29 ŽATEC, CZECHOSLOVAKIA
JULY 14, 1948
Sam Lewis had been smitten by the Constellation since the day in early WWII when he first glimpsed that sleek shape. He’d flown the big four-motored Connie throughout the war, then as a captain for TWA, and then for the bogus airline LAPSA. RX121—the only one of the three Connies bought by Schwimmer to make it out of the United States—was the flagship of Israel’s new Air Transport Command.
Now Lewis was peering up at the circling Constellation. He didn’t like what he was seeing. He was standing on the ramp at the Zebra base, and he could tell that only one of the Connie’s landing gear was extended. The other gear and nose wheel were still retracted.
With Marty Ribakoff in command, RX121 had made her seventh trip to Ekron Air Base in Israel. The Connie was returning to Žatec with twenty passengers, including women and children, families of Israeli consular personnel in Czechoslovakia, and deputy air force commander Haman Shamir.
The flight from Ekron had been uneventful until they neared the Yugoslav coast. A Russian-built YAK fighter intercepted them off the Adriatic coast. After looking the big transport over—it still bore the Panamanian LAPSA markings—the fighter pilot waggled his wings and departed.
A few minutes later, as though the brush with the fighter had been a catalyst, the trouble began. The Constellation’s main hydraulic line burst. When Ribakoff lowered the landing gear for landing at Žatec, only the left main gear came down. The right gear and the nose gear hadn’t moved.
For two hours Ribakoff circled the Žatec air base. By radio he talked with mechanics on the ground while Jimmy Weddell, the flight engineer, went down into the belly of the aircraft and tried to manually crank the other landing gear down.
Nothing worked. The left gear remained locked down. The right gear stayed up.
Sam Lewis and engineering chief Sam Pomerance watched helplessly from the ground. The Connie looked like a one-legged swan droning in circles over the field. It was the worst possible landing configuration, coming in on a single landing gear. The opposite wingtip would drop to the ground and the airplane could cartwheel.
Sam Lewis was racking his brain. How could they get the left landing gear to unstick and retract?
And then Lewis had an idea. He told Pomerance he was going to take off in one of the squadron’s BT-13 single-engine training planes. He’d fly beneath the Connie, jam his wingtip against the stuck landing gear, and force it to retract. Of course the BT-13 would probably lose part of its wing, in which case Lewis would bail out.
Pomerance stared at Lewis as if he were seeing an escapee from an asylum. You’re going to do what with your wingtip? Surely Lewis wasn’t serious.
Lewis was. When Pomerance saw Lewis strapping on his parachute, he intervened. Sam Pomerance was nearly as burly as Lewis. He grabbed Lewis’s arm and told him there was no way Lewis was going to fly that BT-13. Let Ribakoff land with the wheel down.
They scuffled some more. Red-faced, eyes blazing, Sam Lewis finally backed off.
Minutes later, Lewis and Pomerance and an audience of dozens stood watching Ribakoff bring the four-engine transport down to the runway.
Ribakoff did everything right. He kept the left wing low, gently alighting on the one main landing gear. The spectators on the ground, including Lewis and Pomerance, held their breath. Will the one gear hold the weight of the airplane? Or will it fold?
It didn’t fold, at least not right away. The big airliner floated down the runway for a thousand feet, balancing on its one gear. Ribakoff strived valiantly to hold the right wing up.
Finally, as everyone knew it would, the right wingtip descended to the ground. The transport veered off the runway. The single gear collapsed and a torrent of sparks and dirt and torn metal spewed behind the airplane. She ground to a stop on her belly, leaving in her wake four freshly dug trenches across the grass field. Almost immediately the passengers and crew were clambering out the doors.
There was no fire. Given the circumstances, it had been as perfect a landing as anyone could have made. The beautiful Constellation was wrecked. A broken main spar jutted through the top of the right wing like the point of a spear. Her propeller blades were bent back at a grotesque angle. Panels of belly and wing skin were ripped from the airframe and strewn in the grass.
