This was the first time I had heard a real, practical discussion of law and morality in war, and I didn’t know which of the two positions to adopt. Was I in favor of killing the fallen pilot? Or against it? At the end I chose to agree with Giora Furman’s response—he had a dry sense of humor, which ended the argument.
“Since we all will have to engage MiGs in the future, I, for one, prefer to fight this guy again. We all saw his performance.”
“True, especially since now he received one good lesson,” added Goldie.
And ZBB, who was in a funk for having put his plane into a spin, consoled himself by saying, “Let him share his experience with his friends.”
So the Scorpions registered her first downed MiG.
SOME NONOPERATIONAL FLIGHTS become the most serious of them all.
Saturday afternoon. The end of a spring day, and everyone was taking naps. That was life before 1967. But in the Super Mysteres’ hangar, hammers were banging away. The Scorpions had demanded that one more aircraft be serviceable for the next day’s training. Yawning, the technicians worked on. Finally, when the last screw was fastened and the sun was low in the west, the phone rang. I was called to test-fly aircraft number 35.
I took off into an empty sky. The Mediterranean spread endlessly before me, the red path in its center led to an orange sun. I turned north. The coast of Israel passed along my right-hand side. Gradually the land began to blur as a white layer of early summer clouds blew in. The sea on my left shone yellow and red. Here we were, just the three of us—the sun, me, and number 35—and we had the sky to ourselves.
What joy!
I got to forty thousand feet over the sea, north of Israel. Now I saw no sea anymore beneath me—just a white desert of clouds. This was the time to begin testing the engine, and I had to stop fantasizing about wonderful lands beyond the horizon.
First, check the afterburner. I moved the throttle forward, over the detent. A pause, then a choking sound—a sharp deceleration. I heard two loud bangs under me. I recoiled and throttled back. Then a whining sound, which slowly faded. Then the engine died.
At this altitude, forty thousand feet, it is impossible to restart a jet engine. One has to be at lower altitude, where there is more oxygen.
So I headed east, toward the coast. My Super Mystere glided slowly, the blanket of clouds streaming under me like a layer of foam seeded with large and small bubbles. Cold air caressed my shoulders as cockpit pressurization failed and the outside cold air penetrated. Still, I was not afraid. Soon I would initiate a restart, but I began to feel uneasy when my repeated emergency calls on the radio brought no answer.
Okay, down to restart altitude, twenty-five thousand feet. By now, the clouds were closer, a landscape of individual lumps and crevices, with no ground visible. The Earth hid from me beneath the clouds. Now I was in a hurry to restart. First one attempt, then a second one, but no sound whatsoever from the engine and no response from the instruments. Looking back, I noticed a long white trail behind me. That meant that fuel was spilling into the exhaust behind my plane. This was really bad, and restarting attempts had to stop. I had to find a place to land, and fast.
There was only one airport in the vicinity, Ramat-David, Israel’s northern fighter base. I searched my documentation and found the frequency of Ramat-David’s control tower. Thank God, somebody over there was alert. The controller updated me on the situation there. “Low clouds, low visibility in the whole valley,” he said. “Scattered showers in the whole area around Ramat-David.” Winter had returned to the north of Israel.
It all began to look pretty grim. My dead Super Mystere and I were already shaving the pink off the cloud tops. Among the peaks there were gray depressions, and I peered into them. The color inside them was the color of evening, gray-blue. One after the other, I could see no hole through which I could catch a glimpse of the ground. I flew the vectors I received, but all beneath me was obscured. I had no way of telling where I was.
Where the hell was Ramat-David down there?
Now I thought, maybe I should enter the clouds and descend through them? Not a good idea. I remembered that Ramat-David is in the Izreel Valley, but this valley was surrounded by hills. And there was also one pretty high ridge—Mount Carmel. It might be touching the clouds. If I happened to come out right there…
What now?
