Original subtitles

I visualized two little beaten up airplanes on an abandoned runway in

Brindisi, Italy.

We had to travel a thousand miles to Israel.

We were reading every day about the convoys in Israel being trapped in the

hills.

In one case, it was a convoy of 40 doctors that were killed.

It was desperation time in Palestine.

There was food to be dropped, ammunition to be dropped, and they only had a few

Piper Cubs. So these airplanes were critical to get over there.

We took out the seats in the back and put in a big rubber tank full of fuel

a pipe going to the wing tank.

We were flying mile -top cocktail.

We didn't have life raft, no operational radio.

We were in a hurry.

I saw some beautiful wildflowers right by the runaway.

I saw Lou jump out of his airplane and pick flowers.

I wanted to kill him, but I was able to control myself.

Just off the edge of the airstrip was a cliff.

And the airplane just sunk like this.

Eleven and a half.

Hours of watching that single propeller go round and round and round.

Never saw land, never saw a ship, never saw an airplane, nothing but just water.

It was the dumbest thing we ever did.

Flying 11 hours over water with a single -engine aircraft.

The only person I know that ever did that was Lindbergh.

Finally, we made a landfall at Matanya, turned south.

We circled the Tel Aviv airport.

It was nothing but a dirt strip.

It had no lighting except what they call goosenecks.

And after about 45 minutes, we were able to come in the land.

These two little airplanes were the biggest thing that they had in Israel.

The very next morning, they were already dropping supplies to the kibbutzim.

I handed the flowers to the first woman I saw.

Well, it flew.

I learned afterwards that we were the first ones to arrive.

This is the beginning of the Israeli Air Force.

It's a day they've been waiting for. It's a day of days for these sailors and

for the best reason in the world. They're the first group to be released

Navy. Thanks, mates, for a job well done.

After I returned from three years of war, I was in Minot, North Dakota,

in a used car and truck business, money, girlfriends, cars, the whole

enchilada.

I really wasn't very concerned about Palestine.

I never went to Hebrew school.

My mother had to drag me kicking and screaming to get me bar mitzvahed.

very virulent anti -Semitism.

People like Father Copeland.

We believe in Christ's principle of love your neighbor as yourself. And with

that principle, I challenge every Jew in this nation to tell me that he does not

believe in it.

It was tough. When I was walking home from school, we used to get it up, down,

and sideways.

Christ Killer, Sheeny, and Dirty Jew, and the whole bit.

We tried to ignore it, but you just couldn't. It was part of your psyche.

They'd surround me, and the guy would hit me from the back, and I'd turn

and then he'd hit me.

I realized by the time I was about 13 years old that in order for me to

I got to get very strong.

So I wrote a way to a guy called Charles Atlas, a dollar bill.

By the time I was 15 years old, nobody was beating me up.

I graduated high school April.

End of April, I went to the recruiting office.

And there were guys lined up.

And there was a guy sitting at a desk.

I filled out the form.

Of course, it said their religion, Jewish.

He looked up at me and he said, Marine Corps is a tough outfit. Do you think

could make it?

I looked down at him and I says, if you made it, I can make it.

I grew up in Newark, New Jersey.

I used to come back from a battle with black eyes, and I'd walk into the house,

and my father said, what did you do to the other guy?

My old man was a tiger.

We didn't have cars.

I had friends who had bicycles, and we'd go across highways and everything in

our bikes.

I lived near Newark Airport.

We would watch airplanes land.

watched the pilots and admired them. So I was always interested in aviation.

When we were kids, I used to go to Coney Island with my friends.

I would go on the Cyclone or the Thunderbolt when I could afford it. It

probably 10 or 15 cents a ride.

That rush of being frightened and loving it at the same time.

That was my introduction to taking risks and wanting to be a pilot.

We kept the culture home out of respect for my grandparents, but I didn't like

being a Jew.

I don't think you can get a job in the fire department or the police department

in New York if you're Jewish.

I didn't deny my Judaism, but I wasn't happy about being Jewish.

What changed me simply was knowing what Hitler did to the Jews.

To be murdered, six million.

I didn't understand Zionism, but I knew what had happened in Europe in the

concentration camps.

And the refugees who were trying to find some place to live.

and also the British intercepting them on the high seas and putting them behind

barbed wire in Germany.

I thought there should be something done about this.

Europe's displaced persons are on the last lap of a journey toward freedom.

Their eyes turn toward the horizon, seeking the shoreline of the promised

Off in the distance, the British destroyer fires away.

Too near and yet so far.

Palestine is still a promise.

At the end of the war, there was massive pressure on the British who control

Palestine to allow Jews to immigrate in large numbers to Palestine.

Which is something the British government refused to do.

Because they know they're going to have a future in the region, they have to

have the goodwill of the entire Arab world.

And they will not have that if they allow massive immigration of Jews to

Palestine.

The British realized that they could not achieve a compromise between the

warring clans in Palestine, the Jews and Arabs.

