Sam Pomerance

USA

Combat Record

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Story

Sam Pomerance volunteered to help the future state of Israel build an air force and was first assigned to be the flight mechanic on a Curtiss C-46A Commando belonging to Service Airways, a shell company that fronted the Haganah's air acquisitions in the US. With an export licence for delivery to Lineas Aereas de Panama SA (LAPSA, another Haganah shell company) in hand, the Commando left New Jersey on Mar. 6 bound for Italy, with stops in Goose Bay, Nfld.; Blue Weist 1, Greenland; Iceland; Shannon, Ireland; and Geneva.

Upon landing at Castilliona di Lago airfield, near Ambrosini, Italy, the crew found no Italian authorities and failed to notify any of their arrival. The press jumped on the story of a Service Airways airplane missing on the Geneva-Italy route, and to avoid further attention, the airplane stayed idle in Italy for two months, although it did move to a more suitable airfield.

From Italy, Pomerance was sent to Czechoslovakia to check out the S-199s, probably in April, although whether this was before or after the April 23 contract for ten of the planes was signed is unknown.

In late August, Pomerance met the newly-arrived Jack Cohen and the two men "subsequently became very friendly." (J. Cohen, 2000) Pomerance and Cohen flew to Kunovice, Czechoslovakia to approve of and modify Israel's new Spitfires. The newly purchased Spitfires could get to Israel by one of three ways: in a ship, in an air transport, or under their own power. Surface shipping took too long and while air transport was faster, the transport aircraft were resources needed elsewhere. Sam Pomerance, a crucial figure who served as Israel's mechanic-in-chief in Czechoslovakia, suggested stripping the Spitfires of all excess weight, strapping on some fuel tanks, and flying them to Israel. Sea rescue support would be provided by transports equipped with dinghies which would also carry the equipment removed from the lightened Spitfires. This plan, code-named Operation Velvetta (after a skin creme), was accepted.

Pomerance, along with Bob Dawn and a staff of Czechoslovakian mechanics, removed all non-essential equipment, like guns and radios, from the Spitfires and added extra fuel tanks. Jack Cohen explained in detail:

A Spitfire normally only has an 85-gallon fuel tank which keeps you in the air - in economical flying - about an hour and a half. So that wouldn't have taken us very far. So we fitted a slipper tank, you know, the old normal long-range tank underneath the belly (and) two long-range tanks, two cigar-shaped tanks on the bomb-racks under the wings. They were 62.5 gallons each, the long-range tank of course held 90 gallons, and then we took the complete radio out and had a special tank built to fit in where the radio was, just behind us in the cockpit.

All the fuel tanks were connected: booster pumps on the wing tanks pumped the fuel into the slipper tank, which had a gauge in the cockpit. The tank that was fitted in place of the radio - that was a 79-gallon tank - was just gravity-fed into the long-range slipper tank. Normally you would take-off on the main tank, go over to the long-range tank until the engine cut sort-of-thing, and then go back onto main. Anyway it gave us from 85 gallons to, I think it was about 370 odd gallons, which was enough, we hoped, to take us non-stop from Czecho to Israel. (Hyde 2000)

Each wing tank was actually a 300-litre Luftwaffe belly tank. The configuration was given one test, a four-and-a-half hour airborne endurance flight, which it passed. Despite the extra fuel capacity, the Israelis secured Yugoslavian permission to land and top off the tanks at Niksic, an abandoned Luftwaffe air base in the Yugoslavian province of Montenegro, near the Albanian border. The flight from Kunovice to Niksic is an easy hop. The second leg, to Israel, crossed 2,250 km of open water and took seven hours to complete. Pomerance estimated that each Spitfire would land with a mere reserve of 20 minutes worth of fuel.

On the morning of Sept. 24, six of the Czechoslovakian Spitfires left Kunovice for Niksic, 300 miles away, with Modi Alon, Boris Senior, Syd Cohen, and Tuxie Blau joining Pomerance and Jack Cohen behind the controls. Sam Pomerance took off first, to lead the group. Tuxie Blau took the last pilot spot over Arnold Ruch although Ruch had more experience. Without the built-in radios, the pilots communicated as well as they could - which was poorly - with walkie-talkies. Blau forgot to lower his landing gear at Niksic and damaged his plane but was unhurt. Ruch traveled in a transport.

