34 HERZLIYA AIRFIELD
OCTOBER 2, 1948
Most fighter pilots remained loyal to their first loves. The airmen of the Red Squadron were no exception. For the Canadians, South Africans, and two sabras, it would always be the Supermarine Spitfire they had flown in WWII. USAAF veterans Rudy Augarten and Sid Antin were loyal to the tough Republic P-47 Thunderbolt. Ex-navy and Marine pilots Mike Flint, Lou Lenart, and Chris Magee loved the F4U Corsair.
For Gideon Lichtman, it was the North American P-51 Mustang. The Mustang had been his choice in WWII when he blustered his way out of an instructing billet into a fighter squadron. He’d flown the Mustang in the Pacific, in occupied Japan, in the reserves in New Jersey.
Now he was going to fly it in Israel.
The first of the two crated Mustangs smuggled by ship from the United States to Israel had been assembled and was ready for its first mission. After much argument, the assignment went to the tough-talking kid from Newark, Gideon Lichtman.
As he strapped into the fighter, Lichtman remembered why he loved it. Unlike in the claustrophobic Messerschmitt, he had a clear view through the P-51 Mustang’s bubble canopy. Instead of the Messerschmitt’s spindly landing gear, the Mustang had a wide-track, wing-mounted gear that tracked straight down the runway.
Even starting the engine was more civilized. In place of a mechanic cranking the flywheel of an inertia starter, he had only to toggle the Mustang’s starter switch. The big four-bladed propeller snapped around, two, three revolutions—pocka-pocka-pocka—and the twelve-cylinder Rolls Royce chuffed to life.
It was supposed to be a reconnaissance mission. The truce was still in effect, which meant Lichtman wouldn’t be using the Mustang’s .50-caliber machine guns. Not unless the Arabs were obliging enough to fire at him. Then it was open season.
His first reconnaissance pass was over the Lebanese air force field in Beirut. Lichtman spotted a cluster of fighters lined up in a neat row like targets in a shooting gallery. For a moment Lichtman was tempted. One high-speed strafing pass and he could blow half a dozen Arab fighters to smithereens.
He moved on. Shooting up Lebanese planes on the ground would be a blatant violation of the truce. Someone’s butt would be hung out to dry, and Lichtman knew whose it would be.
He flew over Damascus. He observed nothing of consequence, so he headed south. Lichtman was approaching the coast of Egypt, peering down at the Suez Canal, when the sky around him erupted. Bloom. Bloom. The Mustang lurched in the turbulent air. “The heaviest damn flak I’d ever seen,” he recalled.
Dodging flak bursts, Lichtman quickly finished his reconnaissance run and headed back north.
He was almost to the coastal border of Israel when he spotted it. Something glimmering like a mirage on the floor of the desert. Lichtman rolled the Mustang up on its wing and peered down at the object.
It was a fighter. An Arab fighter, since there were no other Israeli fighters in the air. But this one was different. It had a blunt nose and semi-elliptical wings. He guessed it was a Sea Fury, a fighter no one had reported seeing in this war.
It was worth a closer look.
Lichtman armed the Mustang’s guns. He peeled off toward the Arab fighter. “I got right on the guy’s ass,” Lichtman recalled. “He turned into me, and the fight was on.”
Lichtman was surprised. Unlike the bumbling Egyptian fighter pilots he had seen, this one was aggressive. Lichtman wondered if the guy was really an Egyptian. Or was he one of the mercenaries the Egyptians were rumored to be recruiting?
It became a classic mano a mano dogfight between the premier propeller-driven fighters of the world. The Sea Fury and the Mustang were flying a tight circle, each trying to get inside the other’s turn. In tiny increments, the Mustang gained the advantage.
Lichtman had the Sea Fury in his sights. He saw the pilot turn in his cockpit and look back at him. Lichtman squeezed the trigger.
Nothing happened. No hard rattle of the .50-calibers.
Lichtman squeezed again. And again. He felt himself filled with a seething rage. The goddamned guns wouldn’t fire!
The pilot in the Sea Fury was still looking back at him. Wondering if he was about to die.
For several more turns Lichtman stayed on the Sea Fury’s tail. He couldn’t leave the fight or the Sea Fury pilot would be on his tail.
Finally Lichtman saw his moment. He broke away and roared back at high speed for Herzliya. As he flew northward, the anger swelled in him like a mounting storm. He could have been killed because the guns didn’t work.
He landed, rolled the Mustang up on the dirt apron from which he’d left an hour before. He stormed across the ramp cursing the Mustang, the unworkable guns, the idiots who installed them, the air force, the whole goddamn war.
By the time he reached the operations building, the message was waiting for him: Report to IAF Headquarters. Immediately.
Lichtman had a reputation for his temper. When he was a kid in New Jersey his temper got him in fights with street kids. “I’d get the shit beat out of me every day,” he remembered.
