Date of Birth:January 12, 1916
Rank: Flight Officer
Physical Description/Picture:
Place of Origin: Berlin, Germany.
Flight/Flight Combat Experience: Served for two and a half years as a pilot in the German Luftwaffe from 1933-1935, when he was forced out for his Jewish heritage. Spent 2 years as a pilot with the Republican Forces, from 1936-1938. Joined the RAF as a "friendly enemy alien" in 1939.
Ground Combat Experience: Some combat seen in the International Brigades in late 1938 after he was grounded and transferred to the Republican ground forces.
Specialties: Air Combat, speaks fluent German and English, passable Spanish with an accent.
Weapons of Choice: Luger pistol, Spanish 1893 Mauser
RP Experience: Just a couple small, kinda weird RPs. Nothing anyone here would have heard of. Yknow, commando pilots in World War II, that kind of thing.
Personal History/Bio: David was born misfortunately. He was unlucky to be born a Jew in Germany, unlucky to be born just before the end of the Great War, but it can be said he was lucky to be too young to remember times of prosperity because he could never miss them. His father had served as a member of the German Air Force first in the Eastern Front against the Russians, then later in the air against the French and British. For many of the first few years of David’s life, even when times were truly hard (as they often were in the Weimar Republic), his father could be sure of work by dint of either his service or his religion. Of course, most of the work was day laboring offered by more prosperous Jewish families in the community, but it kept food on the table and clothes on their backs.
As the economy worsened, their fortunes actually improved. David’s father, through the community, was able to get work as a pilot for one of the few transport and cargo air companies operating in Germany at the time. He often took David flying with him, and it became David’s love and passion. By the time he was 15 David was picking up the occasional shift as a cargo hauler. In 1933, when the National Socialist party took office, David, in large part due to his experience as a pilot, became one of the many Luftwaffe secretly trained in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. He spent two years in training, deliberately tuning out the increasingly vitriolic anti-Semitism of the Nazis in hopes of continuing to fly. In 1935 however, the Nazis officially forbade all Jews from serving in the German military, and David was forced out of the Luftwaffe. Bitter, and with a rapidly deepening hatred of the fascist regime, in November of 1936 David fled to Spain and the Republicans, where he had heard that experienced pilots would be put in the air with no questions asked.
Because of his experience as a pilot, the Republicans immediately put David in the cockpit of one of their new Soviet-supplied I-16 Type 6 fighters. Barely two weeks later, he was part of the first combat operation of the I-16s, on the 13th of November 1936. David and 11 other pilots intercepted a Nationalist bombing raid of Madrid, and claimed 4 victories. Over the next six months David scored two air to air combat kills against the far inferior Heinkel He 51. However as the war dragged on, the Condor Legion appeared in the skies over Spain, and with them the Messerschmitt Bf 109. Faster, better armed and armored than the I-16s, the Bf 109s coupled with increasingly incompetent Republican leadership put an end to David’s kill log. Over the next six months David flew thirteen combat missions, and managed only a single additional victory. When another accident on takeoff destroyed David’s third I-16 (the average life of an I-16 was unfortunately 87 days), he was officially grounded for lack of replacement aircraft. David spent the next several months attached to the Naftali Botwin Company, Palafox Battalion until its demobilization in September of 1938. Now officially out of the Republican Army, and with no desire to return to the now overwhelmingly hostile Nazi Germany, David was granted asylum as a “friendly enemy alien” in Britain. In November, word reached David of Kristallnacht in the first letter from his mother in almost six months. His father and 30,000 other Jewish men had been arrested and incarcerated somewhere secret. Although neither of them knew it, the men had been sent to Dachau. Knowing war with Germany was inevitable, David almost immediately began petitioning to be allowed into the Royal Air Force. When Chamberlain announced the full British support of Poland in March of 1939, David was admitted as a non-combatant in the ground crews.
However, the Royal Air Force soon became worried that it would find itself well short of the number of trained pilots necessary to carry out its commitments. So, after two months as a non-combatant, David was transferred to a training group and spent five months there, four in the Service Flying Training School, and one in the Operational Training Unit learning to handle the Supermarine Spitfire. So it was that in late August, David was brought into a windowless room, and handed a stack of papers. A man in a nondescript suit told him to sign the papers, so he did. The man informed him that so much as hinting at a word that was said in this room would result in him spending the rest of his life in a windowless cell, and then offered him a chance to join a unit that would “be the knife in the dark in the fight against the Nazis”. His abiding hatred of the Nazis by this point both deeply seated and well known (a fact that had not gone unnoticed), David accepted immediately