And they understood they couldn't remain here indefinitely.

So the British in February 1947 said, we'll hand Palestine and the whole

back to the world community.

And the United Nations came up with a partition proposal, and the idea being

partition the country into two halves, two states, one for the Jews of

and one for the Arabs of Palestine.

The Jews accepted the partition resolution of 29 November 1947.

The Arabs rejected. They want all of Palestine for themselves.

United Kingdom of Spain, United States, yes.

Uruguay, yes.

While the vote is being tallied, people are counting in their head.

And when they realize the two -thirds majority has been reached, there is such

cry of joy.

Their dreams of data have finally been granted.

The resolution was adopted by 33 votes, 13 against, 10

abstentions.

The people here were overwhelmed.

Everybody was dancing and singing in the street.

There was just one said man.

His name was David Ben -Gurion.

I stand on his side when he looked at the dancing people.

And he says, well, today they dance.

Tomorrow their blood will be spilled.

And so it happened.

There was violence.

From the time of the partition through the spring of 1948, a kind of civil war

between Jews and Palestinian Arabs.

This is when Jerusalem was besieged.

It's when the state of Israel looks like it might never emerge.

Large numbers of Palestinians turned into refugees or were displaced from

homes as a result of the fighting.

In a few cases, there were expulsions.

And in others, their leaders told them to leave.

But basically they fled in face of the flail of war.

After the partition vote, The British announced that they were going to leave

Palestine on May 15, 1948, and that started a ticking clock.

Everybody knew that come May 15, there would be a vacuum.

And so for the Jews, they knew they had to be organized and ready to fight a war

with the neighboring Arab armies, who were preparing to invade as soon as the

British left.

The Egyptians have an air force with several dozen Spitfires and a few other

military aircraft.

The Jews in Palestine had a very small air arm called the Haganah Air Service.

The air service was insignificant and didn't have military aircraft.

A girl called me and she says, look, we have a little bit of rifles, a little

bit of machine guns.

We don't have planes. We don't have tanks.

And unless we shall get some arms, we are lost.

And he says, I'm going to the United States to mobilize the money.

The Hungarian view was that the U .S. really would be the place to go for

everything.

American money,

World War II surplus equipment either rotting in fields or...

being sold at scrap prices, Jewish veterans who had current military

skills.

I got a letter from a friend of mine at TWA, and the letter just simply said, if

you're interested in flying munitions to Palestine, call this number in New York

and ask for Swifty.

Just like that.

So what the hell? I called the number.

Livingston, where the hell are you? We've been waiting a week for you.

I said, waiting for me?

Yeah, we need you right away.

The minute I got this, I knew my whole life would be different. I just knew it.

I'm in Hollywood.

There was a Palestinian general who was going to speak at the temple that night.

I went up to him and I said, look.

I know there's going to be a war there, and I'm a fighter pilot, and I want to

go there.

He said, well, I don't know anything about it.

Because, you know, it wasn't like a newspaper ad joined the Haganah. It was

illegal, of course.

Although Truman had been a strong supporter of a Jewish state, the State

Department had become very ambivalent about partition.

They thought that a Jewish state could not successfully be established, that

Jews would be overrun by the Arabs.

And so the U .S. took a number of steps to make it clear that anybody who tried

to go to Palestine to fight would lose their citizenship.

And that there would be no exportation of American war material to Palestine.

The Americans took the lead in establishing an embargo of arms to the

Middle East.

Our problem was how to break the embargo.

They used every possible way.

Ingenuity, connections, smuggling, everything.

Because it was a matter of life and death.

This is when a pivotal figure named Al Schwimmer stepped in.

Al Schwimmer was in many ways the founder of the Israel Air Force.

He began his career as a flight engineer.

It was Al Schwimmer, the American, who, when he got involved in this enterprise,

suggested you're not going to win a war against the Arab states if you don't

have an air force.

Ben -Gurion, he thought very similarly.

I get a phone call on a Sunday morning from Al Schwimmer.

He gave me an envelope with $5 ,000, sent me down to the War Surplus

Administration.

At that time, the desert was filled with airplanes.

And if you're a veteran, you can buy one.

So the airplane cost to build about $175 ,000.

For $5 ,000, I became owner of a C -46.

Schwimmer purchased a dozen or so of these C -46s, two or three of the

Constellations, and got an operation established in California.

Essentially, from scratch, he created an airline and ultimately the nucleus of

Israel's transport squadron.

The important point at the time was to recruit crews.

We had these airplanes, but no one to fly them.

My first job was not flying.

It was scouring the stolen records of New York Air National Guard rosters,

looking for Jewish sounding names with pilot status.

I got the phone call from New York, pricing me that Israel was going to

itself a state, that they had purchased some airplanes, but they had no one to

fly them.

My father was a stunt pilot, daredevil flyer. He was very swaggery and macho.

He was like Indiana Jones, kind of, you know? I mean, he had that kind

of personality.

