The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War Page 5

  “Your time is over, Jews. The experiment in nationhood that the Zionist entity has managed to sustain for nineteen years is due to expire.”

  Ahmad Said explained, in Hebrew with an accent, how Egyptian heavy bombers would devastate Tel Aviv and Haifa. He advised his Israeli listeners to get away while they still could. To remain was folly. “Save yourselves and your families!”

  At thirteen, you are not too young to grasp the significance of events unfolding around you. Naturally you ask your parents to explain what is going on. How serious is it that every young man from our building has left for the army, or that all the taxis and buses are gone? How much should we believe of what we’re hearing on the radio?

  Many in our neighborhood were Holocaust survivors. Our parents never spoke of this. We children grew up knowing nothing of the Shoah. Our mothers and fathers were protecting us. We were sabras, Israel-born, brave and independent. When our parents answered our questions, their replies were confident and positive. But their voices betrayed them.

  In seventh grade I already had a serious interest in Arab history and culture. I was fluent in Arabic; I read Arab newspapers and listened to Arab radio. It was clear to me that Nasser spoke not only for Egypt but for the entire Arab world. His broadcasts were greeted with as much enthusiasm in Damascus and Baghdad as they were in Cairo and Alexandria.

  The qadis of Egypt’s mosques had been ordered to declare jihad—holy war—against the Jews. Radio Damascus’s number one song was “Cut Their Throats!” Mobs marched in the streets; thousands chanted for Israel’s destruction.

  Nasser preached the concentric community of the Arab world, with Egypt and himself at its epicenter. His voice called 122 million Arabs to unity and summoned them to loose their rage upon our two and a half million Jews.

  How would our government respond to these threats? In Israel then, the prime minister was also the minister of defense. He commanded the army. When would Eshkol give Nasser his answer?

  May 28.

  I remember my mother telling me over breakfast, “Tonight Eshkol will speak. This evening the prime minister will address the nation.”

  In our part of the country, Levi Eshkol was revered. He was from the north, as we were. He had been a farmer and an engineer. And he had steered the state successfully through a number of crises in the economy, immigration, and agriculture.

  Finally tonight Eshkol would speak. Finally Nasser and Ali Ahmad Said would get their answer.

  I couldn’t wait to hear.

  9.

  THE STUTTERING SPEECH

  My first reaction was to laugh. I thought it was a joke. This couldn’t really be happening.

  Lieutenant Giora Romm hears Eshkol’s speech at the home of his squadron commander, Major Ran Ronen, at Tel Nof Air Base, along with the other pilots of Squadron 119.

  I had a friend at Kol Israel, the radio station, who told me later that the prime minister had read through the text of his speech twice in rehearsal and hadn’t flubbed a word.

  What happened apparently, when the program went live, was that Eshkol’s aide Ady Yoffe substituted a revised version of the text at the last minute. Some of the changes were handwritten. The prime minister was taken by surprise. For a few seconds, he forgot he was sitting before an open microphone. He turned to his aide and asked, “What is this word?” We could all hear it.

  Haim Koren, thirteen, is listening at home in Bat Galim with his mother and father:

  He was stuttering. We could hear the prime minister stammer. The air went dead. For a moment it seemed like the whole broadcast was going to be cut off.

  I thought I could hear in the background the engineer, or whoever controls such things, trying to shut down the program in midspeech.

  Lieutenant Avigdor Kahalani is a tank company commander with the 7th Armored Brigade, stationed opposite Gaza in a forward position along the Egyptian frontier:

  Voice is everything when you command. As a company commander in a tank battalion, you have fourteen four-man crews listening to you through their headsets. Many times in combat, when I have been frightened or unsure, I have deliberately paused to be certain that I had my voice under control. You don’t want your men to hear that chicken voice.

  Yael Dayan is with General Arik Sharon’s headquarters on the Egyptian border:

  I had driven with my friend Dov Sion from the front to Beersheba to file a story. Dov is a colonel, General Sharon’s liaison with the General Staff. He and I heard the prime minister’s speech on the car radio, driving back from Beersheba.

