New Heavens

by Boris Senior

  THE BATTLE FOR JERUSALEM

  While I was away in South Africa, heavy fighting began in Jerusalem. When it seemed the Old City would be unable to hold out against the attacks by the Arab Legion, the Harel brigade of the Palmach was transferred to Jerusalem. They penetrated the Jewish Quarter of the Old City through the Zion Gate in an attempt to save the city. But the situation was hopeless, and shortly afterward the people of the Old City were evacuated. While the fighting raged, a few hundred trucks managed to get through to Jerusalem from the coast. After the British left Palestine, the Arab Legion entered the fighting in earnest in the Old City and moved on to cut the road between Jerusalem and the coast at Bab el Wad (a steep pass with the mountains on both sides, the peaks held by the Arabs).

  All road transport to Jerusalem must pass this defile. When the first convoy of the Haganah approached, the vehicles were fired on and stone barriers were laid on the road to block the passage of the convoys. The Haganah’s armored cars led the attempts to go through the pass. The “armored cars” of the Haganah were homemade in various kibbutzim. Their armor was made of wooden boards sandwiched between steel sheets and afforded only minimal protection.

  Located high above the road, the Arabs poured withering fire into the convoy causing heavy losses. Beit Mahsir was the largest Arab village on the heights and was the source of most of the continual shelling of the vehicles trying to maintain the precarious supply link between the coastal belt and Jerusalem.

  The heavy fighting between Arab forces and the Harel Brigade concentrated mainly along Bab el Wad. The brigade made several attempts to capture the village but was repulsed time after time with heavy casualties. On 8 May, the commander of the brigade, Yitzhak Rabin, was ordered to capture Beit Mahsir at all cost. Mindful of the heavy casualties he had already suffered, he called for air support.

  I had arrived just in time to offer help. At the time I landed in the Bonanza from South Africa, the desperate shortage of aircraft and pilots made it impossible for me to check out anyone else on the Bonanza, so I had to fly urgent missions to Bab el Wad day and night. My precious Bonanza, still with the African dust on its undercarriage, entered the fray the day I arrived in Israel. We put up a small tent near the runway in Sde Dov where, utterly exhausted, I rested between the night flights.

  I logged sixty night hours in the blackout with minimal instruments in ten days. My job in the Bonanza, apart from the occasional bomb thrown out through the luggage door, was to carry an army signaler with a large World War II walkie-talkie between his legs with the antenna protruding through the hole in the perspex canopy. His duty was to communicate with the ground troops.

  On one occasion when I was flying low over the Arab positions in Beit Mahsir, a bullet passed through the belly of the Bonanza and smashed the plastic tail trim wheel between my knees. I had to land without a trim wheel.

  A former Russian Air Force technician fitted my Bonanza with electrically operated bomb racks under the wings. This made for better accuracy for dive-bombing. I made sure to seek him out and congratulate him on his achievement. However, my trust in his technical abilities did not extend to allowing him to install a synchronized machine gun that could fire through the propeller, which he begged me to let him do.

  After bombing the village a number of times with the Bonanza using 50-kilo Double Pushkins, I saw that, apart from keeping the enemy’s heads down during the bombing and having some effect on their morale, we were not accomplishing much. I suggested to headquarters that something be done to drop heavier bombs, especially just before our ground forces attacked. The losses our Palmach troops had suffered were unsustainable, and the impossibility of keeping Jerusalem supplied while the Arab forces in Beit Mahsir held on to their positions overlooking the pass made it imperative to somehow give better support from the air.

  One of our two Norduyn Norsemen was pressed into service. By then, we had some experience in making bombs and we filled a 200-liter drum with dynamite with a fuse on the lid. The fuse had to be lit before throwing it out of the aircraft. Our expert in bomb-making was a former RAF engineer, and he planned and supervised the making of our bombs at that time. When I suggested he accompany me on flights to test his bombs, he refused and that should have kindled my suspicion. On 10 May 1948 a large new drum bomb was lifted into a Norseman and a crew of four in addition to the two pilots climbed into the machine. They made several attempts to reach Beit Mahsir but without success because of low cloud cover and returned to base. In the meantime, I managed to keep up my bombing missions in the Bonanza.