The equipment removed from the Velvetta 1 Spitfires was taken to Niksic in a Norseman. A C-54 the Spitfire pilots called the "Mother Ship" would lead the Spitfires on the long second leg of the flight over the Mediterranean. It carried the surplus Spitfor parts, plus sea rescue equipment. In the event of a problem, the C-54 would drop a dinghy then continue on to Israel. Two naval vessels went to sea to cover the route and a third waited on alert in Haifa harbor. A C-47 loaded with more sea recue equipment stood ready at Ramat David.

The first batch of six planes left Kunovice for Niksic, 300 miles away, during the morning of Sept. 24 with the 101's Modi Alon, Boris Senior, Syd Cohen, and Jack Cohen joining Sam Pomerance and cadet Tuxie Blau behind the controls. Without the built-in radios, the pilots communicated as well as they could - which was poorly - with walkie-talkies. This first delivery, Velvetta 1, suffered its first set-back when Blau forgot to lower his landing gear at Niksic and damaged his plane, but was unhurt.

The five airworthy Spitfires took off for Israel on September 27, led by a C-54. Two hours into the flight, Alon and Senior felt that their reserve fuel tanks were not functioning and the two landed in Rhodes. Leo Nomis, who with Sandy Jacobs had been circling over the Mediterranean in S-199s to escort the gunless Spitfires, recorded what Syd Cohen had told him:

Modi and Boris Senior had force-landed on the Greek island of Rhodes. Their reserve fuel tanks had malfunctioned and now the Spitfires were interned by the Greeks. So were Modi and Boris Senior....

Syd says Modi didn't say much on the R/T at the time, but that Boris was joking over the radio as they were preparing to land on the island. The other aircraft, including the C-54, had circled until the two were down on the Greek runway, but they couldn't tarry and had to leave them behind. (Cull et al 1994)

Jack Cohen thinks he knows what happened:

Around about Rhodes, Boris Senior ran out of fuel... and shortly after that Modi Alon pulled up and said he'd gone onto main tank. What I think happened is we had little breather pipes fitted to the wing tanks with the cut-away edge facing forward, and I think what really happened there was the pressure of the wind up against this little pipe was sufficient to pressurize the tanks and, acting as a pump, force the fuel into the full main tank, which would then simply pump the extra fuel overboard from the relief valves. When they did go onto main tank there was nothing left in their wing tanks. So we learned our lesson from that and the second time (Velvetta 2) we put the breather pipes in, but facing the wrong way and we had no problem. (Hyde 2000)

Alon and Senior landed at Rhodes. Greek authorities suspected both pilots of being Communists and arrested them. Senior recalled:

We taxied up to the control tower and got out. Our Spitfires had Israeli markings, but no guns. The Greeks asked us what we wanted. I replied we wished to see the Shell agent, to obtain some fuel. About five minutes later they came back with some soldiers with guns. They took us and put us in an office. They separated us immediately and started questioning.

We had a pre-arranged story. I told them that we were on a long-range patrol from Israel and that we had run out of fuel. The Greeks had nothing special against us, but they were fighting Communist invaders from Albania and Yugoslavia, and they found a piece of my map with a course line over the Peloponnese from Yugoslavia. They also found my South African passport with a Czech visa.

One night, two little men in dark suits and black ties woke me up in the middle of the night, and threatened to shoot me. I told them I was not a Communist but they didn't believe me. I told them I had known a pilot in the Greek Air Force in 1943, George Lagodimos, who would vouch for me. Within a couple of hours, Squadron Leader Lagodimos walked in (they had flown him specially from Athens to Rhodes), but he said he didn't know me!

Eventually, he remembered me and I told him the problem, but he said he couldn't help me. We were then flown in a Dakota to Athens and put in an air force prison. Finally, they decided to release us. (Cull et al 1994)

Alon and Senior landed at Rhodes while the other three planes (D-132, 133, and 134) made the passage to Israel safely, but not without a worrisome moment for Cohen.

I had a problem with my long-range tank - the gauge in the cockpit wasn't working. I thought "What do I do?", then decided to go on and wait till the engine cuts then switch onto main tanks and then pump. Eventually, the gauge did start showing - I thought it strange after all that time - so I switched on my booster pumps (to pump from the wing tanks) and in next-to-no-time nothing more came. So I realised then that something had gone wrong between the wing tanks and the pumps and the long-range tank. To cut a long story short, I restarted my motor, carried on on main tank, and I landed in Israel still with about 45 gallons of fuel. Everything had worked fine except for that pump in the wing tanks, I think. (Hyde 2000)

The three Spitfires crossed the Israel coast at 15:30, whereupon the Mother Ship bade goodbye and headed for Ekron, while the three Spitfires aimed for Ramat David. The trip, the longest ever by a Spitfire, lasted six and three-quarter hours. Pomerance landed first, followed by Syd Cohen then Jack Cohen.

