Spitfire by Jonathan Glancey

Author:Jonathan Glancey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

CHAPTER IV

THE LONG GOODBYE

BLUE Spitfires. Pink Spitfires. White Spitfires. Yellow Spitfires. Spitfires with wings striped like zebra crossings. Spitfires adorned with roundels, red stars, and even, when captured, swastikas. The Second World War had witnessed Mitchell’s masterpiece in coats of many colours. But a glossy black Spitfire? Surely no air force would ever have considered painting a fighter such a light-catching colour? It would stand out against the backdrop of any sky like a Montgolfier balloon over late eighteenth-century Paris or a bird of paradise today on a grey morning in Kensington Gardens.

In 2005, a lone glossy black Spitfire flew over the funeral cortège of Ezer Weizman, former president of Israel. Its flight marked one end of a long, extraordinarily complex and painful story. Born in Tel Aviv in 1924, Weizman was a nephew of Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, and brother-in-law of the famous Israeli soldier and politician Moshe Dayan. In the Second World War, which he began as a lorry driver in the Western Desert campaigns with the British Eighth Army, Weizman went on, after training in Southern Rhodesia, to fly Spitfires with the RAF in India. In the Israeli War of Independence of 1948–9, he was a fighter pilot again, but this time fighting the Egyptians, together with the Syrians, Jordanians and Iraqis, as well as the Arab Liberation and Holy War armies.

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