Louis Lenart

He was born in Hungary, and immigrated to the USA with his parents when he was 10 years old.
In the summer of 1940, after he graduated from high school, he joined the Marine Corps with one target: "killing as many Nazis as possible". He served as a marine soldier for a while before being accepted to flight school. He had a bad training accident, but recovered and took part in the battles against the Japanese in the Pacific Ocean front.
After the war, he was discharged as a Captain , and came home to discover that 14 members of his family, including his grandmother, who stayed back in Hungary were murdered by the Nazis.
In early 1948 he attended a lecture on the importance of the Zionist cause. At the end of the lecture he approached the speaker and asked to join the "Hagana". A few weeks later he received a phone call with his first assignment: fly a freight plane from Italy to Israel -1300 miles, "... after a harrowing 11 hour flight, we, me and my co-pilot Cooly Goldstein, arrived. The landing was good, but as I got off the plane I told myself I would never fly another flight like that one".
May 29, 1948, only two weeks after the declaration of independence. The Egyptian army was near Ashdod, preparing their attack on Tel Aviv. Israel needed to defend itself in an absolute way the IAF's first aerial attack. This historical move was Lenart's responsibility: "There were thousands of troops, tanks and hundreds of trucks. We flew lower, dropped the bombs, and started shooting at anything we could spot. The Egyptians tried to shoot at us, but they were stunned. They didn't even know Israel had an air force. The Arabs had everything, we had nothing, and we still won. We just did not have a choice. That was our secret weapon. The mission was a success: the Egyptian forces were blocked and Tel Aviv could breath a sigh of relief."
Later on in the war he became one of the pillars of the Israeli air force.
After the war, he took part in an operation to bring 100,000 Jews from Iraq to Israel.