Lou Lenart: A Hero for Our Tenebrous Times

Seventy-six years ago today a single act of courage may have saved the newborn state of Israel

Thirty years ago, pursuing a lifelong dream, I wrote a film script. It told the story of the legendary British general, Orde Wingate. The father of guerrilla warfare, Wingate was in many ways the founder of the IDF. A Christian Zionist posted to Jerusalem in the 1930s, he trained five future chiefs-of-staff, among them Yigal Alon and Moshe Dayan, and taught the Jews how to fight. It seemed only fitting that Ha-Yedid, as his soldiers called him, “The Friend,” who later battled for Asian and African freedom as well, should have a Hollywood blockbuster based on his life.

So I wrote the script, Orde, and started hunting for a producer. That search, little did I suspect, introduced me to a man no less heroic than Wingate, an American Zionist who, though no streets or schools are named for him, was equally instrumental in securing Israel’s rebirth.

Lou Lenart was well into his sixties by the time I met him, but still indomitably youthful, fit, and fully enjoying his bachelor pad in Tel Aviv’s then-chic Kikar Ha-Medina. A producer of six action films and an advisor to Cast a Giant Shadow, the biopic of American-Israeli General Mickey Marcus, starring Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, and Frank Sinatra, he seemed custom-made for Orde. And he couldn’t have been more hospitable. No sooner had I knocked on his door when he invited me in, made me coffee and asked me rapid-fire questions about my life. I knew nothing of his, not beyond his filmography. But then I noticed a black-and-white photograph on his wall.

It showed a much younger Lou, bare-chested, helmeted, and armed with a .45 pistol and commando knife. “You fought in World War II,” I surmised. “Where?”

Lou shot me the boyish grin I would come to know as his trademark. It served as his semaphore for a story that would grip me for the hour or more it took him to relate it—a chronicle of sacrifice and courage that still inspires me today and which every Israeli family, in these seemingly lightless times especially, should recall.

Born Lajos Lenovitz in 1921, Lou’s farming family moved from western Hungary to the northeastern Pennsylvanian city of Wilkes-Barre. Not knowing a word of English and one of the few Jews in the gruff mining community, the ten-year-old Lenart suffered anti-Semitism almost daily and couldn’t wait to escape.

His opportunity came at age 17 when, after completing a Charles Atlas body-building course, Lou joined the Marines. Once again, Lou found himself the lone Jew in his often Jew-hating troop, yet he breezed through the brutal training and was accepted into Marine flight school.

With few exceptions, fighter squadrons at the time were exclusive WASP clubs. Jewish pilots, particularly those with Hungarian accents, were exceedingly rare. Yet, once again he excelled and was assigned to fly the formidable F4U Corsair fighter-bomber, the backbone of the Navy’s carrier and land-based air power. Then came the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Within days, Lou deployed to the Pacific Theater.

Before he could fight, though, while training for aerial combat, Lou’s Corsair was hit by another plane and corkscrewed toward earth. “I saw this big orange sun and thought ‘how beautiful life is and what a shame I’ve got to leave it,’” Lou later told me. Miraculously surviving the crash, he was nevertheless severely wounded, unlikely ever to walk again, much less fly. But recover and fly he did, participating in several Pacific operations, culminating in the war’s last great battle on Okinawa.

That was where the photo of him I saw in his apartment was taken.

“You were a pilot,” I asked him. “Why were you dressed like a grunt?”

Again, that impish grin. “I loved the Marines. Between my missions, I always went out with them on patrol.”

The war ended and Lou, though now a decorated captain, was out of a job. He barnstormed around Central and South America, during which time he learned that fourteen of his relatives, among them his grandmother, were murdered in Auschwitz. But he also heard that the United Nations, in November 1947, had voted to create a Jewish state in Palestine, and that the Arabs pledged to destroy it. The newborn state would need an army and the army would need an air force.

Though never a fervid Zionist, overnight Lou became one. Recruited by Al Schwimmer, an American air engineer, Lou joined veteran pilots from multiple countries who volunteered to fly for the soon-to-be declared Jewish State.

There was only one problem: No planes. Lou found himself in Italy where the Mafia had been hired by the Zionists to help procure World War II surplus freight planes. One of these aircraft, a Pressman with a range of 350 miles, was supposed to reach Palestine, almost four times that distance. Lou removed the seats and filled the cabin with a big rubber fuel bag from which he fed the engine throughout the 11-hour flight. With no maps, radio, or parachute, his landing at Lydia (Lod) air base was, he later described it, “a miracle of the oil.”

The fighter pilots arrived, but they had no fighter planes. The Jews also lacked tanks and artillery. The situation was critical. The armies of Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, and Iraq, all lavishly equipped by Britain and France, were poised to attack the Jewish state the moment it declared independence.

