As most of this film was shot at the Stockton Airport in California, it's very obvious that the production had the assistance of the California National Guard that has a facility there. The C-130's are all National Guard aircraft. their camouflage being very different from that of Israel. All of the vehicles were of national guard origin. The Ford M151A1 "jeeps" (mutts) were then in use in active military and national guard. In the film both the Israelis and Ugandans were driving them. When the Ugandan reinforcements arrive, they're driving current "deuce and a half" trucks that would only be found in the current US military, Uganda would have most likely had old hand-me-down UK equipment.
The character of Lt Col Yonatan Netanyahu (played by Stephen Macht) was the brother of the former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.
The song sung by the Israeli soldiers on their way to Entebbe and at the end of the movie is Hine Ma Tov, a setting of Psalm 133
Operation Entebbe was a counter-terrorist hostage-rescue mission carried out by commandos of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) at Entebbe Airport in Uganda on 4 July 1976.[3] A week earlier, on 27 June, an Air France plane with 248 passengers was hijacked, by terrorists of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the German Revolutionary Cells, and flown to Entebbe, near Kampala, the capital of Uganda. The hijackers separated the Israelis and, according to some, Jews from the larger group and forced them into another room.[4][5][6] That afternoon, 47 non-Israeli hostages were released.[6][7][4] The next day, 101 more non-Israeli hostages were allowed to leave on board an Air France aircraft. More than 100 Israeli and Jewish passengers, along with the non-Jewish pilot Captain Bacos, remained as hostages and were threatened with death. [8][9]
The IDF acted on intelligence provided by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. The hijackers threatened to kill the hostages if their prisoner release demands were not met. This threat led to the planning of the rescue operation.[10] These plans included preparation for armed resistance from Ugandan military troops.[11]
The operation took place at night. Israeli transport planes carried 100 commandos over 2,500 miles (4,000 km) to Uganda for the rescue operation. The operation, which took a week of planning, lasted 90 minutes. 102 hostages were rescued. Five Israeli commandos were wounded and one, the commander, Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu, was killed. All the hijackers, three hostages and 45 Ugandan soldiers were killed, and thirty Soviet-built MiG-17s and MiG-21s of Uganda's air force were destroyed.[12] 24 hours later, a fourth Israeli hostage was killed[13][14] by Ugandan army officers at a nearby hospital.[15]
The rescue, named Operation Thunderbolt, is sometimes referred to retroactively as Operation Jonathan in memory of the unit's leader, Yonatan Netanyahu. He was the older brother of Benjamin Netanyahu, who served as the two-time Prime Minister of Israel from 1996 to 1999 and from 2009-present.[14]
You can read the rest here
The Raid on Entebbe is considered one of the best counter-terrorist operations planned in the modern era. it did much to burnish the reputation of the IDF that had received a bloody nose from the 1973 Yum Kippur War
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