36 HERZLIYA AIRFIELD
OCTOBER 15, 1948
First they heard the sound. Even before the silhouettes came into view, there was no mistaking the source of the noise: the staccato rattling sound of the Jumo engines.
Dusk was settling over Herzliya, and the pilots waiting by the runway had heard no news good or bad. Did we lose pilots again?
The Messerschmitts were coming in low. Not until they were within a couple of miles of the field could the men on the ground spot them. In the next few seconds the fighters were roaring over the field in a loose echelon.
Three Messerschmitts. The same number that left.
The Czech Mules were still landing, each pilot doing his delicate, rudder-waggling Messerschmitt dance, when the next wave came back. The sound was similar—but distinctly different to those who knew both species of warplane. The throaty, high-pitched growl of the Spitfires’ Merlin engines resonated through the orange groves. The men on the ground counted the taper-winged silhouettes.
Three Spitfires. There was cheering, hand shaking, big grins all around. Six fighters departed, six returned. None crashed on landing.
In the history of the 101 Squadron, it amounted to a milestone.
Modi Alon climbed down from the Messerschmitt. Most of his squadron was there—mechanics, armorers, pilots—and they were all happy. For the young squadron commander, it was a moment of supreme satisfaction.
Israel’s small fighter force had finally been deployed the way Alon always wanted: to establish air superiority. And they had done it convincingly. The Egyptian fighter base at El Arish, while not destroyed, was in a shambles. Egypt’s Spitfire fighters had been kept out of the fight. Not a single Egyptian warplane had threatened Israeli bombers or the infantry brigades advancing into the Negev.
For the bombers, the opening air strikes were a mixed success. Most of them missed their targets. The only real effect of the 5.5 tons of bombs dropped by the B-17s, Dakotas, and Commandos was to spread panic in the Egyptian garrisons at Gaza and Majdal. Scaring the crap out of your enemy sometimes counted for as much as blowing him up.
Among the crowd at Herzliya that night was Mina, Modi Alon’s bride. Mina was wearing her usual shy smile. Modi and Mina had planned to go home, but they decided to hang around. Bill Pomerantz, the resident Red Squadron chef, was firing up one of his special dinners at the Falk House. A squadron party was in progress.
Tomorrow, Saturday, was the Sabbath. It would also be the first whole day of the Yoav offensive, and the 101 Squadron would be in the thick of it. Alon was a commander who believed in leading by example. Instead of taking one of the new Spitfires—every pilot’s choice over the Czech Mule—Alon again assigned himself to fly the Messerschmitt.
But Alon was also a new husband. He made a promise to Mina. After he’d flown tomorrow morning, he would drive Mina up to her family’s place on the Sea of Galilee for the coming Jewish Sukkot holiday.
Hearing this, Mina gave him a smile. The former kibbutz nurse was no longer concealing the fact that she was expecting. Their first child was due in six months.
To the other pilots, most of them bachelors, it seemed odd, perhaps overly hopeful, to be starting a family at such a time. Not to Mina and Modi. They had decided to live one day at a time. They wouldn’t worry about tomorrow.
During the night of October 15, three infantry brigades of the IDF—the Yiftach, Givati, and Negev Brigades—had managed to drive a wedge across the Egyptian east–west axis in the north Negev. At the same time a commando battalion of the Yiftach Brigade planted mines along the railway line connecting El Arish with the Egyptian stronghold at Rafah. From their newly captured hilltop positions, units of the Yiftach and Negev Brigades now dominated the critical north–south main road from Gaza to Majdal.
To the east of Faluja, a new IDF unit was clanking into action. A tank battalion—consisting of the two stolen British Cromwell tanks and several Hotchkiss light tanks—was attacking the heavily fortified Egyptian position at Iraq al-Manshiya.
For the inexperienced Israeli tank crews, it was turning into a learning experience. And a bad one. By the end of the day all the tanks would be out of action, destroyed or damaged by Egyptian guns. The accompanying infantry platoon of the Negev Brigade would be driven back by Egyptian artillery.
Eleven thousand feet above the battlefield, Bill Katz had a splendid view from the cockpit of his Flying Fortress. Katz and his two accompanying B-17s were withdrawing from their early morning bombing mission.
Katz and the Hammers of the B-17 squadron had been in action since the evening before, when Operation Yoav kicked off. This morning their target was El Arish. Again no Egyptian fighters came to challenge them or their two Spitfire escorts from 101 Squadron.
Katz had just turned his bombers northward for the trip home when the bombardier called out a bogey—an unidentified aircraft—ahead of them at twelve o’clock low.
Instantly alert, they all peered down at the fast-moving warplane. As it passed beneath they recognized the slender-winged shape.
It was a lone Messerschmitt, headed south.
Rudy Augarten’s first choice of combat assignments wouldn’t have been a photo mission. Flying over places that had just been bombed was, by definition, a high-risk job. By now the antiaircraft gunners at El Arish were in a foul mood and looking for targets.
Augarten was flying one of the two Messerschmitts configured with reconnaissance cameras. It was Augarten’s job to photograph the results of this morning’s B-17 bombing raid.
The other thing that made photo missions dangerous was that the pilot was on his own. No escorts. Prey for enemy fighters. That was fine with Augarten. Besides the camera mounted in the Messerschmitt’s belly, the fighter carried full canisters of cannon and machine-gun ammo. Just in case.
El Arish was easy to spot today. A column of black smoke—the results of the recent B-17 visit—rose on the horizon like a marker beacon. Over the nose of the Messerschmitt Augarten could see the curved roof lines of the hangars.
