Authors: Boris Senior
The next step after the widening of the Anglo-U.S. embargo to include civilian aircraft in April 1948 was to form a charter nonscheduled company in Johannesburg, which we called Westair, to register the C-47s. In May 1948, this charter company became Universal Airlines and began a twice-weekly service to Israel. Most of its passengers were former South African army and air force veterans who had volunteered to join the Jewish forces in Palestine. Westair became a vital link between South Africa and Palestine. Moreover, while on their normal passenger runs, the C-47s were used, after their arrival in Palestine, to fly urgent supplies to beleaguered kibbutzim during their turnaround. After the war, Universal became part of Israel's national carrier El Al.
Unknown to most, including the South African government to this day, one of the C-47s even carried out a night bombing raid on Damascus while it had large South African registration letters on its fuselage and wings. The Anson went by the West African route but crashed en route. The rest of the aircraft purchased in South Africa eventually arrived in Palestine. They tripled the entire fleet of planes we
had in the air service when I left for Johannesburg on 15 February 1948.
The South African government appeared to ignore our activities, and we were able to operate largely without hindrance throughout the fateful year of 1948. Despite this I soon became of much interest to the special branch of the South African Police Department. I realized it was essential to get the airplanes out of the country as soon as possible, and, after I decided to be the first to make the journey to Palestine, I left in late April in one Bonanza while Cyril accompanied me in another Bonanza. We cleared customs at Pietersburg on the northern border of South Africa after submitting flight plans for Lusaka in northern Rhodesia, now Zambia.
During the flight I was puzzled that when the northern Transvaal Mountains and valleys gave way to bush and scrub there was no sign of human habitation for hundreds of miles. Though the countryside looked fertile and well watered, I could make out only a very occasional desolate-looking village of round African huts with straw or grass roofs.
I discovered later that this part of Africa was a prohibited area for flying as it is a zone of sleeping sickness, the scourge of Africa. I was later reprimanded by the Rhodesian Civil Aviation authorities for using that route, and they set up a board of inquiry. During the exhaustive investigation, we
did not disclose our true destination and they accepted our story that we were on our way to England.
After a three-and-a-half-hour flight in the turbulent midday heat, I landed at Lusaka. When I refueled, I discovered that the auxiliary fuel tank installed in the cabin had collapsed because of faulty installation in Johannesburg. Because of the long distance from Wadi Halfa in the Sudan to Tel Aviv, I had ordered long-range tanks to be flown in from the United States and hurriedly installed in the Bonanzas in Johannesburg. Because I was always urging everyone connected with the operation to complete the job quickly, I felt partly to blame for their having neglected to remove a seal on the pipe leading from the tank to the engine. When the pump drew fuel, it created a strong underpressure because of the sealed air inlet pipe. This meant that I could not fly nonstop from Wadi Halfa to Palestine but would have to refuel at Luxor in Egypt. This was not a very desirable route through a hostile country, which was already giving support to the Arab irregular forces and was fated eventually to become Israel's most powerful enemy. But I had no alternative.
In the meantime, Cyril was nowhere to be seen though his Bonanza was a trifle faster than mine. After two hours of anxious waiting, a message came, delivered part of the way by an African with a note in a cleft stick. It informed me that Cyril had landed at a strip in the jungle near the Zambezi River and couldn't take off because his flaps didn't work.
The maintenance engineer of Central African Airways in Lusaka graciously agreed to accompany me with his bag of
tools to fly to Cyril. I found the strip at Chirundu by the Zambezi River in wild country. In that area there is neither habitation nor any sign of human life, and Cyril was very relieved to see me. He said he had lost his way while airsick from the turbulence he had encountered. We couldn't fix the flaps, and I decided we should leave for Salisbury (now Harare) about an hour's flight away to get help.
The three of us climbed into my Bonanza, and I taxied to the end of the strip. As it was a short strip, I opened to full throttle with my feet firmly on the brakes to lessen the distance required for takeoff, then released the brakes. I sensed something was wrong but kept the throttle fully open to get flying speed as quickly as possible while holding the stick in the pit of my stomach to lift the nose.