I tried again to restart the engine; perhaps this time it would work. Once and twice, and now I had to force my fingers to be steady. But no luck: the engine wouldn’t start. And all the time my Super Mystere continued dropping like an elevator. No doubt, in such conditions the right thing to do was just to bail out.
I began moving in my seat, pulling here and there, tightening seat belts.
And then, suddenly, magically, I saw a hole ahead of me among the clouds, perhaps the one and only hole in the entire cloud cover. I glided there, passed over it, and lowering a wing, stared down it as into a deep well. Way down—between the vertical gray-blue walls—I could see the slope of a mountain, black and wooded. And this sighting would have been of no use had there not been glaring, from the side of the picture, lit by a red ray of the setting sun magically shining through the fog, the one and only building that cannot be mistaken, because there is none like it: the monastery on the Mukhraka, on top of the Horn of Carmel.
Now I knew where I was in relation to Ramat-David. The airport and indeed the entire valley were very near, at eleven o’clock, just left of my aircraft’s nose. The hole was passed and gone. Should I descend into the clouds?
My body acted for me.
It was my body that left the seat straps alone and decided on its own to land, and my Super Mystere followed, veering a little to the right, to open distance from the base, and then lowered its nose into the clouds, accelerated, and turned left in the direction of the valley. And when this had been done, here I was, driving the aircraft in the clouds, flying on instruments.
In the dense fog I made one important decision: if at two thousand feet on the altimeter we were not out of the clouds, I will pull up and bail out. Again I tightened my belts, and mumbled words of farewell to my Super Mystere. I hoped that if I ejected it wouldn’t hit a populated area.
At 2,500 feet the clouds around me thinned, and instantly the air cleared. Close on my left side, I saw beyond a screen of drizzle, a runway, glinting like polished silver. Ho, Ramat-David.
And immediately a tight turn toward it. My speed slowed in the turn, and I lowered the landing gear. Clunk, and another clunk, in maddening slowness, the three wheels lowered one after another and locked. Three green lamps on, and the runway was already very near. Eucalyptus trees passed on both sides.
And so, still in the turn, my number 35 hit the runway heavily, wheel after wheel after wheel, and rolled to a stop.
When I opened my canopy and the cold drizzle caressed my face, a small Citroën Deux Chevaux car beeped at me from below. A heavyset man in pilot’s jacket came out and waved both hands at me.
I slid down the aircraft’s side, and he caught me like a bear and stood me firmly on the tarmac. Major Kvody, the base maintenance officer, a warm-hearted guy, enveloped me in a hug.
“You are not leaving before you have a drink at my place!” I didn’t know yet that he wasn’t talking about a cup of tea. “Then we’ll find a car and send you home to Hatzor.”
“Where is everybody?” I wondered, searching around for firefighters, ambulances, tow trucks, people, anything.
“Where is everybody? Sleeping,” the nice man said, dismissing me. “Come on. Your aircraft will be taken care of tomorrow. All in good time.” And suddenly he added a sentence from Ecclesiastes, totally unexpected from the muzhik he was: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”
Chapter
5
Doubletalk
AS ALL FIVE OF US WERE good enough, we soon found our niches in the Scorpions. This squadron had something unique and special. ZBB defined it as �
��another world,” and we, the five trainees, had fallen in love with the Scorpions, and together we wrote a song of praise that we sang loudly at the next air force’s Independence Day party: “Every Country Has a National Squadron, but the Scorpions Is International!”
Naturally, that song became the anthem of the squadron.
THE MOST PROMINENT DIFFERENCE was that in the Scorpions they flew speaking Hebrew.
Before, in flight school, the language was a pidgin aviation English built on terms and figures of speech left by foreign volunteers. Those volunteers came to Israel in 1948 to help in our fight for independence. They came from all over the world, mostly America, England, Australia, and South Africa, and at that time no one could fly speaking Hebrew. After the war most of them returned to their homelands, but some remained for a few years. And some of them—all World War II veterans and very respected—were still training cadets at Tel Nof. So it turned out that the actual language in use was aviation English. As a consequence, we were split in two; at ground school we were taught in Hebrew, but once we climbed into the cockpit, all the terms changed into foreign ones. This mixture of languages and terms caused many misunderstandings and a lot of confusion.
