Original subtitles

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Visualize two little beaten-up airplanes on this 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 filled with fuel,

with a pipe going to the wing tank.

We were a flying Molotov cocktail.

We didn't have life rafts, no operational radios.

We were in a hurry.

I saw some beautiful wildflowers right by the runway.

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

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

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Just off the edge of the airstrip was a cliff,

and the airplane just sunk like this.

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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, single-engine aircraft.

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

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Finally, we made a landfall in Netanya, turned south.

We circled the Tel Aviv Airport. It was nothing but a dirt strip.

Had no lighting, except what they call "goosenecks."

And after about 45 minutes, we were able to come in and 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, that's Lou.

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

That was the beginning of the Israeli Air Force.

♪

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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 by the Navy. Thanks, mates, for a job well done!

After I returned from three years of war,

I was in Minot, North Dakota.

Partners 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-mitzvah'd.

I grew up in an age of very virile and anti Semitism.

People like Father Coughlin...

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 it!

It was tough. When I was walking home from school,

we used to get it up, down, and sideways.

Christ killer, sheeny,

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 around and then he'd hit me.

I realized by the time I was about 13 years old that,

in order for me to survive, I gotta get very strong.

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

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

I graduated high school in 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 there, "religion." "Jewish."

He looked up at me, and he says,

"Marine corps is a tough outfit. You think you can 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, but 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, and watch the pilots and admire 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 was probably 10 or 15 cents a ride.

It's 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 a kosher home out of respect for my grandparents.

But I didn't like being a Jew.

I don't think you could get a job in a fire department or a police department in New York if you were 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.

He murdered six million!

I didn't understand Zionism, but I knew

what had happened in Europe in the concentration camps.

And the refugees 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 towards freedom.

Their eyes turn toward the horizon,

seeking the shoreline of the promised land.

Off in the distance, a British destroyer fires away.

So 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 just refused to do.

Because they know if they're gonna have a future in the region,

they have to have the good will 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 the Arabs.

And they understood they couldn't remain here indefinitely.

So the British in February '47 said, "We'll hand Palestine and the whole problem,

back to the world community."

And the United Nations came up with a Partition proposal.

The idea being to partition the country into two halves,

two states, one for the Jews of Palestine, 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.

The United Kingdom,

abstain.

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 a cry of joy.

Their dreams of statehood had 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 sad 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 happened.

There was violence.

From the time of the Partition through to 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 looked like it might never emerge.

Large numbers of Palestinians

turned into refugees, or were displaced from their 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.

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

Ben-Gurion called me, and he 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 should get some arms, we are lost."

And he says, "I'm going to United States to mobilize an army.

Ben-Gurion's view was that the US 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 ammunitions 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, huh?"

"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 wanna go there."

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

'Cause, you know, it wasn't like, a newspaper ad, "Join 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 the Jews would be overrun by the Arabs.

And so, the US 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 embargo alarms to the entire Middle East.

Our problem was how to break the embargo.

We 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, now, he thought very similarly.

I got 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 were a veteran you could buy one.

So the airplane cost to build about 175,000.

For $5,000 I became the 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 this time

was to recruit crews.

We had these airplanes,

but no one to fly them.

My first job was not flying.

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

looking for Jewish-sounding names with pilot status.

I got this phone call from New York

appraising me that Israel was going to declare itself a state,

that they had purchased some airplanes,

but they had no one to fly them.

My father was a stunt pilot, daredevil flier.

He was very swaggery and macho.

He was like a, um...

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 to fly for a good cause was just grand.

I believe that the reason he went

was purely because he was so passionate about 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 began 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 start getting phone calls and telegrams.

"Meet a guy with a flower in his lapel

on West 57th Street."

These clandescent operations

to recruit pilots and procure arms

were centered in a hotel in which the Copacabana 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

and 50 million Arabs surrounding them.

I didn't see how they could possibly survive.

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've gone.

I was risking my citizenship and also jail time.

I didn't give a shit.

I was gonna help the Jews out.

I was gonna 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... I wasn't a good Jew.

And I said, "I'm gonna go and risk my life to be a good-"

He said, "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'd received a telegram

from the War Department that I'd been missing in action.

I didn't wanna put her through that again.

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

and I almost didn't make it out the door.

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

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

Part of my family wound up in 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

would be nothing compared to what they're gonna do.

Schwimmer had to figure out a way to get the planes out of the US.

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

and on high alert for arms smugglers.

But you couldn't leave them in the US

because of the arms embargo.

So they would have to hopscotch around the globe

to get as close to Palestine as 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 Lineas Areas de Panama,

which was a phony.

You have these planes lining up on the taxi ready to take off

and they're very well aware that this 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.

Swifty said, "These are foreign-registered aircraft."

"No, they're not. They're US."

Swifty says, "Wait a minute."

Goes in the hangar, he comes out with a mechanic with a can of blue paint.

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

"LAPSA." L-A-P-S-A.

Lineas Aereas de Panama.

Sloppy letters, all bleeding down.

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

And the guy says, "But I still won't let you go."

