The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War Page 6

  I was so furious I wanted to tear this sergeant’s throat out. I knew the only reason he would ask that question was because my enlistment form said I was a Jew. But I also knew that I couldn’t get mad or shoot my mouth off or he might not let me join. So I stared him in the eye, as directly and as hard as I could.

  “If you made it, I can make it.”

  That was it. He stamped my form and I moved on.

  I owe the Marine Corps everything. To take a kid from a tiny village in Hungary and not only give him the chance to serve under the Stars and Stripes, but to let him become an officer and a fighter pilot—that’s why I love the Marine Corps and I always will.

  The war ended and I went home to Los Angeles, but I was very aware of what was going on in Europe, with the Jews who had survived the Holocaust being held up by the British in transit camps, all that Exodus stuff. I had wanted to fight in Europe from the start. Nobody told me the Marines were only gonna fight in the Pacific.

  Anyway, one Friday night I read in the paper that a Palestinian major (in those days “Palestinian” meant someone who lived in British Mandate Palestine) was speaking at a synagogue in Hollywood. I went. He spoke; I went up to him and tried to volunteer, told him my background as a combat vet. He was wary because the FBI was all over the Jews in those days. The State Department, too. He said, “Meet me at my hotel tomorrow night. Bring your discharge and your combat citations.” I went home, got my stuff, and drove to his hotel that very night. Two weeks later I was in.

  Under an executive order of the War Assets Administration, a vet was entitled to buy an airplane. An ex–TWA captain named Sam Lewis, who was working with Al Schwimmer, met me and gave me five thousand bucks in hundreds. He sent me downtown to the City Center and I bought a C-46, a Curtis Commando, just like that, a big, powerful cargo plane, the kind that had flown “over the hump” from India to China. The planes were in mothballs out in the Mojave. Schwimmer had a hangar at Lockheed in Burbank with four mechanics; they got the planes in and made them flightworthy. That was Schwimmer’s operation, creating an air force for Israel out of thin air. He was a genius and a visionary.

  Within weeks I was in New York, working with the Haganah recruiting vets to fly for Israel. That’s when I took the train down to Philly to enlist Collie Goldstein. From there we got to Europe and then flew the Norsemen to Israel.

  This was May 9, 1948, five days before the British Mandate was due to expire. Five Arab armies were massing on Israel’s borders, ready to invade the minute the Tommies pulled out. And Israel had no fighter aircraft. Nothing that could attack the enemy. Nothing.

  At the last second, six of us got sent to Czechoslovakia to pick up these bastardized Messerschmitts. The route was Cyprus-Rome-Geneva, then by train to Zurich, and finally on a Czech Airlines DC-3 to Prague, where we were stuck in a hotel for two days before we at last reached the training base. The Arab invasion was two days away.

  There’s no way you can learn to fly a new plane in two days, particularly a fighter, and especially this piece of junk. But again, en brera. No alternative.

  We trained at a place called Cěské Budějovice. Every night we got bulletins from Israel. The Arab Legion with tanks and artillery was attacking near Jerusalem. Syrian forces had crossed the Jordan. The Egyptian Army, with Spitfires, tanks, and artillery, was advancing up the coast road toward Tel Aviv. There’s a kibbutz on the frontier called Yad Mordechai. Three Egyptian battalions were attacking a force of 140. Even the kibbutz women fought in the trenches, firing World War I Enfields. They held out for five days before the Egyptians stormed the place and captured it.

  Our Czech training officers were wonderful guys who sped up the training as fast as they could. But we had to tell them, “You don’t understand—the whole country of Israel is about to be overrun!”

  May 20 we fly back. It takes four more days to get the Messerschmitts home, in crates, with the wings off, in the bellies of three of Al Schwimmer’s C-46s. One of the C-46s crashes, so we lose two Messerschmitts. We’re down to four. The Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem is days away from surrendering. The Arab Legion holds the fort at Latrun, cutting the capital off.

  What is the Israel Air Force at this hour? David Remez is technically in charge, but who are the real pilots? Us. Me and Modi Alon and Ezer Weizman and Eddie Cohen from South Africa, none of whom has flown in combat, and a few other crazy brave guys who have flown in from around the world to try to help save the infant state of Israel.

