No Trophy, No Sword : An American Volunteer in the Israeli Air Force During the 1948 War of Independence Book

Harold Livingston was one of a eclectic group of former World War II aviators, mainly Jews, who in early 1948 volunteered to fly arms and fighter planes to Israel. The beleaguered infant nation possessed little or no modern military equipment and not a single fighter plane to defend itself against relentless enemy aerial attacks. The volunteer flyers had embarked on a veritable "Mission Impossible": flying war-weary C-46 transport airplanes, the aviators not only would have to circumvent the British blockade of the Palestine coast, they would have to first smuggle their airplanes out of the United States, which had imposed an embargo on the export of all military aircraft. After a series of adventures, escapades, and outrageous acts of chutzpah that carried them from the U.S. to Panama, Brazil, Africa, and Italy, the flyers finally reached their destination, a secret airstrip behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia. There, they took on their cargoes of arms and ammunition - and fighter aircraft, ironically, Nazi-designed Messerschmitts. These volunteer flyers were crucial to the success of Israel's war for independence. For Harold Livingston, the American who had always considered his Jewishness an unalterable accident of birth, it was the beginning of what would be a long and arduous voyage of self-discovery. No Trophy, No Sword is Harold Livingston's personal story, but it is framed within the monumental events of a far more important story: the creation and survival of the State of Israel.