And he said to the T-man,

"You wanna 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 Woods and I bought white suits.

And 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 else 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 are all over the place.

And then we headed out, landed at Rome.

Rome was the headquarters of the Haganah,

and there were gathering pilots there.

We were all young guys, flight 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 Beurling.

They introduce me to him.

Buzz Beurling was Canada's leading World War II ace.

He was 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 Lichman, were out

running around and picking up women,

he was in his hotel room practicing with his model planes.

One day Buzz Beurling says, "I'm gonna fly a Norseman tomorrow."

He says, "You wanna 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 longer.

I called up Buzz Beurling.

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 Cohen.

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 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 the American-Jewish contributions to the cause.

The Czechoslovakians made available an air field so the Israelis could base

all of these transport planes

that they had smuggled out of the US 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. I told them in combat I flew the...

Thunderbolts P-47, the Mustang, the P-51...

"Oh," they said. "We've got them. We've got them."

I said, "Great! Wonderful!" 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 turn out planes.

The factory that made the engines

apparently had burned down,

so they had to take an engine out of a bomber.

Mickey Mouse had to fit in through this little 4,000 pound fighter.

This thing was put together from junk.

Different propellers, different engines, and so on.

"Messershit" 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 the Nazi 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, German parachute.

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

The irony of it did not escape any of us.

♪

The hour of 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 deploys for invasion on the Transjordan border.

The rarely photographed King Abdullah reviewed a brigade of reinforcements from Iraq.

How far will the Arabs go to prevent the partitioning of the Holy Land?

On the 12th of May, 1948,

Ben-Gurion summoned his chief commanders to a session

and asked them what's going to happen if we declare a state.

On the 12th of May he asks them,

and Yigael Yadin, the head of Haganah operations

tells him 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 absorb 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 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 frontier settlements have heard the first onslaught

of the fighting forces of the organized Arab army.

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 is life or death to them.

The Egyptians bombed sites inside Israel.

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

The Jews actually have nothing with which to respond

to these Arab air attacks. They have no proper air force,

and psychologically they feel very vulnerable.

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

The Czech Commander was in there. I told him, I said, "Look,

we have to go back right now."

But he says, "You haven't finished your flying course yet."

"Can't wait. We're going."

They say, "You're on your way to go to Israel."

I say, "How the hell am I gonna get to Israel?"

"In an airplane."

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

ATC.

These aircraft, which Schwimmer 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, Giddy Lichtman.

♪

As I flew into Israel,

I had the greatest feeling I've ever had in my life.

I'll never forget it.

And that was to land in my country.

You're gonna 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 groves,

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'd been put together, and they couldn't be tried out.

Their first fight 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.

By 5:00, Shimon Avidan rushed up in the jeep. He says, "Look,

six miles from where we're standing now at the airbase

is the whole Egyptian army of about 10,000 men,

and we have nothing to stop them."

He says, "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, Ezer Weizman, Modi Alon,

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.

♪

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I'm climbing at 6,000 feet in the climbing turn

Modi Alon realized that I wasn't sure where it is,

and he went like this.

I looked down, and as far as the eye 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 Shema Yisrael even though I'm not religious,

turned the planer upside down because to dive bomb,

the steeper the dive, the more accurate is the hit.

I dropped my bombs,

and then I stayed down, strafing

what they call a clover leaf like this.

There are machine guns firing through the propellers,

like in World War I.

Timing mechanisms didn't always function properly,

and some of the pilots were shooting off the propellers.

♪

♪

This is what we suspect happened 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 commander of 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 it was going to be much stiffer

opposition if he continued to just sort of rumble through the desert in broad daylight.

It was probably the single most important flight

in the whole Israeli air force.

They stopped the Egyptians cold.

There was a second air strike

which followed immediately after on the 30th of May

by an American pilot against the Iraqis.

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

They struck westward into Israeli territory

and controlled and occupied the Northern West Bank.

And this is where the Israeli Messerschmitts attacked them.

Two pilots were on patrol.

Ezer Weizman and Milton Rubenfeld.

This is from my father's debrief.

"Open fired with MG and cannons on Tulkarm Police Station

and dropped the second bomb on Police Street.

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

registered hits, tracer, on all four of them, zero distance."

This helped persuade the Iraqis to hunker down

and not attack Israeli territory thereafter.

"No flack 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 coming in with rifles.

Now, bear in mind

that nobody in Israel knew that we had a quiet combat aircraft.

All they knew was that they were being attacked with an 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."

"Matzo, Pesach..."

- "Gefilte fish." - "Gefilte fish."

So, hey, they stopped with the pitchforks.

Fighter squadron was at that time

made up entirely of foreign volunteers.

♪

♪

With two notable exceptions. Modi Alon and Ezer 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 wanna have an insignia,

and we wanna have a number for our squadron."

I said, "What's the number?" He said, "101.

We want them to think we have a hundred 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 Malak ha-Mawet.

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 of the angel of death with flight goggles.

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

8:00 in the morning, I'm not sure of the time,

I can feel somebody tap me on the shoulder.

"Get ready. You're going to fly."

