The media is pointing out that it is now the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kipper War, the war that Israel came within an inch of losing, a war that I found myself involved in, not by my own choosing. I was NOT happy about my involvement and look back on it today without any fondness whatsoever.
The nation of Israel came into being in 1948 when “Israelis,” who were mostly European immigrants and their descendants of Jewish ancestry, declared the tiny region known as Palestine to be an independent nation. Palestine became a trouble spot after the decline of the Ottoman Empire and control of the region passed to the British, who were given a mandate to govern the region. The UK inherited problems that had begun a half century before when European Jews espoused a movement which came to be known as Zionism, a movement to return to the land of their ancestors and establish a Zionist homeland in the region once known as Israel, the name given to Jacob, the son of Issac (who stole his brother’s birthright. Jacob was also known as “the trickster.”). European Jews began immigrating to Palestine, where they were looked on with askance by the native Palestinians, many of whom are descendants of the early Christians. Descendants of the Biblical Pharisees, who allied themselves with Rome during the Jewish-Roman Wars then dispersed across Europe, the Zionists’ goal was domination of the region and the establishment of a Jewish homeland. Friction developed between the native Palestinians, particularly the Arabs, and the European immigrants which led to hostilities and revolts against the British. Some Zionists were so zealous that they attempted an alliance with Adolph Hitler’s Germany against the British. Zionists continued battling the British through World War II and it’s aftermath. After a terrorist group led by Menachim Begin blew up the King David Hotel, Britain began having second thoughts about their mandate and announced their preference for the situation to be decided by the United Nations. Before the UN could reach a decision, Zionists declared Israel to be an independent nation. US President Harry Truman immediately recognized the new nation, thus giving Israel legitimacy.
Although the United States was the first to recognize the new nation, it declared itself neutral in the conflicts between Israel and the neighboring Arab states, who had declared their intention to destroy it. Although the US provided some economic aid to Israel during the Eisenhower years, France was Israel’s main source of military equipment and aid. After assuming power in 1961, President John F. Kennedy lifted the restrictions imposed by the previous administration. The first weapons supplied by the US to Israel were Hawk antiaircraft missiles. After his assassination, his successor, Lyndon Johnson began openly supporting Israel. The Johnson Administration concealed an Israeli attack on the US intelligence-gathering ship USS Liberty during the Six-Day War from the American public, accepting an Israeli claim that it was mistaken identity. (It was not.) After the Six-Day War, the Johnson Administration began selling top-of-the-line military equipment to Israel, including F-4 Phantom fighters.
I flew a mission to Amman, Jordan in a C-141 in 1968, almost a year since the Israeli Pearl Harbor-style sneak attack against the Egyptian and other neighboring air forces to launch the Six-Day War. Black, greasy spots on the parking ramps showed where the Jordanian air force’s fighters had been destroyed during the attack. As we drove to the Amman Hilton for our overnight stay, we noticed that people were close to their houses. We saw few people on the streets and the hotel was practically deserted in fear of another Israeli attack. Our mission, which carried a load of Jeeps and trailers, was classified. Just what the classification was I don’t know, but my squadron was selected for the mission because we were qualified to transport nuclear weapons, and everyone held a Top Secret clearance. It was probably Secret, I don’t know. The mission was classified because the Administration didn’t want American Zionists to know we were selling military equipment to Jordan.
In early 1969 I returned to the Pacific for another tour on C-130 Hercules transports flying missions mostly in South Vietnam. Our mission was airlift but we also were responsible for COMMANDO VAULT, the delivery of 10,000-pound bombs, officially to clear helicopter landing zones. That’s not all they were used for. In the summer of 1970, I returned to the United States for a new assignment at Charleston AFB, South Carolina where my new squadron, the 3rd Military Airlift Squadron, had just started operating the new – and controversial – Lockheed C-5A Galaxy transport. The huge airplane, at the time the largest to take to the skies, could carry the load of three C-141s or six C-130s. The airplane was capable of transporting every piece of equipment the US Army owned but one, a mobile bridge launcher. To say the new airplane was plagued with problems would be a bit of a stretch, but there were problems due to the unfamiliarity of maintenance with the complex systems and the lack of parts in Military Airlift Command’s world-wide system. If an airplane broke, it often took a week or more for parts to be shipped over from the factory. There were some problems with the kneeling system, which Lockheed had designed to use pneumatic motors rather than hydraulics in an attempt to reduce the airplane’s basic weights. The Air Force bought the C-5 prior to operational testing, which would be conducted on actual MAC missions rather than by test crews prior to delivery to squadrons, of which the 3rd was the first to receive the airplane.
