Six Days of War

by Michael B. Oren

  One man did not sleep, however. Alone at his desk sat Levi Eshkol, composing a brace of letters. The first was to Kosygin, essentially a plea for non-intervention by Soviet forces against Israel. “Surrounded on all sides by hostile armies, we are engaged in a life or death struggle to defend our existence and to prevent Nasser from fulfilling his goal of repeating the crimes perpetrated by Hitler against the Jewish people. We are certain that the Soviet Union’s role in history will again be determined by understanding and brotherhood toward the Jewish people at the time of its great trial.”

  The second letter, no less ardent, was destined for Johnson. Earlier that evening, a tense debate had emerged over whether Israel should claim that Egypt had started the war. Dayan was opposed, but Allon, backed by Eban and Herzog, believed that Israel had nothing to lose, and perhaps something to gain, by pinning the immediate blame on Nasser. Thus, Eshkol wrote that the Egyptian guns had opened fire on Israeli settlements, and that formations of Egyptian aircraft had been observed flying toward the border. He then went on to describe the chain of events that had led to the present confrontation: Nasser’s call for Israel’s demise, the eviction of UNEF and the closing of Tiran, the alliances between Egypt and Syria, between Egypt and Jordan, and the reckless prevarication of the Soviets.

  Implicit in this summary was an understanding that the Middle East morass had sprung from a context, an environment in which the Arab-Israeli conflict could be inflamed by inter-Arab and superpower rivalries, and by the internal politics of every country involved. Primed by catalysts—terrorist attacks, border clashes, reprisal raids—that context then produced a crisis that, once ignited, burned irreversibly toward war.

  “The struggle before us has not ended,” wrote Eshkol, and asked for the “energetic support” of Israel’s “largest friend,” particularly in checking the Soviets. As for the goals of the war, the prime minister remained modest. There was no thought of altering that context fundamentally, of eliminating the possibility of similar wars erupting in the future. Rather, all Israel strove for was an end to the immediate threat, and for an indefinite period of quiet thereafter. “We want nothing but to live peacefully in our territory and to enjoy our legitimate maritime rights.”69

  THE WAR: DAY ONE, JUNE 5

  Israel’s air force strikes.

  The ground war begins.

  Jordan and Syria counter attack.

  It started at 7:10 in the morning, Israel time, when sixteen Magister Fouga jets—French-manufactured, 1950s-era trainers, newly outfitted with rockets—took off from the airfield at Hatzor. The Fougas were transmitting on frequencies used by Mystére and Mirage jets, and, simulating those craft, they flew in a routine patrol pattern. Four minutes later, the real fighters—Ouragan bombers—left Hatzor airfiled, followed five minutes after that by a squadron of Mirages from Ramat David and fifteen twin-engine Vatours from Hatzerim. By 7:30, close to 200 planes were aloft. With them went the orders issued that morning by Air Force Commander Motti Hod: “The spirit of Israel’s heroes accompany us to battle…From Joshua Bin-Nun, King David, the Maccabees and the fighters of 1948 and 1956, we shall draw the strength and courage to strike the Egyptians who threaten our safety, our independence and, our future. Fly, soar at the enemy, destroy him and scatter him throughout the desert to that Israel may live, secure in its land, for generations.”

  They flew low, often no more than fifteen meters, to avoid detection by any of Egypt’s eighty-two radar sites. Most of the planes turned west, toward the Mediterranean, before banking back in the direction of Egypt. Others raced down the Red Sea toward targets deep in the Egyptian interior. Radio silence was strictly observed. Communication would be limited to hand signals, even as flight paths crossed. “The name of the game is reaching the Egyptian coast without being spotted,” Col. Rafi Harlev, chief of IAF operation, had lectured his pilots. In the event of mechanical trouble, there could be no calls for assistance, he warned them. They would have to crash in the sea.

  But those pilots also had major advantages. They were better trained than their Egyptian adversaries, had more flying time, and almost all of their 250 planes (65 Mirages, 35 Super Mystéres, 35 Mystére Mark IV’s, 50 Ouragans, 20 Vatour light bombers, and 45 Fougas) were operational. These had repeatedly practiced Focus, carrying it out on mock-ups of Egyptian airfields, under circumstances of near-total secrecy. Only a few ministers knew of the plan, while members of the general staff received no more than a single-page summary. On the other hand, a great deal was known about Israel’s targets—the location of each Egyptian jet, together with the name and rank and even the voice of its pilot.

