New Heavens (14 page)

Sde Dov airfield, in the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv, was our base. There was an assorted collection of civilian aircraft: an Auster, two Tiger Moths, a Taylorcraft, which flew backward at a hint of a headwind, and one luxurious Polish three-seater with the unusual name of RWD 13. This was the nucleus of the future Israel Air Force. Not one of the aircraft boasted an engine larger than 100 horsepower, and they had no armament of any kind.

The field consisted of one east-west runway of 800 meters in a sandy waste on the Mediterranean coast. The sand on which the field was built pervaded our environment completely, and its tawny color is etched into my memory to this day. As Palestine was still a British mandate and no hint of military flying could be shown, we operated from Sde Dov in the guise of a flying club. The field was reached via a dirt road that crossed over a rickety wooden bridge put
up by the management of the electric corporation. The corporation charged us a toll of ten piastre each time we crossed the bridge over the narrow Yarkon River. The field was next to the electric-power station with its large chimney. We had one hangar and a tiny wooden hut, which served as our changing room and store for our flying kit. In time, someone appeared without warning and in a true spirit of private enterprise, began to serve us tea and biscuits at a price until someone at headquarters put his foot down and to our regret removed him.

A large, hollow wooden cube painted in black-and-white squares was brought to the field and served as our control tower. Shmuel, a former Belgian Air Force navigator, acted as our flying controller. Not having any radio equipment, he used an Aldis lamp to give us a green for “go” and red for “stop.” One mechanic saw to the line maintenance of our small fleet.

We operated entirely clandestinely from Sde Dov. At that time, as the area was still under British mandatory occupation, a British army motor-transport unit used the field as a base. One of my tasks was to shout our identity in English to the British soldier guarding the entrance to the field as we arrived from our billets every morning in a large taxi.

The airfield's single runway ran east to west toward the sea and was also the main approach to the sands on the beach north of Tel Aviv. Quite often, we had to stop takeoffs and landings when a long line of trucks would form to use the runway. They came for the fine building sand near the sea. It was a reminder that we were in the Middle East when we sometimes saw long trains of camels making their way
along the side of the runway from the beach, their saddlebags loaded with sacks of sand.

Our billet was in a hostel in north Tel Aviv used for trade union and kibbutz members who came to the city to study and to attend seminars. Accommodations were on the second floor of the modern building, usually three or four to a room. The atmosphere was suffused with the wholesome feeling of a kibbutz. It was rough but aesthetic, clean and businesslike and run by old Yishuv Slav types, who had such an overwhelming impact on the original molding of Israel and whose influence remains to this day.

After having eaten English breakfasts and prepared meals all my life at my boarding school and in the SAAF, I was baffled by my first encounter with the Israeli breakfast in the dining room. Cold hardboiled eggs, rye bread, which we had to slice ourselves from the loaf, white cheese, and fresh vegetables, the latter not served as a salad but in large basins on the tables. We chose the vegetables we fancied and then peeled the cucumbers, cut up the peppers and tomatoes, very communal and kibbutzlike. I made the acquaintance of a kibbutz custom, the
kolboinik
, into which we threw all our peels, egg shells, and other debris at the table.

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.

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 unobtrusively 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.