44 TEL AVIV
DECEMBER 23, 1948
Two days earlier, when Gordon Levett made his pitch to Haman Shamir to be transferred to the 101 Squadron, he was telling the truth. He had been trained in Spitfire and Hurricane fighters during WWII.
The part that Levett left out was that he had never actually flown a Spitfire in combat. Or any other fighter.
Gordon Levett’s war had been spent far from the front lines, first as an instructor in basic training and later as a transport pilot. By the end of the war he had risen to the rank of squadron leader—the equivalent to major. But Levett always felt that he’d been cheated out of the great prize: he’d never been a real fighter pilot in a real war.
Still, Levett liked the RAF. He liked it enough that after war’s end he stayed in—until he was booted out of the service for taking unauthorized leave from his remote Burma base. Down on his luck, the twenty-six-year-old ex-pilot was unable to find a flying job of any kind. He was working in a Jewish-owned diaper laundry in London when he began hearing about the troubles in Palestine.
Levett had no Jewish blood in him. Still, something churned inside him when he learned about the thousands of Jewish refugees being turned back from Palestine—by his own British military. Until then Gordon Levett’s postwar life had seemed purposeless. Now he was sensing a mission.
Through his employer, an ardent Zionist named Silver, Levett made contact with a Haganah agent. At their first meeting, the operative asked how much pay Levett expected.
“Board and lodging and pocket money.”
“What can you fly?”
“Anything.”
The agent wanted proof. Levett presented his logbooks showing the many types of aircraft he’d flown, pilot assessments, and a total of 3,337 hours. There were more questions. Finally the Haganah operative seemed satisfied. He asked, “What do you think about having your genitals cut off and sewn into your mouth?”
Levett didn’t have a good answer. He knew the operative was warning him that this wasn’t an ordinary war. The Arabs would be taking few prisoners.
Levett shrugged. He said he wasn’t worried.
There was a follow-up interview. At the end the agent produced a bottle of vodka and two tiny glasses. They knocked back the vodka and toasted Zion. “I must tell you,” said the agent, “I have reported to my superiors that I think you are an agent working for British intelligence. They have decided to play along to see what happens.”
Levett had to smile. Even the British, he told the agent, wouldn’t send an uncircumcised gentile to be an agent among the Jews.
Levett’s timing was perfect. At the moment the ATC squadron had a full complement of airmen. But the 101 Squadron was receiving new Spitfires, and they needed pilots. With a stroke of the deputy commander’s pen, Levett was transferred from the ATC to the Red Squadron.
That evening Levett stuffed his possessions into a rucksack and headed for the Gallei Yam bar on the beach. He knew from experience the 101 Squadron pilots would be hanging out there.
A half dozen Red Squadron pilots were clustered in the bar, including squadron commander Syd Cohen. They were drinking beer and wearing their red baseball caps. They invited Levett to join them, and by late evening everyone was pleasantly soused.
With their new squadronmate in tow, the pilots wobbled out to the street to look for transportation. Parked nearby was an American station wagon. One of the pilots quickly hot-wired the ignition. Minutes later they were motoring toward Hatzor in the stolen car.
Watching all this, Levett had to grin. He grinned even more when he settled in at Hatzor and saw the casual nonmilitariness of the squadron. There were no uniforms. Most pilots were going around in battered old leather flight jackets—Army Air Corps or navy issue—with a silk scarf cut from throwaway parachutes.
He watched pilots being driven out to their fighters in jeeps or Chrysler limousines—whatever vehicle had recently been stolen. And he learned the name for the area behind the barracks where they kept the swiped vehicles: Syd Cohen’s Used Car Lot.
Like every new guy, Levett had to prove himself. The squadron pilots watched from the tarmac while Levett made his first flight in the Spitfire—the only one of the three fighters he had ever flown before. Except for overcontrolling on takeoff and landing—an inevitable result of going from a 25-ton C-46 to a 5,000-lb fighter—he got the Spitfire up and down without incident.
Then the Messerschmitt. To the surprise of the observers on the ground—and to himself—Levett kept the Czech Mule arrow-straight down Hatzor’s thin strip of concrete.
After the Messerschmitt, flying the wide-geared Mustang was almost anticlimactic.
Syd Cohen was satisfied. The new pilot was ready for action. Levett would fly as his wingman for the dawn patrol tomorrow.
That night Levett lay awake thinking about the upcoming patrol. A bothersome truth kept flitting through his mind. He didn’t know anything about flying in combat.
The sun had barely risen on the morning of December 28 when the pair of Spitfires lifted from Hatzor. They climbed toward the Gaza Strip where, just outside Rafah, they spotted an Egyptian train heading southwestward.
And the Egyptians spotted them. Almost immediately black-and-white filigree patterns of antiaircraft fire appeared in the dawn sky around them.
Cohen’s pair of 250-lb bombs were near-misses on the train. Levett’s bombs weren’t even close.
Then they came back to strafe the locomotive. It was the first time Levett had ever fired the guns of a fighter. “I was astonished at the clatter and the recoil effect,” he wrote later.
This time he didn’t miss. He was so enthralled by the sight of his bullets hitting the target he nearly flew into the train. Levett could see passengers jumping from the coach cars. They scrambled for cover from the attacking fighters. “By unspoken agreement neither Syd or I had attacked the passenger coaches,” he recalled.
Back on the ramp at Hatzor, Levett climbed out of his Spitfire. In the space of less than an hour he had made the transformation from novitiate to real fighter pilot. He had flown in combat.
Of course, it was an air-to-ground mission, not a mano a mano dogfight. That wouldn’t come until his next mission.
It came later that same morning. This time Levett was flying a Messerschmitt. His leader was Jack Doyle, the seasoned ex-RCAF veteran with four kills in WWII. Their mission was to escort a flight of four Harvard AT-6 dive bombers in a raid on the Egyptian force at Faluja.
