Grandma's army

  By now, the Egyptians knew that Israel had fighters and they knew the whereabouts of the airfield. A new, secret  base beyond the range of Arab guns was  hastily prepared. It was constructed in a patch of sand dunes and the orange groves of the sleepy farm community of Herzliya. The pilots all hated the treacherous Messerschmitts, but they were still the only fighters available. In fact, the Israeli forces were short on everything – except for resourcefulness. They had already used scraps from tanks, guns, warships, etc. to cobble together weapons. Why not a fighter? When the British withdrew, they left behind a scrap heap containing the remains of Spitfires. Even better was the almost intact Egyptian spitfire ditched on the first day of the war. Three months before the War of Independence, a brilliant mechanic named Jack Friedman, defected from the RAF and joined the Haganah – even giving himself a Hebrew name. He, and his ragtag team of mechanics, had to stitch to...

Adolph “Al” Schwimmer was crazy about every aspect of aviation. He had spent the war years in a USAAF uniform, flying throughout Asia and the Middle East. After he learned about the Haganah organization that was smuggling Holocaust survivors to Palestine, he knew he had found a mission. After repeated attempts to win over Jewish Agency personnel in the U.S.with his ideas, Schwimmer finally found a willing ear - in the Haganah’s star spy and smuggler, Yehuda Arazi. Following his handshake deal with Arazi, Schwimmer had burned his bridges and resigned from TWA. On their second meeting, Arazi handed him a fistful of dollars, telling him it was for expenses. Schwimmer left immediately for California. He was going to buy airplanes for the Haganah .  Ben-Gurion was aware of the fact that Czechoslovakia had been a major arms producer for the Germans in WWII. It still had  large inventories of munitions, even war planes. It had been a wartime manufacturer of the Luftwaffes prem...