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Rating: 
Summary: A Book for the Serious Student of Israeli Military History
Review: Any serious Israel Air Force buff should have at least three books on his shelf: Ehud Yonai's "No Margin for Error", Peter Mersky's "Israeli Fighter Aces", and Eliezer Cohen's "Israel's Best Defense". As a former fighter and helicopter pilot, Eliezer Cohen had first hand experience with, and access to the pilots and leaders who have made up the most respected air force of the jet age. His retelling of his own, and comrade's experiences in the face of war is riveting, and the scope of his IAF history takes him a full decade further into the story of this remarkable marriage of machines and men than does Ehud Yonai's own remarkable telling. Perhaps his one weakness in telling this story, is that Eliezer Cohen is a pilot by trade, and not a journalist, or novelist. Reading this book, you can see his skills as a story teller developing with each turn of the page. His finesse as an author starts out weak, but by the time that you reach his account of the Six Day War, Cohen's narrative becomes far too absorbing to pass this book by.
Rating:
Summary: decent, I thought it was a history not an 'eyewitness' read
Review: I thought this book was going to be a blow by blow history of the IAF. Unfortunatly much of it is the authors recollections. Now this does not discount the books greatness. The story is one of heroism and triumph over great odds. The Israelis built one of the best air forces int he world. An air force that able to defeat the arabs many times and proved in one on one combat to be far superior. Some detractors say this was simply because the 'American' weapon system was better, thats like a workmen blaming his tools, which is typical of the arab mindset, if they lose they always blame some plot that brought them failure, instead of crediting their opponents resolutness. Furthermore the Israeli air force was able to slip into entebbe and rescue Jewish hostages, something the americans failed to do in 1979 in the Desert One failure. On top of this the Israelis were able to airlift tens of thousands of jews from Iraq, Ethiopia and the Yemen.
Rating:
Summary: decent, I thought it was a history not an 'eyewitness' read
Review: I thought this book was going to be a blow by blow history of the IAF. Unfortunatly much of it is the authors recollections. Now this does not discount the books greatness. The story is one of heroism and triumph over great odds. The Israelis built one of the best air forces int he world. An air force that able to defeat the arabs many times and proved in one on one combat to be far superior. Some detractors say this was simply because the 'American' weapon system was better, thats like a workmen blaming his tools, which is typical of the arab mindset, if they lose they always blame some plot that brought them failure, instead of crediting their opponents resolutness. Furthermore the Israeli air force was able to slip into entebbe and rescue Jewish hostages, something the americans failed to do in 1979 in the Desert One failure. On top of this the Israelis were able to airlift tens of thousands of jews from Iraq, Ethiopia and the Yemen.
Rating: 
Summary: Gets the facts right, but misses much of the story
Review: This book tells the extended story of the Israeli Air Force, famed but also perhaps a sometime victim of its own rep. From its humble beginnings of foreign volunteers and Piper Cubs to the supersonic age of super-aces in F-16s, the IAF always possessed the veneer of the heroic. Being the principal military branch for a young nation repeatedly beset by war, the IAF's story closely parallels the history of Israel - from the scrappy jury-rigged days of the war of independence, the disappointment of 1956, the near-miraculous triumphs of 1967, the tragic near reversal of 1973 and the painful realities of Lebanon. Though the IAF has come a long way since its humble beginnings, and its history covers half a century, the shift from a cobbled-together, volunteer-staffed air force to an elite-trained arm equipped with cutting edge aircraft was sudden - about the time the major European powers turned to Israel as a counter for the pan-arabism of Egypt's Nasser, leading up to the abortive Suez campaign. Most of the foreign volunteers had returned home by then, and the Spitifres that fought the Independence War put into storage. (Late model F-51 Mustangs, however, remained in service and flew missions against the Egyptians in 1956; though seeming contemporaries of the Spitfire, IAF's Mustang's are more identified with the '56 war, then the war of independence). Israeli pilots, traveling abroad (seemingly on vacation) were taught to fly unforgiving transonic jets like the French Mystere. The IAF had opened its own academy by then, and had already established its reputation for being unforgiving to its cadets. Because it's almost impossible to separate the stories of Israel and her air force, the authors can't go that deep into the individual stories of the pilots or the various conflicts in which they serve. With so many stories, so many people and hardware, it's hard to become interested in any one of them. Sure, this wasn't meant to be an especially dramatic reading, but air combat, like drama, relies on perceptual powers of its participants. In short, we get the stories - all of them - but have no human dimension in which to frame them. We learn that the Avia S-99, a Czech copy of the famed Me-109 fighter of WWII, was about as dangerous to its pilots as its enemies, or that the supersonic Mirage III had a severe problem with its engine, one that would soon show reveal itself to its pilots. We learn that Avi Lehnir flew too close to the MiG-21 he destroyed, and returned home covered in soot. Because the book is only concerned with getting the facts right and utterly ignoring the impact of the events on those who lived them, it's hard to get a sense of what it must have been really like to fly one of those monsters, and, more importantly why the Israelis were much better at it than any of their enemies. In fact, the difference was lay in how the Israelis excelled in learning how to fly their aircraft in ways not envisaged by their designers - the drag of the big delta wing on the Mirage III made it unsuitable for flying low altitude, or in extended dogfights where it lost energy quickly; the F-4 Phantom was designed as an interceptor rather than a dogfighter. Nevertheless, the Israeli triumph in 1967 owed much to her pilots' ability to coax unknown agility out of the Mirage, and fly them well below Egyptian and Syrian radar; and, echoing the American experience in Vietnam, the Israelis discovered a master dogfighter in the F-4 as well. Missing is any sense of the people flying these planes or at least responsible for them. The enormous success of the IAF therefore remains a mystery, probably unintentional. By the end of the book, you've covered 50 explosive years of aviation history, and can't begin to explain a single thing you've read.
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