I arrived at Charleston in September 1970. Soon after I arrived, South Carolina Congressman L. Mendel Rivers, who represented Charleston and the surrounding area, died. As chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rivers was responsible both for the C-5 and for it’s assignment at Charleston. Without him there to campaign for us, those of us in the squadron feared our days at Charleston were numbered. It turns out we were right, although it took a few years for the move to happen. In the spring of 1973, we were notified that we would be moving to Dover, Delaware where the 9th MAS was converting from C-141s to C-5s to make the second East Coast C-5 squadron. Two other squadrons were equipping with C-5s at Travis AFB, California. There were also a few C-5s in a squadron at MAC’s training facility at Ardmore AFB, Oklahoma.
I had just started a relationship with a young member of the Women in the Air Force squadron at Charleston. We were making plans to get married, but she wanted to wait a year from the time we met to give us time to get to know each other. When I learned my squadron was moving to Dover, we decided to move up our wedding. The Air Force had a policy called “Join Spouse” where married members could transfer together in the event one received transfer orders. We got married at the end of June and transferred to Dover in August.
Hardly anyone in the squadron had been excited about the move. Squadron personnel were mostly Southerners. Hunting and fishing were popular activities. We knew there was goose hunting at Dover. We had a squadron deer hunting club of which I was a member. Shortly after we arrived at Dover, Al Steed, one of my buddies, told me that he and some of the other NCOs and some officers were starting a hunting club. They had arranged to lease a large farm out from Smyrna, the town just north of Dover. Dues were $100 a year. We’d have full use of the farm for hunting. Although we would primarily be hunting geese, there were deer on the property and other small game. The farm was leased to Green Giant or one of the other vegetable companies. My recollection is that it was planted largely in corn, which had already been harvested. The nearby Bombay Hook wildlife preserve was a haven for geese and ducks, and they were feeding in the fields.
Somebody had come up with a plan to make decoys out of old tires. The landowner, who was an attorney in Dover as I recall, gave us permission to use the storage room at the bottom of one of his silos to store our decoys and the materials we needed to make them. I went to the base exchange and bought a saber saw. We used the saws to cut the tires in half and to cut outlines of goose heads from plywood. We painted the heads black with a white stripe around the base. The finished products were good enough to fool a goose. While we were working, we listened to a portable radio for news of the situation in the Middle East where Israel was engaged in another of the many wars and conflicts with it’s Arab neighbors. The squadron was on Bravo alert, which meant all crewmembers were to stay close to a phone and had an hour to be at the squadron in the event we were called out. We’d arranged with the operations officer to go to Smyrna and work on the decoys. They had the landowner’s phone number and would call him or his wife in the event someone was alerted. We had our flight suits and equipment in our cars. Fortunately, we weren’t called out.
As it turned out, we weren’t called out by opening day on Columbus Day, October 8. My buddy Ted Miller and I went hunting on a foggy October morning and got our limit in just a few minutes. (That was the only time the geese came into the decoys we had set out! They wised up after that.) We knew Israel was running short of ammunition and President Nixon had agreed to supply them. Contracts were offered to the airlines, but none took them up. EL AL, the Israeli airline, was picking up ammunition at Pease Air Force Base, New Hampshire in their 707s and single 747 but it wasn’t enough. We were expecting to get involved at any time. We didn’t know it, but Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, a Kiev-born Jew who grew up in America, was making preparations to use nuclear weapons Israel had never revealed that it had. President Richard Nixon was aware of Meir’s intentions and determined to avoid the use of nukes. After it became apparent that Israel didn’t have the capability of airlifting it’s own supplies and the airlines refused to do it, he ordered the Air Force to mount an airlift. Finally, the weekend after opening day, the squadron started sending crews out to pick up loads for Israel. I was put on a crew and told to stand-by at home. When the first C-5 returned to Dover for fuel, we’d get on as a deadhead crew, meaning we were riding as passengers. Deadhead time didn’t count against our crew duty time.