  Later that morning while I was in the air on the same mission for the second time, the Norseman again took off with a crew of six. The pilot in command was Yariv Sheinbaum, the flying controller who received me at the steps of the aircraft on my first arrival in Palestine some months before. They climbed to 6,000 feet in the direction of the Jerusalem hills toward Beit Mahsir and reported that they were diving toward the target. I was already struggling with the bad visibility, but I found a hole in the cloud and dived through to drop my bombs on Beit Mahsir. The Norseman failed to return, and after some days we heard that witnesses had seen the Norseman diving through the cloud into a hill with a tremendous explosion.

  There have been various theories about what happened, including an army report, which maintained they were shot down by an RAF Spitfire. My own theory is that when they moved the heavy barrel-bomb to the back of the aircraft ready for pushing out through the rear door, they upset the aircraft’s center of gravity and went into an uncontrollable spin. There were reports that a British Spitfire was seen in the area at the time they crashed, but quite probably, the observers confused my Bonanza, which was new and unknown to anyone at the time, with a Spitfire.

  Our reporting system was bad, and evidently no one told Yariv’s young wife because no one knew for some time about the eyewitness reports confirming the crash. For some days after his disappearance, his wife Aya appeared every lunch time at Café Kassit, where the aircrews gathered asking if anyone knew where Yariv was. Each one of us left hurriedly when we saw her approaching.

  Though of vital importance, strategically Jerusalem was no less important from an emotional standpoint, having been the focus of all Jewish hopes and dreams since the conquest and the destruction of the Temple by the Romans 2,000 years before. It had no airfield, and our forces cleared a short strip some 500 meters long in the Valley of the Cross, so called because tradition has it that a small forest was there and the cross on which Jesus was crucified was cut from it.

  At the end of the strip was a fortress-like monastery built in the Middle Ages. It was a stone building with a high defensive wall surrounding it erected for protection against intruders or invading troops. This made it necessary for me to open to full throttle while keeping my feet on the brakes, and then releasing them immediately before takeoff to get over the wall. It was essential to gather maximum speed on the short takeoff run and to pull the stick back just before reaching the wall almost at stalling speed. After accomplishing that part of the flight, further speed was gained by flying down a conveniently located wadi. Only then could one gain sufficient height to climb over the mountains between Jerusalem and the coast.

  This was hard enough in one of the smaller aircraft, but I tried to land a much larger aircraft, the twin-engine Aerovan capable of carrying nine passengers. With its two Gipsy Major engines, it was underpowered, and taking it into Jerusalem was a risky affair. The only approach to the field meant flying a tight circuit over the western edge of the city and then diving steeply to the landing. This did not always prevent us from being shot at by the Arab forces in East Jerusalem during the landing approach. This large airplane had not been seen before in Jerusalem, and when I first landed, crowds of Jerusalemites came to the strip to look at it.

  Jerusalem was now under siege, cut off from the rest of the country with only an occasional convoy managing to get through. To this day wrecked armored cars can be seen as memorials on the
sides of the main road near Bab el Wad.

  The shortage of food and other commodities in Jerusalem was serious and could be seen in the pale wan faces of the crowd at the airstrip. Often, people appeared at Sde Dov airfield before I took off for Jerusalem with homemade cakes and biscuits, begging me to take them to their loved ones in the besieged city.

  On my second flight to Jerusalem in the Aerovan to evacuate women and children, there were two incidents, one nearly fatal. Just before taking off from Jerusalem, and purely by chance, I discovered two air mechanics from a base near Tel Aviv stowed away in the space behind the rear seat. Had I not discovered them, we would certainly not have made it, for we were loaded to the hilt without them and with their additional weight would have crashed into the monastery. They were not prosecuted or court-martialed as laws and regulations were not enforced efficiently in Israel at that time.