After the war, the airlines were not hiring Jewish pilots, so an opportunity

fly for a good cause was just grand.

I believe that the reason he went was purely because he was so passionate

it. He felt like it was destiny.

He said yes almost immediately and called four friends who all said yes.

I was working as a flying instructor.

in Philadelphia on the Delaware River.

I was going to make inquiries to see whether I could go to Israel.

I was invited to New York, met with Al Schwimmer.

It was supposed to be hush -hush.

I got a form, were you in World War II, in what capacity? So I filled it out. I

was a fighter pilot.

Boom! A couple of days later, I started getting phone calls and telegrams.

Meet a guy with a flower in his lapel on West 57th Street.

These clandestine operations to recruit pilots and procure arms were centered in

a hotel in which the Copa Cabana was located.

And Frank Sinatra used to perform there.

In fact, he once volunteered to pass money to buy illegal weapons.

They asked me how much I wanted to get paid. I said, I don't need any pay. I

thought I'd be home in a month or two.

I really thought we would lose.

You know, you're talking about 600 ,000 Jews.

50 million Arabs surrounding them. I didn't see how they could possibly

I said, Mom, I'm going to Palestine.

She said, You're not going.

Under no circumstances are you going.

And I said, I'm going.

My father said nothing.

I know he would have gone.

I was risking my citizenship and also jail time.

I didn't give a shit.

I was going to help the Jews out.

I was going to help my people out.

Jewishness to me didn't mean anything. I was an American.

But the idea that Jews were going to fight, I found exciting.

It's about time.

My father, I had an argument with him about it.

I was always arguing with him.

He was always telling me I wasn't a good Jew.

And I said, I'm going to go and risk my life to be a good Jew. You don't have to

kill yourself to be a good Jew.

I told my mother I was going to work for a cargo airline.

In World War II, she received...

telegram from the War Department that I had domestic inaction.

I didn't want to put her through that again.

My mother threw herself on the floor, started crying hysterically, and I

didn't make it out the door.

I had just made up my mind that nothing was going to stop me.

I couldn't live with myself if I didn't do this.

Part of my family wound up at Auschwitz, my grandmother and my cousins.

I felt that the remnants had a right to life and some chance of happiness.

The alternative is too hard for me to envision.

The possibility of what the Arabs could have done. And they talked about the

fact that what Hitler did will be nothing compared to what we're going to

Schirmer had to figure out a way to get the planes out of the U .S.

You couldn't take them to Palestine because the British were still there and

high alert for arms smugglers.

But you couldn't leave them in the U .S. because of the arms embargo.

So they would have to hopscotch around the globe to get as close to Palestine

possible.

This idea was hatched to turn these Jewish planes into the nucleus of a fake

airline.

There was a former Air Force major who was friends with the nephew of the

Panamanian president.

So we were linear city at DePenema, which was a pony.

You have these planes lining up on the taxiway to take off, and they're very

well aware that the embargo is taking effect.

And you have these Treasury agents, or T -men, as they were called in the day,

show up, and there's a confrontation with some of the pilots who are getting

ready to take off.

Swiftie said, these are foreign -registered aircraft.

No, they're not.

They're U .S.

Swifty says, wait a minute. Goes in the hangar, comes out with a mechanic with a

can of blue paint.

The mechanic gets up on one of the sides of the C -46s and he prints LAPSA, L -A

-P -S -A, Linear City of Panama.

Sloppy letters all bleeding down.

Swifty says to the guy, okay, now they're foreign registered.

The guy says, well, I still want to let you go. And he said to the T -man, you

want to stop us? Shoot us down.

In Panama, we had the run of the town.

We settled on a favorite place, which I remember was called Tierra Feliz, Happy

Land.

We bought a Buick sedan.

My friend Norman Munson and I bought white suits.

We would ride around and pick up girls.

We were young.

Good looking, had hair.

We had a lot of testosterone.

And we didn't want to waste it.

What can I say?

We got out of Panama.

We had to go through the South Atlantic.

So we landed at Natal, Brazil.

Then we took off.

Got to Casablanca.

Payoffs all over the place.

And then we headed out.

Landed at Rome.

Rome was headquarters of the Haganah, and they were gathering pilots there.

We were all young guys,

white jackets.

And Rome was a wild place at that time.

Beautiful women with beautiful boobs.

And I'm having a hell of a time there.

And I meet Buzz Burling.

They introduced me to him.

Buzz Burling was Canada's leading World War II ace, the Falcon of Malta. He was

the kind of person who single -handedly had the potential to alter the course of

the war.

The Arabs wanted him. He wasn't Jewish, but he made it known that he wanted to

fight for the Jews.

For him, going to Palestine was going to get him back to his glory days.

And in Rome, while other pilots like Giddy Lichtman were out running around

picking up women, he was in his hotel room practicing with his model plane.

One day, Buzz Burling says, I'm going to fly a Norseman tomorrow.

He says, you want to go up? I say, sure.

Just prior to that, I had met this lovely young Italian girl.

