By Tom Tugend for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA). Published May 1, 2022.
LOS ANGELES (JTA) — Harold Livingston, a novelist and Hollywood screenwriter who as a fighter pilot in two wars lived through the adventures he vividly described in his writings, died April 28 at his home in Westlake, California, at the age of 97.
Like many combat veterans, he found civilian life boring, and in early 1948, when a former comrade in arms wrote him a letter asking whether he might be interested in flying munitions to the embattled Jewish state in the making, Livingston didn’t hesitate.
The following day he was off to Israel as one of an estimated 4,000 men and women from all over the world who fought alongside the Israeli army and navy and largely laid the foundation for today’s vaunted air force, ranked as one of the world’s best.
His experience was laced with irony. Most countries embargoed weapon shipments to Israel, so the volunteer pilots had to smuggle in the planes and other weapons to the newly established Jewish state. Ironically, most of the planes were German Messerschmitts, sold by the Czechs to the Israelis. Many were in deplorable condition, held together “with wire, spit and prayer,” as Livingston recalled.
In retrospect, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin observed, “Honestly, this is all we had.” Nevertheless, the Egyptian pilots and ground troops, who had been assured by their commanders that the Israelis had no combat planes, “got the shock of their lives the first time the Messerschmitts took off to meet them,” he said.
After the Israel-Arab war ended in an armistice agreement in 1949, Livingston returned to the United States, moved to California and launched his writing career. His 1954 novel The Coasts of the Earth included a fictional account of his service in Israel and won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award.
He followed this up with six more books and with the screenplay for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which featured the original cast of the subsequent television show.
Livingston went on to appear in the documentary Above and Beyond, produced by Nancy Spielberg and directed by Roberta Grossman. Grossman spoke for Livingston and for a thousand Americans and Canadians who served in all branches of the Israeli armed forces in 1948-49 when she said of the volunteers that their service “was the most important thing they did in their lives.”
Livingston is survived by his daughters Leah Hopkins and Eve Livingston; his son David; granddaughters Elizabeth and Ariel; and his nephew.