As the picture of the battlefield became clear in Israel, in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world it grew deeply obfuscated. Officers at the ravaged air bases were aware that a terrible tragedy had transpired. The pilot Hashem Mustafa Husayn, stationed at Bir al-Thamada, described the feeling:
Some 30 seconds from the end of the [first] attack, a second wave of planes arrived…We ran about the desert, looking for cover, but the planes didn’t shoot. They merely circled, their pilots surprised that the base was completely destroyed and that no targets remained. We were the only targets…weak humans scurrying in the desert with handguns as our only means of self-defense. It was a sad comedy…pilots of the newest and best-equipped jets fighting with handguns. Five minutes after the beginning of the attack the [Israeli] planes disappeared and a silence prevailed that encompassed the desert and the noise of the fire that destroyed our planes and the airbase and the squadron. They completed their assignment in the best way possible, with a ratio of losses-100 percent for us, 0 percent for them.
Brig. Zaki had a similar experience. Helplessly he had watched as Husayn al-Shaf‘i’s plane, having barely managed to land on a secondary airstrip, was strafed by enemy Mirages. The crew and passengers managed to escape, but those in an accompanying craft proved less fortunate; all died on the runway. “Israel spent years preparing for this war, whereas we prepared for parades,” he testified later. “The drills for the annual Revolution Day parade went on for weeks…but there were no preparations for war.”
Surrounded by what Sidqi Mahmud called “a forest of Israelis jets,”‘Amer’s plane could not land at all. It circled from base to burning base for nearly ninety minutes before touching down at Cairo’s International Airport. There, Col. Muhammad Ayyub, ‘Amer’s air force liaison officer, was waiting with a drawn pistol, convinced that a coup had been staged against his boss. “You want to murder him, you dogs!” Ayyub shouted as the other officers present also pulled out their guns. Sidqi Mahmud stepped between them, though, averting a firefight. “Fools,” he scolded them, “put your guns away! Israel is attacking us!”
Lacking military transportation, ‘Amer took a taxi to Supreme Headquarters. Only thirty-seven of his MiG’s were still flightworthy and he had nearly been shot out of the sky, but ‘Amer was nevertheless elated. The war had finally begun. He promptly commanded Sidqi Mahmud to provide air cover for the conquest of Israel’s coast (Operation Leopard) and to deploy Egypt’s newest Sukhoi jets, if necessary with their Russian instructors. ‘Amer then called Damascus and Baghdad and requested that they execute Operation Rashid—the bombing of Israeli airfields—at once. The Iraqis consented, but then complained of “technical delays.” The Syrians claimed that their planes were presently engaged in a training exercise.
Such disappointments did little to dampen the mood in Egypt’s Supreme Headquarters which seemed to the Soviet attaché S. Tarasenko, “tranquil, almost indifferent, the officers merely listening to the radio and drinking coffee.” Throughout the capital, however, the citizenry was celebrating. “The streets were overflowing with demonstrators,” remembered Eric Rouleau, Middle East correspondent for Le Monde. “Anti-aircraft guns were firing. Hundreds of thousands of people were chanting, ‘Down with Israel! We will win the war!’” But Rouleau, together with other foreign journalists, was not allowed near the front. All international phone lines were cut. The sole source of information was the government’s communiqué: “With an aerial strike against Cairo and across the UAR, Israel began its attack today at 9:00. Our planes scrambled and held off the attack.”
The accounts of that counterstrike were promising. A total of eighty-six enemy planes were reportedly shot down, including an American bomber. Egypt’s losses were put at two. “There is a good deal [of] effervescence and clapping at this news,” American ambassador Nolte reported. “The radio [is] playing patriotic songs interspersed with calls for a return to Palestine and rendezvous in Tel Aviv.”‘Amer wired Gen. Riyad in Amman with the news that, in spite of their initial surprise, the Israelis had lost 75 percent of their air power. The Egyptian army was hitting back and mounting an offensive from Sinai.7
Not present at Supreme Headquarters when the news of the Israeli air strikes arrived, Nasser also welcomed the opening of hostilities and believed the tide would soon turn. Nevertheless, by 10:00—the height of the second wave—when the air force claimed to have downed 161 Israeli bombers, Nasser became suspicious. He tried contacting ‘Amer, but received no reply; Sidqi Mahmud was also unreachable. One of the few men who would have told him the truth, Anwar Sadat, had secluded himself at home. Entering headquarters at 11:00, Sadat heard from Soviet ambassador Pojidaev and from other senior officers of the full extent of Egypt’s disaster. “I just went home and stayed in for days,” he wrote, unable to watch the “crowds…chanting, dancing, and applauding the faked-up victory reports which our mass media put out hourly.”
