21 SDE DOVE AIRFIELD, TEL AVIV
JUNE 4, 1948
Bomb Amman?
In his command shack at the Sde Dov airfield, Boris Senior read the order that had just been handed to him by Ezra Omer, the adjutant to the commanding general. Amman was the capital of Transjordan, which straddled the Jordan River to the east of Israel and, until its independence in 1946, had been a British protectorate. The country was heavily defended by Transjordanian Air Force fighters and antiaircraft guns. Amman also happened to be the site of a major military air base of the British, who maintained a watchful presence in the country.
Senior shook his head. How were they going to bomb a city? His little squadron at Sde Dov consisted of a handful of utility planes—Piper Cubs, Austers, Fairchilds, a Dragon Rapide biplane, and a Beechcraft Bonanza. He had no bombers or fighters. Fewer than two dozen airmen were assigned to the unit. None except Senior was military-trained.
Ezra Omer was a tall, taciturn soldier who didn’t mince words. He hadn’t come here to be told all the reasons why something couldn’t be done. There was a good reason to bomb Amman. IDF headquarters had received intelligence reports that the top officials of the Arab League were meeting that night in Amman to discuss progress in the war against Israel. This was a perfect moment to send them a message.
Senior just nodded. It was a crazy idea, but no less crazy than most of the ideas headquarters had come up with. So far in this short war the IDF general staff had displayed a notable lack of understanding of the limits of their tiny air force.
Senior’s little band of pilots had already become amateur bombers. They chucked explosives from the open doors of all their light planes—Austers, Norsemans, Dragon Rapide transports, even Boris Senior’s V-tailed Bonanza.
Bomb Amman? Sure, said Senior. They’d do it.
It would have to be at night, if the attack were to have any chance of success. Even then there was no guarantee that Transjordanian Spitfires wouldn’t swat them down like moths.
Senior assigned himself to lead the mission in the Bonanza. He would be first over the city and drop incendiaries to mark the target, just as the Pathfinder aircraft had done during heavy bomber raids over Germany. The heavy bombers, in this case, amounted to a Fairchild F-24 Argus light plane and a twin-engine Rapide biplane.
That evening the crews were standing in the darkness at Sde Dov, about to depart on the mission. One of the pilots was having second thoughts. His name was Asher Breier, and he was a member of the old Palestine Flying Club. Already that day Breier had flown two missions over the embattled town of Sdom by the Dead Sea.
Breier declared he wasn’t going on this one. Even if they found the target in the darkness, they’d be shot out of the sky by the fighters that would surely come up after them.
A silence fell over the little group. Ezra Omer, the army major from headquarters, broke the impasse. He pulled out his pistol and shoved the muzzle against the pilot’s head.
“If you do not fly, you get a bullet in the head.”
Asher Breier’s eyes widened. So did the eyes of the others. They all knew Omer. No one doubted that the battle-hardened officer would do exactly as he said.
Without a further word, the pilot turned and climbed into the cockpit of the Rapide. Minutes later the three little planes were on their way to bomb Amman.
Senior couldn’t see a light anywhere on the ground. There was only a sliver of moon, a glitter of stars, the glow of the Bonanza’s instrument lights. Flying with Senior was his bomb-chucker, a tough, thirty-year-old volunteer named Dov Judah. Judah was a Johannesburg lawyer and a former navigator in B-26 Marauders in the South African Air Force during WWII.
The three slow-flying aircraft droned eastward, crossing the Jordan River into Transjordan. They could see the moonlight reflecting from the Dead Sea. They’d been flying less than an hour when Senior spotted the lights of Amman ahead. There was still no gunfire, no sign that the country was at war.
Senior headed the Bonanza across the city toward the target. The incendiary bombs were long sticks of shiny metal with handles attached so the bomb-chucker could hurl them out the Bonanza’s baggage door. Like much of the Israeli Air Force’s weaponry, the bombs were homemade.
Senior tried to guess the drift and arc of the bombs. Over the target he yelled to Judah to chuck out the incendiaries.
In a left bank, Senior could see the trail of exploding incendiaries in the city. City lights were extinguishing. Behind Senior, the Fairchild and the Dragon Rapide made their own runs, aiming at the incendiaries that were twinkling like fireflies down below.
Seconds later came the expected response. Flashes appeared in the sky around them, followed by the thud of explosions. Tracer rounds, some green and some red, arced into the sky.