  Most of this information had been obtained through electronic means, but some was the product of espionage. Wolfgang Lotz, a German-born Israeli spy posing as a former SS officer, obtained vital details from the Egyptian military leaders he befriended until his capture in 1964. Other high-placed sources, among them an intelligence officer named Anwar Ifrim and ‘Ali al-’Alfi, Nasser’s personal masseur, contributed to what Hod later called “Israel’s real-time intelligence” on Egypt’s aircraft. The Egyptians, for their part, did little to shield their planes. These were concentrated by type—MiG’s, Ilyushins, Topolovs—each to its own base, allowing the Israelis to prioritize their targets. Though proposals for constructing concrete hangars had been submitted by the air force and approved, none had ever been submitted by the air force and approved, none had ever been implemented. Egypt’s jets were parked on open-air aprons, without so much as sandbags surrounding them. “A fighter jet is the deadliest weapon in existence—in the sky,” Hod was fond of saying, “but on the ground it is utterly defenseless.”1

  Almost all of Egypt’s planes were on the ground at that moment, their pilots eating breakfast. Assuming that any Israeli attack would begin at dawn, the MiG’s had already flown their sunrise patrols, and had returned to base at 8:15 Egypt time, an hour ahead of Israel’s. Only four training flights were in the air, none of them armed. Taking off from al-Maza base, however, were two Ilyushin-14 transports. In one, bound for the Bir al-Thamada base, flew Field Marshal ‘Amer and Air Commander Sidqu Mahmud; in the other, Internal Intelligence Chief Husayn al-Shaf’i, the Iraqi prime minister, and a senior Soviet adviser, headed for Abu Suweir. All of the army’s commanders were either seated in those two planes or waiting for them to land. Nothing the Ilyushins on their radar screens, the Israelis were concerned that the planes would detect their approaching squadrons. Such an alarm was indeed sounded, though not by the bombers, which calmly climbed to cruising altitude. The warning, rather, came from ‘Ajlun.

  Supplied by Britain, Jordan’s radar facility at ‘Ajlun, near Jerash, was one of the most sophisticated in the Middle East. At 8:15 A.M., the station’s screens were suddenly studded with blips. Though the Jordanians had grown accustomed to large numbers of Israeli aircraft heading out to sea, the density of the concentration was unprecedented. The officer on duty radioed in Grape—‘Inab, in Arabic, the prearranged code word for war—to Gen. Riyad’s headquarters in Amman. Riyad, in turn, relayed the information to Defense Minister Shams Badran in Cairo, and there it remained, indecipherable. The Egyptians had changed their encoding frequencies the previous day, but without updating the Jordanians. The Israelis had also altered their frequencies, leaving ‘Ajlun’s observers to wonder whether the blips were IAF planes or foreign aircraft—British or American—launched from carriers at sea. They watched as the radar suddenly showed a diversion eastward, toward Sinai, and then cabled the code word repeatedly.

  But even if those messages could have been read, Badran was not present to read them. The defense minister had gone to bed only a few hours before, leaving strict orders not be disturbed. Similarly absent were Col. Mas’ud al-Junaydi, in charge of decoding, and Air Operation Chief General Gamal ‘Afifi. At this subsequent trial for incompetence, ‘Afifi claimed, “I was out of the army for ten years before that, and less than six months in that job. Thank God I wasn’t there, for the man
who was at least knew who to call and what to do. Had I been there, the situation would have been much worse.” Air force intelligence also reported extensively on the Israeli attack, but the officers at supreme Headquarters, devoted to ‘Amer and distrustful of Nasser loyalists in the air force, ignored them.2

  For the Israelis, those minutes were pivotal. “The suspense was incredible,” Ezer Weizman recounted. He had not resigned in the end, swallowing his pride and remaining chief of operations. But Weizman cared little about ground battles; his main concern was the air force and the Focus plan he had helped originate. “For five years I had been talking of this operation, explaining it, hatching it, dreaming of it, manufacturing it link by link, training men to carry it out. Now, in another quarter of an hour, we would know if it was only a dream, or whether it would come true.”

