no idea of the exact provisions of the convention. I asked him how he got the wound on the back of his head, for when crashing an aircraft one gets hurt in the front of the head. He replied, “I landed all right, but when I tried to get out of the aircraft, a soldier came up and hit me on the back of my head with a Sten gun.”

  After making sure that he was not badly injured, I blindfolded him and flew him to Sde Dov, from which I took him to Tel Aviv for interrogation. The commander of the air force, Aharon Remez, and Dan Tolkowski, chief of operations, joined me in the interrogation. The Egyptian was Flight Lieutenant Baraka. He was forthcoming in his replies to our questions, maintaining that the Egyptian air force had sixty Spitfires, of which, about forty were serviceable. Aware of our total lack of any military aircraft, this information shocked us.

  Baraka kept muttering, “You Israelis have very good wireless,” which I eventually understood to mean that we had good intelligence services. Throughout the interrogation he was unusually nervous and depressed. He asked me for permission to go to the toilet. I took him to the bathroom, asking a guard with a Sten gun to accompany us. When Baraka saw the guard, he became very agitated and said, “Please sir do not kill me now.” I calmed him down, and after that, he continued to answer our questions.

  He was married with two children and had at one time been employed at the Egyptian air ministry. He was later transferred to a prison camp and after the war returned to Egypt in a subsequent exchange of prisoners, but minus his wings, which I removed from his uniform as a souvenir.

  Even allowing for the effect on him of crash-landing his aircraft in enemy territory and suddenly ending up as a prisoner of war, I thought that he seemed not only stunned but unusually terrified. He was evidently not well briefed, for he could probably have glided with his dead engine from Sde Dov to Lydda Airport, which was in the hands of his Transjordanian allies, saving his aircraft and himself from imprisonment in Israel for the duration of the war.

  In the bombing of the airfield at Sde Dov early in the morning of 15 May and four times thereafter on the same day, our twin-engine Rapide was destroyed, one Bonanza was badly damaged, as were the RWD 13 and two Austers. Although other aircraft at the field suffered less damage, we were largely grounded. We had lost five men killed and nine wounded.

  Baraka was not the only prisoner of war with whom I had contact. A second Egyptian Spitfire was shot down by an RAF fighter not long after Baraka. This was after an attack by Egyptian Air Force Spitfires on the RAF base at Ramat David near Haifa. This base remained in British hands for a few days after the expiration of the mandate, covering the British exodus. It was faulty intelligence on the part of the Egyptians for presuming it to be an Israel Air Force base.

  Britain had powerful air force units in the Middle East at the time. After the first bombing of Ramat David, the Egyptian Air Force returned for another raid, but the RAF had a Spitfire patrol in the air over the field when the Egyptians came in for a second attack. Without too much trouble, the RAF fighters shot one down and the pilot, Flight Lieutenant Eynan, baled out. He landed near Kibbutz Dalia in the Carmel range and was taken prisoner by Israeli forces. Unbelievably, the Egyptian Spitfires later returned for a third attack. In total they lost five Spits in that one day. When Eynan was shot down, the news came to Israel Air Force headquarters in Tel Aviv where I was at the time deputy chief of operations.

  I immediately drove to Dalia and found the Egyptian pilot sitting in a storeroom. He was a hairy, thickset man dressed in an undershirt, but he did not seem as deeply dejected as his predecessor Baraka. I took him blindfolded in my car to air force headquarters in Tel Aviv and used the time during the journey of some two hours to interrogate him. He told me he had done training on Harvards and readily answered questions. When I asked him what the stalling speed of the Harvard was, he replied, “Sixty-nine miles per hour.”

  I gently said, “No, it is sixty-seven.” He immediately clammed up and refused to answer another question. I had flown seventy-five hours in the Harvard during training.

  After the first bombing, we were unable to do much flying. When we did get airborne, we were fired on by our own troops for they had no way of identifying us as friend or foe. There was an urgent need to have easily recognizable markings on our aircraft. I got someone to paint a Magen David (Star of David) on the fuselage and wings of one of the Austers and had one of the pilots fly the aircraft around the circuit. None of us could make out the marking from the ground, so I told the painter to fill in the Star of David in a solid, dark blue color and to paint a white circle around it. A few circuits at up to a thousand feet proved that the markings were now clearly visible, and I gave instructions to paint the rest of the aircraft. To this day the Israel Air Force uses these markings, and they are a constant reminder to me of the dark old days when our backs were to the wall. Since then aircraft so emblazoned have flown great missions as far as Iraq in the north and across the Mediterranean to Tunis in the west.