Sam Pomerance’s mechanics crawled over the airframe, peering at the damage, shaking their heads. It would be a huge task, perhaps an impossible one, to make RX121 flyable again.
Off to the side stood a lone, slump-shouldered figure. Sam Lewis didn’t look like Smilin’ Jack any longer. He looked like a man who had just lost his sweetheart.
At Ekron Air Base in Israel, Ray Kurtz was wearing his trademark big bear grin. He was still on a high from the Cairo bombing mission. Kurtz and his crews had pulled off the most dramatic raid of the war so far.
Then, a few minutes before midnight on July 15, came new orders. They were leaving. The big, easy-to-recognize Flying Fortresses had become the Egyptian Air Force’s most sought-after target. IAF Headquarters sent the order: the bombers would be dispersed to different bases in the north to lessen the chance of all three being caught in a surprise air raid.
But first, they had to fly another mission.
The sun hadn’t yet risen as Kurtz hauled himself back into the B-17. Fewer than twelve hours had elapsed since they’d rained bombs on King Farouk’s palace. Now they were headed for El Arish, the Egyptian air base Moonitz and Raisin had been unable to find in the darkness last night.
This time they had no difficulty spotting the intersecting runways, the rows of parked Egyptian warplanes. Their 6 tons of high explosives pounded the field.
The bombers were gone before the surprised antiaircraft gunners opened fire. No Egyptian Spitfires came up to challenge the Flying Fortresses.
By the end of the day everyone—crews and IAF command—realized that dispersing the bombers to three different bases was a bad idea. Remez countermanded his original order. All the B-17s would be based at Ramat David, the former RAF base in the north of Israel.
During the three-and-a-half days before the July 19 truce, the B-17s flew twenty-three combat sorties, dropping over 100,000 pounds of explosives. They flew in formation, escorted by Messerschmitts from Herzliya.
The bombers’ early tactic was to come in low to avoid detection, shoot up the area with the bombers’ multiple gun stations, and then come back to drop bombs from altitude. Seeing the big warplanes with the Star of David emblazoned on the wings roaring over their lines was a dramatic morale-booster for the IDF brigades on the ground.
One day remained before the fighting ended. Before the truce went into effect, it was time to send one last message to the enemy.
Bomb another Arab capital?
Norm Moonitz nodded agreeably. Hell, why not? Moonitz had recovered from his injuries in the C-46 crash last May. He liked the idea that they had bombed the capitals of Egypt and Transjordan so far. Why not Syria?
But this mission would be different. Instead of a three-ship raid, Moonitz would be flying a one-bomber attack.
On the early morning of July 18, Moonitz’s B-17 rumbled down the runway at Ramat David Air Base. He banked to the right and pointed the big bomber toward Damascus.
“We made one pass,” Moonitz reported. “I was afraid because we only had one B-17 with not a lot of armament. We had no armor . . . we had those crummy Czech guns with the old ring sights.”
It was enough. After plastering the city, Moonitz turned his attention to the nearby military airfield of Al Mezze where the Syrian AT-6 Harvard dive bombers were based. He dumped another load of bombs on the airfield and “then on the way back we dove down and we strafed everything we could see.”
The raid accomplished its mission. Just as with the raids on Cairo and Amman, the psychological effect on the Syrians counted for more than the actual damage.
And it was time for another air force ritual. The three-bomber force was about to become an official squadron of the air force. To go with the new status, the outfit needed an official label. It would be the same peculiar democratic process by which the 101 Squadron named itself. The crew members of the bomber outfit were told to come up with a designation for their squadron.
They did it the traditional way. They had a party. They kicked ideas around. Some were mundane, some controversial, some utterly tasteless.
The next day the bomber crewmen announced their new designation: 69 Squadron.
Sixty-nine? At headquarters level there were frowns, coughs, a few knowing winks. The fliers stuck to their guns. Some insisted the label came from a decorated USAAF WWII bomber squadron. Kurtz and Moonitz struggled to keep a straight face, saying it was a sentimental number for them. It came from their old New York Fire Department Engine 69.
