37 HERZLIYA AIRFIELD
OCTOBER 16, 1948
The report reached Modi Alon in the early afternoon. The Egyptians are pulling out of Ishdud.
It seemed too good to be true. Ishdud was where Alon, Lou Lenart, Ezer Weizman, and Eddie Cohen had flown the squadron’s first combat mission. Ishdud was where they’d stopped the Egyptian march on Tel Aviv. Ishdud had huge symbolic value to both sides.
The Egyptians were pulling their brigade out of Ishdud to consolidate with the main Egyptian force 15 miles south at their stronghold in Majdal. Now IAF Headquarters had a new mission for Alon’s squadron: Hit them as hard as possible. Keep the Egyptians on the run.
Alon had already flown that morning. Mina was waiting for him in the squadron operations office. More than ever she was looking forward to their afternoon together in the Galilee.
Alon made a decision. It would be a quick mission. And a historic one. One he had to fly.
Ezer Weizman had just landed after a patrol over the front. Alon grabbed him and said, “What do you say we go fly in Hebrew for a change?”
The ever-eager Weizman just grinned. “Let’s go.”
On the way out to the airplanes, the two argued over who would fly number 114, a “doll of a plane” in Weizman’s opinion, meaning it had shown the fewest nasty tendencies of the Messerschmitts. The other fighter, number 121, was the one in which Leo Nomis made a calamitous belly landing a couple of weeks before.
Alon, being the commander, pulled rank. He took the doll—number 114.
Minutes later the pair was airborne. Each Messerschmitt carried two 70-kg bombs plus their standard load of cannon and machine-gun ammunition.
They had no trouble spotting the Egyptian convoy. The long column was strung out along the road from Ishdud just as they had been when Alon and Weizman first saw them the evening of May 29. The only difference was that this time the Egyptians were retreating.
And they could see the bridge at Ishdud. The bridge was still down, just as the Israeli commandos had left it when they stopped the Egyptian advance on Tel Aviv. Now the bridge had a name: Ad Halom. In Hebrew it meant “Up to Here.”
The Messerschmitts pounced. Diving down through the small arms fire, Weizman planted his bombs in the center of the Egyptian bivouac. Alon dropped his bombs in a neat pattern atop the long row of trucks. Weizman followed the road south to Majdal, strafing the convoys until his ammunition was gone.
In the haze and smoke over the battle front, the pilots lost contact with each other. By radio they agreed to head back to Herzliya separately.
On his own now, Weizman yielded to temptation. He was elated from the historic mission. He felt like buzzing something.
He spotted a suitable target beneath his nose. The enclave of Rehovot, near Ekron Air Base, was the home of his famous uncle, Chaim Weizman, who would soon be elected the first president of Israel.
Weizman brought it in low over the rooftops. He shoved up the propeller pitch—Whrrrrooooom—adding volume to the howling twelve-cylinder engine.
It was a classic buzz job. A little reminder to the folks in Rehovot that Chaim Weizman’s nephew was alive and fighting.
And then he headed north. He knew that by now Modi Alon should be on the ground.
Alon had just requested clearance. Sid Antin, the muscular ex-P-47 pilot, was on duty in the makeshift Herzliya control atop the water tank. Antin cleared Alon to land.
Antin could see Alon’s Messerschmitt approaching from the south. It was slowing to land. Two more fighters —Spitfires flown by Syd Cohen and Maury Mann—were at the end of the runway awaiting takeoff clearance.
Antin kept his eyes on Alon’s Messerschmitt. The landing gear was coming down. But it didn’t look right.
Alon was glowering at the main gear indicators on his instrument panel. The indicator showed that the left gear was extended, but the right was not.
It was another of the maddening habits of the Czech Mule, one of the two main gear hanging up. It was an irony that Alon had chosen this airplane—number 114—because it was the least troublesome of the bunch. He’d stuck Weizman in number 121, which had a history of landing gear troubles.
Like most of the pilots, Alon had encountered the problem before. Usually the stuck gear could be freed by yanking the airplane up and down. Putting G-forces on the airplane would pop the gear out of its cavity in the wing.
And that’s what he was doing, yanking hard on the control stick to force the wheel down, when he heard another radio call from Sid Antin in the tower.
Antin had spotted a bogey—an unidentified aircraft coming in from the coast. He wanted Alon to check it out.
Alon didn’t hesitate. An intruder heading for Herzliya. It could be an incoming bomber. Alon shoved the Messerschmitt’s throttle to full power. The landing gear problem could wait. A single enemy airplane could wipe out most of the squadron’s airplanes before antiaircraft gunners or fighters could stop it. Roaring westward toward the coast, Alon caught up with the bogey.
It wasn’t hostile. The low-flying aircraft—it looked like one of the Auster light planes from Haifa—had the highly visible Star of David emblem on its fuselage. Alon returned to Herzliya and resumed trying to get the Messerschmitt’s gear down.
From the control tower Antin watched Alon’s yanks and banks. But then he saw something else. Something peculiar.
Smoke. It was a thin wisp, streaming from the nose of the Messerschmitt. Coolant? Engine oil?
Antin called for Alon to check his engine temperatures.
Alon checked. Seconds later he replied that they were fine. He didn’t sound worried.
It looked to Antin that Alon’s hard yanking of the Messerschmitt worked. The balky landing gear appeared to be down. The Messerschmitt was on a downwind leg for landing.
But something was wrong. The wisp of smoke was still streaming from the engine. The Messerschmitt was flying too slow. Its nose was tilted downward.
The fighter began descending like a stone.
“Get it up!” Antin shouted on the radio. “Get it up!”