  Much has been made of Eshkol’s stumbling over the text. But the problem was the text itself. People were desperate for decisiveness. Instead they heard a call for patience. Wait for the Powers. Give diplomacy a chance.

  I thought of the troops in the trenches listening to this mess. Some wept, I heard. The speech was a turning point. After that, the people took over. The need for decisiveness overrode all other concerns.

  Itzik Barnoach listens from Burgata in the Sharon Plain, where he and his mobilized reserve unit have been training for four weeks:

  I had a transistor and I said, My God, this schmuck is not only talking nonsense, he’s stuttering! We were not afraid, but we were anxious. The whole world is against us, we don’t know what will happen. We hoped this speech would declare war! So this was even worse. It was a disaster. A disaster.

  Dr. Naomi Eilam is the wife of Major Uzi Eilam, commander of Paratroop Battalion 71:

  Next day the editorials clamored for action. Either Eshkol had to go or he must cede the defense portfolio to someone else. After two interminable weeks of crisis, it was clear to all that the nation’s political leadership remained paralyzed by indecision and irresolution.

  BOOK TWO

  EN BRERA

  10.

  NORSEMEN

  The year 1967 was not the first time that Israel’s survival had hung by a thread. Nineteen years earlier, before the nation had even declared its independence, the armies of five Arab nations—Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon—had massed on its borders, preparing to invade. Their intention was to wipe out the state of Israel before it could even be born.

  Coleman “Collie” Goldstein is an American B-17 pilot of World War II. Shot down over France in the fall of 1943, he crash-landed safely, preserving his ten-man crew. Goldstein survived the winter, aided by the French Resistance, before crossing the Pyrénées on foot to safety.

  The date was April 1948. I was at home in Philadelphia when I got a call from a guy who introduced himself as Lou Lenart. Lou told me he was a Marine fighter pilot who had flown Corsairs with Squadron VMF-323 on Okinawa and against the home islands of Japan. Lou asked me if I had been following in the newspapers the situation in the Middle East. I said I had. Did I know that the yet-to-be-born state of Israel was in mortal danger and was desperate for combat pilots to help defend it?

  Lou said he had something extremely important to talk to me about, but he couldn’t do it over the phone. He was in New York, he said. If he took the train down to Philly, would I meet him for a cup of coffee?

  Of course, I said.

  At that time, before the phone call from Lou, my day-to-day efforts were focused entirely on securing employment with a U.S. airline. I was looking for a job. I was a decorated vet, but I couldn’t get on anywhere.

  No one would hire a Jew. Passengers on Pan Am or TWA didn’t want to hear, “This is your captain, Coleman Goldstein, speaking.”

  I had made up my mind to learn every skill necessary to start a career in aviation. I had my mechanic’s license and my flight engineer certification. Still no one would take me.

  Suddenly Lou appeared. He said he was staying at the Henry Hudson Hotel on Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan. Apparently this was the headquarters for the Haganah and various underground organizations seeking volunteers for the armed forces of Israel. Israel, Lou stre
ssed again, needed pilots desperately. He himself was leaving for Rome in a few days. From there, the Haganah would get him to Tel Aviv. He gave me a pitch about how the British, who were in the final days of their occupation of Palestine under a mandate from the United Nations, were giving the Arabs weapons, planes, and bombs while they were putting Jews against the wall for carrying so much as a pistol. As they say in the movies, Lou had me at hello.

  I went up to the Henry Hudson, which by the way had the best martinis in the city at that time. Four-ouncers. Two weeks later Lou and I were in Rome, in a hotel on the Via Veneto with a handful of other Jewish and non-Jewish fliers, living side by side with Czech gunrunners and Russian mobsters, pimps, hookers, and Vatican smugglers shuttling ex-Nazis via secret routes called “ratlines” to haven in Argentina and Brazil.

  We wore leather flight jackets and carried guns and got our meal money from a Haganah paymaster who looked like Sydney Greenstreet. It was like being in a Humphrey Bogart movie.