  Aharon Remez, a young Sabra with a deep commitment to the Zionist dream of a Jewish state, was eventually appointed as the head of the air force. His father was a close associate of Prime Minister Ben Gurion and one of the stalwarts of the Histadrut general trade union, which was the dominant power in Israel for years before and after the founding of the state. Remez had shortly before been released as a pilot from the RAF and had gone to the United States for a year to study. Though only having been a sergeant pilot, he had a comprehensive understanding of the role of an air force. He carried on a running fight with general headquarters, which had no experience in air warfare and tended to treat the air force more or less like another battalion that operated in a different medium, the air. This conflict led to endless friction between general headquarters and air force headquarters

  Remez fought for a larger measure of independence and an increased budget for the air force. Throughout the war I saw him returning day after day exhausted from long tussles with the general staff on the subject. He did not succeed completely in his fight but did achieve a certain measure of operational independence for the air force. He stayed in command throughout the War of Independence and did an excellent job during a period crucial for the nascent air force and the State of Israel.

  After 15 May the efforts invested in obtaining aircraft and arms elsewhere began to bear fruit. Al Schwimmer in the United States and Freddy Fredkins in Europe were making headway with their secret, mostly illegal purchases because of the arms embargo. Emissaries from Israel had also come to an arrangement with the Czechoslovakian gove
rnment and, after getting a nod from the Soviet Union, bought Messerschmitt 109 fighter planes.

  Three B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bombers, ten C-46 Curtiss Commando freighters, and three Lockeed Constellations were acquired in the United States. At night an airlift using C-54 Douglas Skymasters and C-46s from Czechoslovakia carried arms, and dismantled Messerschmitt fighters began arriving in Israel and saved the day. Slowly, the vitally necessary arms and aircraft began to augment the few aircraft that had arrived from South Africa.

  MAHAL

  Shortly after 15 May a stream of Mahal volunteers, mostly Jewish, arrived in appreciable numbers from South Africa, the United States, Canada, and Europe. The flow of volunteers was heartening, however, they encountered many problems. They had come from widely differing backgrounds and countries and arrived in the midst of a war for which they had not been prepared. Although in an unfamiliar environment with an unfamiliar language, they all were motivated by a desire to prevent the defeat and wholesale killing of the Jews of Palestine.

  The Mahal volunteers were by and large from nontraditional Jewish homes. The stream of volunteers from different countries who left their homes and families to come to fight in the unfamiliar distant land was an expression of these Jews’ longing for national identification with their people and its history.

  Most had come without contracts, had not signed up for any fixed period, had nowhere to stay when they got leave, and were short of money. Having been the initiator of the first influx of foreign volunteers from South Africa and the commander of the first air force base, I tried to help them with their problems. I gathered more than a hundred volunteers in the Yarden Hotel lounge to discuss their problems.

  In time steps were taken by the Zionist organizations in their home countries to supplement their meager army wages. The arrangements made by the South African Zionist Federation office in Tel Aviv became a role model for other countries. In the inevitable disorganization, which was a result of Israel’s being thrust into a full-scale war before having the infrastructure of a state, there were even cases of overseas volunteers being killed in action without their families being informed or cared for.

  It is of note that there was virtually no friction between the Mahalniks and the young local pilots, and relations between us and the small number of volunteers were excellent even in times of stress during the fighting.

  MESSERSCHMITT OVER TEL AVIV

  While the Egyptians enjoyed complete air superiority, we couldn’t fly in daylight. Knowing that they did not fly their fighters at night, we began to take off just before sunset and land just after sunrise. We carried out many bombings of the southern Arab towns of Mijdal, Isdud, and Gaza, always at night but with limited results apart from the psychological effect on the Arabs and the lift to our morale. We faced anti-aircraft fire from light- and medium-caliber guns. After the Egyptians were entrenched in Gaza, the fire became more accurate with radar-controlled heavy guns and powerful searchlights.

  One operation, which the population of Tel Aviv witnessed with a grandstand view, was a great morale builder. On 3 June 1948 two Egyptian Dakotas, converted to bombers, arrived over Tel Aviv. Despite the wailing of the air-raid sirens, we stood outside and watched in anger and frustration as without opposition they slowly circled and dropped their bombs. One bomb fell on the central bus station in Tel Aviv killing forty people and wounding more than a hundred. Undoubtedly, the Egyptians had been briefed by their intelligence that we had no fighters or anti-aircraft guns, and they were probably enjoying the easy raid. I was about to take off in desperation in a Bonanza with a man to operate a machine gun when we saw a fighter—one of our Messerschmitts—approach the Dakotas from behind. Golden specks soon appeared around the big Daks.

  Both Dakotas were hit by the Messerschmitt’s fire and emitted streams of black smoke as they began losing height. The ME-109 continued to shoot at the two aircraft. The exhilaration of most of the raptly watching population of Tel Aviv was boundless. I took off immediately and followed the Dakota, which was attacked first, and saw it in a shallow dive flying south parallel to the coastline evidently still under pilot control. He made a crash-landing with wheels up on the beach near Bat Yam some ten kilometers south of Tel Aviv. I descended low over him flying into the cloud of oily, black smoke. Some of the crew survived and were taken prisoner.