  I’m the only pilot with combat experience in fighters (Collie and a few others are combat fliers but only in bombers), so I’m picked to lead the first mission, which is going to be a surprise attack at dawn on the Egyptian air base at El Arish. Who picked El Arish? Me. I’m the senior pilot, so what I say goes. Of course, I have no idea where El Arish is. I have no idea where anything is. I know only that Egypt’s Spitfires are at El Arish. Job one is to wipe those bastards out.

  Finally, the mechanics bolt the Messerschmitts together. The Egyptian Army is twenty miles away, advancing up the coast road. We have no time to prep, no time to take the planes up. It’s three thirty in the afternoon of Friday, May 29.

  Suddenly, onto the base races a jeep carrying Shimon Avidan, the commander of the Jewish troops—two companies of the Givati Brigade—who are hanging on by their fingernails holding off the Egyptians.

  “Lou, we need your planes now.”

  Avidan tells me his guys have blown up a section of the bridge at Ishdud, seventeen miles south of Tel Aviv. The Egyptian invasion force is seven infantry battalions, an armored battalion with artillery, antitank and antiaircraft support, and six hundred vehicles. They’re held up for the moment, but as soon as they repair the bridge, there’s nothing left to stop them.

  I tell Avidan that my planes are hitting El Arish at dawn.

  “Forget El Arish! You have to take off now and attack the Egyptians at the bridge.”

  I say, “No way. We haven’t tried the bombs or test-fired the guns—we don’t even know if these pieces of shit will fly!”

  “Lou, you don’t understand,” Avidan says. “If the Egyptian Army crosses that bridge, they’ll be in Tel Aviv tonight and that’s the end of Israel.”

  En brera.

  No alternative.

  We take off. Where’s the bridge? I have no clue. As I’m circling, letting the other pilots get airborne to join me in formation, my number two, Modi Alon, pulls alongside, pointing south.

  The formation is me and Modi, Ezer Weizman and Eddie Cohen.

  We fly for only a couple of minutes and suddenly we see ’em. The Egyptian column is miles long, choking the road, jammed up at the dry riverbed with the blocked bridge in the middle.

  There is no making light of this moment. Behind us is Israel, the Jewish people hanging on by a thread. Ahead of us is the enemy, advancing to destroy everything we love.

  We attack. The guns malfunction; the bomb releases balk. I look right and left and see nobody. Antiaircraft fire is ferocious. Six thousand Egyptians are putting up everything they’ve got. Eddie Cohen, a wonderful, brave pilot from South Africa, must have run into too much of it. His plane doesn’t come back. I manage to put one 70-kilogram bomb onto a concentration of trucks and troops in the town square of Ishdud. Modi and Ezer do what they can. It’s a mess. We straggle back, having inflicted minimal damage.

  But the shock to the Egyptians is overwhelming. To be attacked from the air by four Messerschmitt 109s with the Star of David on the side!

  That night the Givati Brigade hits the enemy from the flank. The Egyptians are thrown into disorder. Israeli intelligence intercepts this dispatch from the brigade commander to Cairo:

  We were heavily attacked by enemy aircraft and we are scattering.

  The Egyptian Army deflected to the east, to link with other Arab forces besieging Jerusalem.

  Tel Aviv was saved, and so was the nat
ion.

  Sometime later I got a chance to speak with several Egyptian officers who were there that day. They said that the soldiers in the column were certain that these four planes, our piece-of-crap Messerschmitts, were just the tip of the spear, that the Jews had hundreds more, poised to attack and destroy them all.

  Today that spot is called Gesher Ad Halom, gesher meaning “bridge,” ad halom meaning “thus far and no farther” (literally, “up to here”).

  Collie Goldstein:

  There’s a final beat to this and the Norseman story. Twenty years later, Lou is in New York waiting for a traffic light at the corner of Fifty-second and Broadway, when a good-looking woman walks up to him. “Captain Lenart?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  The lady smiles and holds out her hand.

  “I’m the girl you gave the bouquet of wildflowers to at that little airstrip north of Tel Aviv in 1948.”

  12.