  But this was no joke. In Palestine, the British Mandate was due to expire in a matter of weeks. Already Arab irregulars and fedayeen were cutting off roads and terrorizing Jewish farms. The armies of five Arab nations, as I said, were mobilizing to invade the new Jewish state (which still didn’t have a name, and in fact hadn’t yet made up its mind that it even wanted to be a state) the second it declared independence.

  The Jews had a solid defense force, the Haganah, and its shock troops, the Palmach. But they had no tanks, no artillery, no weapons heavier than 88-millimeter mortars. And no air force.

  The British had given the Egyptians fifty brand-new Spitfires. With fifty Spitfires, I could have conquered Eastern Europe. The English had been training and arming Arab armies since the days of Lawrence of Arabia. Iraq was a primary source of England’s oil; the Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 had drawn the boundaries for the place, along with the borders of Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, and Palestine. King Abdullah of Jordan had been hand-carried onto the throne in 1921 by British decree. His army, the Arab Legion, was British-trained and British-officered. Even now, in ’48, the Legion’s commander-in-chief was an English lieutenant general and its field commander an English brigadier.

  Meanwhile, the Jews outside of Tel Aviv and the coastal cities were isolated in a few dozen kibbutzim scattered from Galilee to the Negev. Arab bands were cutting off the roads. It was like Fort Apache. The Jews on their farms were surrounded, under siege, with no hope of escape or resupply by road. Everything had to be flown in. But the Haganah had no planes. I mean no planes. Nothing.

  Another American air force vet, by the name of Al Schwimmer, had made himself the visionary smuggler of surplus aircraft into Palestine. Schwimmer had set up a fake airline—Líneas Aéreas de Panama. He was keeping one step ahead of the FBI by flying the planes via South America to Africa and Europe and from there to Palestine.

  Somehow Schwimmer and the Haganah got their hands on two Alaskan bush planes. They had them here in Italy. Who would fly them to Palestine?

  Lou and I volunteered.

  The Noorduyn Norseman was made in Canada to fly in and out of the northern backcountry. It was a bush plane—a rugged, high-wing monoplane with a powerful engine and an oversized cargo bay. The Norseman was exactly what the Haganah needed. With these aircraft, supplies and ammunition could be flown in to the kibbutzim and the wounded could be taken out. Even two planes could save many lives. All Lou and I had to do was fly them from Italy to Palestine.

  That was like saying that all Lindbergh had to do was fly from New York to Paris. First, the Norseman had a range of 500 miles; Rome to Tel Aviv was 1,275. With the Haganah and our copilots, we managed to outfit the Norsemen’s interiors with auxiliary rubber bladder tanks. But no one knew if the extra fuel would be enough. We had no parachutes, no life vests, no rafts. No radio. My maps were from a world atlas. I didn’t even carry a sandwich.

  Then there was the embargo. The Western nations, led by Britain and the United States, had placed a universal blockade on arms for Israel. The British were flying patrols to interdict all shipments. The FBI was imprisoning any American caught “serving under a foreign flag.” The only countries that would work with the Jews were those of the Soviet bloc, specifically Czechoslovakia, which was desperate for American dollars. We didn’t dare fly overland. Even making landfall for navigational purposes was risky. Lou asked me what our protocol was for engine failure over water. I told him, “We drown.”

  If one of us hit the drink, the other would have to keep flying. There was nothing else he could do.

  “Remember Glenn Miller, the bandleader?”

  “The one who got killed in a plane crash?”

  “That plane was a Norseman.”

  The date was May 2, 1948. I remember sitting on the tarmac at Brindisi, with no flight plans, no runway clearance—and the aircraft so overloaded with fuel (one gallon weighs six pounds) that I wasn’t sure we could even get airborne. We had two other pilot volunteers with us as passengers: Milt Rubenfeld and Eddie Cohen. I had put a Haganah man at the three-quarter mark on the runway and instructed Lou to abort if his ship wasn’t wheels-up by that point. This was absurd, of course. The planes would be doing over a hundred knots. There was no way to stop them short of the cliff at the end of the runway. Meanwhile, we were fighting fuel leaks and problems with the valves that switched the feed from the main tank to the auxiliaries. I’m a worrier. Lou is not. He told me, “Collie, if you think we can make it, that’s good enough for me.” I didn’t tell Lou that I put our odds at about fifty-fifty.