I spent the night with her, and she wanted me to, and I wanted to stay

I called up Buzz Burling.

I said, Buzz, I can't make it today.

I have a young lady here.

So he says, I understand.

So he got another guy. I think his name was Cone.

Unfortunately, that particular plane had caught on fire and crashed.

He and his co -pilot were killed instantly.

There was some thought that his plane had been sabotaged to prevent him from

ever making it to Palestine.

Perhaps some of the women that the soldiers were carousing with were spies.

No one will ever really know.

There was only one country in the world willing to break the embargo and sell

arms and aircraft to Israel.

Czechoslovakia needed Yankee dollars. The Zionist movement had millions of

American dollars because of American Jewish contributions to the cause.

The Czechoslovakians made available an airfield. The Israelis could base all of

these transport planes that they had smuggled out of the U .S. and down to

Panama.

The Israelis were able to set this up as essentially a remote Israeli base.

When I met these people in New York, they asked me what I flew, and I told

in combat I flew the Thunderbolts P -47 and the Mustang, the P -30. Oh, he says,

we've got them, we've got them.

I said, great.

I thought.

Anyhow, that was not correct.

They were training us in an Me 109.

The Messerschmitt was a famous German fighter in World War II.

The Germans during the war had built a Messerschmitt factory in Czechoslovakia.

The Czechs took it over after the war and continued to churn out planes.

The factory that made the engines apparently had burned down, so they had

take an engine out of a bomber.

Mickey Mouse had to fit into this little 4 ,000 -pound fighter.

This thing was put together from junk.

Different propellers, different engines, and so on.

Messer shit, I called it.

I was amazed that it could get off the ground, and most of the time it

couldn't.

We lost a lot of planes on takeoffs and landings, a lot.

They gave us flight clothing, blue suede with an

Etsy wings, Luftwaffe wings on it, which I immediately took off.

I remember sitting in the cockpit of my Me 109, wearing a German

uniform, German helmet, a German parachute.

What's a nice Jewish boy from St. Paul doing in a place like this?

The irony of it did not escape any of us.

destiny approaches in Palestine.

Last pictures from Jerusalem before the end of the British mandate show a city

tensely quiet, barricaded and armed to the teeth.

Eastward, the Arab legion poised for invasion on the Transjordan border.

The rarely photographed King Abdullah reviewed a brigade of reinforcements

Iraq. How far would the Arabs go to prevent the partitioning of the Holy

On the 12th of May, 1948, Ben -Gurion summons his chief commanders to a

and asks them, what's going to happen if we declare a state? On the 12th of May,

he asks them. And Igael Yadin, the head of Haganah operations, tells them the

chances are 50 -50. That is, we don't know whether we're going to win against

the Arab states if they invade.

The Arab media did talk about killing the Jews, destroying the Jews, throwing

Jews into the sea.

And the Jews absorbed this.

And that motivated them in the sense of fearing that if they lost the war, there

would be a second Holocaust.

And that the world would not intervene on their behalf.

Ben -Gurion declared the State of Israel on the Friday afternoon, the 14th of

May, 1948.

I was a volunteer.

And our mission was to fly over Jordan and to give the army high command

an estimate of the strength of the Jordanian army that was invading Israel.

It really was a very grim situation.

The armored cars and the troops and the trucks were nose to tail for miles

coming in from Jordan.

This evening, the invasion. Arab armies are pouring in. Their tanks have already

crossed the borders and the 20th settlement has helped the first

the fighting forces of the organized Arab armies.

Saturday morning Tel Aviv was bombed. The Jews are holding their ground in the

country in spite of the fact that they have been outnumbered by the Arabs and

the Arabs have come much better equipped with heavy arms than the Jews have in

their possession.

Jews who are fighting in Palestine, the state of Israel, are fighting for the

only thing that they have in their possession.

It means life or death to them.

The Egyptians bomb sites inside Israel.

They attack the central bus station in Tel Aviv, killing several dozen people.

Jews actually have nothing with which to respond to these Arab air attacks. They

have no proper air force, and psychologically, they feel very

In Czechoslovakia, three of us were in the commandant's office.

The Czech commander was there, and I told him, I said, look, we have to go

right now. But he said, you haven't finished your flying course yet. Can't

We're going.

They say, you're on your way to go to Israel. I say, how the hell am I going

get to Israel?

In an airplane.

We set up what was known as the Air Transport Command, ATC.

These aircraft, which Swimmer had smuggled out of America, started flying

equipment to Israel.

They would bring Messerschmitts.

We would dismantle these airplanes.

One fuselage would fit into the C -46, plus a wing.

The rest was filled with boxes which contained machine guns and ammunition.

Over this fuselage, they take the wings.

And over the wings, they stick me, Kitty Lichtman.

As I flew into Israel, I had the greatest feeling I've ever had in my

never forget it.

And that was to land in my country.

You're going to think this is corny, but I had been there before.

I had this deja vu.

