Arieh O'Sullivan published an article on 17 May giving various bits of information and speculation about Germans, Yugoslav Moslems, and other non-Arabs serving with Arab armed forces during the Israeli War for Independence.

I too heard of foreigners serving with the Arabs in that period while interviewing large numbers of MaHaL volunteers who came to Israel to fight. Quite a few of them mentioned seeing or hearing of non-Arabs serving with the enemy forces.

The stories I most consistently heard were of Yugoslav Moslems who came here to fight. Of them I have no hard information, and, judging from O'Sullivan's article, neither does anybody else.

I did however spend several months in Cairo looking for and interviewing most of the surviving Royal Egyptian Air Force of the early generation, and I came up with some interesting material there.

In the Egyptian Air Force itself, there were no non-Egyptians that I know of. Egyptian commanders who had flown against Israel told me that they felt they had no need for non-Egyptian pilots; their problem was an acute lack of aircraft, even as Israel suffered from having too few fighters and bombers. Both sides were under an arms embargo, and both sides thought up a number of creative and clever ways to smuggle airplanes to their respective air forces. Israel bought, smuggled, or stole aircraft from the United States, Czechoslovakia, and Great Britain; the Egyptians found a way to acquire Italian Fiat fighters. The Fiats were superior to the Messerschmidts Israel bought from Czechoslovakia.

Egyptian fighter pilots were trained to fly, but the British RAF who trained them, denied them operational training of the kind RAF pilots received after the flight course. This placed the Egyptian pilots at a great disadvantage when competing with Israeli fighter pilots, most of whom were volunteers who had flown in combat in the American and British air forces during the Second World War. Some advanced pilots to train the Egyptians in the finer points of maintaining formation and dogfighting, but no Egyptian told me they had such pilots.

RAF Documents preserved in London state that the Operations Officer of the Royal Egyptian Air Force tried to get the British RAF, who maintained bases in Egypt at that time, to second him RAF fighter pilots, who would wear Egyptian uniforms and go into combat against Israel. The British declined to do this. The Egyptian general himself did not mention this episode to me when I interviewed him decades later.

What the Egyptians do seem to have done was to get the RAF itself involved in fighting Israel during the period leading up to the incident of 7 January, 1949, when Israel knocked down five RAF airplanes with no losses of its own. The British squadron leader subsequently wrote reports on his squadron's action that day in which he stated that his Spitfires were on "unarmed recce", which means they flew unarmed over ground combat between Egypt and Israel, but I happen to know that the British were armed, and that they strafed Israeli soldiers on the ground in an act of war. This was a success for the Egyptian Ops Officer I met. He struck me as a capable general who had been dealt a very weak hand to play, but who managed to make the best of it.

Israel employed a number of Swedish pilots to fly in the Air Transport Command. These Swedes flew Dakotas and other transport aircraft between Israel and Czechoslovakia in the airlift that brought Czech arms to this country. According to people I met who knew them, and specifically an Israeli woman who had been married to one, other Swedish pilots flew for the Arabs. The Israeli Swedish pilots reportedly met each other in Europe and cracked jokes about their respective employers. I have not met these Swedes, so I know no more about them.

The Syrian air force at that time was tiny and feeble. Syria had only recently become independent, and the Syrians had built up their armed forces very little by the time they entered the war against Israel. I did not go to Syria to research the Syrian air force, because it might be bad for my health.

While in Egypt, several people told me that the Syrians had a pair of German Luftwaffe pilots flying for them. Their names were Seiffert and Miller or Muller or Mueller. Nobody seems to remember their first names, and Miller is a common German name with many spelling variations. Egyptian pilots told me that the one called Seiffert subsequently flew civil aircraft in Egypt, that he married an Egyptian woman, and that he and she later returned to Germany. I was alas unable to obtain an address for him.

Egyptians who knew this Seiffert told me that he had been captured in Syria, where he was serving with the Luftwaffe, before the British (with help from the early Palmach) took the country from the Vichy French. When the war ended, Seiffert left his POW status. The newly independent Syrian government hired him and the other German pilot to help them establish Syrian aviation. Egyptians who knew Seiffer told me that he had no wish to return to Germany in 1945, because the country was wrecked and occupied, and he had the job offer in Syria.

When Syria went to war with Israel, these two Germans flew Harvards in combat against Israel, and they trained the first Syrian fighter pilots. A Harvard, also known as a Texan, is an intermediate training craft designed to be a bridge between Pipers, with which many air forces begin pilot training, and the vastly more powerful fighters of the Spitfire generation. The Israel Air Force used them for that purpose for many years.

Both Israel and Syria used Harvards in actual combat in 1948. The Israeli Harvards were in a squadron with the Norsemen, a light transport plane Israel was using as a bomber, because Harvards and Norsemen use the same kind of engine, although the Norsemen has two of them, being heavier than the little Harvard. Israel slung bombs from the Harvard wings, causing them to sag under weight they were not built to carry, but the Harvards did good work on bombing missions against the invading Egyptian forces in the Negev.

The Syrians' Harvards were also used as bombers. They carried out missions in Galilee. The Israeli Air Force shot several of them down; they were no match for a fast fighter like the Messerschmidt, nor were their Syrian pilots well trained in evasive maneuver.

The motivations of these German pilots fighting for the Syrians remain unknown to me. They might have been willing to fight Israel for antisemitic reasons; they had been, after all, Hitler's pilots. The Egyptians who knew them seemed to speak of them as simple mercenaries.

My information about the Syrian pilots is sketchy, but it comes from Egyptians who were in a position to know at least something about it.