Lou Lenart

I happened to see an item during my morning surfing, saying a man named Lou Lenart has died at 94.

The name wouldn’t normally have meant a thing to me. But as it happens, a few months ago I read one of Ian’s military history books called The Pledge, by Leonard Slater. Ian has the 1970 first edition, but it’s still available in paperback. The book doesn’t spend a lot of time on the actual 1948 war, it’s really about what happened before that. After WWII, a large percentage of surviving European Jews said, ‘Screw this, we need to kickstart Israel.’ Of course a great many people objected to the idea, and the western powers cooperated just half-heartedly enough to ensure that Israel would be born in blood if at all. And so behind the scenes there was this amazing, sometimes comical, sometimes inspiring effort to deal with the logistical needs of the inevitable war that would inaugurate either the birth or the stillborn death of modern Israel. Much of this happened in America, where some factions within the federal government officially endorsed arming the Jews while other factions hunted the people trying to actually do so as criminals.

The Jews took what they could get: For example they needed warplanes and wanted P-51s but simply couldn’t get them in time so they smuggled – and I do mean smuggled – some Me-109s* into Palestine from Czechoslovakia. The Brits, on the other hand, actively armed the Arab nations with surplus Spitfires, which led to some of the most ironic air battles in the history of military aviation. And that’s where Lou Lenart comes in.

It’s a really fascinating book and I recommend it. Lenart appears in it only briefly, in a typically dysfunctional but decisive manner: (Lengthy excerpt below the fold)

Lou Lenart, the intense Hungarian-born former U.S. Marine, was one of the first fighter pilots into Israel. He had flown in early, bringing one of Mrs. Silverman’s Norsemen, gone on to Czechoslovakia for training on the Me-109, then returned as a passenger on the newly established airlift, sitting behind Larry Raab with the fuselage of a dismantled Me-109 jutting into his back.

In Israel he waited impatiently while Czech mechanics assembled the first fighters. The Arab air forces – Egyptian in the south, Syrian and Iraqi in the north – still flew over the country at will, bombing and strafing settlements, airfields and cities. Air raid alerts sounded in Tel Aviv daily. With few antiaircraft guns and no fighters, there was nothing the Israelis could do to stop them. Their own tiny Air Force, consisting of Piper Cubs, Austers and Rapides, was pressed into all kinds of missions for which the planes were never intended: as light bombers (the bombs were rolled out the doors), to parachute supplies (they were dropped overboard), in tactical support of ground forces (with hand-held machine guns aimed out the windows), for reconnaissance (having no radio equipment, pilots would scrawl their observations on a piece of paper, put it in a bottle and drop it to the troops below). Most of the flying had to be done at night to avoid Arab fighters and it was becoming harder and harder to perform the essential job of supplying the isolated settlements and evacuating the wounded.

Lenart watched one day from a slit trench at Ekron air base while Egyptian Spitfires bombed the hanger next to the one housing the Me-109s.

On May 29 the first four planes were ready. “Our plan,” Lenart remembers, “was that the very first mission would be a surprise raid on El Arish,” a former RAF air base just across the Egyptian border in the south, to which the Egyptians had moved a squadron of Spitfire fighter planes and several bombers; it was their principal base for aerial operations against the new state.

As the four Me-109s were being made ready to take off in the late afternoon, the commander of the Haganah forces in the south, facing the Egyptians on the ground, rushed in to plead for a change of plans.

The Egyptian advance toward Tel Aviv had been stalled by the stubborn defense of the Negev settlements along the way, particularly one called Yad Mordechai. The time gained had been used to evacuate the children of the settlements and to organize their defense. But the Egyptians had regrouped also. That afternoon an Israeli observation post had reported that an Egyptian column consisting of five hundred vehicles, including artillery and tanks – the full rolling stock of an entire brigade – was moving north along the coastal road. It was more than enough to make good the Egyptian boast that they would overrun Tel Aviv, only twenty-five miles away. The column had stopped temporarily at the Ashdod bridge, which had been blown up by Haganah sappers the night before. Egyptian officers had been observed leaving their cars to look over the damage to the bridge; the vehicles were massed along the road, a perfect target and a heaven-sent opportunity to smash the ominous Egyptian advance.

“The decision was made just like that,” says Lenart. “Half an hour later we started up the planes inside the hangar, the doors were opened and we made a fast taxi out to the runway going east-west. There was a shout from the guys on the field and we took off. We made one wide low turn. We had to join up very fast so that nobody would see us and we no sooner joined up than we were over Ashdod. We started coming down and right away the whole place erupted.”

Heavy antiaircraft fire easily reached the low-flying planes. Lenart could see the plane piloted by Eddy Cohen, a South African volunteer flying his first combat mission, “blow up, just a ball of fire.” Two Israeli pilots who had been trained in Czechoslovakia, Modi Alon and Ezer Weizmann, dropped their bombs, then returned to strafe the Egyptians, but their machine guns jammed. Lenart, “holding one hand down for the manual release because I didn’t trust the electrical release,” dropped his two bombs and tried to strafe, but his machine gun jammed too; his cockpit was peppered with antiaircraft fire and his plane damaged.

Back at Ekron air base they tallied the score of their maiden action: one plane and one pilot lost; another Me-109 damaged in a bumpy landing. Damage to the Egyptians: Much less than they had hoped for.

They were bitterly disappointed. But later in the day came a new report. The Egyptians, sobered by the sight of Israeli fighter planes, were digging in at Ashdod, apparently for a prolonged stay. They had not been destroyed. But they would not be in Tel Aviv “in forty-eight hours” either. Some of the 65-mm mountain guns that Arazi had sent from France were brought up to shell the Egyptian column. That night Haganah began a series of harassing actions on the ground. In the days that followed, the Me-109s returned to make more expert attacks.

The Egyptians had been stopped. They would never get any farther. The danger had passed of a quick victory that would rally the other Arab states with the smell of blood, weaken the will of the Jews to resist, and shake the confidence of Israel’s wavering sympathizers in the world.

*Ed Note: The book calls them Me-109s but Wikipedia says they were really Avia S-199s, which were a sort of aftermarket franken-Bf-109. Which helps clear up something mentioned in the book I didn’t understand at the time. These were clearly junk planes and I don’t ever remember reading that actual Messerschmidts were all that inferior.