Maybe I was with Joshua at Jericho or someplace because everything started to

look familiar.

I remember the smell of the citrus grove.

Then coming into the hangar and seeing all these people in uniform.

These are Jews?

My cynicism vanished very rapidly, I'll tell you that.

The first four Messerschmitts arrived a week or so after the war started. They

had to be assembled.

And at that point, they were truly a secret weapon.

They were being assembled in one hangar, and the Egyptians came over and bombed

the other hangar.

Got a little bit lucky there.

They'd been put together, but it wasn't clear how successfully they had been put

together, and they couldn't be tried out.

Their first flight was going to be a combat mission.

At first, there was the thought of using them against the Jordanians, but then a

frantic call came in for assistance in the south.

About 5 o 'clock, Shimon Avidan rushed up in the jeep. He said, look, six miles

from where we're standing now at the airbase is the whole Egyptian army of

10 ,000 men, and we have nothing to stop them.

He said, if you don't go now...

They'll be in Tel Aviv in the morning and there's no Israel.

The pilots were actually two Palestinians.

These are white men.

Modi alone.

A South African named Eddie Cohen.

And Lou Lenart.

And Lenart led the mission.

This was the Air Force of Israel.

These four people and four junk airplanes.

Climbing at 6 ,000 feet in a climbing turn, Wadi Alam realized that I wasn't

sure where it is, and he went like this.

I looked down, and as far as I could see, the Egyptian army was there on the

road.

Tanks, trucks, artillery, everything.

I looked there.

I saw the enemy that came to destroy us.

I looked back and saw the people of Israel were behind me.

I just did a quick schmice foil, even though I'm not religious, turned the

airplane upside down because the dive bomb, the steeper the dive, the more

accurate is the hit.

I dropped my bomb, and then I stayed down, strafing what they call a clover

leaf, like this.

They had machine guns firing through the propellers like in World War I.

Timing mechanisms didn't always function properly and that some of the pilots

were shooting off the propellers.

This is what we expect to happen with Eddie Cohen.

We were like a band of brothers. It's like a piece of your heart breaks off.

That evening, our intelligence intercepted a radio message from the

the Egyptian army.

And I quote,

we are heavily attacked by enemy aircraft and we are scattering.

The commander of that column decided to dig in and not to advance further,

thinking that this was the vanguard of a much larger Jewish Air Force and that

there was going to be much stiffer opposition if he continued to just sort

rumble through the desert in broad daylight.

It was probably the single most important flight in the whole Israeli

They stopped the Egyptians cold.

There was a second airstrike which followed immediately after on the 30th

by an American pilot against the Iraqis.

The Iraqi army in the 48th war was the largest of the Arab armies involved.

They struck westward into Israeli territory and controlled and occupied

northern west bank.

And this is where the Israeli Messerschmitts attacked them.

Two pilots were on patrol, Asa Weizmann and Milton Rubenfeld.

This is from my father's debrief.

Open fire with MG and cannons on Tolcombe Police Station and drop the

bomb on Police Street.

Made a 90 -degree turn to north, attacked four tanks, registered hit,

And all four were zero distance.

This helped persuade the Iraqis to hunker down and not attack Israeli

thereafter.

No flak until hit right over tanks by two cannon shells, one in left wing and

one in belly.

Left wing crumbled up, climbed above clouds, all instruments gone.

He realized that he wouldn't be able to get back to his base.

He bailed out on the beach.

He saw a number of kibbutzniks come in with rifles.

Now, bear in mind that nobody in Israel knew that we had acquired combat

aircraft.

All they knew was that they were being attacked with Egyptian aircraft.

They thought he was an Arab, and so they were shooting at him.

He didn't speak Hebrew.

He had his arms up.

He started yelling Yiddish words and the names of Jewish food.

Shabbos gefilte fish.

Gefilte fish, gefilte fish.

Matzah.

Pesach. Gefilte fish. Gefilte fish.

So they stopped with the pitchforks.

Fighter Squadron was at that time made up entirely of foreign volunteers.

with two notable exceptions,

Modi Alon and Azar Weizman.

Modi Alon was a very cool customer.

Modi Alon was a good pilot, totally fearless.

One day, Modi calls us all in and said, we want to have an

insignia. and we want to have a number for our squadron.

I said, what's the number? He said, 101.

We want them to think we have 100 squadrons.

They were sitting in a bar in Tel Aviv, and someone said, you know, we need a

logo for the fighter squadron.

I said, let's call ourselves the Macha Movet, Angels of Death.

There were two veterans from California who volunteered together.

Their names were Bob Vickman and Stan Andrews.

They met on the campus of UCLA, and they were both incredibly talented artists.

Stan and Bob literally got out a cocktail napkin, and they drew this logo

angel of death with flight goggles.

And that emblem's on Israeli F -16s today.

Eight o 'clock in the morning, I'm not sure the time.

I feel somebody tap me on the shoulder.

Get ready. You're going to fly.