The three light aircraft zoomed toward the unlighted terrain in the west. At regular intervals Senior turned the Bonanza to look behind. No fighters were chasing them down.
After half an hour of droning in the darkness, Senior spotted a flashing light on the ground ahead. As he flew closer he saw that it was the airfield at Lydda, only about 15 miles from Tel Aviv. The field was still in Transjordanian hands, and the beacon on the tower was in full operation.
Senior and Judah broke out in laughter. After the tension of the dangerous bombing raid, it was comic relief. The Jordanians had thoughtfully left the lights of Amman on so that the bombers could locate the target. Now they were providing a homing beacon for the trip home.
As expected, the bombing raid caused little actual damage, but the real mission had been accomplished. An unmistakable message had been delivered to the Arab League officers gathered in Amman. The war they had promised would be ended in two weeks was just beginning. By attacking Israel, they had exposed their homeland to attack.
The Amman raid produced an unintended consequence. Three of Senior’s incendiaries had fallen on the RAF air base at Amman. So had three bombs from the other two aircraft. One scored a direct hit on the base’s main hangar. There were no casualties, but the bomb damaged two Anson aircraft and wrecked numerous military offices and storage facilities of Great Britain’s Royal Air Force.
There was a howl of protest. The British Consul-General at Haifa warned the new government in Tel Aviv that if any RAF aircraft or installations in Amman were bombed again, “We would be bound to defend ourselves and attack Jewish aircraft on the ground or in the air.” To back up the threat, all British units in Transjordan were placed on alert.
No one in Tel Aviv, least of all David Ben-Gurion, felt like apologizing. Jabbing a thumb in Jordan’s eye had given Israel a badly needed morale boost. But drawing the British into the war was a worrisome prospect. Ben-Gurion gave the order that there would be no more air raids on Amman.
A clash with the British Royal Air Force had been averted. For now.
Baron Wiseberg was strapping into the Messerschmitt on the tarmac at Ekron Air Base. The 101 Squadron hadn’t yet moved its fighters to the new Herzliya base. A burly mechanic was winding up the fighter’s inertia starter. Wiseberg yanked the starter handle and the Jumo engine barked to life. A few minutes later he was roaring down the runway.
Wiseberg was a slender, dark-haired Englishman. He had been tapped for the mission because he was a former British Fleet Air Arm pilot and the only ex-navy pilot who had experience bombing ships.
After Modi Alon’s downing of the two Dakota bombers, the Egyptians had given up attacking Tel Aviv from the air. Now they were coming from the sea. On the afternoon of June 4, an Egyptian flotilla was spotted heading for the Tel Aviv coast. An urgent order went to the 101 Squadron: Send fighters to attack the enemy ships.
Attack ships with Messerschmitts? It was yet another ill-suited mission for the fighters. In any case, only one Messerschmitt was flyable.
Baron Wiseberg was still new to the quirky Messerschmitt. As Wiseberg went hurtling down the runway, his old navy habits kicked in. Instead of raising the tail of the bomb-loaded Messerschmitt, he took off in a three-point, nose-high attitude.
The Messerschmitt rose no higher than 10 feet above the runway. Then it stalled. The fighter settled back to the runway. Shedding pieces and propeller blades, the Messerschmitt careened along on its belly to a stop.
The stunned Wiseberg opened the canopy. He sat there for a moment thinking about what happened. Then he lit a cigarette.
Wiseberg was still sitting in the cockpit smoking when the crash truck came roaring up.
“Get that bloody thing out, you fool!” yelled a fireman. “You’ve got petrol and bombs.”
Wiseberg looked at the fireman. The man had a point. Wiseberg did as he was told. It was the shortest combat mission he had ever flown.
Wiseberg had crashed the last available fighter. The Egyptian flotilla was still bearing down on Tel Aviv. The tiny Israeli Navy had nothing that could engage the Egyptian ships.
Another urgent order went out, this one to Boris Senior’s little band of amateur bombers at Sde Dov. Minutes later the same trio of flivvers that bombed Amman—the Bonanza, Fairchild Argus, and the Rapide biplane—were headed out to engage the Egyptian Navy.
It seemed a parody of a World War I scene—desperate airmen tossing bombs from the cockpits of wood-and-fabric airplanes. They’d gotten away with it because until now all their missions had been in darkness over land targets. This was mid-afternoon in a clear Mediterranean sky. The Egyptian warships were armed with antiaircraft guns firing 3-lb shells.