My recollection is that it was a Sunday. The historical record shows the first transport arriving on October 14, which was Sunday, but I don’t believe that’s true. I recall that I reported to the squadron on Sunday evening, which was the fourteenth. I kissed my bride of less than six months goodbye and wondered if I’d ever see her again. This was not Vietnam. The communists hadn’t had an air force in South Vietnam; Israel’s opponents did. We would be flying into the deadliest place in the world at the time. The crew I was assigned to was scheduled to board the first C-5 to come back to Dover and deadhead to Lajes AB, Azores where the flying crew would go into crew rest, and we would take over the airplane and take the load on to Lod Airport (now Ben Gurion Airport) at Tel Aviv. Normally, missions to Israel would have been routed through Spain or Germany but both countries refused permission for US aircraft to land there while enroute to or from Israel. They had been notified that they’d lose their crude oil supply sources in retaliation for support of Israel. Portugal alone was immune to Arab threats because they had their own oil supplies in Angola, which at the time was a Portuguese colony. Considering what happened, Portugal must not have yet granted permission for MAC transports bound for Israel to use Lajes. The airplane came in and landed. We went out to the flight line and got on. The airplane was loaded with ammunition. I don’t recall where they’d picked it up. Loads were coming out of several Army arsenals around the country. I went to the troop compartment and pulled the armrest up on one of the seats to make a bed – the seats were just wide enough to lie down on – and laid down to try to sleep.
Lajes is in the Azores, a group of islands a thousand miles off Portugal, who owns them. I’d been there before when I was flying C-141s. For some reason, MAC used Lajes as a stage base for crews going to and from Europe. I don’t know why, because C-141s were capable of flying to any of the European bases from the United States without refueling. Lajes had been established as a fueling and crew stage base during World War II. Military Air Transport Service continued to use it. MATS became MAC in early 1966 and continued using Lajes. Although C-141s were not, C-5s were equipped for aerial refueling. However, MAC had decided not to qualify its crews. It wouldn’t have made any difference; there were no tanker bases that weren’t in countries that hadn’t forbidden use of bases in their territory for support of Israel.
We got to Lajes around midnight but instead of taking the airplane on to Lod Airport at Tel Aviv, we were told that Portugal hadn’t yet granted permission and we were going into crew rest along with the other crew. When I was there before, MAC had aircrew barracks for MAC crews but for some reason we were sent to some old barracks that had been reopened to support the Israel operation. We went to the barracks and went to bed, expecting to be alerted at any time since our crew had been deadheading and didn’t need crew rest. No alert came.[1]
I awoke around noon and looked out on a flight line covered with airplanes. Several C-141s and C-5s had come in behind us. There were also some Strategic Air Command KC-135s on the ramp. There may have been some F-4s as well. The US was sending USAF fighters to Israel to replace their combat losses, but I don’t know if they had arrived at Lajes yet. The tankers were there to provide aerial refueling for them. We put on our flight suits and went somewhere to eat. I found the time to write a letter to my bride. I mailed it at base ops. Not long after we got back to the barracks, we were alerted. However, instead of taking the airplane we had come in on the night before, we were given a Travis airplane. The Dover bird had been buried behind it. It was sometime in the afternoon. The airplane was loaded with ammunition so we loadmasters didn’t have anything to do except order the snack packs we ate instead of flight lunches. MAC crewmembers were tightwads – if we ordered a regular flight lunch, we’d lose our per diem, so we ordered the thirty-five cent snacks, which consisted of a sandwich, usually ham, a chicken leg and a Little Debbie.