Suddenly the nose lurched down and hit the ground and the propeller smashed. We ended up in an almost vertical position, but we were unhurt. It seems that the surface had given way and the nose-wheel of the Bonanza had sunken deeply into the ground. We realized that the strip was covered with sun-baked mud and that underneath the thin layer of hard surface was a deep bed of mud because of our proximity to the river.
We left a black ranger to guard the aircraft and struck out for Salisbury in a truck. After a while, we were surprised to discover a police post not far away. We spent the night in that wild and desolate part of Africa in the police post with a few black rangers. We were in the malaria belt, but having taken anti-malaria pills, we thought that we were reasonably safe.
As night came we began to hear the cacophony of jungle
night noises. I heard the roaring of lions close by and the trumpeting of elephants. I was worried about the aircraft parked on the deserted strip nearby, but it would have been foolhardy to venture out of the police post at night. We tried to get some sleep on the floor, and at first light, we made our way to the strip. There we saw monkeys climbing happily all over the aircraft but more worrying were the traces of elephant dung close to the planes. The visits had evidently been made by the elephants with great care in pitch darkness. The trumpeting of the elephants we heard during the night had been from farther away. Again, we found a ranger to guard the aircraft and started out for Salisbury.
In Salisbury I organized a local aircraft company to repair the two Bonanzas, and eventually they were brought to the city by road. Mine was badly damaged because the engine had lifted itself off its bearers. Cyril's aircraft was eventually made serviceable by a Rhodesian company and was later flown to Palestine. Mine arrived only after the war was over.
I returned to Johannesburg by train, where I woke up in the morning with a splitting headache and a high temperature. A doctor diagnosed malignant malaria, and I spent a week in bed delirious and disoriented. So the anti-malaria pills had not managed to protect me from the mosquitoes in the jungles of the Zambezi. The failure of the mission didn't help my mood. As soon as I could get out of bed, I ordered another Bonanza. Finance for all aircraft purchases and
other costs came without any difficulty or questions from the South African Zionist Federation.
By now the South African police were watching my every step, and I felt it likely they would impound my second aircraft if I tried to leave with it for Palestine. I asked Cecil Wulfsohn, an experienced pilot who had flown the Cairo-Johannesburg route many times during World War II, to fly the Bonanza out of the country for me. We linked him with a young lady of an Afrikaans family having close connections to the establishment in South Africa as a kind of partner or paramour. The ruse worked. They departed without problems.
Cecil handed the plane over to me in Rhodesia after getting it out of South Africa, and I continued on the flight to Palestine. The route crossed the whole continent of Africa, a distance of more than 10,000 kilometers of savannah ending over uninhabited and largely uncharted deserts. Anyone undertaking this flight, in addition to maps, must be well equipped with water, food, hand compass, anti-malaria tablets, and some kind of weapon for self-defense.
The route over Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), Tanzania (formerly Tanganyika), Kenya, Sudan, Egypt, and finally the Sinai Desert meant five days of solo flying with no radio contact and no navigation aids. It was an endurance test with heavy turbulence but fair visibility until the buildup in the early afternoon of the gigantic cumulonimbus storm clouds.
With no radio navigation equipment in the aircraft I had to rely entirely on map reading and dead-reckoning and the use of such landmarks as rivers and the occasional railway
line. Although I had some anxious moments, I didn't manage to lose my way.
In the early stages of the flight, the parched brown savannah lands slowly gave way to the lush green of the tropical latitudes. Great Lake Victoria kept me company on my port side for hours and soothed my eyes after the harsh scrub of the savannah lands. After Kisumu in Kenya, the White Nile River guided me as it flowed through the Great Rift that divides the African continent. Gradually, the topography gave way again to the harshness of scrub that denotes the onset of the desert wastes. Midday temperatures reached the mid-forties, and after landing, the aircraft cabin turned into an oven. I kept a large thermos of lemon tea on the seat next to me with a tap from which I could drink while flying to make sure I would not become dehydrated. I had a large packet of dry biscuits and managed to exist for the five and a half days flying on this diet.