"I'm gonna fly what?" "You're gonna fly the Me."

I say, "Okay, fine."

I get into the cockpit and I'm looking around,

"Where the fuck is this? Where's this...

I don't know where this is."

Before I flew a fighter aircraft in the American Air Force,

I got at least a hundred hours of intensive instruction.

Here I got 35 minutes,

and I'm taxing out the airplane.

Modi says, "Let's take off," so I give it a 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.

Modi rolls over,

and I roll over

with my thumb up my tuckus 'cause I can't shoot the guns.

He makes a pass, shoots at 'em, and they break off,

and they go into the mist.

We got 35 minutes fuel in these farshtunken 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 his tuckus and pulled the trigger, and I see pieces

fall out into the 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 troops to begin,

grim, real war still in progress.

Jews held in fortified parts of New Jerusalem and Tel Aviv

while Arabs advance 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 re-arm, 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 a Hebrew acronym.

"Mitnadvei Hutz La'Aretz."

"Volunteers From Abroad"

The Mahal was a truly global enterprise.

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

Many were not Jewish,

and about 190 of the Mahal 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 or allies had a tremendous impact.

The Israelis understood that they weren't alone,

if you like, in contrast to 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 Mahal 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 Le Parc Hotel.

And they were partying!

Beautiful girls, guys, soldiers...

And I figured, this is 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 the caps coming, he'd call the police.

We used to steal the 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 through the base

and that's how we got our vehicles.

Somehow or other, Modi Alon was able to keep us together.

He 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 Parc Hotel

which Modi 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 Frankel was legitimate.

Torpedo bomber pilot in the Navy.

He won the highest medal, the Navy Cross.

Handsome.

We were all shtuppers,

but he was the primo shtupper.

I had a couple of girlfriends there,

and 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...

Well, 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 around.

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 Parc Hotel.

The conflict arose, when it came

whether I would settle in Israel.

I said, "No, I'm a Yankee. An American."

"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.

Then Israel went over to the offensive.

The air force plan was to have this lightning raid

right at the beginning of the next round of fighting

to go after the most forward Egyptian base in El-Arish,

and to knock their planes out on the ground.

Lou Lenart 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 to fly together.

♪

Andrew's 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, went south,

but they'd used up valuable fuel

while waiting for the Andrews situation to be sorted out,

and had to turn 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 Vickman's plane plunged into the sea.

Stan 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, and 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 through 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 B-17,

which of course 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 and for all from the Negev.

We had a contingent of soldiers down there

totally cut off, totally isolated.

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 air strips 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 that were brought in.

Really, though, the whole survival of the Negev communities

was because of the air force.

We would take off from Tel Aviv.

We'd bring Palmachniks in.

Take our 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 and I saw 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.

Gun in her holster.

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

Packing a gun.

Jesus.

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 Negev by myself,

and I came upon this engagement.

I saw an Me 109 right behind a Spitfire knocking chunks off of it.

Then 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 Cairo.

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

So I looked at the oil gauge,

and it read zero.

In all of my years of flying I'd never seen an oil gauge read zero.

And then I started smelling smoke.

And I said, "Leon,

you better look for a place to come down because you're not gonna make it."

I just cleared the orange groves,

slid forward, went up on its nose,

then 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 gonna 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. They said, "Oh it's one of the pilots."

It was either Modi Alon or Ezer Weizman.

Ezer's parents, they came into my room, hysterical, both of them.

"Is my son dead? Is my son dead?"

I said, "No, he's alive. He's alive. He's alive."

It turned out to be Modi Alon.

It was a horror.

Devastating. Devastating.

We felt that we'd really lost our leader.

It was like losing our heart.

♪

And 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. My...

I felt...

totally paralyzed.

So they took me to a hospital in Jaffa.

And I decided that 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.

♪

Volunteers were always free to leave.

The Israelis realized they're going to need as quickly as possible

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

Dani Shapira 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

had families, you know, and 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 arrived a guy who 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.

Stall, spin..."

I got back,

and I made a nice landing. George Lichter 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 Israel.

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 the war right away.

We were short two pilots,

and I recommended that we take these students.

They 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 Moti, "Let's keep the mouth shut.

They won't put us on the formation if we will 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.

Moti on one wing and Dani Shapira 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 the 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 air speed was building up.

I didn't know how to recover.

And I knew, "Dani...

That's it. You're going to die."

I was very concerned how am I gonna 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.

The next day, the Israel army pushed the Egyptian army back.

And those Spitfires took a big part.

We were 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 against the Egyptians.

The B-17s and the Spitfires and the C-46s.

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

♪

♪

♪

The '48 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 and extended war.

♪

The people who fought in 1948 brought about

the creation of the State of 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 kvell.

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 'cause I never cracked a book!

I know they were both very, very proud.

Those were the best days.

When we built an air force.

We started 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 is my home.

When I came back with my wife to Israel.

We were four couples and 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, at 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, that'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

the remnants of our people survive.

♪

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Shortly before I left Israel,

I happened to be in Tel Aviv

when they were 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.

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