We’d probably been alerted three hours before our scheduled takeoff time and reported two hours prior. An hour or so before takeoff, the officers arrived. Our aircraft commander, Lt. Col. Tedd Griffith, gathered everyone in the cargo compartment for a briefing. Portugal had finally given permission for MAC transports to continue from Lajes to Lod Airport, but none had yet arrived in Israeli airspace. One historian (who wasn’t there) recorded that a C-5 took off with the MAC airlift command element but had to abort and turn back. I doubt that this is true since our crew was first in the stage. I have a copy of Colonel Donald Strobaugh’s report, he was the ALCE commander, and without digging it out and looking at it, I’m pretty sure he was on a C-141. My recollection has always been that we were the first into Lod. However, the official history of the operation, dubbed NICKEL GRASS, listed Lt. Col. Josh Hensen as the aircraft commander. Hensen was the AC on the crew we deadheaded with. It also says the first C-5 into Lod was a Travis airplane. We were flying a Travis airplane. The time given is also the time we arrived at Lod. Col. Griffith gave us some disturbing news – Egypt was threatening to shoot down any transports that entered Israeli airspace. “Where are the parachutes?” I asked. Col. Griffith gave me a funny look. Air Force regulations stipulated that everyone on board airplanes entering hostile airspace were to wear parachutes. MAC, however, was not a combat command and it did not put parachutes on its airplanes. Griffith responded that there weren’t any available. I was incensed. These idiots were sending us on a mission where there were threats we would be shot down – and we had no parachutes!
I seriously considered getting off the airplane. I had spent several years of my life flying combat and combat support missions in Southeast Asia, including some over North Vietnam and Laos. I had some 1,500 combat sorties to my credit. To say I was not thrilled at the prospect of being shot down in a C-5 with no hope of survival is an understatement. But, I didn’t. I mouthed off but stayed on the airplane. I fumed the entire flight when I wasn’t sleeping in the crew bunkroom. Griffith had told us that the United States had warned Egypt and Syria that if they shot down an American transport, the US would enter the war. The Israeli Air Force had promised to protect us. I wasn’t afraid, I was mad. To think MAC would send it’s people in harm’s way without parachutes – against Air Force regulations! Allegedly, some general, probably MAC commander P.K. Carlton, had waived the requirement. I kept thinking about not seeing my young bride again.
Although we took off in daylight, we soon entered darkness. Our route was across the Atlantic from Lajes to Gibraltar then generally up the center of the Mediterranean to keep us out of Egyptian airspace to a point where we made a turn to enter Israeli airspace. Allegedly, the Navy’s Sixth Fleet had fighters up to escort us. If so, we never saw them. Not so the Israelis. True to their word, a flight of IAF F-4s met us. Their red and green navigation lights and flashing read beacons looked good! I finally relaxed. They settled in right off of our wing and escorted us to Lod. We landed without incident. The tower directed us to a parking area that I believe was in front of the airline terminal. I don’t know because I never left the airplane. We were met by a crowd of Israelis wearing blue and white uniforms. Some wore military uniforms. They climbed into the airplane and were preparing to offload the ammunition a box at a time by hand when a white cargo truck pulled up behind the airplane. It was similar to the 25-K loaders the Air Force used and was used to load pallets onto EL AL’s Boeing 707s and 747 (they only had one.) I don’t remember if there was just the one or if there were more. The Israeli’s pushed the pallets off the airplane onto the loader. It took awhile to offload because the driver had to take the pallets somewhere and get them off his truck.
After we finished offloading the cargo, an EL AL flight attendant in uniform came up the crew ladder. She invited us to come down to her truck and partake of the goodies. We took her up on her invitation. She had sandwiches, soft drinks – Israeli brands – coffee and snacks. I took a sandwich and was surprised that it was ham! I suppose it was Kosher. I took an orange drink and probably a snack. We had coffee on the airplane. Those $6,000 coffee makers made good coffee! The engineers put on fuel. I don’t remember if they brought out the fuel in trucks or if we were parked at a fuel pit. The officers weren’t with us. They left the airplane and went into the terminal where El Al had set up a special “MAC Lounge” for the crews to wait while the airplane was being offloaded. The only place I went off of the airplane was the snack truck. I don’t think it was on that first trip, but on one of the trips I made into Lod, the officers came back carrying pewter key chains the Israeli’s had made up. When I got home, I put my keys on it. We used it for several years. The last I remember of it; it was in a drawer in my desk. That desk is long gone, I gave it to my son. He’s been dead twenty years. I believe Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, paid a visit to a C-5 but it wasn’t us. We were there in the middle of the night – literally. I’ve heard they presented the officers with bouquets of roses, but I don’t remember seeing them. I don’t suppose they were for the enlisted swine.
