In Israel you go to flight training straight out of high school. It’s a great system.
Think about it. You’re young, single, you have no kids. No fear. You’re too dumb to know what fear is.
Our squadron has been created for the onetime emergency of the war. Air force command has thrown it together in the three weeks prior to the outbreak of hostilities. The squadron is made up of retired pilots, reserve fliers from El Al, and nine of us straight out of flight school. The air force has about fifty Fouga Magisters, the planes we trained on in flight school. It will make twenty-four into warplanes.
We are twenty-four pilots.
This is it.
We are going to war.
I have graduated from flight school only three months earlier. I have not even been assigned to a squadron; I’m still in OTU, Operational Training Unit. I have only six weeks of training instead of the required four months. I cannot be certified as operational.
Suddenly Nasser is closing the Straits of Tiran. War has become inevitable. What can the air force do with us young pilots? En brera. No alternative. I and my fellow recent graduates are sent back to the only plane we know how to fly: the Fouga Magister. Now we must learn to fly it in combat. That is like telling an intern who has just finished medical school, “Here, perform brain surgery.”
We train at Beersheba. There are no living quarters for us at Hatzerim Air Base; the place is still under construction. We are put up in a hotel instead: Neot Midbar—the “Desert Oasis.”
Beersheba today is the capital of the Negev. Then it was a one-horse town without the horse. The place is dark because of blackouts and empty because everyone has been called up for the war—everyone except the girls who flock to the hotel each night because there is nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. We pilots train all day, learning to fly in formation, to attack armored columns, to use our rockets, and to fly very, very low. If you flew that low in flight school, they would put you in jail.
The Fouga has no night flying capability, so when the sun goes down, we pilots are free. Our commanders—three regular air force officers—are no-nonsense types. They remain on base, preparing for tomorrow’s training. The rest of us head down the dirt road to the Desert Oasis.
None of us young guys has a car. We ride with the old-timers. These fellows are like James Bond to us. They are thirty, thirty-five years old. World travelers, El Al captains and first officers. They have danced at the Plaza Hotel in New York; they have dined at the George Cinq in Paris. They steal girls from us. They make us pay for drinks. But they also take us under their wings.
We ask, Is war coming? Bank on it, our mentors declare. Keep close to us and do what we do.
The Fouga Magister is a forerunner of the American A-10 Warthog, which is a heavy, lumbering bucket designed for close air support of ground troops. The joke is that you train a Warthog pilot by making him sit in a garbage can while you throw rocks at him.
The Fouga has no bombs and only a peashooter 5.62-millimeter gun. It had no weapons panel at all until the flight mechanics cobbled one together a few days before the war. The Fouga’s armament is 2.75-inch rockets. That is ridiculously small. The original U.S. version was called a Mighty Mouse.
The Fouga has no targeting system. The gunsight is a cross on the windscreen. All targeting calculations must be done in your head. You have to eyeball your dive angle and “play the wind” like a kicker in soccer.
To attack a column of enemy tanks, you approach at zero altitude, pull up about three kilometers out, climb to 1,500 feet (which takes forever because of the weight of the rockets), then line up on your target and go in. No chatter on the radio; the channels must be kept open for emergencies. You go in very shallow. No need to dive, because you aren’t dropping bombs.
The Fouga has eight rockets. You fire four at a time, in salvos, aiming the whole volley at a single tank. What are your chances of hitting it? At 400 meters: zero. At 200, you can’t miss.
If you tell this to pilots today, they will think you are crazy or lying. Two hundred meters? The tank is so big in your windscreen you can see the seams of the welds on the turrets.
How low do you fly to attack a column of tanks? The Fouga has two fuel tanks, one at the tip of each wing. The third day, near Jericho, I hit one of my tanks on the ground. You are so young you think nothing of this. You have a mission and you will do anything—anything—to accomplish it.