Alon didn’t answer. The Messerschmitt seemed to be out of control. Sid Antin had never felt so powerless in his life. With a sickening feeling he knew what was going to happen.
It took three more seconds. The Messerschmitt plunged into the ground nose first. The impact was felt across the field and all the way up to the control tower. A geyser of flame mushroomed from the spot where the fighter struck the ground.
The rescue and fire crews raced across the field toward the burning wreck. And then abruptly stopped. They heard another sound: a crackling pop-pop-pop noise.
The ammunition in the Messerschmitt’s canisters was exploding.
Dozens of people watched, all powerless to intervene, while the Messerschmitt burned. No one dared approach it while the ammunition was lighting off. A dense black column of smoke was rising nearly straight up in the still air.
Weizman saw it from 10 miles out. After the buzz job over his uncle’s compound at Rehovot, he was returning to Herzliya.
Weizman was stunned. Someone had crashed.
He was still climbing out of the Messerschmitt’s cockpit when the squadron maintenance officer, Harry Axelrod, came to him. Axelrod’s face was grief-stricken. “Modi’s been killed.”
Weizman just nodded. He trudged up the path to the squadron operations building where Modi Alon kept his office. He knew that Mina would be inside. She would have seen the crash and the pillar of smoke. Mina knew that only two pilots, Modi and Ezer, were flying this afternoon.
Weizman took a deep breath and walked into the office.
Gideon Lichtman and Boris Senior spotted the smoke from the cockpit of their Piper Cub. What was happening? Was Herzliya under attack? They could see three fighters orbiting over the field. Are they Arabs? Bombing the airfield?
Lichtman and Senior were returning from the nearby auxiliary field at Ma’abarot. They’d gone to inspect one of the P-51 Mustang fighters that had arrived in a crate and was still being assembled.
They dove the little utility plane down to the tree line to avoid being seen by the fighters. Not until one of the warplanes zoomed close overhead could they determine its identity. It was a Spitfire. Clearly visible on the fuselage was the Star of David.
Herzliya wasn’t under attack. Someone had crashed.
As they flew nearer the airfield they saw the airplane burning in the open space near the southeastern approach to the runway. Lichtman plunked the Cub down, bounced, plunked again—“the worst landing I ever made,” he said later—and as he rolled along the runway he had a clear view of the wreck.
He saw that it was a Messerschmitt. Standing in front of the operations hut was a lone figure. She was staring helplessly at the burning pyre of the Messerschmitt, her hands pressed to the sides of her face.
The word spread through the frontlines and the kibbutzim and the streets of Tel Aviv. People spoke in mournful voices, wearing expressions of grief.
Modi Alon had become a near-mythical hero. His exploits conjured images of a young David in single-warrior combat against an overwhelmingly powerful enemy. In the first dark days of their war for independence, Modi Alon had given them hope.
At Herzliya, darkness settled over the orange groves and the camouflaged revetments. Most of the pilots had left the airfield. They wandered in twos and threes up the road to the Falk House in the Kfar Shmaryahu village. They stopped a few times to gaze back at the field. Smoke was still rising from the crash site.
Missing tonight were the kibitzing and wiseass banter. No one felt like setting up the makeshift bar—the plank laid over a couple of barrels. Ezer Weizman had left. He’d driven Mina up to her parents’ home where Modi had planned to take her that day.
Giddy Lichtman went to the room in the Falk Pension that he shared with Ezer Weizman. He was lying on his cot, all the events of the day whirling through his mind, when the door flew open. Standing in his room was a middle-aged couple. They were Ezer Weizman’s parents.
“Who was killed?” the mother blurted. She knew there had been a crash. She also knew that their son Ezer and Modi Alon had been flying together. The Alons and Weizmans were close.
It was Modi, Lichtman told them. Ezer was okay. He’d taken Mina home to her family.
The couple stared at him. The father said nothing. He shook his head and wore a mournful expression. Abruptly the mother burst into sobbing and threw her arms around Lichtman, holding him tightly as she wept.
Outside in the courtyard Augarten, Antin, Cohen, and Mann talked about what had happened. The crash was another of the troubling Messerschmitt mysteries. What caused Alon’s fighter to abruptly nose down and plunge into the ground? Had the Messerschmitt been damaged by enemy fire over Ishdud?
Sid Antin had been the last to speak with Alon. When Antin spotted the wisp of smoke and told Alon to check his temperatures, Alon had replied in a clear voice that they were fine. But when the Messerschmitt began its steep descent, Alon didn’t respond to Antin’s frantic calls.
Was Alon incapacitated from the smoke? Had the fighter taken combat damage that made it suddenly uncontrollable? The way the Messerschmitt plunged out of control, it looked like a classic stall-spin accident, perhaps following an engine failure.
The burned-out wreckage provided few clues. The official IAF investigation was maddeningly vague, concluding that “Aircraft crashed out of control, burst into flames and was completely destroyed.”
Losing a squadronmate was nothing new. Each of the volunteers had seen best friends, wingmen, squadronmates die in battle. It was the nature of war, and the veteran pilots of the Red Squadron had been through the worst of wars in Europe and the Pacific. In Israel they’d already lost buddies: Cohen, Vickman, Bloch, as well as several guys from the other squadrons.
This was different. Modi Alon was not only a buddy but a leader they had come to revere. He was a pilot like them, a WWII vet with similar training to theirs. But he was something else: an Israeli. Alon was a member of the threatened little nation the volunteers had come to help. Alon had made them feel that they were part of a greater purpose.
And now he was gone. Sitting in the gloom of the courtyard at the Falk House, each pilot wrestled with his emotions. “Everybody in the squadron was crying,” recalled Rudy Augarten. “In all the wars I’ve been in, I had never seen anything like that.”