26 HERZLIYA AIRFIELD
JULY 10, 1948
With the war raging on all fronts, there was no time to grieve for a lost comrade. Calls were coming from besieged ground forces for air support. One of the calls was from the Israeli commander on the northern front where Syrian warplanes—dive-bomber-configured North American AT-6 Harvards—were pounding Israeli positions.
It was the morning after the loss of Bob Vickman. A pair of Messerschmitts scrambled from Herzliya and headed for the battle zone, a place called Mishmar Hayarden near the Sea of Galilee.
In the lead fighter was Maury Mann, a former Spitfire pilot and Battle of Britain veteran. A short, chubby Brit, Mann had an inexhaustible catalog of raunchy songs with which he kept his squadronmates entertained at their nightly gatherings.
On Mann’s wing was a slender young veteran of the South African Air Force, Lionel “Les” Bloch. This was the first combat mission of the war for the two men. From 3 miles out the pilots spotted exactly what they were looking for: a pair of Syrian AT-6 Harvard dive bombers.
Most of the Messerschmitts by now were equipped with radios. Mann slid in behind the first Harvard. “I’ll take this one,” he called to Bloch, “you take the other.”
Mann knew the Harvards were slower than the Messerschmitt, but they could be deadly. He was sure that each carried a rear gunner. He also knew that the gunner’s firing angle would be limited to either side, not directly rearward or below.
Rapidly overtaking the slower aircraft, Mann opened fire. In the hail of cannon and machine-gun fire from Mann’s Messerschmitt, the Harvard spewed debris. Abruptly it plunged straight down into the mottled landscape near the Sea of Galilee.
Mann pulled up and looked around for Bloch. “We were over what was then the Syrian border, and I couldn’t see him,” Mann recalled. He had last seen Bloch chasing the second Harvard across the border into Syria. Bloch wasn’t answering Mann’s radio calls.
Mann was low on fuel. He made a quick sweep of the area. He spotted no wreckage, no column of smoke except from the Harvard he’d just shot down.
Dejectedly, Mann turned back to Herzliya. Without Lionel Bloch.
Airmen hated mysteries. They especially hated mysteries concerning the disappearance of buddies and squadronmates.
The gloom at Herzliya that night deepened as the Red Squadron dealt with the latest loss. In the two days they’d been back at war, they’d lost two pilots.
The next day another South African, ex-medical student Syd Cohen, was flying a Messerschmitt on a search mission over the northern front. He looked around for signs of Lionel Bloch’s fighter. He peered down at the Sea of Galilee, the surrounding shoreline, the adjoining Hula swamp. Cohen spotted nothing that looked like the remains of a Messerschmitt.
Cohen was puzzled. It seemed that Bloch had chased his quarry deep into Syria. And then something happened. Was he shot down by the Harvard’s tail gunner? Antiaircraft fire?
Or something else?
Cohen had a hunch. He swung the Messerschmitt out over the coast. He squeezed the machine-gun trigger. He felt the rattle of the two nose-mounted 13.1-mm guns. Almost immediately he felt something else.
A vibration that wasn’t there before.
Something was wrong, and Cohen had a strong suspicion what it was. He landed back at Herzliya. Cohen climbed down and walked around to inspect the nose of his Messerschmitt.
What he saw made him grimace. All three propeller blades had pieces blown off them. The blades looked as if they’d been hit with . . . bullets.
His own bullets.
Cohen had come within millimeters of shooting off his own propeller. It meant the synchronizing system of the machine guns—the gearing that allowed the guns to fire between the propeller blades—was flawed.
As the realization dawned on the pilots that the Messerschmitt’s guns could be shooting off their propellers, the pilots’ feelings about the Czech Mule swelled into a full-scale hatred. And it inspired yet another uncomplimentary label for the airplane: the Nazi Revenge. The goddamned Nazi Revenge was killing them!
Much later, as more evidence came in, their conclusion seemed founded. A high-ranking Egyptian Air Force officer reported that on the day of Vickman’s disappearance, a low-flying Lysander utility plane had come under attack by a pursuing Messerschmitt. Just as the Messerschmitt came within firing range, it abruptly flew into the ground and exploded.
Given the timing and location, it could only have been the fighter flown by Bob Vickman. Vickman had either inadvertently flown into the ground or, as now seemed likely, shot off his propeller with his first burst of fire and then crashed.
A postwar Syrian report revealed that a Messerschmitt—it had to be Bloch’s—crashed inside Syria while pursuing an AT-6. The pilot was badly injured and died in captivity. Though the unidentified body was returned to Israel in 1949, not until many years later would it be learned that it was in all likelihood that of the crashed pilot, Lionel Bloch.
Did the Messerschmitt kill Vickman and Bloch? There was little proof, but the pilots needed no further convincing. The unsynchronized machine guns were just one more evil attribute of the Nazi Revenge. It became a standard procedure at the beginning of every combat mission to test fire the guns.
Just in case.
On the hazy evening of July 18, with half an hour to go before the next cease-fire, Rudy Augarten took off on his first combat mission in the Messerschmitt.
It was nearly his last.