I'm going to fly what? You're going to fly the ME.

I said, OK, fine.

I get into the cockpit and I'm looking around. Where the fuck is this? Where is

this? I don't know where this is.

Before I flew a fighter aircraft in the American Air Force, I got at least 100

hours of intensive instruction.

Here, I got 35 minutes, and I'm taxiing out the airplane.

Marty says, let's take off. So I give it the throttle. I take off.

And I'm trying to follow him through this mist,

and I can barely see him.

We see below us four.

Egyptian spitfires.

I'm looking for the gun sight switch. I'm looking for everything.

I can find nothing.

Marty rolls over, and I roll over with my thumb up my tuchus because I can't

shoot the guns.

He makes a pass, shoots at him, and they break off, and they go into the mist.

We got 35 minutes fuel in these verstunken airplanes.

Finally, I find the gun switch. I find all the switches.

I see one of them break out. He sees me now, so he makes a half -assed turn. I

drove up as toughest and pull the trigger, and I see pieces fall out into

mist.

And I come back to the base.

They say there's an airplane that crashed.

That was the first kill.

A promise of peace for at least four weeks comes to the Holy Land.

But almost until the very hour set for the truce to begin, grim real war still

in progress.

Jews held in fortified parts of New Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, while Arabs

through other parts of Palestine.

That first phase ended successfully in the sense that the Egyptians had been

stopped in the south and there still was a Jewish state.

And Israel geared up knowing that there would be a round two.

Israel was far better organized than the Arab states and knew how to use and did

use the truces which the United Nations had forced on the sides.

To rearm, resupply, reorganize its troops far better than the Arab states.

Volunteers continued to make their way to the country.

These volunteers from outside the land are called Mahal.

Mahal is the Hebrew acronym.

Volunteers from abroad.

The Machal was a truly global enterprise.

There were about 3 ,500 of them from throughout the world.

Many were not Jewish, and about 190 of the Machal were volunteers for the Air

Force.

They came from Canada, from England, from South

Africa.

Everyone came for a different reason.

The arrival in Israel of large groups of volunteers, morale

-wise, had a tremendous impact.

The Israelis understood that they weren't alone, if you like, in contrast

Jews in the Holocaust who did feel alone and were alone.

They had expertise that very few people in Israel did.

Ground crew, radio technicians.

Each individual Makhal participant had the potential to contribute to the war

effort far above and beyond even their experience in World War II.

During truce periods, they took us into this little hotel called the Park Hotel.

And they were partying. Beautiful girls, guys, soldiers.

And I figured this was a great war.

We were notorious.

We weren't looking for trouble, but we were always looking for action.

The fighter squadron had these red baseball caps.

Any time a bar owner saw their caps coming, he'd call the police.

We used to steal a jeep because we had no vehicles.

We called that moonlight requisitioning.

Somebody would come along with a tow chain and hook onto the Jeep and pull it

out to the base, and that's how we got our vehicle.

Somehow or other, money alone was able to keep us together.

You had to put up with a lot of nonsense.

One night we got so bombed out that we took a big jar or something and threw it

against the mirror.

Somebody took out the back bar at the Park Hotel, which money made us pay for

collectively.

These are some of the shtick we used to pull. We used to pull all kinds of

stuff.

I love Giddy.

He's special.

Leon Franco was legitimate.

Torpedo bomber pilot in the Navy.

He won the highest medal, the Navy Cross.

Handsome. We were all stupors, but he was the primo stupor.

I had a couple of girlfriends there. I don't know if it was my looks or my

status or what it was that attracted them, but we got along very well.

And that's about all I can say about that.

Many of the volunteers, most of them, did not speak Hebrew.

Many of the Israelis did not speak very good English.

Social relations between the two of them could be difficult.

I don't think the Israelis were too pleased with us because we swaggered

For them, it was a different experience. It was a hard life.

The economy was not firmly established.

There was great poverty there, and there were shortages.

And the new state was still absorbing tens of thousands of survivors.

I met this girl at the Park Hotel.

The conflict arose when it came whether I would settle in Israel.

I said, no, I'm a Yankee, an American.

She said, well, you're a Jew. I said, I can be an American and a Jew, can't I?

I said, I'm here to help you people.

You can help us by helping us grow.

I said, I'm helping you become an entity. Isn't that enough?

I didn't know then that I was one of them, or I didn't admit it.

On the 8th of July, the Egyptians broke the first truce.

And then Israel went over to the offensive.

The Air Force plan was to have this lightning raid right at the beginning of

next round of fighting to go after the most forward Egyptian base at El Arish

and to knock their planes out on the ground.

Lou Lenard again headed that mission.

Bob Vickman was one of the other pilots.

Stan Andrews was to be part of that mission as well. He and Bob were going

fly together.

Andrews' plane, as these planes often did, ground looped on takeoff, and he

ended up in a cloud of dust.

The remaining three planes formed up and went south, but they'd used up valuable

fuel while waiting for the Andrews situation to be sorted out and had to

back before reaching the target.

