Loud and Clear

by Iftach Spector

  Since I was planning to become a pilot, this was interesting.

  Armies and navies, said Douhet, were nothing but a waste of resources. All they could do was crawl around on the surface nose to nose and grind each other down endlessly.

  “But nowadays”—the book was from 1927—“we have the capacity to build large bombers.” Immediately after the outbreak of war, these bombers should pass over the front lines and attack deep in the enemy’s rear what he called “targets of value”: cities, population centers, intersections of transportation and railway junctions, water and electricity installations, plants and factories—in short, the entire infrastructure, public and private. These all were civilian targets, manned by noncombatants. For these aerial attacks the “most efficient” means shall be used, prescribed Douhet, and he numbered them: explosive and combustible bombs, poison gas, and every other “effective weapon” for causing damage and death. He even went into calculations of damage and death per pound of weaponry put on the target.

  The enemy state would lose its will to fight in direct proportion to the aggressiveness and murderousness of the attacks, maintained Douhet, and surrender. This argument had a moralistic dimension, too: the destruction of a vigorous but short war could be less than the damage of a lengthy struggle.

  I concluded my lecture with a flourish. I wrote on the blackboard in large letters QED, the Latin acronym of “proven.” This was the way Mr. Kagan, our mathematics teacher in high school, used to complete a proof in geometry. Smiling victoriously, I scanned the faces of the other air cadets. From the corner of my eye I could see Massad scribbling in his notebook, and I even caught a glimpse of the grade he gave my lecture: AB—that is, okay, not too bright, but at least he didn’t talk too long.

  Massad raised his head. “Any questions for the lecturer?”

  ZBB’s hand shot up. “Yes. Did Douhet consider the possibility that the two rivals may have air forces?”

  “Sure.” I knew the answer from the book, and proudly I cited it to him: “The bombers would get through.”

  As usual, ZBB was smarter than I. “Get through they will, and every side will bomb the other. The question is, what’s the end of such a process?”

  And Umsh remarked from the back row, “What is going to be left of these two rival countries when it’s over?”

  I was about to try an answer, but my fifteen minutes were up. Major Massad looked at his watch and stopped the discussion, and Goldie rose to the podium to present his analysis of Air Power in War by British air marshal Tedder. Unlike me, Goldie preferred to save time and get right away to his conclusions. And Tedder’s conclusions, to the astonishment of us all, referred directly to the question that was left open from my lecture: how Douhet’s war would end.

  Tedder knew something about this subject, since he was one of the top commanders in the Allied air war against Germany in World War II. That air war went pretty much along Douhet’s lines and included intensive bombings of cities and industries.

  First, the air marshal was not blinded by the euphoria of victory. His conclusion was that strategic bombing hadn’t brought victory. Then the end of the book put the whole idea in doubt: “What shall we gain,” asked Tedder in the last sentence, “if while winning the war we shall lose our souls?”

  Goldie raised his eyes from the book and let the question sink in.

  Somebody remarked, as if in reflection, “Douhet was after military victory, but Tedder was looking at the costs, too.”

  “My conclusion is,” said Goldie, “that anti-Semitic elements aside, Giulio Douhet was Hitler’s twin brother. They both saw no problem in hitting civilian populations to achieve a goal. Tedder, on the other hand, thought differently.”

  “Perhaps the whole difference between Douhet and Tedder is,” someone broke in, “that Douhet invented his theory before seeing Hitler in action, and Tedder saw it.”

  “Shshsh,” said Major Massad. “Sit down, Goldstein. Very well done.”

  “AT THE END OF THE NINETEENTH century,” Massad summed up, “a new concept was born in Europe: that there should be rules for war, too. In this way,” he explained, “the Geneva Convention was born. According to the convention it is illegal to attack anybody who is not a part of the warring forces. It is the obligation of every soldier to defend civilians if they are caught inside a battle zone. It is forbidden to injure enemy soldiers who had surrendered or were captured as prisoners of war. It is forbidden to use any weapons of an undiscriminating nature, such as chemical weapons.” He distributed among us mimeographed abstracts.