As the cumbersome formation droned south, Levett peered at the peculiar sight. Big blunt-nosed American-built training airplanes retrofitted as bombers, escorted by a British Spitfire and a German-Czech Messerschmitt. Even more peculiar was that Levett and Doyle were communicating by hand signals. The radios in the mismatched fighters didn’t share a common frequency.
Levett had to shake his head. Only in the Israeli Air Force.
The Harvard dive bombers were still diving on the target at Faluja when Levett spotted shadowy dark shapes approaching from the east. They looked like sharks slicing through shallow water.
And then Levett recognized them. Four Spitfires and four Italian-built Macchis, the sleek new fighters acquired by the Egyptian Air Force.
The dive-bomber pilots saw them, too. The Harvards dumped their bomb loads in one pass and exited the area, skimming low over the sand dunes to the north.
Doyle and Levett climbed into the sun until they were 4,000 feet above the incoming fighters. Levett had heard a rumor floating around the squadron. Ex-Luftwaffe aces might be flying with the Egyptian Air Force. It would be a bizarre fate, Levett thought, for an Englishman in a Messerschmitt to be shot down by a German in a Spitfire. A hell of a war.
Doyle and Levett were high with the blinding morning sun behind them. The Egyptian pilots still showed no sign of having seen them.
A perfect ambush.
With no radio communication, Levett was flying close enough to Doyle to see his hand signals. He saw Doyle grin, then point downward. Then he cocked an imaginary gun with his thumb.
Down they swept, each going for a separate target. Doyle pulled in behind an Egyptian Macchi and opened fire. Levett locked on to a Spitfire. Churning in his head were the fighter pilot’s maxims: Wait till he’s close . . . fire short bursts . . . keep checking your tail.
The Egyptian Spitfire was centered in Levett’s gun sight. He waited . . . waited . . . then for the first time in his life he opened fire on an enemy airplane.
And to his astonishment, he was hitting something. Pieces were flying off the Egyptian fighter. Then, a telltale sign: a white stream of glycol trailing behind the fighter. It meant the Spitfire’s Merlin engine was doomed.
Levett was about to give him another burst when something caught his eye. Something behind him.
Another Spitfire. One of the Egyptian fighters was on his right rear quarter. Levett yanked hard into a climbing turn, trying to throw the attacker off his tail.
It wasn’t working. The Egyptian was staying inside his turn. Levett looked back over his shoulder. What he saw sent a chill through him.
The twinkling orange muzzles of the Spitfire’s machine guns.
The hunter had become the prey. Levett knew the Messerschmitt couldn’t win a turning fight with a Spitfire. There was only one way out.
Levett shoved the Messerschmitt into a violent negative-G vertical dive. Dirt and dead bugs flew from the bottom of the cockpit. The Messerschmitt accelerated toward the earth like a descending missile.
Levett glimpsed the airspeed indicator. It was going through 725 kilometers per hour—beyond 450 mph. Only speed and the negative-G maneuver would save him.
Bottoming out of the dive, Levett grunted against the G-load and glanced behind him.
The Spitfire was nowhere to be seen.
Levett zoomed back toward the swarm of warplanes above him. He saw a gaggle of Spitfires, but . . . which were the Egyptians? They all looked alike. He couldn’t shoot because one of them might be Doyle. Doyle, on the other hand, could blast away at any Spitfire he saw, knowing it wasn’t his wingman in a Messerschmitt.
And then Levett glimpsed something just off the shoreline—a different silhouette, pointier-nosed than a Spitfire, with tapered, square-tipped wings. It was one of the Macchi fighters. It was low over the water, turning back toward his home base at El Arish.
With his altitude advantage, Levett swept down on the Macchi’s tail.
The Egyptian pilot was an inept dogfighter. Levett stayed stay inside his turns, firing short bursts into the evading fighter. The Egyptian was making a clumsy effort to escape being shot down.
Levett wondered if he was wounded. He considered coming alongside and lowering his gear, signaling the Egyptian to surrender.
No, Levett decided. It would slow him down and make him a sitting duck for other Egyptian fighters. Get it over.
Levett fired more bursts into the Macchi. Black smoke belched from the V-12 engine. The Italian-built warplane went into a steep plunge toward the Mediterranean.
There was no sign of a parachute.
Levett peered around. The sky was clear of fighters. Even Doyle was gone. When Levett landed back at Hatzor, Doyle was on the ramp waiting for him. In their mission report, each pilot claimed one Fiat G55 killed (they were actually Macchi MC.205Vs) and one Spitfire probably destroyed.
Levett couldn’t sleep that night. After several hours of staring into the darkness, he rose and switched on the bedside light. He lit a cigarette and reflected on what happened.
He’d shot down one and probably two enemy fighters in air-to-air combat. And nearly been shot down himself. Levett knew that he should be elated, full of himself, filled with a warrior’s chest-thumping pride.
He wasn’t. Today he had killed a man. Maybe two. Smoking his cigarette alone in the room, Levett wondered about them. Were they young? Old? Married? Fathers? One, he knew for sure, was at the bottom of the Mediterranean still in his fighter.
After all these years of aspiring to be a fighter pilot, this wasn’t what Levett expected. None of the high-blown talk about righteous causes and saving a nation and fighting for something greater than himself had been in his mind. Levett had obeyed the warrior’s primal command: Kill or be killed.
There had been nothing righteous about it.
Levett rose and shuffled through his small collection of books. Finally he located the passage he was looking for. It was in a letter from the French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry to his friend and fellow writer André Gide.
Saint-Exupéry had been in combat for the first time: “I now know why Plato places courage on the lowest rung of the virtues. Never again shall I be able to admire a man who is only brave.”