Israel's Forgotten Heroes

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.. .. . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . .. . .. .. .. . .. It's probably the most crucial struggle in the 2000 years in the history of the Jewish people. He had kids. Nobody said no. They just went and did it. The terrible losses and terrible odds. I felt for what was going on with the Jews in Palestine, I felt for what had happened to the Jews in Europe, and I wanted to fight. And I wanted to be a part of the fight. We had to continue the heritage of the Jewish people. It was, you know, the Bible come true again.

In July of 1945, David Ben-Gurion came to this country to find the major Zionist philanthropic people to help put together the state. He would recruit men and women that had served in World War II who were Jewish to go fight in Israel's war of independence. And that movement was headquartered right here on Miami Beach. There would be a state, and there would be a war. And they had to win the war, and it was up to the American Jewish community to supply the material to win that war. My father was asked to be the representative in Miami because the Haganah needed boats outfitted. They needed materials shipped out of seaports. But it's a hectic tire. It's very, very like we said, to live today, die tomorrow. When I was listening to Ben-Gurion,

and the artillery was booming somewhere in the distance, reality really began to set in. The Egyptians were 25 miles from Tel Aviv. They were coming up the coast. And there was really very little if anything to stop them. When we found out by telephone that there were six or eight Spitfires coming in from Egypt to attack Israel, we would scramble squadrons that didn't exist. We had no aircraft. We had no pilots. We had nothing. The Jews of the diaspora helped in a major way create the state of Israel. We were very happy because they would fight them. They were the real fighters. We helped the Israelis understand that they were not alone. Few events throughout history are as riveting as the struggle of a people

attempting to reestablish a homeland, especially after 2,000 years of hardship. Most of us are familiar with the dramatic story of how against overwhelming odds Israel won its independence after the Holocaust. First, by pressuring their British occupiers to leave, and then by defeating six Arab armies attacking from all sides in 1948. Yet few of us are aware of how easily that war could have been lost. If not for the heroic efforts of American veterans of World War II, men and women, Jews and non-Jews, who not only chose to break the law by joining the battlefield in Palestine, but who provided sustenance by pumping desperately needed weapons, aircraft, and dollars into a nascent country facing annihilation without them. These American fighters, who together with other valiant soldiers who poured in from all around the world, are Israel's forgotten heroes. The subject of this special program.

I'm Hal Linden, and I'm proud to present this little-known, but extraordinary story that took place between 1945 and 1949. I was between the ages of 10 and 14 years of age, and I lived in Miami Beach, and Miami Beach was then an Air Force camp, because it was in the middle of World War II, 1942-43. So it wasn't a tourist community in those days. Everybody was working very hard to win the war. There was rationing going on. You know, we had gas rationing. Families had one car, not two and five cars like today. We had blackout every night on Miami Beach. So that was what life was like. I went to North detail elementary school on 41st Street, and we had to practice for bomb drills. That was what was going on in those particular years. Very different than what would be happening to somebody 10 to 14 years of age today.

My father was instrumental in starting the Miami Beach Zionist organization of America, the chapter, the Miami Beach chapter, which eventually grew into the largest single district at 1,000 members. They used to meet at our family home, which was a 37th in prairie. All these people would crowd into the porch. We had a screened in porch, and the men would come, and they would sit in the porch, and they'd have this business meeting. And the women all came just to hear what was going on, and they were in the living room and in the dining room. And I was busy asking them what they wanted to eat and drink. Now, at that time you have to understand there were not that many Jewish people lived in Miami Beach, so practically everybody was belonging kind of, because it was in the middle of the war. They were beginning to hear rumors that these terrible atrocities were happening to Jewish people.

I mean, they knew about Hitler. They obviously did not know the extent of the concentration camps. So that was yet to be fabbened. In households in America, at that time, people tuned to the radio at dinner time. They come home for dinner. You want to know what happened in the war. And then when the armies running across Europe and they're going and they're discovering these horrible camps, it was totally startling. I mean, you'd see Germans captured and you'd see these horrible concentration camp victims being released. So the idea of trying to find a home for these people, I think, caught the imagination and the heart of our vast majority of Americans. So many Christian people signed on to help their Jewish brethren accomplish the goals. There must be lessons to be learned out of World War II.

