Haim SlavineII

Haim Slavine II

Haim Slavine was a real person. Back in the 1940's, the Jewish agency was working toward obtaining Israel's independence from the British empire. They knew that the Arabs would attack them as soon as they declared independence, and they needed to prepare. However, under the British mandate, they were not allowed to import weapons or ammunition of any kind, much less things like tanks and aircraft. Any military materiel they obtand had to be obtained surrupticiously.

Haim Slavine was dispatched to the United States to buy up surplus arms manufacturing equipment that was being liquidated with the end of WWII. Much of the equipment had been broken down, and so Slavine identified which parts were missing and sent teams to junk yards to find the missing pieces. All of the equipment purchased was sent to a dairy barn in upstate New York.

He had to ship the equipment under the noses of British authorities. So after assembling it all in the barn, he disassembled all of it, labeling each piece and scrambling them together in shipping containers to disguise their purpose. He then obtained a permit to import textile production equipment, and succesfully smuggled the equipment into Palestine.

Once there, the equipment was reassembled, and it was said that not a single part was missing. Production of weapons began, and by the end of the Israeli War of Independence, Haim Slavine's salvaged equipment has produced millions of rounds of ammunition, tens of thousands of grenades, and thousands of automatic and semi-automatic weapons.