  The plan, requiring dozens of squadrons from different bases to rendezvous silently over eleven targets between twenty and forty-five minutes’ flying time away, was labyrinthine in its complexity, and exceedingly hazardous. All but twelve of the country’s jets were thrown into the attack—American football fans would call it a Hail Mary—leaving the country’s skies virtually defenseless. Innumerable practice runs had convinced IAF commanders that the Egyptian air force could be destroyed, even if it managed to get off the runways,in as little as three hours. Yet Rabin continued to entertain doubts, and even ordered commando units to prepare for nocturnal attacks on enemy airstrips in the events that Focus failed.3

  Now Rabin, along with Dayan, waited in IAF headquarter with Weizman and the anxious commander of Israel’s air force. “The first forty-five minutes felt like a day,” said Hod, on whose shoulders fell the immediate responsibility for the attack. A lean, taciturn former kibbutznik, Hod had smuggled Holocaust survivors into Palestine after World War II and then, prior to the War of Independence, smuggled in a British Spitfire as well. Throughout the battles of 1948 and 1956, he had earned a reputation as a skilled and cool-headed pilot,

  less known for brilliance than for his resourcefulness and grit. Cincinnatus-like, his strongest desire was to return to farming, but Weizman had insisted that Hod replace him as air force chief early in 1966. Since then, he had concentrated on refining Focus, reducing the turnaround time for refueling and rearming jets to less than eight minutes. The Egyptian turnaround rate, by comparison, was eight hours. “He may not be able to quote [the Hebrew poet] Bialik or Shakespeare,” Weizman said of Hod, “but he will screw the Arabs in plain Hebrew.”

  Sweating, guzzling pitchers of water—“like a giant radiator,”Weizman observed—Hod waited for news of the opening wave of attack. The lead formations had now passed over the sea where, using electronic jamming equipment, they were able to elude detection by Soviet vessels. At 7:30 Israel time, the first targets came into view. In the huge bases of Fa’id and Kibrit, for example, which Egyptian intelligence had erroneously concluded were out of Israel’s range, the jets were parked on the aprons, in rows or in semicircular revetments. Many airfields had only one runway—block it and the planes supposed to use it were doomed.4

  In the sky, the visibility was excellent, the wind factor close to zero. Conditions were optimal for attack. The Israeli jets now swooped up sharply to as high as 9,000 feet, exposing themselves to Egyptian radar and sending Egyptian pilots out to the tarmac, scrambling. Few would reach their planes.

  The jets dove. They approached in foursomes and attacked in pairs, each making three passes—four, if time permitted—the first for bombing and the rest to strafe. Priority was to be given to destroying the runways, then to the long-range bombers that threatened Israeli cities, and then to the jet fighters, the MiG’s. Last to be raided were missile, radar, and support facilities. Each sortie was to take between seven and ten minutes. With a twenty-minute return flight, an eight-minute refueling time, and ten minutes’ rest for the pilot, the planes would be in action again well within an hour. During that hour, moreover, the Egyptian bases would be under almost uninterrupted attack.

  “The sky gradually cleared as we approached the target,” remembered Avihu Bin-Nun, a captain commanding a formation of Mystéres over Fa’id. “As I dived and released my bombs, I saw four MiG-21’s at the end of the runway lining up to take off. I pulled the bomb release, began firing and hit two of the four, which went up in flames.”

  The bombs Bin-Nun dropped were Durendals, a top-secret device developed jointly with the French, who had named it after Roland’s sword. Once released, the 180-pound bomb was stabilized by a retro-rocket and a parachute until it was directly over its target and pointed downwards at 60 degrees, at which point a booster rocket drove it deep into the pavement. The Durendals left craters 5 meters wide and 1.6 meters deep, rendering runways unusable. Nor could they be repaired, as delayed fuses on many of the bombs continued exploding. Over one hundred of the devices were dropped on Abu Suweir alone, in less than one hour. Bin-Nun continued, “We destroyed sixteen of the fortyMiG’s scattered around the field, and paralyzed a SAM-2 battery on our way back. We could see all the other Egyptian airfields in flames.”