Too many people died for there not to be huge lessons. Six million of them were Jews. If there were ever a justified homeland in the world, it would be the state of Israel. The country means a great deal to me, and I'm not Jewish, but I understand intimately how the state came to be and why it came to be. Sometimes I think we in our own country don't realize how perilous and tenuous sometimes democracy can be. You can lose it. Well, I think the people in Israel understand that intimately. We all felt very deeply concerning the plight of the refugees. You had to feel that way. The press helped you feel that way. They would tell you these heart-wrenching stories. Even the photographs you saw that DB camps couldn't put it up in a way that these people did when they spoke of their personal experiences that time,

and everything was fresh in their minds, and they were the lucky ones who had somehow heard that they'd gotten out of the ship and gotten out early, or whatever their background was, they all considered how fortunate they had been to get out. And those of us who had been in the armed services in the United States and experienced little or some antisemitism in our lives, it seemed so trivial compared to what our coalitionists had endured. So when you asked people to do something, they did it. And the help we got to pour it. Obviously, American Jews emptied their treasuries, emptied their pocketbooks. This was an issue of profound, almost visceral importance for them, and nothing in their entire collective experience quite matched the drama. And if you like the compensation after the Holocaust

of the opportunity of a reborn and dignified Jewish homeland. At the end of the war, as everybody did, became aware of concentration camps and how six million Jews were murdered by Hitler. And it affected me negatively and naturally. And I became very active in Zionist affairs. I became aware of the Jews being turned back from Palestine at the time. After being in a concentration camp, they were sent to another concentration camp in Cyprus. And I became extremely upset about the whole situation. When I was in my teens, we heard about these terrible stories coming out of Germany. And I was an infinite little Jewish kid in Brooklyn, couldn't do anything about it. So when I was approached in the 40s to do this, I didn't even hesitate a second.

I grew up during World War II. I had all of my parents' resignists. I had always been a Zionist. I was an Zionist organization at Columbia University where I had just completed my first year. And I was in New York when the petition plan was passed by the UN in November, 1947. And so I was caught up in it. I knew what was going on. I think I was, for an 18-year-old, quite knowledgeable about what was going on as a matter of fact. And the chance came along to go to England on an exchange program on the summer of 1948. And I took it hoping that I would get a chance to join the Israeli army. Of course, my parents didn't know anything about that. They had no idea. And when I got to Paris, that's what I did. I just got out of the Navy. And everybody in the rest of the world were all winding down after World War II.

And I couldn't wind down with them. And I wanted something adventurous, something to do. And then I read about the ship, the exodus, being rammed and what the British did to the people on it. And I found out through an ant that there's an organization in New York. I was looking for Americans to volunteer on these ships running the British blockade to Palestine as Israel was called back then. And so a few phone calls and letters and that. And I got in touch with those people and told them my Navy experience and they took me aboard. One evening, I attended a lecture being given by a guy who had been on a ship, the exodus. And this was late 1947. And he indicated that the Palestinian Jews were expecting to be attacked by the Arabs after the state of Israel was established. After his lecture, I went up to him and asked if there was any way possible I could help.

I would volunteer in any capacity they needed. He indicated that I should write a letter to a newspaper in New York called Land and Labor, which I did. I indicated I was a fighter pilot in the American Army Air Corps. Shortly thereafter, I received telephone calls and telegrams and so forth. They were saying they'd get your butt over to Israel basically. The first launching orders, they wanted the British give up the mandate, so the question of Palestine would go to the United Nations. Well, how do you do that? You've got to get world opinion. The Jewish agency thought that if they would run the blockade and the British said that they would not allow them in, world opinion just could not tolerate the British taking these concentration camp victims and replacing them in an internment camp and Cyprus. At that time, there was a wish list. And I know that there were many people in this country

in strategic locations, certain seaports, Norfolk and Charleston and Baltimore, Miami, trying to fulfill the wish list. And my father tried to fulfill some of the wish list out of the Miami area. So now he's focused to running to the Miami River to get the boats ready. So that was his first assignment. He got two banana boats. The men that worked on the boats were fed many, many meals at my mother's home. Boats were outfitted in the Miami River. I remember going with my dad every weekend because he would check on the progress during the weekend of what had been accomplished. The boats were ostensibly outfitted to go to Central America to pick up bananas. When they would get out of the territorial limit, they would turn and go toward France to pick up the DPs. And it took while to outfit the boats because where they had the racks for bananas,