On the first day I lost my leader. Ground fire killed him. Speed is what protects you from antiaircraft fire, and the Fouga has no speed. We were over the Jiradi Pass in Sinai. We had just finished attacking a radar station near El Arish. All four planes in our formation had been hit by triple-A flying over the pass the first time, though without serious damage. Now we were heading home along the same route—a big mistake. We went through another barrage of ground fire. I saw my leader slump in his cockpit. His head fell to one side. I was right alongside as his plane yawed and dived into the ground.
How did this affect me? I didn’t panic in the moment or react with grief in the aftermath. But I flew like a crazy person for the rest of the war.
You attack a column of tanks in a formation of four, with the first pair a kilometer ahead of the second. The lead pair aims for the front of the column; the second pair takes the rear. The object is to pile up wrecks at each end, trapping the vehicles in the middle.
Military columns are of mixed composition. Trucks and jeeps and command cars are interspersed among the tanks. Tank crews are trained to maintain an interval ahead and behind; they keep their vehicles dispersed. You have two passes before you use up your rockets. You must pick out two tanks and kill them. You can’t waste precious ordnance on anything less.
We say that Fougas are slow, lumbering, and ancient. They are. But to the men in the tanks being attacked, the planes surely feel as if they’re screaming out of the heavens at supersonic speed. Below us, we can see the crewmen scrambling out of their hatches and diving into ditches on the side of the road. The Jordanian Pattons, like ours, carry their shells in the turrets. The turrets are not armored on top. Put a salvo of rockets into them and they go up like cases of dynamite. The turret—all of it—blows straight into the sky.
When an attack from the air knocks out the front and rear tanks of a column, the crews of the vehicles trapped in the middle become stricken with panic. How brave must a man be to see vehicles exploding in front of him and behind—and then get back into his own tank? He doesn’t know that we have only one Fouga squadron with only twenty-four planes. He doesn’t know that these aircraft are only trainers, flown by balding airline pilots and boys who still do not shave. To him we bring death from the skies, and he has no friendly warplanes to protect him.
After the war, we pilots drove in jeeps with the infantry to see the roads and highways that we had attacked. The ground soldiers could not stop thanking us. They took us from tank carcass to tank carcass. They could not believe that we had done all this damage with training planes from the flight school.
Let me, then, put in a word for the Fouga Magisters, these planes with the funny name. History has passed them over, even within the chronicles of the Israel Air Force. Because our squadron was temporary, because its planes and pilots scattered to other duties immediately after the war, we have had no place to plant our standard. Squadron 147 has no headquarters, no historian, no oral tradition like other squadrons that flew then and are still flying today. We have only a number, and even that has been relegated to mothballs.
Beyond that, much of our work was done out of sight even of those whose lives we saved. The Jordanian and Iraqi columns we destroyed were advancing up from the Jordan Valley. The troops and inhabitants of Jerusalem never saw them. We blew the enemy’s tanks up before they reached the top of the hill.
In five days our squadron lost a fourth of its pilots. We started the war with twenty-four and finished wit
h eighteen.
The plodding, unglamorous Fougas broke the Jordanian and Iraqi advance upon Jerusalem. They saved the city and the troops in it, and they produced victory in the West Bank.
48.
THE WESTERN WALL
Our orders are to enter the Old City via the Lion’s Gate. The Lion’s Gate is in the city wall on the eastern side.
Yoram Zamosh commands “A” Company of Paratroop Battalion 71.
One of the legends of Jerusalem is that, of the forty or more times over the centuries that the city has fallen, the invading host has always come out of the north. Jeremiah 1: “Out of the north, an evil comes.”
Only twice in three thousand years has Jerusalem been conquered from a different direction—once by King David, and now by us.
Uzi has left my company in reserve near the Rockefeller Museum, while the battalion’s other companies have assaulted the Augusta Victoria Ridge. His purpose is to place “A” Company in position to get to the Lion’s Gate quickly, in the event that General Headquarters gives the go-ahead to enter the Old City. Uzi has left two half-tracks with me, the only vehicles of any weight that the battalion possesses, to help if we need to force our entry or, once inside, to fight house to house.