  After taking off and passing over the Trappist monastery at Latrun, which lies between the mountains of Jerusalem and the coast, my port engine failed. I feathered the propeller and, though losing height, reached the field at Sde Dov on one engine. The same Aerovan came to a tragic end three months later while on a flight back from the Dead Sea with men and women who were being evacuated. It made a forced landing on the beach twenty-five kilometers south of Tel Aviv and was surrounded by Arab guerrillas, who butchered the occupants. Three survived. One of them played dead and two went for help. The fourth occupant was killed.

  MEDAL FOR A SABRA

  Sdom was a strategically important location for us at the southern tip of the Dead Sea. It was cut off from the rest of Israel soon after hostilities began. As we couldn’t fly there during daylight because of the danger of being shot down by enemy fighters, we had to fly there only by night. In the blackout that was no easy task, for the Dead Sea is more than a thousand feet below sea level. There were no navigational aids so we had to use the minimal instruments of the aircraft as well as fly by the seat of our pants. It meant reaching Beersheba, which was identified by the few roads converging on the darkened city. From there we had to turn left to the southeast and search for the glimmer of the Dead Sea.

  We kept a close watch on the altimeter, for it was an uneasy experience to be letting down in the darkness without navigational aids. The mountains in nearby Hebron are more than a thousand feet above sea level, and with Sdom a thousand feet below, it was eerie to continue descending after the altimeter needle hit the bottom of the scale. With no lights we felt as if we were descending into the bowels of the earth.

  At last we would see the runway flares being lighted. With no radio contact, the only way for them to know when we were arriving was by the sound of our engines, after which they hurriedly kindled the paraffin landing flares. Besides the disorientation caused by descending well below sea level without being able to know the height from the altimeter, the mountains to the east and west of Sdom presented a further hazard in the darkness. The only safe approach and departure from the strip was from over the water or down the Arava Valley.

  Many of the missions were to evacuate seriously wounded kibbutzniks and servicemen, and these flights in particular gave me satisfaction. I remember well one such flight. One afternoon in May 1948, I was in my office in the long wooden hut at Sde Dov awaiting nightfall. The pilots not on duty were making their way to lodgings in Tel Aviv, and paraffin gooseneck flares were being laid out for night flights. The telephone rang; GHQ was on the line. A young kibbutznik in the children’s settlement of Ben Shemen was seriously wounded during an attack by Arab irregular forces. The only way to save his life would be to get him quickly to a hospital. Ben Shemen is a kibbutz that housed mainly children who had escaped from the areas under Hitler and was famous for its excellence in education. It was cut off in the early stages of the war by the Arab guerrillas from Ramleh and Lydda.

  Not overjoyed at the prospect of flying in and out of an unlighted, hardly marked strip at dusk under fire, I took off from Sde Dov in the waning light. Ben Shemen is near the Arab town of Hadita and a very tight circuit was called for. This time the Arab forces were waiting with heavy small-arms fire. After I landed, a barely conscious boy was laid in the back of the Bonanza on the floor. During the short flight back to Tel Aviv, I tried to comfort him but he died during the flight. I was alone in the night with the dead boy. I landed at Sde Dov and the body was removed. A harrowing experience.

  Ben Shemen was the scene of a heroic action by one of the young Palmach pilots, Zvi Ziebel, known to all of us as “Chibbie.” On one flight to Ben Shemen, there was heavy firing from nearby Hadita. The firing was so intense that the aircraft was in danger even while on the ground. Chibbie got hold of a tractor, and after loading it with sacks of sand, placed it between the Auster and the direction from which the firing came. When he was ready for takeoff, he taxied the Auster slowly to the upwind end of the strip with a kibbutznik keeping the tractor between himself and the firing and took off without being hit. Chibbie survived for most of the war but was eventually shot down in his defenseless Auster by a flight of four Egyptian Spitfires.