In one of the flights on the Harvard, my compass stopped functioning. My flight instructor in the backseat, Tsutsik, wanted to know what was going on. He roared at me, “Hey, is your compass US?”
“You—what?… I didn’t understand what you said, sir,” I mumbled.
The name “Tsutsik” was an affectionate nickname, one with an ironic twist. Not small (tsutsik) at all, Lt. Moshe Rosenberg weighed at least a hundred kilos. He was a big man with two mighty, black, hairy arms. He had heavy eyebrows over a big nose, enormous shoulders, and his voice was very deep and smoky. At that time I still didn’t realize that this frightening giant was really a big pussycat. I simply feared him.
“Look at your compass,” he said hoarsely, “and see whether it is US or not!”
I looked carefully on the compass and didn’t see anything. I felt like a complete idiot.
“Well?” the booming voice in my earphones made it clear that his patience was nearing an end.
Then I had an idea.
I loosened my seat straps and bent down forward, twisted around the stick, and stretched my neck forward ahead between my knees. Turning, I squeezed my head into the dark niche under the instrument panel and looked, squinting, at the underside of the instrument panel. The backs of the instruments were all there, looking like small black barrels. Fumbling with my hand, I found the compass box. An electric cable emerged from it like a pig’s tail. Around it stuck several inscriptions in English. I read them.
“Well, what’s up with you, Spector?” brayed my earphones. “Is your compass US or is it not US? Huh?”
Sweating, I corkscrewed myself back to daylight, yelling, “No, sir, it says ‘Made in England’!”
The aircraft and the whole world froze in the air. A hoarse whisper bellowed, “Ohhhhhh, what an asshole!”
We landed. Before I brought the Harvard to a full stop, the flight instructor jumped out of it and went contemptuously to the file room. I knew what he was going to write. I shut the engine and dragged, beaten and dejected, to ask my comrades. They shrugged. Finally Yakir appeared. As usual, he knew everything. “US? What’s the problem? The meaning of ‘US’ is ‘Unserviceable,’ out of order.” And then he rubbed salt in the wound, asking, “How could you not know that, Spike? Everybody knows that.”
SOON WE CADETS WERE SHOWING OFF with this jargon. It smelled like hundred-octane gas to us, and we practiced pronouncing its words with harsh facial expressions, spitting them from the side of the mouth, like Humphrey Bogart. You croaked “contact,” and for a moment you were Jack Robinson scrambling in his Spitfire against the “Boshes” together with Tom, Dick, and Harry Barak.
After we got our wings our pidgin language was enriched with the perfume of Chanel No. 5. Disjoncteur, for example, were a bunch of tiny plugs or circuit breakers scattered in the depths of the cockpit. Base de niveau was the name of a certain yellow lamp. And the air conditioning system of the cockpit was operated by a handle with two positions, the names certainly invented by the paperback author Georges Simenon: Miserable Chauffage knelt, chafing the floor, and over her, from behind, the impassionate Monsieur De Zambouage bent, lifting her skirt.
“Monsieur, ques-ce que tu fait?”
“Rien, mademoiselle, just a quick ‘zambouaging.’”
In the Scorpions they didn’t admire this colorfulness. They demanded we fly speaking only our national language.
THERE WAS ANOTHER EXCEPTIONAL characteristic of the Scorpions: everybody worked hard, trying to establish order and discipline. At noon after the day’s flights had ended, Capt. Giora Furman would assume command, and ground-school studies begin. We learned and relearned and then were tested on the minutest details of the body and engine of the Super Mystere, its gunsight and electronic range finder. We were loaded with tactics, navigation, meteorology, and more. Industriousness and discipline reigned in the Scorpions.