Israel did, on May 14, 1948, and Tel Aviv was immediately strafed by Egyptian Spitfires. Egyptian armor and infantry, meanwhile, advanced from Sinai to Gaza and then along the coast toward Tel Aviv. No serious Jewish force stood in the enemy’s way. If the city fell, so, almost certainly, would the state.

Just then, four giant crates arrived in Israel. They contained, disassembled and packed in grease, Czech-made Messerschmitt fighter bombers. Lou and three other young men would be the first combat pilots in the Israeli Air Force, flying—ironically—planes designed by Nazi Germany.

But first they had to be put together. In a camouflaged hangar at Lydia base, repeatedly harassed by Egyptian bombers, the Messerschmitts were hastily reconstructed. Still, there was no time to test-fly them. The Egyptians had reached the Lachish River bridge near Ishdud (Ashdod), a mere 26 miles from Tel Aviv.

On May 29–seventy-six years ago today—they took off. Following Lou’s command were Eddie Cohen from South Africa and two sabras, Modi Alon and Israel’s future president, Ezer Weizman. “We had never flown the planes before,” Lou told the Jerusalem Post in 2012. “We didn’t know if they would fly or if the guns would work.” With only one machine gun per plane and four 70-kilo bombs, the Israelis were supposed to stop the entire Egyptian army.

Again, without maps or radios, the pilots had to rely on hand signals and simply fly south until they spotted the Egyptians. “I looked down and I saw a line of tanks and trucks as far as the eye could see,” Lou told me. “I immediately executed a dive.” His machine gun jammed and Cohen’s plane was downed by anti-aircraft fire, but Lou, Alon and Weizman all managed to unleash their bombs on target. The Messerschmitts returned to base leaving rows of flaming vehicles behind them.

The Egyptians were stunned. Israel was not supposed to have an air force. They immediately abandoned their northern assault. Tel Aviv, and most likely the nation, was saved.

Though devastated by Cohen’s death—“We lost a quarter of our pilots”—Lou understood the immensity of his action. “It was the most important moment of my life,” he’d attest. “I was born to be there at that precise moment in history.” And what a short history Israel would have had, I often reminded myself, if not for Lou Lenart.

The Battle of Ad Halom (Up to this Point and No Further) Bridge, as it came to be known, was far from Lou’s last. He founded the IAF’s famed Squadron 101 and, on a sketch pad, designed its winged death’s head emblem. Two weeks after Ad Halom, Lou was present on a Tel Aviv beach watching as Israeli forces fired on and sunk the Irgun weapons’ ship Altalena. “They ordered me to take part in the attack but I refused,” he recalled. “I came to fight the Arabs, not kill Jews.”

Later still, Lou served as the air coordinator for Palmach commander Yitzhak Rabin. The Marine flight jacket that Rabin wears in many of his photographs from this period was given to him by Lou during a siege of an Egyptian fortress. “It was a really cold morning and I saw him shivering,” he said.

Israel’s War of Independence ended, but not Lou’s service to the nascent Jewish state. He became one of El Al’s first pilots and participated in a number of classified operations, including the 1950-51 airlifts of Iraqi Jews to Israel.

Later in that decade, Lou moved to Los Angeles where he worked in the film industry and for a period acted as the general manager of the San Diego Clippers. He married twice, divorced, but never grew tired of romance. His heart, though, remained in Israel, and he returned in the 1980s. There, he retained close friendships with Israeli leaders across the political spectrum. Years after our first meeting, in 2009, he picked up the phone to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and insisted that he appoint me as Israel’s ambassador to the United States.

By that time, though, we had become fast friends. We met often and spoke about politics, history, and his never-abating social life. As he entered his nineties, he asked me what he could leave me when he died. Without hesitation, I replied, “That photo of you on Okinawa.” It occupies a prideful place on my bookshelf.

Lou Lenart was one of the volunteer IAF pilots interviewed for Nancy Spielberg’s stirring documentary, “Above and Beyond.” I saw it four times. Shortly after, in 2015, I sat at Lou’s bedside during the final days of his life. Last May 29, I attended a memorial for him organized by his daughter, Michal, to mark the 75th anniversary of the fateful Ad Halom raid.

Though twice optioned, my film script about Orde Wingate was never produced. But whatever disappointment I might have experienced was far more than compensated for by the thrill and privilege of befriending Lou. Here was a man to whom Israel and the Jewish people owe so much yet who received so little recognition in return. A soldier whose example of valor and selflessness is followed, however unknowingly, by the myriad Israelis defending our country today. Lou Lenart, a hero much bigger than any screen.