An air force that barely exists cannot win a war by weight of bombs. Even before independence, declared on May 14, 1948 and answered the next day by the invasion of five Arab armies, Israel’s air arm was a handful of smuggled fighters and a scattering of light civilian planes, many of them crewed by overseas volunteers, and its stock of ordnance was so thin that pilots sometimes carried bombs on their laps and dropped them over the side by hand. The whole of it, in one account of the time, “consisted of about two dozen light aircraft, single-engine Piper Cubs and Austers, which had been used primarily to resupply besieged settlements.” By the measure of tonnage delivered, this air force did very little. By the measure of what it did to the enemy’s nerve, it did a great deal. Again and again the decisive thing was the fact that the planes appeared at all, far more than any damage they caused. The sight of an Israeli plane overhead told an Arab commander that the war was not going the way he had been promised, and that single idea did more than the bombs ever could.
Here are three of those moments, in the order they happened.
1. Piper Cubs over Mishmar Ha’emek, April 1948, and the bomb-chuckers who followed
The improvisation began during the pre-state civil war period. In early April 1948, during the battle for the kibbutz of Mishmar Ha’emek against Fawzi al-Kaoukji’s Arab Liberation Army, two Jewish Piper Cubs flew over the contested hills and dropped bombs made of irrigation pipes, with a screw top on one end and a detonator on the other. By April 12 the fighting had reached a new peak, and Kaoukji, convinced his force was on the verge of collapse, cabled the Arab League that “10,000 Jews have cut Mishmar Ha’emek off and are attacking from all sides.” The real Jewish force was a fraction of that. A pair of light planes lobbing homemade pipe bombs by hand could not have broken him by firepower. What rattled him was that the Jews were in the air at all, and that he could not count the strength arrayed against him.
That first crude bombing set the pattern for the rest of the war. Israel’s light civilian planes, Austers and Piper Cubs and their kin, were never built to bomb anything. With no bomb racks and no bombsights, their crews improvised, and once the fighting broke into the open after May 15, 1948 the practice ran at full tilt. One of the overseas volunteers who ran these missions, Smoky Simon, who became the Israeli air force’s chief of air operations in 1948, described the arrangement in his own words years later: “The crew consisted of a pilot and a ‘bomb-chucker,’ who held a 20-kilo or a 25-kilo bomb plus incendiary ‘bomblets’ on his lap, which he would drop manually on the Arab targets.” There were dozens of these bomb-chuckers, many with no flying training at all, whose entire job was to lean out of an open cockpit and drop a charge onto whatever lay below. Many were Machal, overseas volunteers, who had come to fly these errands in planes never meant for war. One was the American Sam Moster, who flew daring Piper Cub missions against the Egyptians, the kind of volunteer airman the little planes depended on.
The work was as dangerous for the crews as for anyone beneath them. On one sea-support mission a Fairchild F-24 flew with a box of small bombs in its cabin that were to be heaved out of the airplane by hand. The plane was shot down, and both men aboard were killed: the pilot David Shprinzak and Matitiyahu Sukenik, who was acting as bomb-chucker on the ill-fated flight. The improvisation that unnerved the enemy was paid for in the lives of the volunteers who carried it out.
One story from these same months has outlived most of the real sorties, and it has a human face. The Machal volunteers’ own history preserves the memory of a pilot no one could name, whom they called the “Mad Russian.” Every evening just before sundown he climbed into an old Piper Cub and flew off toward Gaza with two dozen hand grenades in his lap and, in the rear seat, a burlap bag filled with empty bottles. He dived to treetop level and hurled the grenades, and when they were gone he reached back for the bag and bombarded the enemy soldiers with the bottles. One day he did not return. The empty bottles were not a mistake or a last resort. They had a purpose, and a 1958 account in the Israeli air force’s own Hebrew journal explains it. Writing on the tenth anniversary of the war, the pilot Ze’ev Segal recorded that someone that spring spread a rumor that an empty bottle, falling from a height, gives off an ear-splitting whistling and shrieking sound, enough, as Segal put it, to cast the fear of Allah into all who heard it. So the crews dropped empty bottles. Segal called it a cheap “psychological” weapon to soften the enemy’s resistance, and he told it half as a joke. The same image reached Hollywood a few years later, when Col. Gershon Rivlin, the official historian of the Israeli army, passed a version of it to director Melville Shavelson for the 1966 film Cast a Giant Shadow, with his own candid caveat that he could not say how effective it was or how often it was done.
