New Heavens (7 page)

Food was wholesome and good, preceded by grace at long tables. Seating was always unchanged, each house or dormitory at its own separate table. Care was taken to ensure that whenever pork or bacon was served for meals, other meat was available for the seven or eight Jewish boys among the 230 boys at the school. Apart from the fact that we did not eat any meat originating from a pig, and did not go to chapel, there was no difference between the pupils, and no discrimination of any kind. Knowing what existed in much of “enlightened” Europe at that time, South Africa can be viewed only, though admittedly from the standpoint of a white citizen, as a haven of decency.

Probably the complete lack of bias between the members
of the white population had its roots in the need for solidarity among the whites in face of the perceived danger of being overwhelmed by the large black majority in South Africa.

In Johannesburg, the pleasant environment for white South Africans in the 1940s belied the tensions resulting from the laws of apartheid as the whites were to a great extent shielded from the iniquities of the laws. Certainly, the fact that I was so protected from what happened in my own society during my youth was a contributory factor to the shock I experienced when I learned after the war about the death camps of Nazi Germany, for I had experienced virtually no anti-Semitism.

There is also a curious affinity between the Afrikaners and the Jews. Many of them see a parallel between the rebirth of Israel with its struggle for survival and their own efforts to exist as a tiny minority in a sea of blacks. There are also traces of the Calvinist belief among the original Huguenot and old Dutch settlers that their mission was to Christianize and uplift the indigenous peoples in southern Africa.

When I left Hilton by train for the last time, I felt satisfaction at leaving school. However, the great expectations of facing the next hurdle of life were tinged with some uneasiness at leaving the safe cocoon of our protected school routine. Though we were all attached to Hilton, it was a relief to be freed of the strict discipline. I still recall the deep comradeship, which can come only from shared experiences and from living together throughout long months.

WINGS PARADE

THE news of the fall of France in June 1940 reached me one late afternoon on a gray, depressing day. After reading so much about the Allied armies and the great French commanding generals Weygand and Gamelin, I was shocked by their humiliating defeat. I began to fear that we were lost and that our seemingly known and secure world would henceforth be run by Hitler and his henchmen. It felt like the beginning of the end of life as we knew it.

After finishing school, all I wanted to do was to join the South African Air Force, learn to fly, and get into a fighter squadron as quickly as possible. In South Africa in World War II, there was no conscription, but until age twenty-one, parental permission was required for volunteers. As my older brother Leon was already in the air force, I agreed to my parents' request to wait for one year before joining up, and I began studies at the university in Johannesburg.

In the midst of the war and with climactic events happening
daily in the various theaters of war, I found it well-nigh impossible to do anything but think about the war. Only with difficulty was I able to wait my turn to enlist. With the war dominating my thoughts and everything I did, campus life seemed tame, and as most of us felt the same, we took part in campus life only half-heartedly.

Leon was a flight instructor, and he realized that I was serious about joining the air force. Leon arranged for me to be taken up with one of his associates at the flying school. Probably on Leon's instructions, he put the Hawker Hart biplane through its paces in aerobatics to frighten me off flying. The fully aerobatic biplane enabled the instructor to throw it around the sky and fly it inverted; of course, it had the opposite effect for I couldn't wait to start flying.

After passing exhaustive medical examinations, I went to the Lyttleton base of the South African Air Force for aptitude tests. I failed the aptitude test as a pilot, and after refusing under any circumstances to relinquish my dream of piloting by agreeing to become an air gunner or navigator, I realized that I had to find some other way of getting on a pilot's course. I had heard that it was possible to join the Chinese Air Force of General Chiang Kai-shek, so I paid a visit to the Chinese consulate in Johannesburg. They were polite but said that I would have to make my own way to the provisional capital in Chungking to offer my services. In the middle of the war this was clearly not feasible, so I went to Rhodesia to try to gain acceptance by the Royal Air Force, Rhodesia being a British colony.

