As it prepared to ward off an invasion by five well-equipped neighboring armies in 1948, newborn Israel lacked the weapons to defend itself. Enter Al Schwimmer, an American World War II veteran who feared a repeat of the Holocaust. He created factitious airlines, bought decommissioned transport airplanes from the U.S. War Asset Administration, fixed them in California and New Jersey, and sent his pilots—Jewish and non-Jewish WWII aviators—to pick up rifles, bullets, and fighter planes from the only country willing to break the international arms embargo: Czechoslovakia.
For the crime of delivering these and other weapons—including three B-17 bombers, which, along with the other planes he brought in, formed the nucleus of the Israeli Air Force—Schwimmer and some of the key members of his team paid a heavy price. They lost their civil rights after being convicted of breaking the arms embargo and the 1939 Neutrality Act. Years later, three different presidents would pardon three of them.
As told by journalist and filmmaker Boaz Dvir, this mostly unknown chapter in history reads like a thriller. The operation members risked their lives, freedom, and American citizenship to prevent what they viewed as a possible second Holocaust. Their story is one of a covert mission involving smuggling arms, evading the FBI and State Department, connecting to underground Jewish intelligence and military groups, gaining the support of the mafia, ferrying arms—mostly Nazi surplus weapons and fighter planes—across thousands of miles, and taking them into combat.
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