  When a committee was set up toward the end of the war to decide on the award of the first medals to be granted to our troops, I was appointed as the air force representative. In recognition of the bravery of the young Sabra pilots, I recommended that the coveted Medal of Valor be granted posthumously to Chibbie, and he became the only member of the air force to be awarded this highest decoration. In retrospect I believe it was a mistake not to have recommended an award to at least one of the non-Israeli volunteer pilots, the Mahalniks, who did the bulk of the fighting in the air. [MAHAL was an acronym from the Hebrew Mitnadvey huts la’aretz, meaning “volunteers from outside the country.”—ed.]

  After the end of the mandate in May 1948, we gradually moved from a purely defensive role to one of active support in bombing, and our function became critically important. Army headquarters began to call urgently for our help.

  The attacks by Arabs increased daily, and Haganah headquarters sought ways to get intelligence data not only about forthcoming attacks but also about the masses of neighboring Arabs pouring into Palestine from all sides to assist their brethren in the war. The nascent Air Service carried out many flights for reconnaissance and photography. We flew lower than ten or twenty feet above the ground carrying Leica cameras held in our hands while flying the aircraft. We often ran into heavy small-arms fire and were such easy targets it is miraculous no one was brought down.

  The shortage of equipment and trained personnel was so critical that preventable accidents occurred. An example was the case of what happened to one of the South African Mahalniks. One morning early in June in my sleep, I heard a huge explosion from the direction of Sde Dov. I rushed down to the field and saw a column of smoke rising from a taxi track near the runway. One of our Fairchilds was burning near a large hole in the tarmac.

  Evidently, a sleepy corpsman had walked into the spinning propeller carrying a 50-kilo bomb, which exploded. There was nothing left of him apart from burned pieces of flesh scattered around the tarmac. The South African volunteer pilot, Lionel Kaplan (Kappy) was sitting in the cockpit and saw what was going to happen. He tried to get out in time. Kappy was injured by the explosion; the next time I saw him was in a hospital bed with one eye missing and many shrapnel wounds in his face. When he recovered he tried to continue flying with his glass eye and made a few flights before he was permanently grounded.

  In many cases we were unable to fly the missions GHQ called for, desperate to help hard-pressed forces in the isolated settlements. They had no experience in the handling of an air arm and had little idea of what was and was not possible with an airplane. Moreover, I am certain that no air force has ever had to fly the missions we carried out with the inadequate equipment and inexperienced pilots at our disposal.

  There is no doubt that in the War of Independence, especially during the first half of 1948, the aircraft that arrived from South Africa played a crucial role in the surviva
l of Israel. The thirteen aircraft purchased and flown from Johannesburg to Palestine with their volunteer crews more than tripled the strength of the Air Service at that critical time. Later, the stream of airplanes and crews from the United States and Europe provided more suitable and more effective tools necessary to fight and finish Israel’s first and most crucial war.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Independence

  FINAL STEPS

  ON 15 May 1948, the unofficial war became a full-fledged open conflict. The tension reached breaking point as the Yishuv feverishly prepared to face the onslaught of the invading Arab armies. The scale of the simultaneous attack by the invading forces of six nations on five fronts is not generally appreciated. They looked as though they would quickly overwhelm Israel. It should be of some interest to students of military history to determine how it was that Israel not only survived the onslaught, but within a year was victorious. If the populations of the attacking countries are brought into the equation, the figures are astonishing. Ranged against the half a million Jewish residents of the Yishuv were more than 40 million Arabs, supported by Muslim communities throughout the world.

  If the coming generations in Israel have any doubt of the heroism of their forebears, let them learn the details of Israel’s history of 1948 and 1949, of Kfar Etzion, Kfar Darom, Zemach, and other settlements that stood against impossible odds. They will then be encouraged in times of adversity.

  At the beginning of May 1948, the military chiefs of the Arab League met in Damascus to plan the invasion and subsequent division of Palestine into areas to be occupied by their respective countries. The war plans of the Arab countries were comprehensive, a full-scale invasion supported by air and naval forces.