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type" who disliked wearing a uniform, he committed himself to the com–
mand after taking a prewar inventory of Israel's weapons reserves, which
appalled him. He organized the corps headquarters, recruited its personnel,
boosted its morale, acted as liaison to the army, reported to Ben-Curion–
and hid his private dread that Israel faced defeat. Each morning, in the
bohemian Cafe Cancan, he met with General Yitzhak Sadeh to discuss
what weapons the Science Corps could supply for the army's operations.
Then he would go to Ben-Gurion's office, where, in Cur's words, "Ben–
Gurion would clutch the ends of his armrests, already impatient, because I
would never sign on anything that we couldn't produce. I told him the
truth about all those gimmicks that the scientists thought up, which he
wanted immediately." So desperate was Ben-Gurion, and so great his belief
in Jewish scientific genius, that he assigned Haim Murro, an engineer, to
screen the letters pouring in from would-be inventors. Their ideas includ–
ed giant magnets, to pull aircraft out of the sky, and curved gunsights, for
shooting around corners. MUlTO, who opened Israel's first oil well, observes
that these fantasies were, at least, in keeping with the style of creative
improvisation that was beginning to characterize Israeli technology.
The Science Corps, which institutionalized this style, was not invent–
ing so much as reinventing. During the first months of the war, the U.N.
arms embargo on the Middle East combatants prevented Israel from
acquiring anti-tank weapons, so the Science Corps relied on the memories
of people like Ratner, who had fought wi th the Allies. Flame-throwers,
bazookas, recoilless cannon, infrared lanterns, smoke bombs, hand
grenades, road-mines, M2 and M6 mortars, and the shoulder-launched
PlAT (Personal Infantry Anti-Tank unit) were among the devices to be
reproduced. Sometimes efforts went awry: a version of the hollow charge,
for instance, famously failed to breach the walls of Jerusalem. More often
they succeeded. In a conference wi th Ben-Gurion, Ratner vowed to pro–
duce the PlAT "if I have to do it with a hammer and anvil." The corps
possessed almost no technical data on the device. When a PlAT was found,
through devious routes, they feared to dismantle it-no one knew how it
was assembled. But by the war's end, working with Israel's nascent muni–
tions factories, the Science Corps had produced 1,800 PlATs, and 77,000
PlAT shells. (Figures taken from a memorandum of Ratner's, in the
Weizmann Institute Archives.)
How was success achieved? The corps developed a flair for improvis–
ing on the weapons sent straight into combat, or, as the joke went, "from
the producer to the consumer." Murro describes how he would drive a
batch of experimental bombs out to the Sde Dov airstrip, near Tel Aviv. He
would load the bombs onto a plane, wait for the pilot to complete a bomb–
ing run, then take the pilot's "consumer report" back to headquarters for