No one believed them. They believed them even less when the squadron adopted the slogan, “69 Is More than a Number.”
To go with the designation, the 69 Squadron took a macho nickname, one that would continue into the next century: The Hammers.
Emmanuel Zur looked like an English dandy—three-piece suit, buckskin shoes, a trilby hat. He was a thirty-seven-year-old Israeli agent and pilot who had a stack of passports in various names and a portfolio of bogus companies through which he made acquisitions for the IDF.
Zur’s mission in Europe was to find attack airplanes. Real attack airplanes that could come in fast and low and put a bomb load precisely on target. The Messerschmitt was a poor air-to-ground platform. At best the fighter could carry only a couple of puny 70-kg bombs. Nor was the B-17 an effective low-level attack aircraft. Its most potent use was in terrifying Arab soldiers on the ground.
The twin-engine Douglas A-20 Havoc bombers that Schwimmer purchased in the United States would have been suitable—if they had not been seized by the Feds. Likewise the two dozen P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bombers Schwimmer had lined up in Mexico—if the purchase hadn’t been nixed by the Haganah when they signed the Messerschmitt deal.
On a cloud-covered early July day in Cambridge, England, Emmanuel Zur stood gazing into an open hangar. A smile came to Zur’s face, and he nodded his approval. Yes. These were the very objects he had been seeking these past six weeks.
Parked in the hangar were two war-surplus de Havilland Mosquito reconnaissance bombers.
The Mosquito was precisely the warplane Israel needed—a fast, multirole fighter-bomber. Both warplanes were in good shape. Zur quickly closed the deal, paying $18,000 for each through one of his cover companies.
Zur’s only remaining task was to get the Mosquitoes to Israel. He knew exactly whom to call.
John Harvey could have been a character out of pulp fiction—war hero, spy, deal-maker, daredevil pilot. He was a dapper ex-RAF flier with a ginger-colored handlebar mustache. In Britain he was going by the alias “Terence Farnfield.” Harvey’s boss was the Israeli agent named Emmanuel Zur.
On the morning of July 5, 1948, Harvey took off from Cambridge in the first Mosquito. Though he had filed a flight plan to Exeter, Harvey turned south and headed toward France.
It wasn’t a smooth flight. Because of a fuel system malfunction, he was forced to land at Nice, on the south coast of France. Harvey was promptly arrested.
Zur came to his rescue, paying off French officials, and the next day Harvey was on his way again. After a refueling stop in Ajaccio, Corsica, he was headed for Israel, 800 miles to the east.
Harvey barely made it. Low on fuel, he dropped into Haifa on the coast instead of continuing to Ekron further inland. Nervous Israeli gunners opened fire, thinking the Mosquito was an Egyptian warplane. Dodging flak, Harvey put the Mosquito down on the Haifa airport—and was promptly arrested. Harvey, a.k.a. Terence Farnfield, went to jail for the second time in two days.
Hours passed and numerous phone calls were exchanged between Israel and Britain before it was finally determined that Terence Farnfield was, in fact, one of them.
A few days later, on July 16 in Ajaccio, Corsica, a hired pilot was taking off in the second Mosquito acquired by Zur. Twenty feet in the air, both engines stopped. The Mosquito slammed back into the ground beyond the end of the runway. In a shuddering crash, the fighter-bomber was destroyed.
But it didn’t burn. It was discovered that the fuel tanks were empty.
The hired pilot survived the crash, receiving a fractured wrist and a broken nose. He said he hadn’t checked the tanks that morning because he had personally supervised the fueling the night before. When he last saw them, the tanks were full.
To John Harvey and Emmanuel Zur, it was worrisome news. They were certain someone had sabotaged their Israel-bound Mosquito. But who? Arabs? Brits?
Radio operator Harold Livingston was in Ajaccio that day on his way to the Zebra base. He spoke with the portly, gout-ridden Commandant Latour who ran the airfield. The commandant assured him he was investigating. The commandant would find the cause of the accident.
Livingston had to laugh. It reminded him of Claude Rains’s famous line in Casablanca: “. . . round up the usual suspects.”