they were secretly converting places for people to sleep. My ship was in Norfolk, Virginia. We had just come back from Europe. When I quit my ship in Norfolk and got all my gear off, I came back to New York. And they told me where the ship was docked. And there were many men working on it, fixing it up for the proposed trip. There were building shelves for 600 people. The ship was meant to hold about a dozen or a dozen and a half. The ship had the name Abrio printed on its bow. But Ben Hecht had written a play that appeared on Broadway. And he donated all the proceeds from that play to the organization to buy the ship. So they named it after him, even though it didn't change the name on the bow. We sailed across the Atlantic into the Azores refueled, went to South France, and we loaded them on the ship, and we took off for Palestine. Somebody in New York donated 2,000 pounds of kosher salami

because these people who had been in the concentration camps eating dirt, not eating at all, they wanted to eat kosher. So our cook made salami soup, salami roasts, salami salami salami and eggs. Every meal it was kosher salami. And that's what we fed the 600 people for the week. It took us to get from France to Palestine. We were 10 and a half miles off the coast when the British Marines slammed into the side of our ship. It was just getting dark. And you can hear the steel railings crunching and the side of the ship venting. When they were right on top of us, 20 British Royal Marines jumped from each other, British ships onto our ship, and they had control of everything. The people, the bridge, the engine room,

and they took us to Haifa. The passengers on our ship went down the gangway across the dock, up the gangway and into the hold of this British ship that had the cages over the whole. They never really even touched Palestinian land. And they took all the passengers who were trying to get into Palestine. They loaded them on that ship, and they took them to the island of Cyprus. The elves did not want any more Jews to migrate to Israel. They felt that as the menick will come, will diminish their chances in Palestine. And so they built the fields at night, and we went out at night in order to put out the fires. And they were shooting at us, and then the Haganah came and shot against them with the machine guns, very primitive at the time. Our weapons were limited. So these were hectic times,

four hours studying, four hours working, and four hours guard at night, and you were young, and it was dark, and it was cold, and it was hectic. Then already the Haganah, of course, looked actively to get turned into an army, and get as many weapons as they could get. A, from the returning members of the Jewish brigade, and also from sympathetic British army units, and built up an arsenal, towards the state of it, and towards an Israeli army. I'd already talked to officials or representatives of the designers, organization of America, and explained what would be necessary in order to fly into Israel, law of the British were there, and after that, assuming that we would fly largely over unfriendly countries, maybe friendly and spirit, but not in a way to encourage illegal transportation of arms. And that's what was necessary,

as we all realized, because the Arab state, six of them are making it absolutely clear that they're full military power, and it was considerable, would be used to drive the Jews into the sea, to use their expression. And Israel had maybe some police arms, I would call them, but that was practically the level at that particular time. They had to have weaponry. Could they count upon the help of this group? Well, they could. And the result was that ever since late 1945, all the way up to and through the birth of Israel in the spring of 1948, there were representatives of the American Jewish community all over the world, working in tandem with Palestinian Jews, seeking out vast quantities of surplus weaponry, in places as far afield as the Philippines, or Panama, and even as you know in the United States itself. None of this was taken from actual American military stocks, it was all surplus, obsolescent equipment.

That was of no significant usage any longer for the American Armed Forces, but for the Israelis, as they would be soon, it was a matter of life or death. In our search, for pilots who would be interested in serving the state of Israel, we wound up with tons of nickels, and in the astrophotel, we blocked out the phones, and we called every Jewish sounding name that had been the Air Force that was qualified to fly. And we got some that way, and of course, it's true that some brought in three others and some brought in one, and some didn't bring in any, but we soon had quite a few guys. We weren't breaking laws by doing that. We were breaking laws and what we intended to do with them, because there was an embargo act against exporting arms in that ammunition to the new state of Israel. I've been in military intelligence during the Second World War,

Commander of a military intelligence unit, combat unit, and that meant by law that when I got to Jerusalem, I was required to notify the military out of shape, the American military out of shape, that I was in the country, and I was going to be there for a while. So I did that. And the moment I did that, of course, the Hagenah intelligence knew I was in the country. Eventually, I was put into their intelligence, so I was an agent, I guess, you might call it, and give them assignments. There were agents all over the place. Everybody knew who was an agent, the British head agents, and the money changers on the street were agents. Eventually, the UN came to Palestine to decide what was going to be the political future, how are they going to divide this country? And so they had a commission. There was witnesses, people come and they ask them questions.