But Nasser remained in the dark, not the least because no one in the army or the government dared enlighten him. All went along with the version, broadcast on Cairo Radio, that “our airplanes and our missiles are at this moment shelling all Israel’s towns and villages,” that called on “every Arab to avenge the dignity lost in 1948, to advance across the Armistice line to the den of the gang itself, to Tel Aviv.”8
Red Sheet over Sinai
Secretly advanced during the night, camouflaged, and observing radio silence, Israeli forces on the Egyptian border had watched as successive waves of Israeli planes soared overhead. Then, at 7:50 A.M., the Red Sheet password arrived and the columns moved out. Gen. Tal’s Ugdah—an IDF division expanded for specific tasks—composed of 250 tanks, 50 guns, a paratrooper brigade, and a reconnaissance unit, crossed the border at two points, opposite Nahal Oz and south of Khan Yunis. They proceeded swiftly, holding their fire to prolong the element of surprise. Ahead lay the Rafah Gap, a seven-mile stretch containing the shortest of the three main routes through Sinai to Qantara and the Suez Canal. For this reason, Egypt positioned a full four divisions in the area, reinforcing a warren of minefields, pillboxes, underground bunkers, hidden gun emplacements, and trenchworks. For the attacking Israelis, there was little choice but to break through these defenses; the terrain on either side of the road, sand and ravines, was impassable.
Yet that was precisely the Israeli plan, to hit the enemy at selected key points and with a “mailed fist” of concentrated armor. A hardened veteran of World War II and the two previous Arab-Israeli wars, Tal had commanded the armored corps since 1964, turning it into a highly disciplined and mobile force. Tested in earlier skirmishes with the Syrians—Tal, himself, had been wounded—the corps was to crack Egypt’s strongest defenses, sowing confusion and demoralization, precipitating a domino-like retreat. Upon completing his prebattle briefing, Tal had reminded his officers that wars were rarely fought according to plan. They only had to follow one principle: “Everyone attacks, everyone penetrates, without looking sideways or back.” The armored corps had broken through the same area in 1956 in just over thirty-six hours. This time they had twenty-four.9
For Tal’s division, the going at first was easy. Leading the thrust was Israel’s finest armored brigade, the 7th, under Col. Shmuel Gonen. Swinging south of Gaza, Gonen’s column was greeted by Egyptian soldiers who mistook its tanks for their own. Similarly, the commanders of Egypt’s 11th Brigade, equipped with Stalin tanks—the Middle East’s biggest—allowed Israeli paratroopers of the 35th Brigade to slog relatively unmolested through the dunes as they made their frontal assault. “Apparently someone in heaven was watching over us,” remarked the commander, Rafael (Raful) Eytan, after the war, “Every unintended action they took and every unintended action we took always turned out to our advantage.” But Israeli advances were more than a product of luck. Egyptian intelligence had concluded that enemy movements in the sector were merely diversions for the main axis of attack, opposite Rafah and Khan Yunis.
Gonen (Gorodish), 37, an upholsterer’s son who le
ft his religious studies at age thirteen to join the Haganah, was a prepossessing officer, staunch and bullish. The day before he had assured his men that “we will thrash them [the Egyptians] as we did in 1948 and 1956,” that the Israelis would “wash their feet in the Canal” and topple Nasser in Cairo. But he also reminded them that “if we do not win, we will have nowhere to come back to,” and cautioned them to conserve ammunition. The goal was not to attack Rafah directly—that was left to the paratroopers—but to outflank it from Khan Yunis in the north. An axis was chosen farthest from the Egyptian guns and downwind of the sea, to avoid poison gas. From the south, 60th Brigade, under Col. Menachem Aviram with eighty-six Sherman and AMX tanks, would enclose Khan Yunis in an iron vise.