  FIRST SONS

  The generation of the War of Independence was the generation of the first sons.

  Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Rabin, hundreds more—the homegrown sabras, born in Israel in the teens and early twenties, who rose to command in ’48. I include in this company Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Sadeh, though they came to the holy land as grown men, and Arik Sharon, Uzi Narkiss, and Ezer Weizman, who were technically half a generation younger. Ben-Gurion was their father. They worshipped him.

  Shimon “Katcha” Cahaner has served with every legendary formation of the IDF paratroops, from Unit 101 in the fifties through Battalion 890 during the reprisal period to the 202nd Brigade at the Mitla Pass in 1956. He was deputy commander of Paratroop Battalion 28 when it helped liberate Jerusalem in 1967.

  We were the next generation. Me and Danny Matt, Meir Har-Zion, David Elazar, Aharon Davidi, Motta Gur, Raful Eitan, Shmuel Gorodish, Uzi Eilam. I could cite many, many more. These were the young fighters, some of whom had been small-unit commanders in ’48 and who rose in succeeding years to command battalions and brigades. There were thousands of others—brothers and cousins and friends whose names no one knows aside from us and their families—who fought as bravely and gave as much or more.

  Part of the generation of the first sons, the best part, gave all they had. They rest now beneath stones. You read their names on walls of marble.

  Seven times in 1948 this generation tried to take Latrun, the British-built blockhouse fort that dominated the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Seven times the guns of the Arabs beat them back. The assault troops were civilians and boys and half-trained militia, without artillery or aircraft; some came to the fight straight off the ships from the transit camps in Cyprus, with numbers tattooed on their arms. They took up M1 Garands and .303 Enfields from piles collected after the round of men before them had charged and been cut down, and they ran in their turn across melon fields into machine-gun fire.

  The generation of the first sons learned to fight at night. They had to, to combat the Arabs—first the thieves who raided Jewish farms to steal sheep or cattle or, later, to blow up pipelines and plant mines along roads; then later still when the marauders began calling themselves fedayeen, “self-sacrificers,” and their objective became to drive the Jews out of Palestine once and for all.

  The sons of the first generation learned to come down from the watchtowers and guard posts and to venture on foot into the darkness “beyond the wire.” Sadeh taught them, and Orde Wingate, the British officer we called HaYedid, “the friend.” At dawn the sons returned, marked by the blood of their enemies. Now, in 1948, during the War of Independence, they needed darkness even more.

  Near the Ayalon Plain, where Joshua smote the Amorites, the sun rose too soon on an assault force commanded by twenty-four-year-old Arik Sharon. Arab machine gunners caught the attackers in the open. Shot through the hip, Sharon gave his men the only order he could: Save yourselves. Years later, another bullet hit him in the same hip. “But this second one I hardly felt,” he said, “because I was with my comrades and not left behind.”

  In July 1948, Dayan took the Arab towns of Ramla and Lod with a handful of jeeps armed with .30-caliber Brownings. He became a legend. Others fought till the last bullet at Gush Etzion near Jerusalem, then fell back, watching the Arab Legion cut off the Old City and massacre every Jew they could find.

  The men of the War of Independence fought in farm boots and city shoes, without ranks and without uniforms. To mount a platoon- or company-scale operation was for them the pinnacle of tactics. Battalion-scale action was beyond their capacity; when they tried, the enemy cut them to pieces.

  Before these first sons had come the generations of the fathers and the grandfathers—the pioneers and the visionaries.

  Joseph Trumpeldor in the British Army during World War I.

  Ze’ev Jabotinsky was an officer in the Russian Army in World War I. His friend Joseph Trumpeldor fought at Gallipoli. There’s a town in the north of Israel called Kiryat Shmona, “City of the Eight.” It was named for the eight Jews who died defending Tel Chai in 1920. Trumpeldor was their leader. This was the first time bullets had flown between Arabs and Jews over the issue of land.

  Trumpeldor was mortally wounded in that fight. “It is a fine thing,” he said, “to die for your country.” This, when there was no country except in the dreams of these few.

