In the first days of October 1973, Israel was losing. Egyptian and Syrian armies had struck on Yom Kippur, and Israeli tanks and aircraft were being destroyed faster than the country could replace them. Then, out of the western sky, came the sound of salvation: the deep drone of American transports, one after another, all day and all night.

The airlift that saved Israel had a deliberately dull codename. It was called Operation Nickel Grass, and it remains one of the greatest feats of military logistics ever flown.

Send everything that can fly

As Israeli losses mounted, Prime Minister Golda Meir pleaded with Washington for resupply. After days of hesitation, President Richard Nixon cut through the debate with a single order.

On 14 October, the U.S. Air Force’s Military Airlift Command began pouring supplies into Israel. Over the next 32 days, C-141 Starlifters and the enormous C-5 Galaxy flew roughly 567 missions, delivering some 22,300 tons of tanks, artillery, ammunition and spare parts straight into Lod airport outside Tel Aviv.

The problem of distance

The hard part was geography. Most European allies, fearing an Arab oil embargo, refused to let American aircraft carrying arms land or even overfly their territory. Only Portugal agreed, opening Lajes Field in the Azores as a mid-Atlantic staging post. Without it, the 6,450-nautical-mile haul from the United States to Israel would have been all but impossible.

Even with Lajes, the C-5 crews often flew the final leg into a war zone, sometimes landing as Israeli jets scrambled overhead. The airlift out-delivered the parallel Soviet effort resupplying Egypt and Syria, and it did so in full view of the world.

The miracle of the immense planes

The materiel arrived in time to matter. Resupplied and reinforced, Israel turned the war around, crossing the Suez Canal and encircling Egypt’s Third Army before a ceasefire took hold. Golda Meir never forgot what the transports had meant.

Nickel Grass reshaped how the world understood strategic airlift. It proved that a superpower could project tons of combat power across an ocean in days, not months — and that sometimes the decisive weapon in a war is a cargo plane.

Sources: Air Mobility Command Museum; Air & Space Forces Magazine; Richard Nixon Foundation; National Air and Space Museum; Wikipedia (Operation Nickel Grass).