Though he fielded a formidable arsenal, including fifty-eight Centurions and sixty-six Pattons, Gonen entrusted the breakthrough at Khan Yunis to a single tank battalion. This advanced on the town, encountering only scant opposition. Then, “suddenly all hell opened up,” recalled Ori Orr, an officer in the reconnaissance unit, half of whose men became casualties. “Artillery shells, machine guns, anti-tank guns—everything fired at us…Along the whole area, Egyptian T-34 tanks took their positions and fired. An [Israeli] half-track was hit by a shell before it could get off the road. All eight soldiers inside were killed.” Another tank battalion was brought up and this, too, was pummeled. Some of the fiercest resistance came from the 20th Palestinian Division, not considered a first-rate unit, under the command of Gen. Muhammad ‘Abd al-Mun’im Husni, Gaza’s military governor.
Gonen’s six lead tanks were quickly knocked out and thirty-five of his officers killed. Aviram’s force became bogged down in the sand, while the dunes created a navigational nightmare for the paratroopers.
“This is a battle for life and death,” Tal had told his men, “We will attack all the time, no matter what the cost in casualties.” The Israelis’ casualties were indeed high as they fought their way through antitank ditches, roadside pillboxes, and stone terraces that forced them off the main axes and into a maze of alleys. And yet their progress was remarkable. In little over four hours, Gonen’s brigade reached the Khan Yunis railway junction and then covered, in twin columns, the nine remaining miles to Rafah.
Rafah, with its sprawling military camps, was in fact to be circumvented, the main target being the Egyptian defenses at Sheikh Zuweid, eight miles to the southwest. These were held by two brigades of the 7th Division, a unit created three weeks before in anticipation of Operation Dawn and Egypt’s conquest of the Negev. Led by the commandant of the army’s infantry school, Maj. Gen. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Suliman, most of the division’s officers were also instructors and, as such, ill prepared for the Israelis’ unconventional approach from the sea and through the sands. Nor, with their twenty guns and sixty-six largely antiquated tanks, were the Egyptians a match for the larger Israeli force of more modern Centurions and Pattons. “We were exposed to a heavy armor attack on several axes, with the sea to our backs in the north, and constant aerial and artillery bombardment,” recalled battalion commander ‘Izzat ‘Arafa. “We had almost no communications with other headquarters in the sector, and no knowledge of what was happening on the battlefield.”
Yet, deeply entrenched and camouflaged, the defenders exacted a painful price. “The [Egyptian] artillery positions were dug in low,” Gonen later told reporters. “They fired ten rounds at a time and with each volley a tank went up in flames. We left many of our dead soldiers at Rafah, and many burnt-out tanks.” Heavy artillery and air strikes had to be called in to enable the lead Israeli elements to break through. Suliman and several of his staff were killed. Leaderless, many Egyptian troops abandoned their positions, leaving behind forty tanks and some 2,000 dead and wounded.
The battle turned into a rout, complete except for Aviram’s battalion which, having misjudged the enemy’s flank, found itself pinned between strongholds. Extricating the force took several hours, yet by nightfall, the Israelis had finished mopping up. Thousands of Egyptian soldiers, hundreds of jeeps and trucks, streamed past the attackers as they regrouped on the road to al-‘Arish.
That road was now open to the IDF. Already by late afternoon, elements of the IDF’s 79th Armored Battalion had charged through the seven-mile-long Jiradi defile, a narrow pass through shifting dunes. Its well-emplaced defenders, troops of the 112th Infantry Brigade, mistook the Israeli tanks for their own. The effect, later described by an IDF internal report, was eerie:
On both sides of the road were dug-in tanks, antitank guns, mortar pits and machine-gun nests all linked by trenches and surrounded with mines. The longest distance between any two positions was 50 meters. The Egyptians were so surprised [by the Israeli column] that they did not shoot. The [Israeli] commander thought the Egyptians had fled and so told his men to hold their fire. Only when the column reached the midway point was it revealed that the Egyptians had not fled.
The pass changed hands several times before the Israelis finally cleared it and emerged at its western end, having advanced over twenty miles in a single afternoon. Just beyond lay the outskirts of al-‘Arish, a town of 40,000 and the administrative hub of Egypt’s army in Sinai. “We reached our objective at 10:00 in the evening, in the pitch darkness,” wrote Lt. Yossi Peled, “Egyptian tanks were burning for as far as we could see, and Egyptian soldiers lying between them. But many of our tanks were also ablaze, and the Israelis lying beside them were no longer alive.” In all, the Israelis lost twenty-eight tanks; ninety-three men were wounded and sixty-six killed.10
However costly, Israel’s offensive was proceeding well ahead of schedule—so much so that a combined sea and airborne assault on al-‘Arish planned for the next day was canceled, and the paratroopers preparing for it were diverted to Jerusalem. Though the war was far from decided, a crucial battle had been won and under circumstances in which the antagonists were generally well matched and in which air power—Focus still preoccupied the IAF—played only a minor role.
