WhatsappHow many people know that Israels’s lack of an Air Force in it’s War of Independence would have meant the destruction of the State of Israel in it’s first days of it’s existence. If it weren’t for the guts, brains, and luck of some superbrave Americans who put their heads together to save the Jewish people, Israel may very well have been overrun.
Al Schwimmer was not alone, but he was the sparkplug, the leader, and the unifying force of the ragtag group of Jews and non-Jews who made a decision to help the brave Jews who were laying it all out to fight off six Arab armies that were amassing on Israel’s impossible-to-defend borders.
Amazingly, the chutzpah of these out-of-the-box airmen led them to the creation of a fake airlines in order to smuggle in airplanes into the State of Israel under the cover of being Panamanian airplanes. Some of the weapons that were smuggled in even had Nazi symbols on them as they were leftovers from World War II that had barely finished 3 years earlier.
But the tiny State of Israel was in desperate need of weapons. It had to do anything – yes, anything – to get weapons. People were killed trying to fly planes that were in terrible shape. But some made it to Israel and so surprised the Egyptian soldiers that they proved to be a critical turning point in the battle to keep Israel alive. Simply amazing.
