Ekron air base, Israel

May 29, 1948 

One after the other the fighters rumbled down the runway.  The deep bellow of each V-12 engine echoed like thunder between the tin-roofed hangars.  In the lead fighter, American Lou Lenart was thinking about the odds.  Four junk fighters—ex-Nazi Messerschmitts—versus an entire Arab army.  It was David against Goliath.

This was the first combat mission for the volunteer aviators in Israel.  Lenart worried that it might be the last.  The armies of five Arab nations were converging on the heart of the Israel.  A fast-moving Egyptian armored division had advanced to within twenty-two miles of Tel Aviv.  If the Egyptians were not stopped, they’d be in the city by morning.  Israel’s two-week-old war of independence would be over.

The four Messerschmitts—and the pilots—had arrived in Israel only a few days ago.  Their existence was still a secret to both Arabs and Israelis.  Lenart and his squadronmates had barely begun learning to fly the Messerschmitt in Czechoslovakia when the Arabs invaded Israel on May 15. 

It was the end of training.  Ready or not, the pilots and the disassembled fighters were bundled into C-46 and C-54 transports and flown to Israel where they would learn to fly Messerschmitt the hard way.  In combat.

What Lenart had already learned was that he hated the Messerschmitt.  “The worst piece of crap I have ever flown,” he said.  It wasn’t even a real Messerschmitt, the classic German fighter of WWII, but a bastardized model produced in Czechoslovakia.  

Lou Lenart was a wiry WWII veteran with curly black hair and dark, piercing eyes.  The twenty-seven-year-old was born in Hungary and grew up in Pennsylvania.  At the age of seventeen he joined the Marines because he heard they were the first to fight.  “I wanted to kill as many Nazis as I could, as fast as I could.”  Nobody told him that the Marines would be fighting in the Pacific.  Lenart wangled his way into flight training and wound up on Okinawa where he finished the war as a decorated Corsair fighter pilot. 

The first target of Israel’s new fighter squadron was supposed to be the Egyptian air base at El Arish, in the Sinai just below the border of Egypt and Israel.  The Messerschmitts would take off at dawn and bomb the rows of parked Egyptian Spitfire fighters at El Arish. 

The evening before, everything changed.  The pilots were huddled in their squadron shack at Ekron when Shimon Avidan, commander of the Israeli Givati Brigade, barged in.  The Egyptian army had reached Ishdud, just to the south of Tel Aviv.  Avidan’s sappers had blown the last bridge on the main road to the north, temporarily halting the Egyptians.  The Egyptians would have the bridge repaired in a few hours and resume their advance.  The two-and-a-half exhausted rifle companies of Avidan’s brigade would be overrun. 

The surprise El Arish strike was canceled.  From Tel Aviv came the volunteers’ new orders:  Take off and attack the the Egyptian brigade at Ishdud.  Now.

Despite its flaws, the clunky Messerschmitt carried significant firepower—two 13.1 mm. nose-mounted machine guns and two 20 mm. cannon on the wings.  Each fighter had two 70-kg (154-lb.) bombs suspended beneath the wings. 

The trouble was, no one knew if the guns would work.  They’d never been fired.  Nor had the bomb racks been tried.  None of the newly-assembled fighters had been test flown. 

The Israelis had a phrase:  ein brera.  It was Hebrew and it meant “no alternative.”  The volunteer fighter pilots had no alternative.  The fate of Israel would be determined in the next hour.

In the gathering dusk, they took off.  Lenart and his wingman went first, making one orbit while the second pair joined them.  They headed west, climbing to 7,000 feet while Lenart scanned the coast, looking for Ishdud.

What he saw shocked him.  A column of military vehicles stretched southward for over a mile along the coastal road.  The center of Ishdud was filled with trucks, tanks, concentrations of troops.  The armored brigade was jammed up at the downed bridge over the Lachish River.  The Egyptians were busy erecting a temporary new bridge.

And they spotted the incoming fighters.  The sky around Ishdud erupted in oily black puffs of anti-aircraft fire.  One behind the other the Messerschmitts dove through the flak, each putting his pair of 70-kg. bombs into the Egyptian column.  Then they came back to strafe with the cannons and nose-mounted machine guns. 

Lenart squeezed the trigger on the control stick.  He felt the hard rattle of the gun.

And then it stopped.  After only a few rounds, Lenart’s guns had stopped firing.  Damn.  It was the first time the guns had been tested—and they failed.

Lenart could see the other fighters darting like hawks through the bursts of flak.  Were their guns working?  Was anyone hit?  Lenart didn’t know.  None of the radios in the Messerschmitts worked. 

With flak bursts nipping at his tail, Lenart pulled off the target and headed for Ekron, only ten miles away.  It occurred to him that it was a hell of war when you could pull off a target while they were shooting at you and see your base just under your nose.

He plunked the fighter down on the concrete runway, then did his delicate rudder dance to keep the fighter rolling straight.  When he reached the hangar he saw that Ezer Weizman’s Messerschmitt was already there.  A few minutes later they saw a third Messerschmitt land.  The fighter was rolling straight, then abruptly veered to the right.  Dragging its left wingtip, the Messerschmitt swirled off the runway, kicking up a geyser of dirt.

It was the first of what would be many classic Messerschmitt ground loops, the fighter swiveling out of control and swapping ends.  The dust settled and the pilot, Israeli Modi Alon, climbed out of the cockpit.  He shook his head and gave the Messerschmitt a baleful look.  Alon was unhurt, but the fighter’s landing gear was wrecked. 

The three pilots stood in the deepening shadows and peered to the west.  Three fighters had made it back to Ekron.  South African Eddie Cohen was still out there somewhere. 

Darkness fell.  There was still no sign of Cohen. 

An hour passed, then came a report.  Israeli troops reported seeing an airplane engulfed in flames go down seven miles southwest of Ekron.  Egyptian troops had already seized the area.  Judging by the impact, the Israelis were certain the pilot was dead.

A pall of gloom settled over the little band of airmen.  They’d inflicted no significant damage on the enemy.  In the space of forty minutes they had lost half their airplanes and a quarter of the pilots. 

The pilots were dejected.  They’d come to help save the new nation of Israel.  And they’d failed. 

They wouldn’t learn the truth until later that night when the intelligence reports came in. 

They hadn’t failed.  They had accomplished a miracle.