“A” Company starts down the Jericho Road directly beneath the Old City walls, the same road where the terrible tank battle of the night before has taken place. I am expecting the same fierce resistance. The Arab Legionnaires fought well and hard last night. These British-trained troops of the elite King Talal Brigade displayed daring, imagination, and professionalism. Parties sallied out from the city walls, taking the fight to our soldiers and exploiting the darkness and the confusion. Give the Jordanians credit. They stopped our entire night attack on Augusta Victoria.
Nor am I the only officer who regards this moment with apprehension. A radio call comes to me now from Motta Gur’s operations officer, Uzi Frumer, whom I know well, ordering “A” Company not to assault the Lion’s Gate until he, Motta, can send tanks down from the Mount of Olives to reinforce us.
The Lion’s Gate is approached uphill via a narrow walled lane, the Lion’s Gate Road. The passage is enclosed along its entire length. Above on both sides rise thick stone walls, five to ten meters high. The lane is between a hundred and a hundred fifty meters long. There’s a thick, metal-sheathed gate at the upper end. No cover. Men and vehicles advancing up the lane have no place to hide.
I hold my company back on the main road, at the turn of the Lion’s Gate Road, waiting for Motta’s tanks. One appears—a Sherman with a 90-millimeter cannon. At the rear of the tank is an intercom telephone in a covered compartment. I dash to this and grab the receiver. The tank commander can hear me now. I identify myself as the paratroop company commander and tell him I have a fire order for him.
“Put three shells into the gate.”
The tank fires once and blows the right-hand door off its hinges.
A new Mercedes bus squats on the right side of the lane.
“Hit the bus, too.” It might be booby-trapped or rigged with explosives.
The tank’s cannon booms again, setting the bus ablaze.
My watch says 9:45. “A” Company starts forward. The bus is cooking like an inferno. My men advance one step at a time, hugging the wall, with their fingers on the triggers of their Uzis, FNs, and MAGs. I’m shouting to them to be ready to sling hand grenades if we receive fire from the gate or the walls. Another group of paratroopers hurries into the lane behind me. I recognize Katcha Cahaner from Battalion 28. My own soldiers are about thirty meters from the gate, when suddenly Motta Gur’s half-track appears in the lane from behind us. It speeds forward toward the Lion’s Gate!
Motta races past me, very excited, passes the tank, passes Katcha, and accelerates up the lane to the gate. He drives through. I’m dumbfounded. Motta is the brigade commander. How can he so recklessly risk his life?
At this instant Uzi Eilam, my own battalion commander, rushes up to me.
“Zamosh, what are you waiting for? Go on! Go in!”
Motta’s half-track is well through the gate now. We hear no enemy fire. “Go on!” says Uzi.
“A” Company pours through.
Inside the Lion’s Gate is a small court. On the left and slightly uphill I can see the Gate of the Tribes, which leads to the Temple Mount. Straight ahead lies the Via Dolorosa. Uzi has ordered me to secure this lane, which snakes away into the center of the Old City. A Jordanian counterattack could come from here. I send the two half-tracks forward with a force of men to seal this approach.
Motta’s half-track is rumbling through the Gate of the Tribes. My whole company follows. A hundred thoughts race through my mind. Foremost is this:
Across the Temple Mount, no farther than a few hundred meters, waits the Western Wall.
Sergeant Moshe Milo is Captain Zamosh’s radioman:
We are running behind Motta’s half-track. We pass through the Gate of the Tribes. Inside: the yellow tents of the Arab Legion. The defenders’ camp. We stride past Land Rovers and weapons carriers, stacks of ammunition boxes, cases of combat rations. We are expecting barbed wire and mines, blockaded passages, ambushes. But the Jordanians are nowhere to be seen.
We sweep up the slope in a skirmish line. The place is vast and open. Buildings on the right have apparently been used as quarters and command posts by the Jordanians. Zamosh sends men to clear and secure this area, including Avremale Shechter, who is his friend from childhood and our company runner.
