2 BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA
JANUARY 5, 1948
Fighter pilot. Of all the labels applied to Mitchell “Mike” Flint, that was the one he liked best. It had just the right macho ring to it, describing the action heroes he had worshiped in comic books and Saturday matinees. And it described the job Flint had performed with distinction until three years ago.
It was a mild winter evening in Berkeley. Mike Flint was sitting alone in his room with his eyes closed. With perfect clarity he was seeing an old image: a tiny winged silhouette. The silhouette was as sharp in his memory as when he spotted it that summer afternoon in 1945. Flint recognized the greenish drab color, the long narrow fuselage, the distinctive red ball painted on each wing.
A Nakajima C6N “Myrt.” It was the fastest carrier-based Japanese warplane in service, and it was coming directly toward him.
Flint shoved the throttle full open and yanked the Corsair fighter into a high, arcing 180-degree turn. After a nerve-wracking hound-and-hare pursuit, he sliced inside the Myrt’s turn.
The tracers from Flint’s six .50-caliber machine guns arced ahead of the enemy plane, drifted back, then converged on the nose of the hard-turning Myrt. There was a flash and then . . . Kabloom. A ball of fire appeared where the Japanese warplane had been. Instinctively Flint yanked back on the stick, barely missing the roiling mass of debris.
As he returned to his carrier, USS Wasp, Flint thought about what had happened. Had he not shot the kamikaze down, the Japanese warplane might have killed hundreds of Americans and possibly sunk a ship.
Flint had the feeling that he’d served a righteous cause. Sometimes he wondered if he’d ever have that feeling again.
By almost every measure, Mike Flint had the world by the tail. He was a slender, good-looking young man with flaming red hair, twenty-five years old, a decorated navy fighter pilot from the Pacific war.
Flint knew that fortune had smiled on him. For the past two years he’d been surrounded by attentive female students at the University of California at Berkeley. He’d not only survived the greatest of wars, but he would also soon graduate from a prestigious school and embark on a glittering career.
Since his acceptance at Berkeley, Flint had taken classes straight through the summers and was graduating early. He was also active socially, especially in a fraternity called Hillel, a Jewish campus organization. The hottest discussion topic among Hillel members was the plight of Holocaust survivors and their quest to settle in Palestine.
Many of the students, like Mike Flint, were veterans. They argued among themselves about what should be done. They had military skills. What could they do to help? What special qualifications did they have?
Flint knew.
It was late, after midnight. Mike Flint peered out at the darkened Berkeley hills. He was thinking about the images that had emerged from the Holocaust. He knew that if his grandparents hadn’t emigrated from Austria-Hungary, they would have been in the death camps. Seared into Flint’s memory were the faces of the survivors, refugees without home or country, desperate to settle in Palestine. In those faces he saw his relatives.
He saw himself.
On the table beside him Flint had a yellow legal pad. He was a logical young man, not given to impulsive decisions. On the pad Flint had drawn two columns. One was a Go list, the other a No-Go list. The No-Go list was the longer column. It included items like girlfriends at Berkeley, post-grad school, the London Olympics that he’d promised himself he’d attend as a graduation present, and most important, his widowed mother. He felt responsible for her, especially since she’d already endured three years of worrying about him in the Pacific war.
The Go list was shorter. And more abstract. Flint was like many of his generation, kids who grew up in the Great Depression and then were thrust into the cauldron of WWII. They were a generation who viewed the world in terms of heroes and villains. Good and evil. Right and wrong. Righteous causes. Their war had been the epitome of righteous causes. There had been no question about whether they should join the fight.
Now this. Was Israel’s war a righteous cause? Should he volunteer to go fight? Was it worth risking everything—life, citizenship, future career, his status as a naval reserve officer?
Flint continued jotting on his legal pad and staring out at the night. Gradually the darkness paled. The yellow pad filled with his notes.
It was almost dawn when Flint realized he had his answer. He had only one remaining problem.
What was he going to tell his mother?
Lou Lenart squirmed in his seat in the crowded Los Angeles temple. Lenart was following the speaker’s words, but his thoughts were on his grandmother.
The speaker was a former British officer, Major Wellesley Aron. The dapper military man was talking about the fighting in Palestine and the war that lay ahead. Aron spoke about the shiploads of refugees from Europe, most of them Holocaust survivors. They were being turned back from Palestine by the British naval blockade.
Lenart closed his eyes for a moment. He saw his grandmother’s face. She had chosen to remain in Hungary when the family immigrated to America. His grandmother and thirteen other family members were murdered in the Holocaust.
Lou Lenart had been born Layos Lenovitz. At the age of nine, he immigrated with his parents to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Lenart grew up feeling not only the sting of anti-Semitism but also bullying because of his Eastern European accent. When he was fifteen, he took a Charles Atlas bodybuilding course, after which, he liked to say years later, “Nobody bullied me anymore.”