I'm flying low south, and I saw a troop ship unloading supplies and

troops in the port of Gaza.

I turned left and came over, and my other two planes followed me.

And I dove down on the ship.

My number two was hit.

An American kid.

Bob Dickman's plane plunged into the sea.

Dan was devastated by his best friend having gone missing on this mission and

committed himself to doing everything in his power to locating Bob, dead or

alive.

He said, I came here with Bob and I'm not leaving without him.

Tragically, he ended up keeping that promise because his plane also crashed

his body was never found.

One of Al Schwimmer's great coups was to purchase three B -17 bombers, and he

smuggled them out of the country to Florida and managed to get them over to

Czechoslovakia.

So then there became this great debate. What do we do with these B -17s? Do we

just fly them to Israel, and do we actually use them to strike at the Arabs

before they've made their way into the country?

Egypt had been bombing Israel for all this time.

Cairo had never been bombed before.

Schwimmer himself had been a TWA pilot and some of the others had been

commercial pilots as well.

So when they flew into Cairo, the radio went off from the traffic control

tower at the Cairo airport asking the plane to identify itself.

One of the pilots said, oh, this is TWA Flight 38. We're coming in, and they

turned on the runway lights at the airport for this P -17, which, of

strafed and bombed the Cairo area as a result.

One bomb fell near King Farouk's palace, and psychologically it made a very,

very profound impression on the Egyptians.

The next day, thousands left Cairo.

They felt it was too dangerous.

And Israel at that point had a real credible bomber force, which nobody else

really had.

For the third round of fighting, the goal was to displace the Egyptians once

for all from the Negev.

We had a contingent of soldiers down there, totally cut off, totally

They had no weapons.

You couldn't get in by sea.

You couldn't truck them in.

They had to be flown in.

That was Schwimmer's mission.

And he put airstrips in, on the sand.

We brought them in. We brought every screwdriver in.

They would have literally starved to death had it not been for the supplies

were brought in.

Really, the whole survival of the Negev communities was because of the Air

Force.

We would take off from Tel Aviv.

We'd bring palm optics in.

Take out wounded.

Fly them back.

These guys were real soldiers who had taken one for the country.

Tough guys. A lot of them were refugees, too, by the way, from Europe.

They were pleased to have given what they gave for this.

I went down there and saw all these kids.

Couldn't believe it.

They could only be equipped with what we could equip them with.

I did have a conversation with a girl, got in a holster.

I thought about my own sister, my little sister, who was about the same age at

the time, packing a gun.

The Arabs, if they were in trouble, they could go home and

live to fight another day.

The Israelis couldn't afford to lose, and they knew it.

They were willing to give their lives.

October 16th, I remember the day very well.

I was heading out over the mega by myself, and I came upon this engagement.

I saw an ME -109.

right behind a spitfire, knocking chunks off of it. And I looked to the left and

saw another Egyptian spitfire.

By the time I pulled around, he was a little speck in the sky, halfway to

And all of a sudden, the engine started running rough.

So I looked at the oil gauge, and it read zero.

Now, in all my years of flying, I had never seen an oil gauge read zero.

And then I started smelling smoke.

I said, Leon, you better look for a place to come down because you're not

to make it.

I just cleared the orange rose.

slid forward and went up on its nose and back down on the ground. I got a face

full of dirt.

I knew I had to go west and north to get away from the Jordanian lines.

Off in the distance, coming down the road, I saw a truck with soldiers in it.

I knew what had happened to other downed pilots.

a couple of them, and I wasn't going to be taken prisoner.

I pulled out my revolver.

Well, if it's Jordanians, I'm going to take five of them and save the last

bullet for myself.

About 50 yards away, I heard Hebrew being spoken.

So I jumped out and started waving my arms.

By the time I got to the air base, I could see there was an airplane burning.

I asked somebody what it was. He said it was one of the pilots who was either

Muddy Alon or Acer Weichman.

Acer's parents, they came into my room hysterical, both of them. Is my son

Is my son dead?

I said, no, he's alive. He's alive. He's alive.

It turned out to be Marialon.

It was a horror.

Devastating. Devastating. We felt that we had really lost our leader.

It was like losing our heart.

As we were leaving the funeral, I was in the back of a Jeep.

I started going into shock.

And my limbs wouldn't move.

I felt totally paralyzed.

So they took me to a hospital in Jaffa.

Then I decided I'd had enough.

We'd gotten some replacement pilots, so I didn't feel like I was leaving the

squadron in any kind of jeopardy.

Policies were always free to leave.

The Israelis realized they were going to need as quickly as possible to train

the local population to be able to take on this burden themselves.

Danny Shapiro was a particularly fascinating young Israeli pilot.

Some of us were sent to Czechoslovakia.

to train as soon as possible to fly back to Israel.

We heard that some of the volunteers, they left the country, their families,

know, they went back.

I said to the guys, we will never surrender.