Once I saw the IAF fighters alongside us, I lost my fears of hostile action. There was no concern around Lod as the fighting was some distance away, although when it comes to Israel, “some distance” is not very far. The whole country isn’t much bigger than the state of Delaware, which comes in right behind Rhode Island in size. They were fighting in the Sinai, which is a hundred miles from Tel Aviv, and with the Syrians in the north. After the engineers finished fueling and the officers showed up, we started engines and departed for the return flight to Lajes. I don’t recall anything about it.
While we were flying supplies into Israel, Soviet transports were making deliveries to Egypt and Syria. I don’t know their routes, but the Soviet airplanes were transiting the same airspace we were and were handled by the same air traffic controllers. Some of our pilots conversed with Soviet pilots on a discreet radio channel. I sat in the jump seat behind the pilots and listened to the conversations. The Soviet pilots spoke English; it was the international language for air traffic control. The Soviet pilots were just as concerned as we were. The last thing they wanted was to go to war with the United States.
When we returned to Lajes, we surrendered the airplane and went into crew rest and entered the crew stage. I’m not certain if the stage was directional, meaning going west after coming out of Lod, or nondirectional, meaning a crew could be alerted to take an airplane in either direction. It seems to me it was nondirectional, and we went back to Lod before we were finally sent in the direction of Dover. I say “in the direction” because even though we were going to Dover, we were only going to crew rest then continue on to Nellis AFB, Nevada with our load. I assume MAC kept us with the load because it was classified. The crew who brought the airplane into Lajes had picked up a load consisting of a Soviet-made radar van and several supporting vehicles the Israelis had captured in the desert. We speculated that it was bound for Jackass Flats, a classified test center in the Nevada desert north of Las Vegas. Wherever it was going, it was going to receive a thorough going over by Air Force and probably CIA specialists as well as civilian weapons experts to determine it’s strong and weak points.
We arrived at Dover on Sunday morning. I don’t remember if it was the Sunday after we left or two weeks later. It seemed like I had been away from my wife a long time. I somehow learned that she was on charge of quarters duty at the WAF barracks. I called her and she said she’d find somebody to take the duty for pay. She picked me up and we went to our house in base housing and went to bed. She dropped me at the squadron the next morning. We took off and flew most of the way across the country to Nellis, which is located just north of Las Vegas near the McCarren Airport.[2] For some reason, we were scheduled to remain overnight at Nellis. Perhaps someone at MAC saw it as an R&R to compensate for our time away from home. Personally, I’d rather have BEEN home with my wife and our dogs! Instead of putting us in a hotel near the base, we were sent to one of the hotel/casinos on the Strip. I don’t gamble, I’d learned my lesson the day I got my first paycheck with flight pay, and didn’t drink much but the $4.50 prime rib was pretty good. There was no reason for us to stay at Nellis. We flew with augmented crews, meaning we had a third pilot and other additional crewmembers, and thus had a twenty-four-hour crew day.
I didn’t fly any trips picking up ammunition. The crew I was with on my first mission caught the airplane after the crew had picked up their load. The one mission I remember where we picked something up was only across Chesapeake Bay to the Aberdeen Proving Ground to pick up a load of experimental armor. The Army evidently wanted the Israelis to put it on some of their tanks and test it under combat conditions. We loaded the airplane then flew back to Dover for fuel and continued on to Lajes where we entered the stage. I don’t recall any loads of armored vehicles. Rather, the loads I carried were ammunition, meaning large caliber ammunition for artillery. They were the same kinds of loads I had carried in Vietnam, meaning Class A explosives, which is usually artillery shells. There were deliveries of tanks and other vehicles; I didn’t carry them.
One of my trips into Lod was in daytime. Since my time was occupied with offloading the airplane, I didn’t really see much on the ramp. My main recollection is noticing cotton with ripe bolls growing all over the airport next to the taxiways and runways. Israelis had a reputation for resourcefulness and use of their land, which wasn’t much. The entire country is small. We took off to the east and climbed out so we could see most of the country, which was noticeably green in comparison to the surrounding desert. The green was obviously from irrigation. I am a fundamentalist Baptist and the belief that Israel is the fulfillment of Bible prophesy is almost doctrine in fundamentalist churches. Although I had yet to read Hal Lindsey’s book The Late Great Planet Earth, I was aware that one of the prophesies was that the desert would bloom. I’m not sure that what is now Israel was technically desert. The Sinai is to the southwest but only a small part of it is in Israel. For that matter, much of what is now Israel was formerly Judea. The Kingdom of Israel was in the north.