And the questions that are asked by the people on the commission are usually prepared by staffers, and if the thing would be, wouldn't it be nice to know what the questions were going to be? And that was an assignment that I was given. One of the weak spots was their security. They would make notes while they were making discussions, then they would tear up the notes at the end of the evening and put them in a basket to be taken out by where they were staying in the hotel, we got the baskets, put the notes back together. There was a time that they felt very good with the British, but they were people that they used. They never liked us to see me friendly with the Arabs. They were always doing some kind of monkey business to destroy our friendship between us. They didn't like it.

Because it was not good for them to validate that we should be friendly with them. And in 48, when they left, and everybody wasn't sure if Ben Gurion is going to declare the State of Israel officially, because even the United States, I remember it, they told them, don't do that. Fortunately, they had a leader once in a century they had been around. And I remember we were in Tel Aviv then, was packed via little museum in Tel Aviv, and there were assembled at the Ben Gurion. And all the people who became depressed, government of Israel, and he declared officially was a Friday, made 1948, and he declared the State of Israel officially. And the dancing, it's unbelievable

what is going on in Tel Aviv and all that we call it already the State of Israel. The dancing was going on all day and all night. Happiness, unbelievable. And when we heard, I don't know if it was an hour or two hours after David Ben Gurion, declared the State of Israel officially, was an announcement. We want you to know that President Truman just recognized the State of Israel. You imagine what is good to us. United States recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the new State of Israel. Britain simply could not support parts of the world where there were bitter civil wars and rivalries going on and where there was a general bitterness and resentment at the ongoing British presence. There was simply no alternative.

They were a country that pulled more than its weight in the war and now had to pay for pipe. I think the first opportunity expressed my heartfelt thanks to the President of the United States and to the government of this country for all they have done in making out of Israel a reality. It is my attitude that the American government couldn't stand early by while the victims of fitness madness were not allowed to build new lives. We were over toward. We went to Friday night services. We prayed for the success. I mean, you know, we were euphoric, but if one stood back for a moment and had any sense of what lay ahead, I don't think they wanted to enjoy the moment. That the day that it was the State was declared, people wanted to enjoy the moment and they did, and they danced and drank.

And it was the Bible come true again. Immediately after proclaiming independence on May 15, 1948, the newly formed State of Israel found itself completely isolated, surrounded and under attack. Flanked by five hostile countries committed to destroying the infant nation, Israel required assistance from abroad that would prove essential for survival. For the foreign volunteers committed to the cause, this literally meant fostering a new military infrastructure from the ground up. And although the country had soldiers willing to fight, its arsenal was barely existent.

Finding themselves outnumbered and outguned, the Israelis were nevertheless defiant. They had no choice. Unlike their enemies, they had no fallback position to which they could retreat. And Israeli loss would certainly result in the complete destruction of the Jewish nation. Fighting next to the Israelis were weary Holocaust survivors who were plunged into battle after surviving World War II. Additionally, there were volunteers from countries such as South Africa, Canada and Turkey. And although the Americans who fought on Israel's side were small in number, they were poised to make a dramatic difference in the war's outcome. It is under these circumstances that we continue our remarkable story, Israel's forgotten heroes. MUSIC When the state was declared, it was euphoria, people danced all night, danced the horror, born files, fireworks. And of course, the next day,

seven Arab armies started advancing towards Palestine, what we call first, Eretz Israel, and then the state of Israel. We had almost nothing. There were 500,000 people in Israel at that time, of which 100,000 were children, 100,000 were old people, 100,000 were women. And we were left really with 100,000 people between 16 and 25 that we could utilize to fight. But we had no weapons. We had World War I, Canadian rifles. Only the weapons we got from the British and smuggled in, no heavy weapons, no airplanes. And the Arab armies were equipped with all the latest things and airplanes. The dancing and the singing and all that didn't last long, unfortunately. MUSIC Next morning, I remember we had the first alarm. MUSIC Air raid alarm, until a bit.