They didn’t have far to fly. The Egyptian ships were less than 4 miles from the beach. They were steaming directly toward Tel Aviv.
Senior was the first in the Bonanza. Dodging antiaircraft fire, he managed to put one 50-kg bomb in the water close to the big flagship. With his second bomb he scored a direct hit on its deck.
Behind him came the bi-wing Rapide, putting down a stick of bombs from fore to aft. Last was the plodding Fairchild, a high-wing cabin monoplane. Each plane made multiple round trips, rearming at Sde Dov and returning to harass the Egyptian ships.
By late afternoon, the Egyptians had had enough. The flotilla headed back to the south.
But one of the bombers hadn’t returned. Missing was the Fairchild flown by David Shprinzak and his bomb-chucker, Mattie Sukenik. With darkness coming, Senior took off again in the Bonanza. He searched the sea where the action had taken place. He found no trace of the lost aircraft.
He searched again in the morning. Still no trace. Senior had to conclude that the Fairchild had been downed by the ships’ gunfire and disappeared in the sea.
Later they learned the truth. The Egyptian Air Force had acquired a new fighter—a Hawker Sea Fury. A charismatic Egyptian squadron leader named Abu Zaid, the Egyptian Air Force’s most successful fighter pilot, had flown the Sea Fury on its first combat mission that day. On his return to his base at El Arish, Zaid reported shooting down an Israeli aircraft.
Nothing was ever found of the Fairchild or the lost airmen.
There’s gotta be something better than the goddamned Messerschmitt.
It was a common refrain among the fighter pilots, especially after a few rounds at the bar. To a man they loathed the Czech Mule. There were better fighters out there. Lots of them. The Mule was still the only fighter available to the Israeli Air Force.
Or was it? The Israelis were short on everything but ingenuity. They had already cobbled together an inventory of weapons from scraps and leftovers—tanks, heavy guns, warships. Why not a fighter?
When the British departed Palestine, they left behind at Ekron Air Base a scrap heap containing the remains of a number of Spitfires. There were also salvageable parts from the Egyptian Spitfires shot down on May 22 during their ill-informed attack on the RAF base at Ramat David. But the real prize was the nearly intact Egyptian Spitfire ditched on the beach near Herzliya on the first day of war.
The myriad Spitfire pieces and scraps were collected and delivered to the air force’s maintenance center at Sharona in the lower Galilee. In charge of the team to build the fighter was a brilliant former RAF mechanic named Jack Freedman. In February 1948, Freedman had defected from the RAF and joined the Haganah. Like many immigrants, Freedman took a new name: Yakov “Freddy” Ish-Shalom.
The collection of scraps looked like a giant jigsaw puzzle. The pieces weren’t even from similar models. The scraps left by the RAF were from advanced versions, and pieces from the Egyptian airplanes were older models. The mechanics had no manuals, no technical documents.
Another problem was the Spitfire’s Merlin engine. Though the British had left several scrapped Merlins behind, they’d made them unserviceable. From the scrap piles at the various British bases, Ish-Shalom’s crew came up with enough matching parts to construct a few workable engines.
By the end of June 1948, they had stitched together an airplane. The wings were from a photo-reconnaissance Spitfire. The fuselage came from a different model.
Shrouded in canvas, the Spitfire was hauled down to the Herzliya airfield for testing. It already had a name: the Frankenstein fighter.
Boris Senior settled himself into the Spitfire’s cockpit. Lined up by the runway were mechanics, pilots, squadron officers, all watching like vultures. No one else had wanted the job of test-flying the new fighter. None had confidence in the ragtag team of mechanics who had assembled the disparate pieces of the fighter.
Now Senior was having second thoughts. Though he had experience in the Spitfire, it had been in WWII. He hadn’t yet flown the Messerschmitt, nor had he flown any WWII fighter in over three years.
Senior started the engine. He remembered that sound. There was no other aircraft noise in the world like the Rolls Royce V-12 Merlin engine.
The plan was to make a couple circuits around Herzliya, then fly to the nearby strip at Ma’abarot where Ish-Shalom’s crew would install the operational equipment—guns, radio, gun sight, and oxygen system. The antiaircraft units along the route had been alerted not to shoot at the Spitfire, which now bore Israeli markings.
When Senior landed, Ish-Shalom and his crew of gritty mechanics were cheering, pumping the air with their fists.
Israel had a new secret weapon. And this one was just the first.