We have to study as fast as possible so there will not be another Holocaust.

In November, they asked me to go back to Czechoslovakia and train some of the

Israeli pilots that were being trained in Czechoslovakia.

George Lichter was fearless. He was not afraid to go up time and time again in a

plane that everybody else was quite fearful of.

One day arriving, a guy looks, you know, tough.

He said, I'm George Lichter.

I came to see who is capable to fly a fighter airplane and who is not.

In fact, we didn't sleep that night, you know, I was so scared.

He flew with me, one flight.

He said, do this, turn left, turn right, tall, spin.

I got back.

And I made a nice landing.

George Yusuf said, now you brief those guys what to do, what to avoid.

The Czechoslovakians agreed to sell a bunch of World War II Spitfires to

The Spitfire could climb like an angel. It was really a great plane.

And they asked me to fly with the Spitfires to Israel so they could enter

war right away.

We were short two pilots, and I recommended that we take these students.

were basically novices. They were beginners.

The more experienced pilots, they spoke to us like if we were going to get

killed.

They said, it's very dangerous.

You don't have any experience flying in bad weather.

I said to Monty, let's keep the mouth shut.

They won't put us on the formation if we say that we are afraid to fly. So I

didn't say anything.

It was so cold, you know, I was freezing. My hands were freezing.

They flew on my wing.

Mati on one wing and Danny Shapiro on the other.

Once we got into the clouds, it all messed up.

I was close to George and all of a sudden I lost sight of him because of

clouds.

To avoid a collision, I turned slightly to the right to open up the space.

All of a sudden, I was alone.

I saw my artificial horizon moving, and I'm losing altitude.

Somehow he got lost from the group.

I went down looking for him.

My airspeed was building up.

I didn't know how to recover.

And I knew, Danny, that's it.

You're going to die.

I was very concerned. How am I going to find that little speck?

And all of a sudden, he saw me much lower, you know, spiraling.

I saw George saying, come over, come over.

I could see his mouth. Come over.

He picked me up and he brought me back.

He saved my life.

He was sure that we will make it.

And we made it.

We made it.

Next day, the Israel army pushed the Egyptian army back.

And those Spitfires took a big part.

Really.

fighting and winning by this time.

As a Jew, I now felt proud of being Jewish.

The final phase of the war was from the 22nd of December.

It was a great battle, and the Air Force threw in everything it had.

Again, for Egyptians, with the B -17s and the Spitfires and the C -46s.

It really was a hell out effort, you might say.

The 48th war ended when the Israelis surrounded the Egyptian army, which was

concentrated in the Gaza Strip, forcing the Egyptians to call it quits and to

call for an armistice.

The United Nations Security Council decreed that the final ceasefire

would be on the 7th of January, 1949.

The 1948 war was the most historically significant of the Israeli -Arab wars.

This was a tremendous blow to the Arab world and is remembered as such to this

day.

It's also significant because during that war, Palestinian society was

essentially crushed.

And 700 ,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes and became refugees.

And this is a second consequence of the war.

The Palestinian people, to this day, see it as a catastrophe, or in Arabic, a

Nakba.

It was a very difficult war.

Close to 1 % of the population were killed, so it was a very, very difficult

extended war.

The people who fought in 1948 and brought about the creation of the State

Israel.

For most of them, this was the golden moment of their lives.

On March 14, 1949,

there was a big parade.

I received my wings.

I had tears in my eyes.

This was my wish. Long time when I was a kid.

Now I became a pilot.

In the Israeli Air Force, in my Air Force, in my country.

To train a pilot takes years.

And there came a group, experienced, volunteers, who

risked their lives, who risked their passports.

They fought, they trained, they built.

It was a godsend.

When I came back, my father would boast to his patients

and his colleagues about my son who saved Israel.

It changed my whole life.

It made me a mensch.

I had done something good for once.

There was a picture of me standing next to Ben -Gurion, my father.

He used to cavil. He loved it.

My father used to look at me kind of out of the side of, you know, like this.

What is he going to do next?

When I went to school, I got terrible grades because I never cracked a book.

I know they were both very, very proud.

Those were the best days.

We built an Air Force.

During difficult times, did you feel that Israel would survive?

Somehow, yes, and I'll tell you why.

Israel is an article of faith.

I felt more at home in Israel than I did in the United States. I felt this was

my home.

When I came back with my wife to Israel, we were four couples in one little

apartment. We shared everything.

Doors were open.

I don't remember a locked door in those days.

The happiest days of my life.

I was born to be here on that moment of history to

contribute to Israel's survival.

And that's the most important thing I did in my life.

We have a great word in Yiddish, it's bashert.

It's fated. It's meant to be.

Maybe God spared us in World War II so that we could come to Israel and help

remnants of our people survive.

Shortly before I left Israel, they happened to be in Tel Aviv when they

bringing in refugees from the death camps in Europe.

I remember them getting down on their hands and knees and kissing the ground.

I knew then and there that was the reason that I came.