The Blue Nile and the White Nile meet in Khartoum and continue until the Mediterranean. In the final legs of the flight, the main problem was the turbulence, which was particularly severe in the heat of the African afternoons at comparatively low altitudes. I flew as early as possible in the mornings while it was still cool. Over the Sudan, the turbulence was so violent that my only course was to fly low and skim over the Nile at about twenty feet. That was my method right across the Sudan and Egypt, following the gentle turns of the river. I had to pull up when encountering the occasional tall-masted dhows with their lateen sails as they plied their way along the river. This kind of routing takes longer but was a welcome change from the endless
beige-colored stretches of desert sand and made navigation much easier.
Without my auxiliary fuel tank, I had to stop at Luxor to spend the last night of the flight. I was unsure about landing and spending the night in what was about to be an enemy country, but I circled the field and landed. In response to Egyptian questions, I said I was on my way to England and would be heading out the next day for Beirut. I checked into one of the large hotels in Luxor. The hotel and city were full of British servicemen and servicewomen, all on short leave from their bases on the Suez Canal in Egypt.
The next day I hastened to fly the final leg to Palestine. Flight control at Luxor was polite, and their last words to me before take off after I filed the false flight plan for Beirut were, “The Jews in Palestine are causing trouble. Stay clear of them.” I thanked them for their advice and replied that I would take care. I climbed to 8,000 feet and headed for the Gulf of Suez and the Sinai desert. After two hours in the glare of the desert wastes, the blue water of the Gulf of Suez appeared ahead of me. I began to feel that after the months of effort the long and exhausting flight would soon be bearing fruit with the arrival of the first reinforcement to our waning fleet.
With a feeling of homecoming, I crossed the southern Sinai desert and after a while saw far below in the brown distance a twinkling reflection of the harsh desert sun from a roof. It was one of the kibbutzim in the southern Negev, probably Kibbutz Gevulot. As the windscreen began to fill with the green of the cultivated fields and orchards in the northern Negev I saw Nir Am, the kibbutz to the east of
Gaza and the base of the southern detachment of our squadron at Sde Dov. I also anticipated being welcomed by Ezer, who was in charge of the Negev flight at the time of my departure.
I circled the kibbutz and landed on the narrow dirt strip, looking forward to the reunion with my companions whom I had left three months before. A group of kibbutzniks stood near my open cabin door. Instead of warm, welcoming faces, I met stony and suspicious expressions. I was shocked to note that some of them were holding weapons at the ready. Eli Eyal looked at me in astonishment and rushed forward to clasp me in a warm embrace. He asked me where I had come from and when I answered, “South Africa,” there were incredulous looks from all around. I hastened to explain. They had watched the unknown silver-and-red aircraft approach from the direction of Egypt and circle the strip and thought that my aircraft was an enemy. Troops next to the runway had machine guns at the ready and were about to fire as I approached for landing. Fortunately, someone ordered to hold fire when it looked like I was about to land.
I was a target that could not have been missed approaching for a landing at low altitude and speed, and that would have been the end of me. So, after all the trials and tribulations involved in obtaining the aircraft and flying it all the way up Africa, the Bonanza and I were within an inch of ending our careers at the very moment of realizing our triumph. After refueling, I took off again and arrived at Sde Dov. Immediately after arriving, I was called to Hayarkon Street to headquarters to face a severe dressing down from
Premier Ben Gurion about the complaints from some members of the Jewish community in Johannesburg about my activities there. Unaware at that time of the desperate situation in Palestine, they thought that my insistence on declaring an emergency was unnecessary and that there was no reason for alarm.
Ben Gurion was a short, sturdy man with small, piercing dark eyes and a crop of white hair standing up high around his mostly bald pate. From his earliest youth in Poland, which he fled in 1906, he was devoted to Zionism and to socialism. He arrived as one of the early settlers in Palestine and became the leader of the powerful labor movement. He had an unusual diction in his Hebrew speech saying for instance
“avironum mivtsayum,”
instead of the more correct
“avironim mivtsaim.”
He was called the “old man or “BG” by everyone, terms of endearment, for he was the most outstanding personality in the government both before and after the founding of the State of Israel. He was well aware of the details of my mission, and I must have fielded his criticisms satisfactorily, for that was the last complaint I had from him about the South African saga.