Air Force Eagles by Walter J. Boyne Page B

shoehorned in surplus bomber engines, great Junkers Jumo 21 IF power plants that made the already fractious Messerschmitt design even trickier to handle. The Czech pilots had rightly nicknamed it the "Mezec"—mule.
    Yet as tough as it had been in Prague, the last seven days in Israel had been real killers. As soon as the course was over, they'd flown to Israel nonstop in a war-weary Douglas C-54 crammed with the parts of a disassembled fighter plane. It transpired that he hadn't been hired as much for his flying skills as for his maintenance officer experience. Three more C-54s had shuttled in to spill out their cargos, a bewildering assortment of wings, engines, and parts. Marshall and a small team of mechanics had worked night and day to assemble four of the hybrid Avia/Messerschmitts, painting them in Israeli colors with the Star of David insignia.
    Now, completely outfitted in captured Luftwaffe flying gear, Marshall waited for a signal to fly in the defense of the new nation of Israel. It would be the first takeoff on the first combat mission of the first Israeli fighter squadron. The "Messers," as they'd come to call them, were in camouflaged revetments along a runway that was no more than a strip of roughly flattened sand. The Egyptians had complete control of the air, and the primitive birthing of the Israeli fighter force was being conducted in absolute secrecy.
    Marshall felt the tension more than anyone. Before his trip to Prague, he'd never seen a Messerschmitt except through his P-51's gunsight. A translator had helped him decipher the few German technical manuals that the Czechs had sent along, but assembling the airplanes had been mostly a cut-and-dry operation, facilitated by good mechanics willing to die from overwork. Now they were waiting to go out on a combat mission, and not one of the Avias had been test-flown, nor had any of their guns been test-fired! He wasn't sure that the bombs would come off—or that the wings would stay on.
    The squadron commander, "Moddy" Myers, limped over to brief them, still favoring a leg injury an Arab car bomb had inflicted on him. Short and bald, he spoke with a lion-like ferocity.
    "We'll take off just after dawn. Egyptian troop columns are moving on Tel Aviv. Less than two hundred fifty Israeli soldiers are available to block them. If we don't stop the column from the air, the war is over."
    He paused and roared at them, "Over, do you understand? Israel will be gone, a two-thousand-year dream destroyed. We've got to delay their attack until reserves are scraped up from somewhere."
    "We're supposed to stop them with these firecrackers? What are they, two-hundred pounders?" The speaker, an American who'd joined them only yesterday, ran his hands over the small bombs under the Messer's wing.
    Myers shrugged and turned his hands palms up. "Seventy kilos. It's all we've got. If you're on target, they'll take out a tank. Follow me and do what I do."
    They were veterans, and they understood.
    The new pilot spoke to Marshall. "I think we met at Ramitelli. You were with the 332nd, weren't you?"
    The man stepped forward, hand outstretched. He was well over six feet tall and moved with a rangy ease.
    "I'm Bayard Riley—they call me "Bear,' mostly, but around here my name's supposed to be 'Moshe Niv.' "
    Marshall recalled him at once. Riley had been a fifteen-victory ace with Quesada's Ninth Tactical Air Force—he'd been sent to Ramitelli to give a dive-bombing demonstration and a pep talk. When he left, he'd put on a dazzling twenty-minute display of low-level acrobatics.
    "Sure, I remember. You really beat up the runway in your Mustang." Then, with a diffident grin, "They call me Seffy Mizrahi here, but I can't get used to it."
    Riley commented, "The Red Tails were a good outfit. You never lost a bomber you were escorting, did you?"
    Marshall liked him immediately. Few people—even Air Force pilots—had ever heard of the pilots from Tuskegee, much less of their combat