  The way a plane prepares for takeoff is the pilot opens the throttle to full speed while keeping the brakes locked down. When you’ve got your pitch right and your gauges tell you you’re good to go, you release the brakes and let the craft get to speed as fast as it can. As I’m cranking up, waiting for that moment, I glance over to Lou’s plane and I see him open the hatch and leap out onto the runway. What the hell! My heart practically stops, figuring he’s got mechanical trouble and the whole mission will have to be scrapped. Lou scurries to the edge of the runway, kneels down, picks a fistful of wildflowers, and dashes back to the plane. I can’t even yell at him because we have no radios.

  Off we go.

  We made it. Eleven hours staring at that single prop without a word spoken or a glimpse of land the whole way. We struck the coast north of Tel Aviv and landed in the dark on a dirt runway illuminated by fire barrels. A crowd of partygoers was cheering. I saw Lou land and spring down with the flowers in his hand. He was so wobbly with exhaustion he could barely put one foot in front of the other, but he managed to cross to the prettiest girl he could find and hand her the bouquet.

  One week later, Lou was in Czechoslovakia, training on the only fighter planes the Israelis could get: the Czech version of the German Messerschmitt 109, a postwar hunk of junk that they called a mezek, “mule.”

  11.

  AD HALOM

  This plane was the worst piece of crap I have ever flown. It was not even an airplane. It was put together by the Czechs from mismatched parts left behind by the Nazis. The airframe was that of an Me-109 but the propeller and engine came out of a Heinkel bomber. You can’t make a plane that way. But it was all we could get, so we took it.

  Lou Lenart was born in Hungary in 1921. He grew up in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and joined the U.S. Marines in 1940 because “I heard they were ‘first to fight’ and I wanted to kill as many Nazis as I could, as fast as I could.” Lenart became a Marine fighter pilot, flying F4U Corsairs on Okinawa and against the home islands of Japan.

  How bad was this plane? The true Messerschmitt’s engine was a Daimler-Benz DB 605 that put out 1,850 horsepower; our Junkers Jumo power plant could barely produce 1,200. It was like sticking the motor from a farm tractor into a Lamborghini. The plane was nose-heavy, unbalanced. There was no trim tab on the rudder and the flaps had to be lowered by a single, tiny hand wh
eel. You couldn’t slow the damn thing down. It landed at 145 knots, which was about 55 too fast. But the worst of it was the propeller.

  The big paddle-blade bomber prop produced so much left-pulling torque that the first time I tried to take off, the plane ran away from me clear off the runway, through a fence, and over a cliff; I only righted the ship a few feet from crashing into the Adriatic. Meanwhile, the synchronizers for the machine guns, which fired through the oar-shaped blades of the propeller, were so difficult for the mechanics to calibrate that each time you pulled the trigger you were terrified that you’d shoot your own prop off. But nobody would sell the Jews anything, so it was this or die.

  There’s a phrase in Hebrew, en brera—“no alternative.” That was us and that was Israel.

  When I was growing up in Wilkes-Barre, the place was full of Polish Catholics. These kids used to kick the crap out of us, what few Jews there were, until I put together a gang and started pounding the hell out of them. I’ll tell you a story about when I joined the Marines.

  This was in June 1940, well before the war, but there was still a long line at the recruiting table. A Marine sergeant was sitting there signing everybody up. Each recruit stepped forward and put his papers down; the sergeant would stamp ’em without looking up. Until I came to the table.

  U.S. Marine Captain Lou Lenart and his Corsair on Okinawa, 1945.

  I could see the sergeant’s eyes settle on the line on the enlistment form that said, “Religion.” On it, I had written, “Jewish.”

  All of a sudden the sergeant looked up. He hadn’t looked up for any of these Catholics, but he looked up for me. He eyed me up and down. “The Marine Corps is a tough outfit,” he said. “Are you sure you can make it?”