The rest of the company hurries ahead, taking long strides, following Motta’s half-track and spreading out on both flanks.
Avremale Shechter, sergeant, “A” Company:
Jordanian soldiers are very British. Their footpaths are bordered by neat rows of whitewashed stones. The Arab Legion offices when I enter are tidy and orderly. I see flags and notice boards, uniforms on hangers, well-organized desks. I grab the scarlet pennant of Jordan’s Battalion 8 and keep it for forty years.
Yoram Zamosh, “A” Company commander:
I can see the Dome of the Rock ahead. We have crossed at least three hundred meters, maybe more, from the Gate of the Tribes.
The whole summit is an army camp—tents and latrines, field kitchens, mortar emplacements. Protection of this holy site has been entrusted to Battalion 8, one of three battalions of Jordan’s elite King Talal Brigade. Since King Abdullah was assassinated in this spot in 1951, only this formation has been entrusted with the defense of the Temple Mount.
At least fifty vehicles are parked in good order, many under canvas covers—Land Rovers, water and fuel tankers, ammunition and supply trucks. Sporadic gunfire comes from lanes inside the city. Ahead in the plaza we see soldiers, and some civilians, scurrying across the open space. Their intent is clearly not hostile. Some are in pajamas. They may be military men who have cast off their uniforms to escape into the civilian crowd.
I pass the order to my men to fire on no one unless fired on first.
Suddenly Moshe Stempel appears. He pounds my back in jubilation. Stempel, as I said earlier, is deputy battalion commander. He falls in with us now, sweeping up the steps and onto the broad open square on the summit of the Temple Mount.
On the Temple Mount, paratroopers of Battalion 71’s “A” Company advance toward the Dome of the Rock.
Photo by Yerah Halperin.
Motta Gur has dismounted from his half-track. Stempel hurries to him. They embrace. Stempel is a head shorter than I and built like a block of stone. To see him clutch Motta is almost comical. The golden dome rises behind them. The Al-Aqsa Mosque is visible a little farther on. The sense of the moment is not of victory or conquest. The enemy can be anywhere. This is still a war. At the same time, I am floating.
Stempel hurries back to me. “Zamosh! Have you got the flag?”
I’m looking for the poplar grove. Of course I have the f
lag. As a youth I have made pilgrimage many times to Mount Zion outside the city walls and there stood on tiptoe to glimpse the crown of the poplars that marks the vicinity of the Western Wall. I have climbed to the roof of Notre Dame Hospice and sought with my eyes this same grove. I know exactly where it is.
Moshe Milo, Zamosh’s radioman:
I have not expected the Temple Mount to be so quiet. You hear the crack of a rifle in the distance, the engine of a vehicle far away—but up here we move through a world apart. Our boots on the stone make almost no sound. I think to myself: Now I understand why this site is holy.
Then I see the poplars.
“Zamosh!”
Paratroopers of Battalion 71 advance toward the Temple Mount. Major Uzi Eilam is at center front.
He has spotted the grove, too. These are the treetops I have glimpsed from Mount Scopus, years ago, knowing what they mean, that the Wall is there, nearby but blocked from view, the Wall that I will never reach, never see, never touch, as all Jews, save at rare intervals, have likewise been debarred for two thousand years.
We’re near!
Suddenly: gunfire.
Yoram Zamosh, “A” Company commander:
Rifle fire cracks over our heads. About a dozen Jordanians—soldiers and civilians, or perhaps soldiers who have changed into civilian clothes—have taken up a firing position behind a barricade of military trucks, jeeps, and Land Rovers. Our group takes cover behind a low wall and scurries forward toward the gunfire.
A few of our men are ahead, shouting to the enemy to surrender. The foe answers with gunfire. Stempel is with us. We drop flat on our bellies at the crest of a descending flight of steps. The Jordanian position lies below us, thirty or forty meters across a stone plaza. The vehicles have been parked under arches against a row of buildings, apparently to keep them safe from mortar fire.
The Lion’s Gate Page 33
