Crash of the Heavens

In the decades before World War II, thousands of young Jewish men and women left the antisemitism of Europe for British-controlled Palestine. By 1942, they then began receiving reports of unimaginable horrors: of the liquidation of the ghettos, of industrialised killing centres in Poland, of the plan to exterminate all of Europe’s Jews. The Yishuv – the Jewish community in British Palestine – needed to act. Striking a deal with British Intelligence in 1943, they trained a cadre of volunteer Jewish migrs to parachute behind enemy lines on a dual mission: assisting thousands of downed Allied airmen to escape and to rescue as many Jewish citizens as possible from the death camps. Thrilling and inspiring, ‘Crash of the Heavens’ is one of the great untold stories of World War II.