  “Fortunately for us,” Massad continued, “Hitler and his gang lost the war, and Hitler’s version of Giulio Douhet—aerial bandits such as Hermann Goering—were put on trial as war criminals. The Allies won, and after the war they reinforced the Geneva Convention. All the states who signed this covenant agreed to honor its rules. Whoever breaks those rules,” Massad warned us, “becomes a war criminal.”

  “Was Douhet a war criminal?” I asked, surprised.

  “In fact, probably not. Potentially—certainly he was.”

  We all sat silent, thinking about future missions. And again it was ZBB who put the hard question: “Sir, how about the Allied bombings of German cities in this context? And what about the Hiroshima A-bomb? Are the people involved in these actions—the same people who tried the Nazi criminals—are they not criminals of war themselves?”

  “I admit,” answered Massad truthfully, “that I cannot answer this question with any logical and moral certainty.”

  We all moved in our chairs. “If so, then is it just opportunistic? Does the winner make the rules?” A tone of resentment was heard in the question.

  “Perhaps. It may sound cynical,” said Massad, “but let us return to the subject of this lecture. The Geneva Convention is finally in force, and nations try to behave in a more lawful way. I remind you”—he rose to his feet—“that the Geneva Convention binds us all. Israel is signatory to it, and accordingly this is the law of the land.”

  “Indeed? So if someone shoots at—uh—”

  “Remember what happened in Kafr-Kassem,” Massad said harshly, and got to his feet. “Remember the black flag!” This unforgettable lesson was over.

  MANY YEARS LATER, IN 2004, I was surprised to run into Giulio Douhet again, in the newspapers. The new Israeli Air Force commander, Gen. Eliezer Shkedy, gave a magazine interview. After giving some insights into his thoughts and feelings—he was the son of a Holocaust survivor—the new commander was asked who his role models were, and to my surprise they were Giulio Douhet and Billy Mitchell.

  At first this selection seemed reasonable: both these men were aviation pioneers and among the first to champion the airplane as a weapon of war. But Douhet is known for his radical theory that advocates the attainment of military victory through the massacre of civil populations and the destruction of enemy infrastructure. Mitchell, who was a hero in World War I, had similar opinions. The strategy they proposed was tried several times and never justified itself. Even the dropping of the atomic bombs on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the essence of Douhet’s concept—doesn’t prove the theory: the bombing shortened the war, reduced American casualties, revenged Pearl Harbor, and frightened the Soviets, but its part in the actual victory was negligible. But even disregarding their inefficiency, the strategies of Douhet and Mitchell are reprehensible and contradict the laws of the State of Israel. I couldn’t understand how an Israeli Air Force commander with such a family history hadn’t noticed this.

  I was disappointed he didn’t look into the history of his own air force. There were some good role models there. One of them is Yak, the late Col. Yaacov Milner-Nevo, the planner of operation Focus. Yak, the father of Israeli aerial combat, devised a method of fighting in jet fighters, wrote it down, tested it in the air, and taught it to the air force. His theory and practice were the bases for our complete control of the air for decades and for the shooting down of hundreds of enemy aircra
ft in a heretofore unknown and unbelievable kill ratio. But his excellence in aerial combat didn’t prevent Yak from attaining another outstanding achievement. As the chief of operations he analyzed the problem of achieving air superiority in a methodical, profound way, and when the crunch came for Israel in June 1967, the air force had a sharp and efficient answer: Operation Focus. This three-hour operation was the ultimate example of airpower at top efficiency. It achieved decisive results, and Yak Nevo even took part in the operation as pilot and leader.

  Yak, a special and original person, never pursued honors, and when he left the military he was forgotten. His unique personality and outstanding achievements passed into oblivion. The Israeli Air Force had produced a first-rate military genius and could take pride in that.