2. Piper Cubs over Nebi Yusha, May 16, 1948
The clearest single case of fear outrunning firepower came from the least warlike aircraft in the inventory. On the night of May 16, 1948, an Israeli force supported by light planes overran the Nebi Yusha police fortress in the north, a strongpoint where 28 Jews had died in an earlier failed attack. The hand-dropped bombs, in the plain words of the record, had far greater psychological than military effect. A few small charges flung from an open cockpit could not level a fortress. What they did was announce, to men who had expected the sky to belong to the Arab armies, that it did not. The capture opened the way to block the invasion road south of Malkieh, and the planes that helped turn the defenders had delivered almost nothing but the shock of their own presence.
3. Four Messerschmitts over Ashdod, May 29, 1948
On May 29, 1948, an Egyptian column of roughly 500 vehicles, with artillery and tanks, had pushed up the coastal road to a point only about twenty-five miles from Tel Aviv. The Givati commander, Shimon Avidan, had almost nothing rested enough to throw at it, and he sent an urgent plea to the High Command for the state’s first fighter planes, which had only just been assembled and were slated for duty elsewhere. Near-panic broke out among his recruits as the column advanced. Some deserted. Even the veterans were alarmed, having never faced a force of that power.
Brigadier Mohammed Neguib was inspecting a damaged bridge north of Ashdod when he heard a familiar drone and looked up to see four dots approaching. “Messerschmitts!” an officer shouted. “Enemy planes!” The first four Avia S-199s, flown in large part by overseas volunteer pilots, swooped over the bumper-to-bumper column and dropped their bombs while the anti-aircraft gunners fired frantically. The material result was modest. Some vehicles were hit, and the Egyptians cheered when one of the planes fell in flames. Neguib’s own first reaction was relief: “Thank God they didn’t do more damage.”
Then the fear set in. The raid damaged Egyptian morale severely because no one had dreamed that Israel had Messerschmitts at all. Neguib grew more reluctant than ever to surge ahead. That night, Israeli harassment deepened the unease. Local reports spoke of an observer directing fire from a mosque tower, of poisoned wells, of strange howling in the desert that the Egyptians took for Jewish signals. Neguib ordered his men to dig in and consolidate before moving on. The column never resumed its drive on Tel Aviv. The planes had done little harm and changed everything, because the enemy commander could no longer be sure what else the Jews were hiding.
A sky that was supposed to be empty
The deeper story runs underneath all of these days, from the Piper Cubs over Mishmar Ha’emek in early April 1948, through Nebi Yusha on May 16, to the Ashdod column on May 29. The invading armies had been told, and had every reason to believe, that the Jews had no air force worth the name. The arms embargo was meant to guarantee it. So the appearance of any Israeli plane carried a weight out of all proportion to its bomb load, because it contradicted the one assumption the whole invasion rested on.
That is why a few assembled fighters and a clutch of converted civilian planes could bend the course of battles their firepower could never have decided. An Egyptian brigadier who sees four Messerschmitts he was told did not exist starts to wonder what else he was wrong about. The garrison that watches a Piper Cub circle overhead, dropping charges by hand, learns that the sky it counted on is contested. The volunteer aircrews who flew those first sorties understood that their smallest asset was also their sharpest. The planes were few, the bombs were fewer, and the fear they produced was the one thing the embargo had failed to keep out of the war.
Source: Dan Kurzman, Genesis 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War, together with the American Veterans of Israel Legacy Corporation’s own historical record of the Machal volunteers, including Smoky Simon’s first-person account of the overseas aircrews and the “bomb-chuckers” in the AVILC newsletter (Spring 2014) and the Fairchild F-24 mission that cost the lives of David Shprinzak and Matitiyahu Sukenik (AVI newsletter, Fall 2003). The whistling-bottle detail comes from two sources in the volunteers’ own corpus: the “Mad Russian” and his burlap bag of empty bottles is recorded in Dr. Jason Fenton’s Strength and Courage: The Untold Story of the Machal Volunteers Who Helped Win Israel’s War of Independence, p. 20, quoting Harold Livingston, No Trophy No Sword (1994), p. xiii; and the whistling-fall mechanism is set out in the Israeli air force’s own Hebrew journal, Ze’ev Segal, “Bonanza, Rapide, Auster, Dakota: the bombers of ‘ten years ago today,'” Bitaon Heyl Ha’avir (IAF Journal), issue 45, 1958, p. 76. A later popular version of the same story is attributed to Col. Gershon Rivlin, the official historian of the Israeli army, as recounted by director Melville Shavelson in Barry Joseph’s “How Seltzer Won Israel’s War For Independence,” The Forward. The “two dozen light aircraft” description of the fledgling air force and the American volunteer Sam Moster’s Piper Cub missions against the Egyptians are drawn from I Am My Brother’s Keeper: American Volunteers in Israel’s War of Independence.