A similar balance prevailed farther to the south, in the heavily fortified area, six miles deep and two wide, of Umm Qatef. This was the first line of Egypt’s Conqueror strategy, and its defenses were a microcosm of Sinai’s: three ‘linear dispositions’—trench systems, minefields, antitank and machine-gun positions, 80 guns, 90 tanks, and 16,000 men—between which the enemy could be crushed. Guarding the vital Abu ‘Ageila junction leading into the peninsula’s interior, to the Mitla Pass and Isma‘iliya, the stronghold had withstood repeated Israeli onslaughts in 1956, surrendering only when its supplies were exhausted. Since then, Umm Qatef had been further buttressed by powerful redoubts at Ruwafa Dam and at nearby al-Qusayma. Manning these positions were troops of the 2nd Infantry Division who, though battle-ready, were commanded by Maj. Gen. Sa’di Nagib, a political appointee best known as one of ‘Amer’s drinking mates.
Facing Nagib was Arik Sharon. At 39, Sharon cut a dashing, if controversial, figure who had earned both censure and encomium for his role in the retaliation raids of the 1950s and the bloody Mitla Pass battle in the Sinai campaign. In his previous position as IDF director of training, Sharon had thoroughly studied Umm Qatef’s defenses, and was determined not to repeat Israel’s mistakes of the previous war. Sharon’s plan was to cross the sand wastes deemed impassable by the Egyptians and to deliver an armored thrust from the north. Simultaneously, from the west, his tanks would engage the Egyptian bastions on the Umm Qatef ridge, and block any reinforcements they might receive from Jabal Libni or al-‘Arish. Israeli infantrymen would clear the three 3,000-yard trenches while, a mile behind them, heliborne paratroopers would silence the Egyptians’ artillery park. Lastly, an armored diversion would be made at al-Qusayma, preoccupying and isolating its garrison. All this would be accomplished, Sharon hoped, in time for the three brigades of his 38th Division to join Gen. Yoffe’s 31st Division in assaulting the second Egyptian defense line—Jabal Libni, Bir Lahfan, and Bir Hasana—in central Sinai.
At 8:15 A.M., the lead Centurion tanks
of Col. Natan “Natke” Nir left Nitzana and crossed the border at al-‘Awja, passing its abandoned UNEF posts. The Egyptians, though, staged successful delaying actions at Tarat Umm, Umm Tarfa, and Hill 181. An Israeli jet, swooping low, was downed by anti-aircraft fire. Then the guns at Umm Qatef opened up. Under heavy shellfire, struggling through dunes and mines, Israeli forces made their approaches from the north and the west. Casualties were high, and visibility confounded by a dust storm. Yet Nir’s tanks managed to penetrate the northern flank of Abu ‘Ageila—‘Oakland,’ in the IDF’s code—and by dusk all units were in position. Over ninety guns had been moved up to rain a punishing barrage on Umm Qatef, and civilian buses had brought the infantry reservists under Col. Yekutiel “Kuti” Adam to within marching distance of the enemy trenches. The helicopters also arrived to ferry Col. Dani Matt’s paratroopers. These movements went totally unobserved by the Egyptians. Preoccupied with enemy probes against their perimeter, they waited in vain for Supreme Headquarters’ order to counterattack, without which they would not move.11
As night fell, the Israeli assault troops lit their flashlights, each battalion a different color, to prevent friendly fire exchanges. But before the final signal could be given, Sharon received a phone call from Gavish. The Southern Command chief recommended that the attack be postponed for twenty-four hours to allow the air force, now free for ground support, to soften up the target. Sharon disagreed, but his response was garbled by electrical interference. The conversation was cut off, but then another call came for Gavish. The air force was rescinding its offer of assistance; its planes were needed elsewhere. A second front had suddenly opened, with Jordan.
The “Whip” Cracks
Six Days of War Page 30