  THE SIX-DAY WAR was over.

  Suddenly, no more scrambling. In the mornings we woke up by ourselves—no reveille. We looked up from our maps, looked left and right, and behold: our families were back. Children in colorful clothes ran around in the squadron briefing rooms and hopped about on the balconies. In military housing, women cleaned their homes and filled their refrigerators with new products from the grocery store.

  Everyone was standing in line to use the phones, and the military telephone system crumbled under all the personal stories—who had done what in the war, and how he had done it. Then the voices were lowered for stock-taking—who was still alive and who wasn’t. In every gathering, people looked around to see who was there and who was gone. People were afraid that someone they expected would not show up, and then they’d be told about his death. And sometimes the opposite happened and the “dead” showed up, causing embarrassed laughter.

  In spite of the pain—everyone in the country had lost either a friend, a relative, or a loved one—at that time, we experienced great joy and relief. From a country surrounded, whose neighbors had threatened it daily with extinction, we suddenly felt a great release. The enemy had melted before us like ice in the rays of the sun. Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, resigned his office, and after changing his mind and taking office again, he executed his vice president, General Amer. Syria’s president Sallakh Jedid lost his job, and his days were numbered. Hussein, the king of Jordan, admitted in public that it had been a mistake to attack Israel.

  Vast spaces were opened to us. In the beginning we called them the Conquered Areas, and then the name was changed to Liberated Areas. In the North, our planes danced in the air over the peaks of Mount Hermon and did aerobatics over the Golan Heights. And in the South lay the widest expanses. We made long navigation flights circling the whole Sinai Peninsula. We rejoiced in front of the black mountains of Santa Katarina and delighted over the long, colorful coral reefs that crowned Sinai’s long beaches of white sand dozing in emerald waters. And in the vast spaces of the Sinai I found something else.

  On the fourth day of the war, I was attacking a retreating Egyptian convoy on a desert road, between the desert forts of Nakhl and Mittleh. During this flight I was on strict firing discipline. My wingman, Poraz, and I fired our guns meticulously, sending short bursts into tanks, trucks, and mobile cannons, setting them on fire and sending defeated soldiers scattering into the hot and dry hills. Poraz was already out of ammunition, and I was pulling my last bullets off their racks when the formation behind me called me on the radio.

  “Armchair”—this was my call sign that day—“where exactly are you now?”

  I had to vector him in so he could continue my work. I unfolded the map and began reading it, and finally I found a name over a long line that crossed the Sinai horizontally from the west to the east: “Darb el Hajj” was written above it. When I said these Arab words on the radio, I instantly realized that I knew these words from somewhere in my childhood. Yes, they had been written in longhand, with blue ink, on an old, lined page. But where?

  On the long flight back I remembered. I saw this name Darb el Hajj, the road of the celebrators, in my mother’s father’s notebook. Nathaniel Tatar used this name when he told how he drove his cart on this way some fifty years before.

  This was the second time I came down from the sky and walked in his faded footprints in the sand.

  THE AIR FORCE CELEBRATED wildly. We were proud of the wings on our chests. It was we who had broken the stranglehold and removed the threat from our nation. We went nuts with festivals of victory, and indulged in massive singing and dancing.

  But Ran Pecker’s Bats squadron outshone us all; it was the jewel in the crown of the air force. Its battle performance was above and beyond that of all of its sister squadrons. The entire air force, and gradually all the IDF and the whole country, reverberated with the war stories of this wonderful Mirage squadron and leafed through the photographs of the Pyramids her pilots took passing by. Luck, as usually is the case, also played into the hands of this squadron.

  “The Bats is the only squadron that didn’t lose a single aircraft or pilot,” said the air force’s commander, Maj. Gen. Moti Hod, when he visited us at the Fighting First. And we, with our three fallen pilots, bowed our heads and felt almost reprimanded. In the gallery of the gods, one step below Moshe Dayan and among very few others, Ran Pecker reigned supreme with his outstanding command. Perhaps only we BBNs, the graduates of his leadership course, were not surprised. We knew in advance.