Augarten hadn’t flown fighters—or scarcely any airplane—during the three years after the war while he’d been a student in international relations at Harvard. His flying skills were rusty when he arrived at 
eské Budějovice to check out in the Messerschmitt.
Augarten surprised everyone, including himself. He was a quick study, requiring only six hours of training in the Arado two-seater and the Messerschmitt before his Czech instructors declared him combat ready. He’d joined the 101 Squadron at Herzliya in June during the first truce and then sat on the ground during most of the Ten Day Campaign waiting his turn to fly a combat mission.
In Augarten’s rush to embark on his first mission, he overlooked an item on the TMFRTS checklist. It was the last T—the one that stood for Trim. He neglected to reset the elevator trim tab from full nose up to the takeoff setting.
Early in the takeoff roll—too early—the Messerschmitt’s nose pitched up. “One of the wings stalled, going to the left side,” Augarten recalled. “Then I realized what happened. I was fighting the stick. The plane was in a slow turn to the left. There was a tree 200 to 250 yards off the runway, and they tell me my wing brushed through.”
Somehow Augarten managed to stay airborne. He joined up with Modi Alon and Sid Antin in the other two Messerschmitts. It was Antin’s first combat mission also. In a loose V formation the three fighters headed for the southern front, where the entrenched Egyptian Army was trying to seal off the Negev Desert from the rest of Israel.
In the evening light they had no trouble seeing the target. An Egyptian convoy of trucks and armored vehicles was strung out for a mile in the desert south of Beersheba. One after the other the Messerschmitts peeled off, diving on the enemy column.
The attack was quick and deadly. Before the Egyptian gunners could train their fire on the Israeli fighters, the raid was over. Smoke and flames billowed from destroyed vehicles. Panicked troops were scattering in every direction from the burning vehicles. The mission was successful, and now it was over.
And then it wasn’t.
Sid Antin’s voice crackled over the radio. “Hey, Rudy, there’s something on your left!”
Augarten saw them—two sleek shapes, down low, flying parallel to the shoreline. Even at this distance he could see that they were Spitfires. Augarten swung his Messerschmitt’s nose hard to the left, descending, sliding in behind the pair of fighters. As he drew nearer he recognized the Egyptian roundel markings on the Spitfires.
For Augarten, it was like old times. In the last months of WWII he’d flown air-to-ground missions, strafing and bombing the enemy on the ground. On one of his last missions, he’d capped it off with a swirling air-to-air engagement, shooting down two German fighters. German Messerschmitts.
Now he was flying, of all things, a Messerschmitt. Chasing Spitfires.
“I put my gun sight on one,” Augarten recalled, “pulled the trigger, and . . .”
Nothing. He squeezed the trigger again. The guns didn’t fire.
It was a fighter pilot’s nightmare—the guns weren’t working! Then it came to him. “For Christ’s sake,” he snapped on the radio, “I’m out of ammunition.” Augarten had used up his cannon and machine-gun ammo on the Egyptian column at Beersheba.
Modi Alon still had ammunition. Augarten watched from the side while Alon poured a hail of bullets into the Egyptian fighter. Belching fire, the Spitfire went into a shallow dive, then pancaked onto the desert floor in a plume of dirt and smoke.
The second Spitfire pilot, suddenly aware of his nearness to death, was in a frantic diving turn trying to escape. Luck was with the Egyptian. The Messerschmitts were too low on fuel to pursue him. Alon gave the signal to break it off.
It should have been one of those triumphant RTBs—returns to base—that fighter pilots dream of. After strafing and bombing an entire enemy convoy, they’d capped off the mission with a dramatic air-to-air shoot-down. Modi Alon had added number three to his list of enemy kills.
It didn’t get any better than this. As usual the rest of the squadron would be standing by the runway watching, counting the airplanes. Did all three make it back? Did they score any kills?
Here was the answer. The Messerschmitts roared in low over the field in tight formation. Pulling up one after the other, each set up for the approach and landing. They’d land to the west, into the setting sun.
It was then the triumphant RTB turned into a demolition derby.
The wheels of Modi Alon’s fighter had no sooner bonked down on the dirt runway when the fighter took a hard swerve to the right. In a swirl of reddish dirt the Messerschmitt veered off the strip, dragging its left wingtip, careening sideways in a landing gear–bending stop at the edge of the strip.
Next came Sid Antin. He landed hard on the main gear and bounced back in the air. When the Messerschmitt came back down, it porpoised along the runway, nose up, nose down, sliding to a stop with its tail pointing skyward.
Close behind came Rudy Augarten. Squinting against the setting sun, he didn’t see Antin’s fighter doing its headstand until the last instant. Augarten roared back into the air, barely clearing the disabled airplanes on the field.
He was nearly out of fuel. In the waning light Augarten had to orbit the field while ground crewmen dragged Antin’s fighter off the runway.
When Augarten finally plunked the Messerschmitt down on the dirt strip, he could see the audience lined up by the revetments. They had seen the whole show. The Red Squadron pilots were grinning and pumping their arms.
Augarten knew it was going to be a rough night at the bar.