To Israel, it was a technical marvel. To the Shah of Iran, it was the means to dominate the Persian Gulf. When the McDonnell F-4 Phantom reached Tel Aviv in 1969, it marked a dramatic shift–the first time the Israeli state, not a formal ally, received advanced military hardware from the United States. When the Phantom reached Iran a year later, it was still a class act, like the Persian nation’s famous caviar. To the two Middle East nations, not far apart yet utterly different, the F-4 Phantom was the biggest, fastest, most powerful and expensive fighter ever built.

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It was, very simply, the standard against which every other fighter through the end of the century would be measured.

Not that the F-4 Phantom looked like much. It looked, in fact, like someone had stepped on the blueprints. It had bent wings, a sharply downswept horizontal tail slab, and a pointed nose with an abruptly fattened aft fuselage holding two powerful General Electric J79 engines. Those turbojet engines produced 17,000 pounds of thrust (8,120 kilograms) with afterburning.

To be used by men in a line of work usually viewed as a solo performance fighter pilot-the Phantom had two seats for two crew members. Over North Vietnam, Americans had learned that having two men aboard provided an extra set of eyes and ears, a second opinion, a second chance to see the bad guys first-although by 1969 two pilots were replaced by a pilot/radar operator team. And the two engines meant redundancy and greater prospects for survival when hit by gunfire.

In close encounters with MiGs over Hanoi, Americans learned the most bitter lesson of all. The Phantom had been designed without a gun because the Pentagon thought the age of the missile had arrived. This was a catastrophic mistake-so a 20mm M61A1 Vulcan ‘GatIing’ gun was belatedly slung under the nose of the F-4E model. The modification looked distinctly like an afterthought, its barrel poking out from nose contours that weren’t particularly streamlined anyway.

Other lessons: the Phantom carried four Sparrow radar-guided missiles in recessed bays under the fuselage, and could use them in a head-on engagement beyond visual range–a capability North Vietnamese MiGs lacked-but in ‘Nam the rules said you had to see before you could shoot. The Sparrow was good up to 15 miles or so even when this advantage was not seized; the radar-guided, AIM-4D Falcon missile (introduced with the Phantom F-4D) was useless, and fighter ace Colonel Robin Olds forebade his men to use them.

At closer range, the Phantom’s infrared heat-seeking missiles, the Sidewinders, were unmatched; this was becoming the most important air-to-air missile of the era.

Following the Six Day War of 1967, the Israeli Defense Force/Air Force (IDF/AF), or Tsvah Haganah Le Israel/Heyl Ha’Avir, needed a front-line fighter. In January 1968, the United States completed delivery of 48 aging A- 4 Skyhawks promised before the war, and President Johnson offered Premier Eshkol 20 more. But pressure built to supply Jerusalem with a newer fighter. Although Johnson was opposed, he began negotiations on October 9, 1968, after presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon came out in favor of it. On December 27, 1968, after Nixon’s election but before he took office, the announcement was made of the sale of 50 Phantoms to Israel to be delivered beginning in 1969 at a cost of $200 million.

The Phantoms began to arrive in September 1969 and were committed to battle on January 7, 1970. The first mission was led by squadron leader Samuel l Chetz, already an ace, against Soviet-constructed SAM (surface-to-air missile) and radar installations at Dahashur. Chetz, known for his aggressive spirit, was later killed in a low-level strike on a SAM site, a loss which permitted Jerusalem to reveal his name although the identities of active pilots remained undisclosed.

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