And then we heard a few bombs falling until a bit, so I saw about one or two early Egyptian players. Over until a bit, upon the first cable, this until a bit. MUSIC There were a number of experience military men in other countries who gave the Jews very little chance. And there were others in this country, too, who wouldn't have given the Jews a plugged nickel of a chance. One of them was a very experienced general who by then was the American Secretary of State. That was General Marshall. He couldn't see, he couldn't anticipate that the Jews really had a serious chance against what appeared to be overwhelming odds of creating a viable defense and ultimately protecting their sovereignty. MUSIC We didn't have any planes. It was there. There were two or three, you know, training little planes that they had

permission from the British to learn, you know, a little plane from the Agana. There was nothing, you know, but they used to throw down on the Arabs. There used to have a hundred grenades that came lower down with that little air place and throw the hand grenade. A lot of bottles, that's what the bombs. There was no bombs then. There was nothing. MUSIC At the beginning, before they got in the American bombs, they gave, they were trying different bombs in their bombs. So they took a solar pipe, cut in there with about this, this one packed with powder, and they put all the pipe in there, and they gave me a fuse, and they said, you like the fuse, come to 10, throw it in, and throw it on the board. Well, I'm looking at this thing, and you know, it's heavy. We've got a lot of bombs. We've got a solar pipe with the power on them. So I said, okay, let me try one, see what happens.

I went up, I let the fuse drop into the bomb. I don't want to get a little bored. Okay, so I get hooked on the side. I couldn't get a little bored. Finally, I had to do it so much so it worked. You know, 10, 10. I got rid of it. And I didn't really run up on that, but that was it. No more of those bombs, you know? Our plane at 10 crates, like eight crates, where they hit five pound bombs in each crate. And of course, not knowing who would be throwing out the bombs, the captain says, Eddie, you're the bomb trucker. The navigator had a big job. With one hand, he had to hold the door open, and with the other hand, he hold my belts right will be followed. I asked him what type of aircraft we would be flying, and they said, leave it to the Jews. We'll have the best aircraft. I said, well, we'd be flying the type of aircraft I had flown in in the American Army Air Corps, P40s and P51s.

They said, don't worry about it. You'll get those aircraft or better aircraft. And I was satisfied that I was looking forward to doing whatever I could to help out. I came home and told my mother and father that I was going off to another war. I had been away for four years, maybe two years at a time, I hadn't seen my family. And they were quite upset, but I told them I was going anyway. There were very few Jewish fighter pilots, few Jewish bomber pilots, few Jewish transport pilots in Palestine. And yet, 1948, Post World War II, a modern war had to be fought with modern weapons. It had to be fought with P51s and with C46 Curtis Commandos. And the people who knew how to use those weapons didn't really exist in Palestine. And so, really, they had to be found abroad. And again, I can give you sort of another concrete expression of the dominant presence of Americans and other English-speaking volunteers

until even until 1950, more than a year after the war ended, the official language of radio communication in the Israeli Air Force was English. It wasn't Hebrew because, again, the Air Force was so dominated by the English speakers that English had to be accommodated as the language of communication. The first general in the Israeli Army was an American. The first commander of the Israeli Navy was an American. The first head of Air Force intelligence was an American. The first tank commander in the Israeli Army was a Canadian. Israel's first chief test pilot was an American. An American code specialist became critically involved in the establishment of the Army's security procedures and actually broke their Jordanian code during the war. The list really goes on from there. They really played a very magnificent, and I think compelling role in Israel's victory in the war. And there are a significant number of firsts associated with the Americans who came to Israel. We had to get the airplanes out of the United States

and down the Panama before April 15, 1948, after which they forget it. You couldn't fly these kind of aircrafts out of the United States. So it became a tremendous job to get the aircraft ready. We were to get to Zadich in Czechoslovakia, a former German fighter strip. Czechoslovakia was a principal source of weaponry. It was not provided only for ideological or even for diplomatic reasons, by the way. They needed the dollars. And the Israelis were willing to pay in hard cash. We were buying the Czech model of the M.E. 109, which is called the M.E. 109, but they had produced them for the Germans. Now they were producing them for us. When I got to the field, I saw these strange-looking aircraft I had never seen before. They were supposedly M.E. 109s, but these M.E. 109s had inferior engines,

engines that didn't belong in M.E. 109s, engines that had far less power. The propellers were different. The armament was different and so forth. And then they stuck me into a two-place, I'll call it an M.E. 109. I took off and did some aerobatics came back landed. I had 35 minutes on that. When I landed, they told me, you're going to leave for Israel tonight. Now, usually in American Air Force, we used to get maybe 120 hours on an aircraft before you went into an operational squadron. Here I had 35 minutes on this aircraft. It was all in the metric system, and I didn't even have enough time to really get to know the cockpit. They took the M.E. 109, took it apart, put it in a C-46, and I was on my way to Israel.