Upon arrival in Salisbury, I went to the RAF recruiting center only to be told that South Africans were not accepted
and that the only option for me was to return and join the South African Air Force.

At my wits end, I next went to see the Belgian consul in Salisbury to try to get accepted to the Belgian Air Force, for pilots from the Belgian Congo were training with the South African Air Force. The Belgian consul informed me that they, too, did not accept anyone from South Africa. Sad and disheartened I decided to return to Johannesburg and to apply to enlist as a navigator.

I boarded the train back to Johannesburg just before dusk and went to the dining car for dinner. By chance, my partner at the table was a personable young Greek Air Force lieutenant, who proudly wore a brand new pair of wings, which he had gained after completing his flying training in Rhodesia. Over dinner, he patiently answered my questions about his flying course. Realizing that he was far from his home and feeling lonely, I invited him to spend time with us in Johannesburg before he continued to the Middle East to join a Greek Air Force squadron. His name was George Lagodimus, and we promised to meet again when the war was over. Our next meeting turned out to be one neither of us could have foreseen.

Eventually, the South African Air Force, perhaps impressed by my persistence, relented when I reappeared, and they accepted me for pilot training. The initial training was at Lyttleton, a cold and deserted-looking camp in the Transvaal veld near Pretoria. Our welcome was not encouraging for it was the habit of the cadets to shout “Go home!” as soon as a bunch of new recruits appeared.

The discipline at the initial training base was harsh. The
commander of the base was a colonel. He had a large black dog that wore a major's crown on his collar, and we had to salute the dog every time we passed him. We all took this quirk in good humor, having been told that when saluting an officer we were saluting not the wearer of the rank but the King's commission.

There were a mixed bunch of would-be pilots in our course: Afrikaners, Englishmen, and a few Jews. Food on the base was plentiful, but the timing of some meals was strange for when we got up in the early morning at 0430, we were often served either steak or mutton chops and mashed potatoes, a little hard to cope with at that time of day. There was much drinking by the cadets at the bar of Polly's hotel in Pretoria, making our way back to the camp in the early hours of the morning.

In time we were sent on a gliding course. The first time I saw the elementary instruction glider, I was surprised to see that it consisted of a bulky wing with a fuselage, which was an open-frame construction without any covering. It looked to me as though it was a cut-down model made to show us how it was constructed. The instructor was puzzled when I quite innocently asked when we would see the real glider.

We were strapped into this contraption and towed along at high speed by a cable attached to a winch. We released ourselves from the cable at 800 feet. We were encouraged to sing when up in the air in order to help us relax, and it was amusing to hear a pupil singing gaily high above us.

The next step in pursuit of my wings was at the elementary flying school, near the small town of Potchefstroom in
the Transvaal, to complete seventy-five hours on the yellow de Havilland Tiger Moth biplanes. They were fairly difficult aircraft to fly accurately and were therefore good for training. The flights in these fully aerobatic trainers with their two open cockpits in tandem for the instructor and the pupil were exhilarating. They were old but reliable airplanes and even some of the maneuvers, which demanded that I be suspended upside down with my head and part of my upper body hanging out in the slipstream, did not worry me. The Tiger Moths were constructed of aluminum tubing covered in fabric, which even at that time seemed old-fashioned.

My instructor was named Cohen, and a friend in the course ahead of me who was also Cohen's pupil complained bitterly about his behavior. Was this coincidence, or was someone arranging for the “Jew boys” to be lumped together? Whatever the reason, we both attained our wings despite our instructor. Cohen was awful. Whether his nerves were shot from a tour of operations in a squadron in North Africa or from instructing I don't know. He screamed and swore at his pupils, and would get so enraged when we made mistakes that he would sometimes undo his harness and stand up in the front cockpit with his control column in his fist threatening to brain us. One of the senior pupil pilots, who had also had the misfortune to be assigned to him, had secretly bent the pins in Cohen's parachute and planned to do a slow roll when he got out of his harness, hoping to get rid of him for good. Of course, he chickened out.