NICKEL GRASS continued for a month, from October 13 to November 14. The airlift continued for a couple of weeks after hostilities ceased to allow Israel to build up its arsenal. I haven’t been able to find numbers for the cost of the airlift and the supplies delivered to Israel. A question is who paid for it. It’s not really a question because the answer is obvious – the US taxpayer. Although few Americans seem to be aware of it, Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid by far, and the bulk of the aid goes to the Israeli military. The United States gives Israel the funds to “purchase” US military equipment each year. There can be little doubt that Israel never paid one thin dime for the ammunition, tanks, other vehicles and airplanes the United States gave them.
Israel added insult to injury by billing the United States for the fuel put in the tanks of the transports at Lod Airport (now called Ben Gurion Airport) and for the trinkets and roses given to the flight crews “as a token from a grateful nation.” They included the cost of the “free” refreshments provided by the pretty El Al stewardesses. That’s bad enough, but the Air Force personnel temporarily assigned to Lod to support the airlift and the flight crews that stayed overnight learned that their Israeli hosts jacked up the rate of the rooms they stayed in and the meals they ate. When we learned about the billing, many of us became incensed. I knew one C-5 crew chief at Dover who was Jewish. He went to Lod with the airlift support element. I saw him dressed in civilian clothes and wearing his Yarmulke while helping the Israelis push pallets. I saw him one day on the flight line at Dover and he was still griping about how the Israelis had ripped them off.
I can’t say I am particularly proud of my participation in the airlift to Israel. I am far more proud of my time in Vietnam. Other than the uniqueness of the situation in that we were restricted to Lajes as an enroute stop and the multiple missions, operations were routine MAC C-5 missions. Although there was the threat of enemy interception prior to the first mission, that threat vanished when it became obvious the Egyptians and Syrians weren’t going to attack any transports. Accounts of the operation claim we were escorted by US Navy Sixth Fleet fighters. If so, I never saw them. The only escorting fighters I saw were the Israeli Phantoms that came up off our wing on that first mission. Nor were we in any danger on the ground at Lod. The closest fighting was a hundred miles away in the Sinai. While Lod was well within range of Syrian fighters, there were no air attacks on the airport or the city of Tel Aviv. As far as I know, no medals or unit decorations were awarded for the airlift. Not that I cared; I already had a chest full of ribbons from Vietnam. I don’t know if the flight engineers logged our time in Israeli airspace as combat or not.
As I write this, Israel is once again under attack on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kipper War. This time the attacks aren’t from one of Israel’s neighbors, but are from the Palestinian group Hamas, a Muslim group whose stated goal is the liberation of Palestine. Using the Gaza Strip as their base, they’ve fired hundreds of rockets into Israeli settlements and taken Israelis captive. Israel has responded with artillery and air strikes. One IAF airstrike hit an Indonesian hospital. The death toll in Israel is climbing, it was at 700 the last I saw. This is not the first Hamas attack on Israel since the organization took over Gaza in 2007 and it won’t be the last. Should Israel invade Gaza, which they are likely to do, they’re likely to provoke widespread war in the Middle East, a war Israel is likely to lose. Should Israel find itself losing, they are likely to use nuclear weapons, as Golda Meir was preparing to do in 1973 before the United States took up the task of replenishing their conventional arsenal.
[1] Several articles about NICKEL GRASS claim the airlift was delayed by 50 knot crosswinds at Lajes. This is news to me. We were on the first airplane to land at Lajes and there was no delay. We arrived around midnight and departed the next afternoon around five. The delay was Portuguese hesitancy to approve the use of Lajes for the airlift, not high winds.
[2] The airport was renamed for the late Senator Harry Reid, even though Pat McCarren did more for aviation and the state of Nevada then Reid ever did.
tennesseeflyboy 