The mission of the operation was to fly anything that we could find in anywhere that could be brought to Zodich, and it had to be, of course, munitions, that's what we were really interested in carrying. And that's what we did carry. They'd bring about in trucks. They were loaded, tied down. The crews came out. The crews took off. They'd fly into Israel, where most of the time, we had a previous crew who had had a night's rest. They got on the airplane, took it back. And when they arrived in Israel, they landed on a dirt field, with automobiles headlights. If you can imagine yourself flying around and you go to the airport, it's right there. There's nobody's going to turn on the lights, but it's going to lead. You don't have gas to go anywhere. You really have a communication with very poor. When we turned in, the winged tip caught the hill and slammed us into the ground. The cargo in the cargo compartment sliding forward instantly killed

mo-robed frozen by my navigator. I was turned around my seat because I was tapping the altimeter. That's the reason why I was the night. The only one that was in lockdown conscious. Norm bounces head off the glare shield and was knocked out. At each direct, the radio operator was his seat snapped off and he was... I thought he was dead. And I was immediately on fire. So I unhooked my seat belt, got out. I tried to go through the compartment that realized it was jammed when it happened. And I shipped Norm away and opened up his window and kicked him out. We got Eddie out and I jumped out. They faced personal risks. They had to leave behind family. They had to interrupt careers. There's an expression in the Talmud that in a place where there are no men, be yourself a man. And that's how I think these people looked at the situation. They didn't say, well, someone else will take care of it.

There are people there who can fight or there are other foreign volunteers who will go. They themselves took it on their own shoulders to go. Every day, fighter planes were dismantled. They acquired two airplanes to hold them but the empty space was filled with other ammunition and things. The crews would take off, leave two or three o'clock in the afternoon, slide a night flight into Israel, getting there in time to unload and get out before the Egyptian fighter planes could strafe us on the ground. And that was basically the routine. It was all faith. Faith was going to be alright and that somebody had to do it. There had been one or two fighters in Israel but about two days before I got there, the Arab Spitfires, four or six Arab Spitfires came over and strafe the hangers and knocked out

all but two aircraft. It was pathetic. We had no aircraft. We had no pilots. We had nothing. But the Arabs didn't know that. Later on, when we found out by telephone from the south that they were say six or eight Spitfires coming in from Egypt to attack Israel, we would scramble squadrons that didn't exist. We would scramble 105 squadron, 110 squadron, 115 squadron. We had no 110, 115 squadrons. So we would scramble 75 aircraft when we had two usually unserviceable aircraft on the ground. One pilot would have broken arm and another pilot who just landed. I was the youngest American at the time who was over there. I went into combat five days after getting into the unit. We had no basic training.

That was ridiculous. I was put in an arm and unit. You know, with the arm and unit consisted of Israeli armored cars made out on truck chassis. You know, there were miserable things that the Israelis built themselves and we had half tracks. We had no artillery of any kind. The heaviest thing we had were heavy machine guns and light machine guns. And that was the arm of unit. We never did have any tanks. The whole Israeli army had three tanks. Our weapons were inferior, but luckily we were fighting armies that weren't much better than we were. Although millions of Jews all over the world were holding their breaths and perhaps even subliminally shared the dire premonitions of some of these professional military men. It didn't look that way to the Israelis as we'll call them now. Those who had brought up in Palestine and who had long, in a sense, internalized

the tradition of vigorous resistance had a good understanding of their Arab enemy. They had fought with them in the years of the mandate. They had had a lot of experience of skirmishes with them and are fighting with them. They thought they knew how to fight them. And all they felt they needed were just a few more recruits and a little more weaponry and they would be able to handle matters on their own. And they had a secret weapon, which certainly was never about safe to the Arabs. It was called no alternative. At that time, the Egyptians who had 25 miles from Tel Aviv had been coming up the coast and there was really very little if anything to stop them. It could have been the end of the war of Israel. We got to report their four Spitfires flying to the north. They took off into the haze and my eyes were tearing and I was sweating.