Cohen did not exactly encourage his pupils, but I managed
to be assigned to another instructor who was a relief after him. After my dual time of seven and a half hours of circuits and bumps, the instructor removed his stick and said, “Off you go now. You are going to be all right.”

Though it was an achievement, a landmark in my life, my first solo was a bit of an anticlimax for I felt no great anxiety when I was left on my own. I just flew the Tiger Moth as I had been taught to do, and the aircraft responded as expected. The great joy came to me in the solo flights that followed later, and I was delighted to be up in the sky alone.

Shortly after that we began aerobatics, and I quickly learned that the Tiger is a most difficult aircraft in which to perform a good slow roll. It was not easy to stop the nose straying to the left or right of its initial position and to keep exactly the same height. All aerobatics are wisely preceded by 360-degree steep turns to ensure that the area is free of other aircraft. On my first attempt to do solo aerobatics, I remained inverted during one of the maneuvers for too long. My engine cut and I was hard put to get it restarted again. Fortunately, I succeeded. In general, aerobatics, which included loops, slow rolls, and the much-easier barrel rolls, stall turns, and rolls off the top, were a great pleasure. Aerobatics teaches you how to maintain complete command of your craft in any attitude and gives confidence in your ability to handle the airplane.

After a hundred hours of advanced flying instruction, I had my first night flight. At night, the air is usually smooth. To
be up on your own, high above the lights on the ground, gives a feeling of being divorced from the earth and your environment while you are suspended in an immense black vault with no beginning and no end. The muted glow of the instrument panel lends a quietness and intimacy to the mood in the cockpit as you glance from the instruments to the world outside. All sounds sound different at night, more muted, and even voices were more subdued. I always felt more at one with my aircraft at night than during the day. The conclusion to a night flight invariably gave me a sense of achievement, and the gooseneck paraffin flares on the side of the runway lent an unusually dramatic atmosphere to our familiar environment.

The Harvard (AT-6) trainers we graduated to were much superior to the Tiger Moths in elementary flying school, and this was the reason I was nearly washed out of the course. Shortly before the great day of the wings parade, we had to make a long solo, triangular cross-country flight. During the flight, I spotted a yellow Tiger Moth flying on a course well below me across my track. Only one of the cockpits was occupied, and assuming that it was a junior pupil on a cross-country flight from the elementary flying school, I could not resist buzzing him repeatedly, thinking that I was showing the sprog some ace flying. I was a little surprised that he did not seem fazed by the mock attacks I made on him, merely continuing to fly a straight and level course. I saw his head in the open cockpit probably giving me a baleful look as I dived down on him at high speed from above. After attending funerals at flying school, I have come to the conclusion that the most dangerous period in
one's flying career is after solo and completing a number of hours at flying school. That is when you are convinced that you are probably the hottest pilot around.

About a week later, I was called into the base commander's office and was told that I had been seen dangerously buzzing a Tiger Moth flown by no less than a colonel who was the aide-de-camp to Prime Minister General Smuts. He had made a note of the number of my aircraft and reported me. A court martial followed, ending in a sentence of ten days detention. I remember standing at attention facing the judge in my short pants and struggling to keep my knees from knocking together. I spent the time in a cell in a military police post. One memory that I have of that confinement was that the door to my cell had no handle on the inside making me feel completely cut off from the world outside. It occurred to me that it would be very unpleasant should a fire break out. However, the most important point was that I was not going to be washed out of my flying course and merely faced a delay of one course, about six weeks.

Finally, the great day came for the wings parade. It was already getting late in the war, and I was concerned that the fighting might end before I could get to a fighter squadron. After rehearsals for the wings parade, we were at last ready for the ceremony, which came after eighteen months of hard training, dropping off, by the way, three-quarters of those who had appeared at the beginning for the aircrew medical and aptitude tests.