No Trophy, No Sword: An American Volunteer in the Israeli Air Force During the 1948 War of Independence (review)

Abstract

196 SHOFAR Fall 1996 Vol. 15, No. 1 established to deal effectively with xenophobia, violence, and right-wing extremism. All the essays in this book combine to make a significant contribution to our understanding of antisemitism in contemporary Germany. In fact, though the focus is primarily on "German antisemitism," there are important lessons that can be learned in addressing new forms of antisemitism in other countries. In a changing world, it is important to realize that antisemitism assumes new and dangerous guises. One would think that, after the Shoah, the new forms would not rear their ugly heads, but Antisemitismus in Deutschland provides us with comprehensive documentation that this is unfortunately not the case. Jack Zipes Department of German, Scandinavian and Dutch University of Minnesota No Trophy, No Sword: An American Volunteer in the Israeli Air Force During the 1948 War of Independence, by Harold Uvingston. New York: edition q, 1994. 262 pp. $21.95. The subtitle of this autobiographical book is somewhat misleading, because the writer never served in the Israeli Air Force (IAF). After serving as a communication specialist with the U.S. Army Air Forces, in April 1948 he joined one of the covert organizations which then were being set up to provide arms for the embattled Yishuv. While Haganah agents scoured the world in search of possible arms purchases, there remained the problem .of how to bring the weapons, immediately rifles, machine guns, and mortars, to Palestine, a difficult task because the British had been and steadfastly remained opposed to the establishment of a Jewish state, while the State Department also reversed its poSition and prohibited the export of war materiel to the region, a prohibition enforced by both the U.S. Customs Service and the FBI. To overcome these obstacles, Jewish businessmen in the United States established a number of dummy aviation corporations, including the SchwimmerAviation Company of Burbank, California, transmuted into the Uneas Aeras de Panama, designed to purchase planes and fly them to Palestine and later Israel, carrying desperately needed arms and later even dismantled fighter planes for the slowly evolving Israel Defence Force (lDF). Moreover, on occasion these transport planes were pressed into Book Reviews 197 service as improvised bombers, the crews literally chucking bombs at advancing Egyptian columns in the Negev. In the beginning, pilots, navigators, radio operators, and ground stafffor the air transport operation were largely recruited from Jewish veterans who had served in the American, British, and Dominion air forces, but they remained civilians. Even though organized as the ATC (Air Transport Command) in the line summer of 1948, in the author's view "ATC [remained] a civilian allforeign volunteer operation and therefore sacrosanct" from conscription (p. 214). And when as part of the regularization of the IDF in December 1948 the new Israeli Air Force (IAF) tried to incorporate these men into its ranks, livingston refused. While many signed contracts turning them into regular air force personnel, livingston refused to submit. Even when given the choice between induction or immediate repatriation, Livingston chose to return to the United States and never served in the IAF. In the end, perhaps, the distinction is not important-livingston did the state some service. This is an intensely personal memoir of days now almost forgotten. livingston, who later became a successful fiction writer, provides a vivid picture of the efforts to purchase and fly aircraft out of the United States, usually one step ahead of the authorities, of the ruses used to bring the planes across the Atlantic, of the secret air base set up in Czechoslovakia to load arms and disassembled fighter planes, of life in wartime Tel Aviv, including an eye-witness account ofthe unfortunate"SS Altalena" incident, when, acting on direct orders from Ben Gurion, Palmach units fired on a ship bringing arms for the still separate Irgun units within the army. If on some occasions this account seems to blur truth and fiction, and if like many old veterans the author remembers certain matters with advantage, and despite some unnecessary excursions into events in which the author was not a direct participant, this is a book well worth reading, carrying the reader back to a perhaps simpler time...