EKRON AIR BASE, ISRAEL MAY 29, 1948
One after the other the Messerschmitt fighters rumbled down the runway. The deep bellow of each V-12 engine echoed like thunder between the tin-roofed hangars.
Their target was only 10 miles away. In the cockpit of the lead fighter, Lou Lenart squinted in the fading light. He was trying to pick out Ishdud from the string of villages on the coastline. Each village looked alike.
Then he spotted it. Lenart was stunned by what he saw.
A column of Arab military vehicles stretched for over a mile along the coastal road. The center of Ishdud was filled with trucks, tanks, thousands of troops. An armored brigade was jammed up at the downed bridge over the Lachish River. The enemy was busy erecting a temporary new bridge.
At that moment the Egyptians spotted them. The sky over Ishdud erupted in oily black puffs of antiaircraft fire. Lenart felt the whump of flak bursts exploding around his fighter.
Lenart swung his head to look behind his wing. The other three Messerschmitts in his flight were strung out in a combat formation. Lenart reached to the panel at his knee and armed the fighter’s cannons, machine guns, and the release switch for the two 70-kg bombs.
The flak bursts came closer. It seemed as if every gun in the milelong armored brigade was firing at the fighters. Lenart rolled the fighter up on its wing. A Hebrew phrase came to his mind: ein brera. It meant “no alternative.”
The volunteer fighter pilots had no alternative. The fate of Israel would be decided in the next few minutes.
Lenart pointed the Messerschmitt’s nose down toward the target.
It was the first combat mission for the volunteer aviators in Israel. Lenart worried that it might be the last. Four junk fighters—Czech-built ex-Nazi Messerschmitts—versus an entire Arab army. David against Goliath.
The armies of five Arab nations were converging on the heart of Israel. The fast-moving Egyptian armored division had advanced to within 22 miles of Tel Aviv. If the Egyptians were not stopped, they’d be in the city by morning. Israel’s two-week-old war of independence would be over.
The four Messerschmitts—and the pilots—had arrived in Israel only a few days earlier. Their existence was still a secret to both Arabs and Israelis. Lenart and his squadronmates had barely begun learning to fly the Messerschmitt in Czechoslovakia when the Arabs invaded Israel on May 15.
It was the end of training. Ready or not, the pilots and the disassembled fighters were bundled into C-46 and C-54 transports and flown to Israel where they would learn to fly Messerschmitts the hard way. In combat.
What Lenart had already learned was that he hated the Messerschmitt. “The worst piece of crap I have ever flown,” he said. It wasn’t even a real Messerschmitt, the classic German fighter of WWII, but a bastardized model produced in Czechoslovakia.
Despite its flaws, the clunky Messerschmitt carried significant firepower—two 13.1-mm nose-mounted machine guns and two 20-mm cannon on the wings. Each fighter had two 70-kg bombs suspended beneath the wings.
Lou Lenart was a wiry WWII veteran with curly black hair and dark, piercing eyes. The twenty-seven-year-old was born in Hungary and grew up in Pennsylvania. At the age of seventeen he joined the Marines because he heard they were the first to fight. “I wanted to kill as many Nazis as I could, as fast as I could.” Nobody told him that the Marines would be fighting in the Pacific. Lenart wangled his way into flight training and wound up on Okinawa, where he finished the war as a decorated Corsair fighter pilot.
The first target of Israel’s new fighter squadron was supposed to be the Egyptian air base at El Arish, in the Sinai just below the border of Egypt and Israel. The Messerschmitts would take off at dawn and bomb the rows of parked Egyptian Spitfire fighters at El Arish.
The evening before, everything changed. The four pilots were huddled in their squadron shack at Ekron Air Base when a new report came in. The Egyptian Army had reached Ishdud, just to the south of Tel Aviv. Israeli sappers had blown the last bridge on the main road to the north, temporarily halting the Egyptians. The Egyptians would have the bridge repaired in a few hours and resume their advance. The two-and-a-half rifle companies of the Israeli brigade, exhausted, would be overrun.
The surprise El Arish strike was canceled. From Tel Aviv came the volunteers’ new orders: Take off and attack the Egyptian brigade at Ishdud. Now.
The target was swelling in Lenart’s gun sight. The airframe of the Messerschmitt was humming as the fighter accelerated in its dive. The front of the Egyptian armored column was framed in the narrow panel of Lenart’s windshield.
He waited . . . watching the target expand . . . jammed the release button. There was a jolt as the two 70-kg bombs dropped from the belly of the Messerschmitt.
Lenart pulled up over Ishdud, setting up for a strafing pass. He couldn’t see whether his bombs landed on target. From the side of the canopy he glimpsed the brownish shapes of other Messerschmitts diving through the curtain of flak.
Lenart dove back down on the target, aiming for the concentration of troops. He could see them scattering like ants toward the fields outside Ishdud. Lenart squeezed the trigger on the control stick. He felt the hard rattle of the wing-mounted cannons.
And then nothing.
Damn. After only a few rounds, Lenart’s cannons had stopped firing. It was the first time the cannons had been tested. And they had failed.
Lenart could see the other fighters darting like hawks through the bursts of flak. Were their cannons working? Was anyone hit? Lenart didn’t know. The radio in his Messerschmitt didn’t work.
With flak bursts nipping at his tail, Lenart pulled off the target and headed for Ekron. He plunked the fighter down on the concrete runway, then did the delicate rudder dance he’d learned in Czechoslovakia to keep the fighter rolling straight. When he reached the hangar he saw that one of the Messerschmitts was already there.
A few minutes later they saw the silhouette of a third Messerschmitt landing. The fighter rolled straight for a hundred yards, then abruptly veered to the right. Dragging its left wingtip, the Messerschmitt swirled off the runway, kicking up a geyser of dirt.
The Messerschmitt was wrecked.
The pilots stood in the deepening shadows and peered to the west. Three of them had made it back to Ekron. The number four pilot was still out there somewhere.
Darkness fell. There was no sign of the missing airman.
An hour passed. Then came a report. Israeli troops had seen an airplane engulfed in flames go down 7 miles southwest of Ekron. Egyptian troops had already seized the area. Judging by the impact, the Israelis were certain the pilot was dead.
A pall of gloom settled over the little band of airmen in the Ekron operations shack. The mission had been a disaster. They’d inflicted no significant damage on the enemy. In the space of forty minutes they had lost half their airplanes and a quarter of their airmen.
The pilots were dejected. What had they accomplished? They’d come to help save a new nation. And they’d failed.
Not until later that night when the intelligence reports came in would they learn the truth.
They hadn’t failed. They had accomplished a miracle.