Milton Lichtman's Accomplishments Of Milton Rubenfeld

Milton Rubenfeld was one example of a devoted MACHAL recruit. He was a stunt pilot and World War II veteran from the RAF (Royal Air Force), and the American Air Force as well. Rubenfeld flew proudly to protect Israel, and, as reported by his son, “he felt it was his destiny”. Rubenfeld and many others like him risked their lives to fly for a country about which they knew nothing of. They were well aware of the horrors that the Jewish people had experienced during the WWII and were more than ready to ensure that it would never happen again. Some even felt that this was why they were saved from the Holocaust. As stated by Gideon Lichtman, an IAF pilot, in a recent interview, “We were born to do this”. With nothing but an everlasting hope this

The planes were unreliable and unsafe, but the pilots had neither the time or material to fix them so they hoped for the best and worked on getting them into the war zone of Palestine. The Air Transport Command (ATC), was responsible for carrying the dismantled planes, the guns, and other weaponry to Israel. The first trip was made by a Skymaster airplane to Be’er Tuvia, and landed on March 31st 1948. Many of the pilots, who would later fly in the war, first flew to Israel as pilots for the ACT, for these MACHAL veterans, this was their first glimpse of the land they were about to go risk their lives to protect. One such pilot was Freddy Fredkins an ex WWII pilot, from England. Ben-Gurion sent him to obtain fighter planes from England, and ship them to Israel without his homeland ever being the wiser. Another pilot named Boris Senior. Boris was a WWII air force veteran from South Africa, he smuggled in a shipment of DC-3 transports along with other airplanes, and the route he created later became an official mail route, for Tel-Aviv correspondence. Creating long distance fuel tanks and installing them in his planes as he smuggled them into the country, MACHAL pilot, Sam Pomerance, was one of the men primarily responsible for making the flight to Israel to more