  Below, the Egyptian pilots were in a state of shock, incredulous of Israel’s ability to penetrate their defenses, to catch them so totally off-guard. “I stood on the runway, at exactly 9:00 A.M., ready to leave with the training sortie,” recalled Brig. Gen. Tahsin Zaki, commander of the Malis base. “I heard the noise of jet planes, at the very same moment, and I looked toward the direction of the noise and saw two gray Super Mystére planes. They dropped two bombs at the beginning of the runway. Two additional planes were behind them, and they dropped two bombs in the middle of the runway,and the last two planes dropped two bombs at the end of the runway. After a couple of minutes, the whole runway was bombed. It was a complete surprise.”5

  The Egyptian planes were inextricably trapped, easy prey for the 30-mm cannons and heat-seeking rockets that next raked them. At the Beni Suweif and Luxor airfields west of the Canal, colossal Topolov-16 bombers and their tenton payloads exploded with such force that one of the attacking jets was literally blown out of the sky. In Sinai, mixed formations of Mirage and Mystére fighters hit the scores of parked MiG’s and incinerating the few that attempted to takek off. Only at al-’Arish was the runway spared, in the assumption that it would soon be serving Israeli transports.

  By the end of that first wave, 8:00 Israel time, an average of twenty-five sorties had been carried out against Cairo West, Fa’id, and Abu Suweir bases. Four airfields in Sinai and two in Egypt had been entirely knocked out. The main communication cable linking Egyptians forces in Sinai with Supreme Head-quarters had been severed. The most devastating damage, though, was done to the air force itself. In little over half an hour, the Egyptians had lost 204 planes—half of their air force—all but nine of them on the ground.

  The Israelis were stunned. No one had ever imagined that a single squadron could neutralize an entire air base, and that Focus’s kill ratio would exceed expectations by almost 100 percent. Those expectations had taken into account the possibility that Egyptians would soon overcome their initial shock and rally, shooting down as many as a quarter of their attackers’ planes. Indeed, Israeli pilots were ordered to reserve five minutes of their combat fuel and a third of their ammunition for dogfights. None occurred, however, nor was there significant ground fire. All of Egypt’s 100 anti-aircraft batteries, its 27 SAM-2 missiles sites, had been issued no-fire orders by ’Amer, who feared they might mistake his plane for one of Israel’s. Only in Cairo did the anti-aircraft units try to repel the planes, shooting wildly at the delta-wing aircraft overhead. “We were on high alert, with more than enough ammunition, but we received no orders to shoot,”attested Sa‘id Ahmad Rabi‘, the major commanding the guns. “Finally, I opened fire myself, and thought I’d be courtmartialed for it. But instead I received a medal for valor, and have kept my job ever since.”

  Rabi’ claimed to have downed several Israeli jets. In all, the IAF lost eight aircraft in the first wave, and
five pilots. One of the planes, damaged but unable to break radio silence, was destroyed by Israeli Hawk missiles after it strayed over Dimona.

  Only now, with the first strike completed, were the results made known to headquarters. These seemed too fantastic to believe, and it was not until Hod had personally debriefed his pilots that he could confirm their remarkable success. “A stone—just one, but of agonizing weight—rolled off the heart,” Dayan wrote. Yet that same stone would remain on the Israeli public. The extent of the IAF’s success would be kept secret for as long as possible, delaying a UN-imposed cease-fire while Israeli tanks rolled into Sinai. At 8:15, Dayan issued the Red Sheet password. The ground war was about to begin.

  The second wave of fighters, meanwhile, reached its destinations: fourteen enemy bases, nearly half of them west of the Canal, and all of Egypt’s radar sites. Though the Israelis no longer enjoyed the element of surprise, and no longer observed radio silence, resistance from these facilities was moderate and largely confined to anti-aircraft fire. The IAF carried out 164 sorties in just over 100 minutes and destroyed another 107 planes, while suffering only nine losses. Of the 420 combat aircraft in Egypt’s arsenal that morning, 286 were destroyed—30 Tupolev-16’s, 27 Ilyushin-28 medium bombers, 12 Sukhoi-7 fighter-bombers, 90 MiG-21 interceptors, 20 MiG-19’s, 75 MiG-17’s, 32 transport planes and helicopters—and almost a third of their pilots killed. Thirteen bases were rendered inoperable, along with twenty-three radar stations and anti-aircraft sites. At 10:35, Hod turned to Rabin and reported, “The Egyptian air force has ceased to exist.”6