The cockpit must have been 120 degrees and I look way ahead of me and I see shadows for Spitfires. A head of me, but slightly below. I don't know where to gun sight. You have to put a gun sight on and you have to put your gun switches on and I'm not sure where all these switches are. So I'm throwing switches. My flaps are coming down. My landing air is coming down. I'm going up again. I'm flowing. Finally, I got the gun sight switch on but I had passed them and at me time they saw us and the four of them broke off into the haze. I pulled up and I finally saw a shadow and I wasn't sure whether it was somebody or whether it was one of the Spitfires. We started dogfight and I noticed it's not an Emmy 109 and it's a Spitfire and we got into a pretty hairy dogfight and I shot him down. That was the first action.

The first fighter aircraft shot down by the Israeli Air Force. There had been two other aircraft shot down, two C-47s that were bombing. Tel Aviv was shot down by Maudi a few days prior to my getting there. He shot down. An English fighter plane that the Egyptians had. They were armed by England at that particular time. And there were two other Emmy 109s. This was the first flight at the Emmy 109s remember they were dismantled and Czechoslovakia and Czech crews plus the Israelis were getting the know-how were assembling them and flying out. That turned at Fallujah because the Egyptians just didn't believe they even told that the Israelis had no aircraft and they had no big guns which were some truths but a few weeks earlier. We got them. I say we because I was part of it

I couldn't help that and as a result of that they stopped. They never got any further. The real heroes one should say the silent army if you like. The physical resistance was the Jewish people worldwide. They provided the political leverage. They provided the bone marrow the financial bone marrow they provided most of the weaponry and they provided not least of all the desperate the desperate influx of refugees by the tens and tens of thousands. I remember that they kept bringing to the base where I was in Telefinski from the ships from the illegal boats young people that they survived the Holocaust refugees. They brought them straight to that boot camp

because they needed people we needed soldiers. Every day officers from the various fighting units there were only eight brigades in the Israeli army. So representatives of the brigades of the battalions would come up to Telefinski and they would say who arrived today? What kind of volunteers what kind of skills because they were looking for all kinds of skills that they didn't have. So when I got there they needed drivers for the half tracks to take the place of those who had been killed and so I moved in to the 79th Armored Regiment before I got there. The 79th was brought against La Trun and they brought BP's off the ships. Very much like a ship I came on they gave them guns and put them into that 79th Armored Decaglia. They were young. They didn't speak any word only like from remaining Jews from Poland and from Hungary

to the three countries that the survivors used to come. I spoke a few languages then and I was speaking to them Yiddish. They didn't know one word Hebrew. I spoke some Polish and they became I became like a big product to them. They were telling me stories there that they know that they have relatives in Israel. They have arms uncles what their parents used to help them. They didn't have a chance even to see them. They brought them straight to the base a few weeks that's all what it took to train them to gave them you know a basis training how to handle my rifle. That's all what we had and we went I took action that was a small village by the name Far Ono. One evening we were sent out

from the base and we took that village but later on unfortunately that was taken back on La Trune was a infamous place there were a lot of casualties there many of those refugees those survivors never came back. There were men who were killed the same day they survived the Holocaust they got all the way over to Israel they were given a rifle and they died the first day they got there. I used always to count them down they were crying on my shoulder I was relabbed and they crowded to them I was three years old and they were a little young but were in the early 20s even something like that early 20s they never saw their family There are some

experiences that live in imprint on one soul experiences that give meaning to our lives validate our and help to find Such was the case for these heroic from abroad who despite perils involved played a decisive part in the founding of Israel they risked their possession in the process their lives from the safe haven of history fully appreciate how dangerous and significant their task really was yet at the time these individuals could little afford the luxury of reflection for as one aptly it was lived today died tomorrow and many volunteers indeed made the ultimate fighting for what they believed in now more than two generations later we can look back roles they and the impact made history for most it was that changed their lives

forever and now the conclusion Israel's forgotten and the the the the the probably is parallel the 20th century for a state that was from the state and the and the the and on team of the the group who i wanting the dogs

I in some instances supported from buyer countries beyond Israel's borders. And yet Israel was able to withstand that invasion. And yet until the very day that Israel became a state, the British weren't controlled the country. They would not let the Jews bring in weapons. They would not let the Jews form military units or train openly. And so it's simply astonishing that with virtually no infrastructure, with no trained soldiers located there in the country, that that kind of invasion was able to be repelled. It's incredible. And I don't think that there is a parallel to it in the 20th century. When I was in a cockpit being shot up and on fire a few times, I always looked from outside at myself in a cockpit. I wasn't the guy that was in a precarious position. I was watching myself from somewhere else. And I think it's not only was I watching myself, but there was a greater force watching myself.