The best personal example was set by Lt. Rami Harpaz. He was a kibbutz kid who demanded of himself that he knew everything. Another self-taught genius was Ephraim Ashkenazi. He had taught himself engineering and sciences. For some time I was received as Ephraim’s guest in his room, with the condition that I turn my face to the wall when Lilly, an energetic, slender girl soldier, came to visit.
At night I woke and saw him through a split in my blanket. He sat, sunk in books and notebooks, filling them with drawings and graphs. At that time computers didn’t exist, but Ephraim’s natural talent for mathematics was such that in a few years he revealed a serious error in the calculations of the French engineers in the gunsight of the Mirage fighter aircraft. Ephraim fixed their mistake using only paper and a pencil.
This accomplishment was historical: until then the Mirages—which had replaced the Super Mysteres as interceptors—couldn’t hit anything. Their cannon rounds always missed the MiGs, and the MiGs always got away. Only after Ephraim’s solution did the Mirages become lethal.
So if Yak taught us how to get into firing position, it was Ephraim who enabled us to hit our targets. One cannot overemphasize the contributions of these two exceptional men to the fact that the IAF shot down hundreds of MiGs in the next twenty years.
Surrounded by supportive people, I opened up, stopped being so closed, so defensive. Slowly a new rule of life ripened in me. Initially I just felt it building up, but in time it phased itself into two words that stayed with me: “always positive.”
There was much to be admired in the Scorpions. In 1960 this squadron was a very serious outfit. It was the most professional of all the squadrons, working hard on the science of battle.
SUCH AN APPROACH WAS THE EXCEPTION in the early days of the Israeli Air Force. At that time, flying fighter planes was considered by many as an adventure rather than a profession. Flight instructors and formation leaders took their students down for mock attacks on trains, and buzzed vehicles on the roads. So when they were on their own, the students did the same thing. On one occasion I was taking a senior pilot back home. On the way he asked for the controls of the Stearman biplane, and taught me the way a father teaches his son how to fly under power lines, as “any pilot worthy of the name” should do. On the way back to Hatzor, I flew low in the Izreel Valley and brought home strips of corn straw wound around my propeller and wheels, smelling of the perfume of the fields.
Only in cases where things got too crazy—for example, when somebody once dove his Stearman on a helicopter carrying the air force commander—was some punishment meted out, but nothing too harsh. A pilot who broke all the rules with an outrageous air show right over the base was fined ten Israeli pounds, but at the same time was patted on the shoulder by his commander as a sign of manly appreciation. A few days later, in a second show, this pilot hit the ground.
We were working in an environment characterized by many so-c
alled accidents-in-training. When somebody spoke about rules and regulations, he would get a flippant response: “Well, are we pilots or college professors?” The more sophisticated among us had more elaborate rationalizations, such as, “The security of the state demands it!” Or, in other words, to prepare ourselves properly to defend our country, we pilots had to train in outrageous ways.
We bought into this bullshit readily. Knowing the law, we violated it all the time. We loved to fly, and no one protested against the confusion of high-performance flying with hooliganism in the air.
THIS IS HOW THE NIGHT ACROBATICS scandal happened. While in the flying school, in the ground class before night flying, we were introduced to a pilot’s worst enemy: the loss of spatial orientation, the lethal “vertigo.”
Vertigo lurks in the darkness to drive pilots into the ground. Without proper references outside the cockpit—at night, or in bad weather—it is a constant danger for pilots of any experience. Aerobatics or extreme maneuvers make a perfect recipe for such confusion.
The flight instructor concluded his lecture. He bent forward over his table and said with a hiss, “No radical maneuvers at night! You can get disoriented and crash. Get it?”
We, all the flight cadets, nodded.
“Write this down: ‘No night acrobatics under any circumstances!’”
We had already been flying for six months, and felt this order was pretty insulting, but he spoke so forcefully that we felt obliged to do as he said. He scrutinized us all.
“Did everybody write down what I said?”
Again we nodded. He seemed satisfied.
“Dismissed.”
We stood up. The instructor grinned a little, and suddenly said in low voice, “Only pussies don’t do night acrobatics.”
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