  And then a small, black worm got inside the golden apple, and its poison did a lot of damage for many years.

  For me, it all began when A.—one of my friends and a pilot in the Bats—tugged at my sleeve. We, all the pilots and senior officers of the IAF, were squeezed into the entrance of the Hatzor cinema, waiting for the doors to open and let us in to attend the general debriefing of the war that was about to be held inside. This was a few days after the end of the war, and most of us hadn’t seen each other since the fifth of June or even before. And so, until the locked doors opened, we were exulting and slapping each other on the back.

  A. had something he wanted to tell me, but quietly. His face was grim. We went off to the side and began to talk. Suddenly we were not alone. More pilots of his squadron came and joined us, among them another A. And what the two A’s told me, whispering and looking around like conspirators, was not a story of heroism but of murder. The murder of a prisoner. And they blamed their commander, Ran Pecker, for it.

  I couldn’t believe my ears. “A., what are you telling me? Did you see this with your own eyes?”

  “Not exactly,” admitted my friend. “But it did happen. Immediately after the war Ran took us all for a short trip into the conquered areas, to see everything. We stopped somewhere near Jericho. A unit of paratroopers appeared. They had some prisoners of war. According to them, one of their captives had taken part in the murder of a downed Israeli pilot, Ben Aaron. Ran wanted to interrogate this prisoner.”

  The pilots of the Bats crowded around us. They also were there.

  “So what did you do?”

  “Nothing. Ran took the prisoner and left. Evening came. Ran returned, alone.”

  “And on this evidence you say the prisoner was murdered? By Ran? You’re nuts!”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Ran himself told us. He boasted about it.”

  I was shocked. Ran was my hero.

  “Maybe the prisoner attacked him?” I was trying to find an excuse for him. “Perhaps Ran had to defend himself?”

  “The prisoner was handcuffed.”

  WE ENTERED THE CINEMA. The general debriefing of the war began, and lasted for the whole morning. Actually, this was not a real debriefing. It was more like a show, a happy chain of success stories and deeds of valor. It started with Gen. Moti Hod, who told us about some of the tense moments at central control. He had sat in his chair, in complete silence, as the leaders of the State of Israel stood behind him, waiting for the first radio calls from deep in Egypt, to know if Operation Focus had worked or if the population of Israel must be sent into the bomb shelters.

  Then each of the squadron commanders followed in turn
. They all projected chosen gunsight films with bombings and aerial kills. Each touted his own squadron’s achievements. In fact, this was an audition of different actors competing for stardom, everyone rehearsing the same Shakespearean speech. It was good fun, but I can’t remember even a single word from that whole show. Until the end of the debriefing came.

  When the presentations were over, and before we were all to leave and have a festive lunch, the air force commander stood up and turned to the audience. He asked if anybody had any remarks or additions. I looked toward A., who sat with his friends a few rows in front of me. He noticed my signal and shook his head.

  “This is it,” I whispered to him, bending forward. “It’s now or never. Stand up!”

  “I’m no fool.”

  “Then if not you, let somebody else from the Bats speak up.”

  “Are you crazy? Shut up and sit down, fool!”

  The second A. looked away from me, as if he hadn’t heard. People around began looking at us, raising eyebrows. My heart pounded. I raised my hand.

  When I received permission to speak, I asked, stammering, if the high command had heard the scuttlebutt. No, I had no details, but I had heard that somebody had done something—I don’t know for sure… .

  I could see that everyone knew what I was talking about. I finished suggesting that the matter be investigated, whatever it was. “Just to know what happened, if anything had really happened.” I stopped timidly and sat down.

  The hall was dead silent. All eyes left me and looked to the podium. At last General Hod answered. He was also stammering as he began. Moti advised us all not to be taken in by rumors and all kinds of sick stories that some people might be spreading around. The debriefing was over. We all went to lunch.