Gordon Levett
Born into such poverty in London that his mother once placed him in an orphanage for eighteen months so he wouldn't starve,[1] Levett joined the RAF in 1939 at age 17 when World War II broke out.
But he was subsequently court-martialled and dismissed from the RAF after taking unauthorized leave from his remote Burma base, and so after the war was unable to find work as an aviator.
The Mahal pilots, mostly English Jews, began ferrying dismantled Avia S-199s (a modified Messerschmitt-109G with a bomber engine and gunpods) fighter aircraft from their base in Žatec, Czechoslovakia, where a group of mostly American Jewish volunteers had assembled a fleet of transport aircraft acquired in the United States, to Ekron airbase in an operation codenamed Operation Balak.
[3] Levett's job was shuttling the Avias and an enormous cache of arms bought from the Czechs, with Soviet approval, to Israel.
Located on an out-of-the-way road in a rural area some 20 miles from the East German border, the Czech base was a primitive facility with a small control tower, a few huts and a single concrete runway used by the Luftwaffe during World War II.
The hazardous trips, recounted by Levett in his memoir Flying Under Two Flags: An RAF Pilot in Israel's War of Independence,[5] skirted enemy groundfire and hostile fighter planes in making their deliveries.
The Avia fighters, dismantled and flown in pieces from the Czech base, were reassembled and painted in new colors when they arrived in Israel.
The squadron, which included Ezer Weizman (later commander of the Israeli Air Force, Minister of Defense and President of Israel), was instrumental in the war.
"One American fighter pilot," he wrote, "was getting 2,000 dollars-a-month and a 500-dollar bonus for every enemy aircraft he shot down," Levett recalled in his memoir.
"[4] Before he began flying the hazardous sorties for 101 Squadron, Levett had kept secret from his Israeli handlers the fact that he had never flown a single RAF combat mission in a fighter, although he had trained in them.
Recruited in March 1948 by emissaries in Europe of the Haganah, the Jewish fighting force in Palestine, Mr. Levett was viewed with a healthy dose of suspicion."
"Their expertise was critical," noted the Times, "in helping what was previously an underground Zionist force win the war against the Arab armies."
Some flights by the neophyte fighter pilot Levett involved actual bombing raids using transport planes jury rigged into bombers.
Later, Levett heard a rumor that former Luftwaffe pilots had been recruited as mercenaries by the Arab forces, and he wondered if he would have to face an old foe.
"Looking back, I have neither failed nor succeeded, the fate of most of us," Levett wrote in his memoir, "but I shall leave the world a better place than when I entered it because I helped found the State of Israel."
He began ferrying planes for aircraft companies, often flying back to Israel for El Al Airline.