He leveled at a thousand feet. It was the optimum photo-shooting altitude. It was also a convenient altitude for getting nailed with an antiaircraft round.
The perimeter of the airfield slid beneath the nose of the Messerschmitt. The belly-mounted camera clicked off images of the Egyptian base and forty-five seconds later Augarten was past the boundary and back over empty desert.
He’d been lucky. Not a shot had been fired at the low-flying Messerschmitt. As Augarten climbed to the east to come back for the high-altitude sequence, he gazed around him. El Arish had been hit several times now. Why hadn’t the Egyptians sent fighters up?
Three seconds later, Augarten knew the answer. They had.
There were two of them, elliptical wings glinting in the early morning sun. They were in a high orbit above El Arish. The Egyptian Spitfire pilots either hadn’t spotted the low-flying Messerschmitt yet or they were unwilling to challenge it. Or they were expecting B-17s, not a lone fighter.
Augarten made one more quick scan of the sky, then pulled the Messerschmitt up in a sweeping turn behind the tail of the second Spitfire. He waited, letting the silhouette of the Spitfire swell in his gun sight.
Augarten opened fire. Not until the Messerschmitt’s cannon and machine-gun fire was pouring into the Spitfire did the Egyptian pilots realize the danger. The pair of Egyptian fighters broke away like flushed quail, splitting in opposite directions.
Augarten’s quarry was racing to the north, diving, frantically trying to get away. Augarten craned his neck around. Where did the other one go?
The second Spitfire was nowhere in sight. Augarten returned his attention to the Spitfire in front of him. He fired several short bursts. Pieces were coming off the Egyptian Spitfire. The Egyptian pilot was jinking—racking his fighter in short, ineffective turns—trying to escape the cannon and machine-gun fire.
He couldn’t escape. Smoke streamed from the stricken fighter. Augarten stayed on the Spitfire’s tail until it crashed in a geyser of debris and smoke in the dunes north of Gaza.
Ten minutes later Augarten was doing a victory roll over Herzliya. In his debriefing he would say that he’d accomplished the recon mission. The film in the fighter’s camera contained good damage assessment images of El Arish. And, oh, yeah, while he was at it he’d shot down an Egyptian Spitfire.
As far as Augarten knew, there had been no witnesses to the shoot-down.
He was wrong. From another Messerschmitt over the battle zone, Leon Frankel had caught sight of a Spitfire with a Messerschmitt on its tail. Frankel knew exactly what he was seeing. “It was Rudy Augarten,” Frankel recalled, “and he was shooting big chunks out of that Spitfire.”
And then Frankel received a surprise. “All of a sudden I saw another Spitfire. He was coming at me from below.” It was the second Spitfire in the pair that Augarten had encountered over El Arish.
Leon Frankel had not been trained as a fighter pilot. A decorated WWII torpedo bomber pilot, he’d won a Navy Cross and had sixty-seven carrier landings to his credit. But he’d never been in a dogfight.
Until today.
Neither, apparently, had the Egyptian Spitfire pilot. When Frankel dove to get on the Spitfire’s tail, the Egyptian abruptly reversed course and headed south.
“By the time I got around, he was halfway to Cairo,” Frankel recalled. He chased the Spitfire south until he realized he’d flown too far south.
He didn’t have enough fuel to make it back to Herzliya. The nearest field en route was Ekron. Frankel decided to land for fuel.
That’s when the trouble started. On the ground, Frankel noticed oil dripping from the engine. He called a mechanic to check it out. “He gave it a couple turns with his screwdriver and turned to me with a big smile and said ‘Fixed,’ and gave me the okay sign.”
Frankel took off again. The Messerschmitt wasn’t okay. The engine began running rough, stuttering, and it was then that Frankel noticed that the oil pressure gauge was reading zero. He tapped the gauge, hoping the needle would move. It didn’t.
Seconds later black smoke was gushing into Frankel’s cockpit. He was too far away to make it back to Ekron or even the nearby Lydda airfield.
Frankel was out of options. “I wanted to do a crash landing by the book,” he remembered, “and the book says you’re supposed to get rid of the canopy.”
That meant opening the side-hinged canopy so it would separate from the airplane. But Frankel’s canopy wouldn’t separate. The canopy was beating against the side of the cockpit like a window shutter in a hurricane.
As the fighter dropped to the earth, Frankel didn’t see any clear place to land. There was only a wadi, gullies, a field filled with boulders.
The Messerschmitt hit hard on its belly. It skipped across the wadis and boulders, pieces of aluminum ripping from airplane. A tornado of dirt and sagebrush swirled around the cockpit. Frankel felt one of the rudder pedals smash back against his leg with incredible force.
It was a hell of a ride. Somehow the Messerschmitt stayed upright. When the shattered fighter finally slid to a stop against an embankment, Frankel was amazed that he was still alive.
He crawled out of the cockpit and hobbled away from the wreck. He didn’t know where he was. Israel or Jordan? He started walking in what he thought was a westward direction.
“There was nobody around,” he recalled. “Just me and a dirt road.”
But not for long. A truck was motoring down the road. As it came nearer, Frankel saw that it was filled with soldiers. Frankel drew his .38 Smith & Wesson revolver. Like all the volunteers, he knew what the Arabs did to captured pilots.
“I had six shots,” he said. “I figured I’d take five of them out and then use the last bullet for me.”
As the truck drew near, Frankel lowered his revolver. He could hear the soldiers yelling in Hebrew. They were Palmachniks—Israeli commandos—sent to look for him.
Not until late afternoon did Frankel finally get a ride back to Herzliya. When the lorry was still a mile from the base, Frankel saw something ominous rising over the field.
A column of black smoke.