  This was the first shooting down of enemy aircraft by the Israel Air Force. The pilot of the Messerschmitt was Moddie Alon, who was destined to be my mate in 101 Squadron. It was the first interception by the Messerschmitt 109 fighters, which had just been airlifted from Czechoslovakia. After the downing of the two Daks, no more daylight bombing raids were carried out by enemy aircraft on any major population center in Israel. Some days before in the Bonanza, I had chased an enemy Anson bombing the outskirts of Ramat Gan with my driver in the back of the aircraft with his machine gun sticking out of the baggage door. We did not locate the light bomber. To be reduced to trying to down an attacking aircraft in a Bonanza with a machine gun firing through the open door of the rear baggage compartment best demonstrates our situation at that time.

  AMMAN

  At the beginning of June, orders came to bomb Amman, the capital of Transjordan. Ezra Omer, adjutant to General Dori, brought the operational order to me personally as commander of the base at Sde Dov. Ezra was a tall Sabra who was curt in his ways and not one to mince words; he had been through too many battles on the ground.

  As we were still wary of flying during daylight hours in our defenseless aircraft, I planned the mission for night. I decided to fly the Bonanza myself, with another pilot flying one of the Fairchild light planes.

  The Rapide pilot refused to fly the slow twin-engine biplane as he was afraid of being attacked by enemy fighters on the way back from the target, though we were fairly sure that no enemy fighter could intercept us at night. There was some justification in his refusal, especially as the slow Rapide would have been an easy target for an Egyptian Spitfire. Ezra Omer was present. He pulled out his pistol and, after putting it to the pilot’s head, calmly said, “If you do not fly you get a bullet in your head.” The pilot climbed into the Rapide without another word and took off to carry out the mission.

  I took off first in the Bonanza carrying incendiaries to pinpoint the target, as the Pathfinders had done during the heavy bomber raids on German cities during World War II. The incendiaries were homemade, like all our bombs, but looked more professional—long sticks of shiny metal in hexagonal form. They were not heavy and could be tossed out of the aircraft with ease.

  South African Dov Judah accompanied me to throw out the incendiaries. He had arrived as a Mahal volunteer early in the war and was prepared to carry out any duty, even as a lowly bomb-chucker during the early days of his service. He was a capable airman and later on in the war was appointed chief of operations of the air force. He was a Johannesburg lawyer and formerly a World War II SAAF navigator in B-26 Marauder bombers in Italy. He was about thirty, tough and uncompromising, and I had frequent contact with him through the war.

  We headed southeast and crossed the Jordan River into Transjordan. Not a light was to be seen below, only the moonlight and glitter of stars keeping us company in the darkness beyond the glow of the instrument lights. The Dead Sea reflected the moonlight and the drone of the Lycoming engine was comforting as we flew deep into enemy territory in open formation.

  We arrived over Amman after less than an hour. Surprisingly, there was no blackout, lights were blazing, and no anti-aircraft fire greeted us. We dropped our incendiary bombs, and almost immediately, all lights below were extinguished. Now anti-aircraft fire started. The flak was heavy but exploded below us. We circled while the others dropped their bombs near the fires lit by our incendiaries, and we headed home.

  I was astonished to see in the distance that the strong beacon light of Lydda Airport in Transjordanian hands for some weeks was still in full operation a mere twenty kilometers from our home base at Sde Dov. It was
the best navigational aid we could have wished for, and the irony of our bombing their capital and then returning to base with such splendid assistance caused some hilarity in the cockpit as we munched the chocolate bars I always carried on raids.

  The raid caused little damage in Amman but generated panic. On our side news of the first raid on an Arab capital raised morale. Three of our bombs fell on the Royal Air Force base outside Amman damaging the main hangar that housed two of King Abdullah’s Anson communications aircraft. One of the bombs did not explode, and the RAF sent it to the Air Ministry in London for examination and, if possible, an explanation for the large iron handle welded to its side. Had the Jews introduced a secret weapon to that theater of war? All our 50-kilo bombs were so equipped, but who outside the Israel Air Force had ever needed steel handles welded to bombs to help chuck them out?

  Following the Amman raid the RAF gave orders to prepare for a fight with the Israel Air Force should another attack materialize. As no further incidents involving the RAF in Transjordan followed, nothing ever came of this order until the engagements in Sinai in January 1949 when the RAF clashed with the Israel Air Force and lost five fighter aircraft to Israel’s 101 Squadron as described further on.

  OVER CAIRO

  When we heard that three B-17 four-engine bombers had been bought in the United States and flown to Czechoslovakia to be overhauled and equipped, I was ordered as deputy chief of operations to plan a bombing raid on Cairo. We had no good maps of Cairo and had to make do with tourist brochures. Study of these showed that the Defense Ministry, the Abdin Palace, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were in a straight line running from southwest to northeast of the city, and I chose them as targets. Israel lies well north of Egypt, therefore, I planned the approach to Cairo from the south as if coming from southern Egypt or Sudan. I felt the Egyptians would not suspect an unidentified aircraft approaching from the south. I prepared an operational order and took it to Czechoslovakia to brief the crews who were to bomb Cairo on their delivery flight to Israel.