At the airfield, amid great excitement, a welcoming ceremony had been prepared. The leading personalities of the new nation and its armed forces were waiting there. When we managed to get out of the cockpits after sitting tightly strapped in all that time, even though we could hardly stand up straight, we had to get in the middle of the celebrations, which also included the usual dancing. (Cohen 2000)

Blau and his wreck later crossed the sea inside a C-46. The Greeks released Alon and Senior on Oct. 12, but kept their Spitfires. A Greek pilot destroyed one in a fatal accident; the other was handed over to Israel in 1950.

The three successful Velvetta pilots held a post mortem to work out what had gone wrong with the planes that had to land in Rhodes. The three investigators discovered that each of them had experienced the same fuel gauge problem on the flight, and each had successfully dealt with it the same way. They decided that the trouble lay in the wing tanks. By process of elimination, they determined that the problem lay in the wing tanks' breather pipes that had been fitted in Kunovice. The angled, open end faced forward and the pressure of the wind through the pipe pressurized the tanks, forcing fuel through fuel lines and pump to the long-range tank, keeping it full and keeping the gauges registering a full tank.

Each Spitfire drew fuel from the long-range slipper tank before engaging the main tank. The pilots should have seen the slipper tank's fuel gauge drop as fuel was used up, but because the slipper tank was continuously topped off by wind pressure, they did not.

Senior and Alon both assumed the gauges were faulty, whereas the other three assumed correctly that the problem lay in surplus fuel feeding. Senior and Alon, suspecting their slipper tanks were low on fuel, both switched on their wing-tank fuel booster pumps, which started pumping fuel into the full long-range tank. As a result, the slipper tank relief valves just dumped the fuel as it was pumped in; Senior and Alon were just pumping fuel overboard.

Two days after arriving with the first Velvetta Spitfires, Cohen and Pomerance flew back to Kunovice to prepare another batch of Spitfires for export in Velvetta 2, which got underway in mid-December. The Czechslovakian crews had a few Spitfires ready for testing when Cohen and Pomerance returnedk. The fuel malfunction was corrected simply. Pomerance made sure to put the breather pipes in facing the wrong way. It worked.

Twelve more Spitfires were ready at Kunovice for a second Velvetta mission by Oct. 22, but Yugoslavia had rescinded permission for the Israelis to refuel. Sam Pomerance began stuffing even more fuel tanks into the Spitfires in the hope of extending their range to allow a non-stop flight to Israel. Seven were so prepared by Nov. 15, with another eight ready for a Velvetta 1-style flight plan. Czechoslovakian authorities refused permission for the Spitfires to take off without a planned refueling stop. They also demanded payment of all debt.

By November 26, 16 more Spitfires awaited an opportunity to fly to Israel. In early December, an Israeli promise to pay $200 per ton of aircraft convinced Yugoslavia to allow the Israelis one last stopover. Oddly, Yugoslavia demanded that the aircraft bear Yugoslavian Air Force markings for the Kunovice-Niksic leg.

Ferry pilots, drawn primarily from 101 Squadron, landed in Prague on December 9.

Ten disassembled and crated Spitfires left Kunovice by train for a Yugoslavian harbor, from where a ship would transport them to Israel. A blizzard delayed the Spitfires that would fly on the Velvetta 2 mission. A C-54 waited for them at Niksic.

After a delay caused by winter storms, Velvetta 2 began as six Spitfires left Czechoslovakia at 10:00 on Dec. 18. Sam Pomerance (in Spitfire 2006 or 2007) took first to lead Caesar Dangott and Bill Pomerantz (2007 or 2006) while George Lichter led John McElroy and Moti Fein (later Moti Hod), an air cadet. In the low visibility conditions, Bill Pomerantz quickly lost the others. With the cloud cover still solid at 14,000 feet, after an hour and a half, Lichter decided to return to Kunovice with the others, but Pomerance, who along with Lichter had the only airborne radios, told Lichter he'd press ahead.

Pomerance died when he crashed into a mountain in Yugoslavia. Jack Cohen thinks he suffered hypoxia:

I think what happened to poor old Sam, was he was in cloud which was really bad at that stage, and he tried to climb on top of the weather, and I think he must have run out of oxygen - that is out of breathing - we didn't have oxygen tanks at all. So he must have gone a bit too high and just flaked out, and went into the mountains. (Hyde 2000)

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