To wear the uniform, displaying the star of David, where at one time it was a symbol of shame during the Holocaust and here a symbol of pride. There was no time to get on. I don't know the case among the approximate before he pilots, copilot, and some flight engineers included where they said, I'm sorry, I'm powered. I can't go. You had to watch it that they weren't too tired, that they could go, because we were flying a wall-weary aircraft over maximum range distances, because they were fully overloaded. These people that had come over from the United States

in South Africa, they had already been in a war. Some of them had been in a war for four and five years. And yet, they left their families. They left their wives, in some cases, children, and they came to volunteer to serve Israel. I think it took an incredible courage to do that, just absolutely incredible courage to do it. There were two critical battle periods. The first before May 15, 1948, was very largely against King Abdullah's Arab Legion, essentially in the Jerusalem area. There was ferocious fighting between this Arab Legion and the Israelis. But once it was resolved, essentially with the partition of Jerusalem, by and large King Abdullah even snow-further imposed in fighting against the Jews and with the quiescence of his military effort,

the most serious part of the war between the Arabs and the Israelis ended. Afterwards, the Jews were able to concentrate their efforts very largely against the other Arab forces. The Lebanese were not all that interested in fighting the Jews altogether, who secretly, they rather regard as potential allies against the Muslim world around them. And the Egyptians had terrible problems among themselves. They were mainly concerned about the British occupation of the Suez Canal area. They always regarded the British as much more than enemy than they ever did the Jews. So their effort was very limited, essentially it was intended to preempt the Arab area of Palestine to some degree the negative desert, to make sure that King Abdullah didn't get at all. And by the time, finally, that the Egyptian army got itself ensconced in this Arab No Man's Land, which was the negative desert.

The Israelis for their part had fairly well protected their lines of communication elsewhere, and were able to focus their attention upon the Egyptians. Afterwards, when the Israelis were able to integrate their forces and to observe that great cornucopia of weaponry that was coming in from outside of Palestine, they were able to focus their attention upon the Egyptians. The Egyptians who felt themselves rather isolated, were uncertain of what their real purpose was and who were very swiftly and angrily dealt with. And a climactic Israeli offensive of December, and early January of 1948 and 49. In that final Israeli offensive, it wasn't simply that the Egyptians were driven out of Israel. The Israelis crossed over into the Egyptian Sinai and thoroughly discounted the British who had never anticipated this sudden reversal of military fortunes.

In fact, they threatened to intervene on behalf of the Egyptians they did. Very briefly, in half-fives, and their planes shut down by the Israeli Air Force. And for that moment on, one may say that the Palestine War for our practical purposes was over. There's no Israeli family that did not suffer someone in that family killed. And so the foreign volunteers and also the D.P.'s who came in, we provided the men and women so Israel could catch its breath. There's no question the war would have looked different without the Americans. Oh, my first trip to Israel, when I got off to airplane, a man said something to be a you captain, Shindler, and I said, yes, he said, where do I? He took both my hands, and he said, I want to tell you how much this means to us. We flew with them, and worked with them,

and we took the brunt of the danger and the problems with them. All of us, volunteers, can be very, very proud. We helped in the independence of Israel, which is a country not only for Israel's, but for all Jews in the world. Every day in Israel was like waking up into a glorious situation, even at the worst of times. And every one of the guys who I flew with feels the same way. It was the greatest experience by far in my life. Even though speeches might be made occasionally in the United States, that these mechanics, and over these far involved volunteers, made a tremendous difference. They didn't make a tremendous difference. They made a deep difference. I don't think the story has ever been told completely.

Most Americans are very unaware of the people who served as volunteers. The fact that Israel would be defeated never entered any of our minds. I wasn't thinking of dying. I was just thinking of doing my job. We were all, in a sense, newcomers trying to rest a piece of land for the Jews of the world. We all feel like this was the most important event in our life. I just think of it in 2,000 years. We're going to have a place where we belong where there will never be a sign discriminating against us because we are Jews. What else could be a more important thing to do? What else? I did one great thing. I helped build the state of Israel. I do not matter.

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