  In 1916, at the start of World War I, Jabotinsky and Trumpeldor had worked to convince Whitehall to form a Jewish Legion to fight as a unit in the British Army. They were seeking to establish credibility for the idea of a future Jewish state. The passage that follows comes from Jabotinsky’s biography, describing an evening in that year:

  London, small room, dim light. Joseph Trumpeldor portrayed before me the simple, fantastic idea of the pioneer movement. Trumpeldor said:

  “We need men and women who are ready for everything, everything that the land of Israel will demand. A generation that will have no private interests or habits, but be like a simple iron bar, which can be shaped to anything that is needed for the national machine.

  “Is a wheel missing? I am that wheel.

  “Do we lack a nail, a screw, a flywheel? Take me.

  “Must we dig? I am the spade. We need a soldier? I am that soldier. Policeman, doctor, lawyer, fireman? Take me. I will do everything. I have no faith, no philosophy, no feelings; I don’t even have a name. I am the pure ideal of service, prepared for anything. I am bound by no limits. I know only one command: to build.”

  “But,” I said to Trumpeldor, “there are no people like this.”

  “There shall be,” said he.

  We are those people. The generation of the first sons, and now us, fighting beside them and under their command.

  13.

  TEL SHIMRON

  The first time I saw Moshe Dayan was in 1946. I was sixteen. I was a member of a youth group associated with the Haganah. The Haganah had different divisions according to age; ours was the youngest.

  Zalman Shoval is an intelligence officer during the Six Day War. Later he will serve two terms as ambassador to the United States, the most recent culminating in the year 2000.

  Our group took part in an overnight training exercise, with tents and sleeping gear, on a hill called Tel Shimron. Tel Shimron overlooks the village of Nahalal, where Dayan grew up. It is where he is buried today. A tel is a raised mound that contains in layers the sedimentary remains of previous civilizations. Joshua had defeated the king of Shimron on this site in the time of the Bible.

  In the night’s exercise, our party of young people was assigned to defend the camp on the hilltop. Another group, from Nahalal, was ordered to attack—not with rifles but with stones and clubs. That was how we learned to fight in those days. There were boys and girls in our group, but only boys in the attacking party. They struck at midnight. It took them about a minute and a half to co
nquer us.

  After the fight we all gathered in high spirits around a bonfire. Dayan came forward, wearing army trousers and a sweater, with his black eye patch. He was thirty, I think, maybe thirty-one. I was riveted. So were the others. I had heard of Dayan but primarily in connection with his wound, which he had got in Syria five years earlier as a commando scout fighting alongside the Australians against the Vichy French.

  This night Dayan was in charge of the attacking group of Haganah youth. Such training exercises provided an occasion for the Haganah leaders to become acquainted with the young people who would hold command in the future. The evenings were, as well, a way for us rising leaders to acquire exposure to the veterans and heroes under whom we would soon be serving.

  None of us had met anyone like Dayan. We were used to the older generation, the grimly zealous Zionists who had immigrated mostly from Poland and Russia and who orated in a kind of lofty rhetoric that we admired but that we did not feel was our own. Here instead was a young guy like us, born here, who spoke Hebrew the way we did, with the same slang and the same rough terms that only we knew. Dayan was speaking about the future of the Jewish state, with absolute conviction that there would be a Jewish state. It was electrifying. Remember, this was 1946, when such an outcome was far, far from certain.

  Dayan wore no emblem of rank; the Haganah had none. It was obvious, though, that he was an anointed one. He was a favorite of the Haganah leadership, including Yitzhak Sadeh, the commander of the elite Palmach. Both Dayan’s father and mother stood in the senior ranks of the Labor Party; they were politicians and activists from the first families of Israel. Ben-Gurion had discovered their son and picked him out as a leader of the future.

  The highlight of these night exercises was the brewing of Turkish coffee. We filled our finjans with cold water and heaped in spoonfuls of the rich, dark grind, then stuck the tin cups into the fire, in the least hot part so the brew would heat slowly. When the liquid just started to boil, we snatched the vessels out and gave them three sharp knocks on the ground—bam bam bam. Each of us put the finjan back in the coals till the coffee rose up again, which took only a few seconds, then yanked it out and poured the piping hot mud-colored liquid, with plenty of sugar, into our little cups. Nothing could have been grander or more fun.