The temper and the quick mouth stayed with him. Lichtman’s use of profanity was well known among the volunteers at Herzliya. But not to the senior officers of the IAF. Not until today.
As ordered, Lichtman presented himself at headquarters in the Yarkon Hotel in downtown Tel Aviv. He sat on a hard wooden chair while an air force staff officer questioned him. In the back of the room stood Ahoran Remez, the air force commander. Remez let the staff officer do the talking.
Lichtman didn’t like the officer. Although the officer had been an RAF pilot during WWII, he was flying a desk in this war. What most annoyed Lichtman about the man was his Britishness—the Alec Guinness mustache, double-creased uniform shirt with epaulettes, web belt. And a riding crop.
The officer tapped the riding crop against his leg while he questioned Lichtman. “What type of Arab airplane was it you encountered?”
“I told you. It was a Sea Fury.”
“You’re mistaken.” The officer leaned in until he was face-to-face with Lichtman. “It had to be something else.”
“I’m telling you what I saw. And get out of my face while you’re talking.”
The officer blinked, then backed off. “How do you know what a Sea Fury looks like?”
“I saw a picture in a magazine.” Lichtman was nearing his limit. “It was a fucking Sea Fury.”
“We know for a fact the Arabs don’t have Sea Furies.”
Lichtman’s limit had been reached. The anger that had gathered in him during the day—the flak over the Suez, the dogfight with the Egyptian fighter, the nonworking guns—all came spilling out. He cursed the staff officer and stormed out of the office.
In any other air force in 1948 it would have been the end of Licht-man’s service. He’d be dismissed, maybe court-martialed, perhaps detained, probably kicked out of the country. What he wouldn’t be doing was returning to his squadron to fly fighters, which is what happened.
This was the Israeli Air Force, and during this brief window in time the rules were different. Between the volunteers and their Israeli commanders was an unspoken contract. The volunteers could get rowdy, smash furniture, steal vehicles, even be as insubordinate as Gideon Licht-man, as long as they fulfilled their part of the contract. They must be willing to fly, kill, and perhaps be killed.
Lichtman heard nothing further about his spat with the air force staff officer. What he did hear a few days later, via Dave Croll, the 101 Squadron intelligence officer, was a tantalizing snippet of information. Intel sources confirmed that the Egyptian Air Force had added to its inventory a potent new fighter.
A Hawker Sea Fury.
The Sea Fury was the last and most sophisticated propeller-driven fighter produced by Great Britain. Powered by a big radial Centaurus engine, the Sea Fury was faster and more heavily armed than any other fighter flown by either side in the 1948 war.
Sea Fury number 701 had been ferried to Egypt in April 1948 by a Hawker factory pilot to demonstrate to the Egyptian Air Force. So enamored were the Egyptians with the new warplane that they seized it, sending the demonstration pilot home and ignoring the flurry of protests from the British embassy.
The requisitioned Sea Fury wound up at the fighter base at El Arish. There it became the personal mount of a handsome, thirty-year-old veteran fighter pilot, Squadron Leader Abu Zaid.
Zaid was Egypt’s most celebrated fighter pilot. He was already credited with shooting down one Israeli aircraft and destroying another on the ground. It had been Zaid who shot down the Fairchild Argus off Tel Aviv on June 4, 1948, killing David Shprinzak and his bomb-chucker Mattie Sukenik.
Gideon Lichtman kept remembering the dogfight over the Sinai. The Egyptian pilot had been good. But not good enough. Lichtman would always remember the way the Egyptian pilot looked back at him, waiting for the hail of bullets that never came.
Squadron Leader Abu Zaid. In a war of mostly nameless and faceless adversaries, it was good information. This one had a name and a face. And he wasn’t an amateur like most of his squadronmates. Sooner or later someone would get another shot at Abu Zaid. And this time they’d get that sonofabitch.
The dust-up between Lichtman and the air force staff officer was symptomatic of the friction between the Machal airmen and the IDF commanders. Increasingly, senior commanders made it clear that this was an Israeli defense force. Hebrew was its official language. Every senior commander in the IDF was an Israeli.
Even the ATC, despite the grumblings of the Bagel Lancers, was now commanded by a veteran Haganah operative named Munya Mardor. Other than possessing a pilot’s license, Mardor had no qualifications for commanding a squadron—except that he was a bona fide Israeli. For his part, Mardor presided over his unruly pilots like a befuddled schoolmaster. He seldom presumed to actually give them orders.
The volunteer airmen were still the angels in the sky who had come to save Israel. But now—well, the volunteers should understand that they were temporary angels. Yes, they had a vital place in the IDF—as long as they were needed. If and when the war was concluded, the IDF would revert to what it was supposed to be: a Hebrew-speaking, all-Israeli fighting force.
Then the angels could go home.