It was a juncture in his life. In 1940 he changed his name to Lou Lenart and joined the Marine Corps. After a year and a half as an infantryman and with war breaking out, Lenart talked his way into flight training. He won his wings and by war’s end was a veteran combat aviator with the rank of captain in the Marine Corps.
When Lenart returned to civilian life he tried to put his Eastern European good looks and swashbuckling style to good use. He married a movie starlet and began trying to carve out a career in Los Angeles. Nothing seemed to work for him. His life was adrift, and he had only a vague sense of what he wanted to do.
Listening to the speaker in the temple, something clicked in Lenart’s mind. At last, something was making sense. After the lecture Lenart drove directly home and pulled out his WWII military résumé. He delivered it to the speaker at his hotel that night.
Nothing more happened for several weeks. One day he received a telephone call. Without introducing himself, a man said, “I understand you’re interested in flying.”
“No,” said Lenart.
The man persisted. He said he understood that Lenart had expressed an interest in a certain kind of flying assignment. And then Lenart remembered. He agreed to meet the agent the next day in downtown Los Angeles. Two weeks later, Lenart was accepted.
Another recruit named Sam Lewis, an ex-TWA captain, contacted Lenart and gave him an envelope with $5,000 in hundred-dollar bills. As a veteran, Lenart was entitled to buy a war-surplus airplane. He was instructed to go to the Federal Building with the money and purchase an ex-military C-46 Curtiss Commando cargo plane. When he was asked what he was going to do with the airplane, he would declare that he and some colleagues were starting a new airline.
Which was close to the truth. The C-46 Lenart purchased was one of ten acquired by a new company called Schwimmer Aviation. They were the beginning of the Haganah’s air force.
Lenart was sent to New York to help recruit more pilots. After a couple of weeks, he was on a plane headed for Europe.
In a Newark, New Jersey, synagogue, a young man named Gideon Lichtman was listening to a talk by a former crewman from the SS Exodus. The crewman was telling his audience how the British Royal Navy had forcibly boarded the Exodus. The ship was en route from France to Palestine with 4,515 immigrants, most of them Holocaust survivors. After a pitched battle in which two immigrants and a crew member were killed and thirty others injured, the immigrants were deported back to Europe, to detention camps in Germany.
As he listened to the story of the Exodus, Lichtman was filled with a growing anger. Like his father, he was a Zionist, a supporter of the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. And like almost every Jew in the United States, Lichtman had seen the images of the Holocaust, knew families of those who perished in the death camps, sensed the deep yearning that compelled the survivors to board ships like the Exodus.
Gideon Lichtman had been out of the military for nearly two years. He’d been a P-51 Mustang fighter pilot with the 3rd Air Commando Group. He’d seen action in New Guinea, Okinawa, and over Japan escorting B-29 bombing missions.
As much as Lichtman liked the Army Air Force, he didn’t like it enough to stay in. By the spring of 1946, he was on his way home. He rejoined his family, enrolled at New York University on the GI Bill, and started a new life. Gideon Lichtman was finished with war.
Or so he thought.
Lichtman waited until the lecture was finished. As the crowd began to disperse, Lichtman walked up to the Exodus crewman and asked how he could volunteer to fight for Israeli independence. The crewman told him to write to an organization called Land and Labor for Palestine, at 14 East 60th Street in New York.
What happened next played out like a low-budget spy movie. After he’d written to Land and Labor, Lichtman received a questionnaire inquiring about his experience and qualifications. He filled it out and returned the questionnaire. Then came a telegram directing him to call a number. He was told by phone that he should meet a guy on 57th Street. He’d be wearing a red rose in his lapel.
Lichtman found his man, and they talked. “No names were exchanged,” remembered Lichtman. “It was all secret. He said that Israel was setting up an air force and there was a need for fighter pilots.”
Lichtman was told to come back to 57th Street the next day to meet a different man.
Again they talked. This time Lichtman was introduced to a young man named Steve Schwartz. Schwartz was the newly appointed vice president of an outfit called Service Airways—and a busy recruiter for the Haganah.
“What will I be flying?” Lichtman asked.
“I don’t know,” said Schwartz. “Could be fighters, bombers, or transports.”
“I’m a fighter pilot,” Lichtman snapped. He had no interest in flying a clunky C-46 or any other multimotored flying truck. “What kind of fighters will the Israeli Air Force have?”
Again, Schwartz was vague. “P-51s, maybe. Maybe P-47s. Maybe something else.”
Bullshit, thought Lichtman. He walked away.
A few days later, Lichtman’s parents told him someone had called the house asking for him. Lichtman returned the call, and later that week came a certified letter.
Inside was an airline ticket to Rome.