Six Days of War

by Michael B. Oren

  Watching that flight from Bir Lafhan, Col. Arvraham ‘Bren’ Adan, Yoffe’s second-in-command and a veteran of the two previous campaigns in Sinai, was stupefied. “You ride past burnt-out vehicles and suddenly you see this immense army, too numerous to count, spread out of a vast area as far as your eyes can see,” he told IDF debriefers after the war. “It was not a pleasant feeling, seeing that gigantic enemy and realizing that you’re only a single battalion of tanks.” Dayan, tracking the course of the war from the Pit, was no less puzzled. “Though Israel had gained command of the skies, Egypt’s cities were not bombed, and the Egyptian armored units at the front could have fought even without air support.”7

  Intelligence Chief Yariv, reporting to the general staff that afternoon, revealed the radical change that had transpired in Sinai. “Our pilots report that the Egyptian army is in bad shape, retreating en masse on roads partially blocked by our earlier airstrikes.” Haim Bar-Lev stressed the need to press on with the destruction of Egypt’s army. But with the enemy fleeing faster than the IDF could follow, how was this to be done?

  “There was no planning before the war about what the army would do beyond the al-‘Arish-Jabal Libni axis, not even a discussion,” Gen. Yoffe recalled. “Nobody believed that we could have accomplished more or that the [Egyptian] collapse would be so swift. Nobody believed we would have four uninterrupted days of combat—we were thinking in terms of a surgical operation.” The questions of where to lead the army, how far, and with what objectives, were all addressed by Shaike Gavish at dusk when he convened his three Ugdah commanders—Sharon, Tal, and Yoffee—at Jabal Libni.

  Gavish’s strategy was to prevent the Egyptians from stabilizing their second defense line and mounting a possible counterattack on al-‘Arish. He wanted to hit them hard and then beat them to the passes, destroying what remained of their tanks. Accordingly, Tal’s forces were to overwhelm the Egyptian positions to the west of Jabal Libni, to attack Egypt’s 3rd Division east of Bir al-Thamada and the 4th Division at Bir Gafgafa. Yoffee, striking south through Bir Hasana and the remnants of the 3rd Division, would divide his force into two columns, one each to the Giddi and Mitla passes. Farther south, Sharon would block Shazli’s retreat at Nakhl before driving the rest of Egypt’s army into Tal and Yoffee’s ambushes. Col. Granit’s column, meanwhile, would continue to advance along the Mediterranean coast, through Romani en route to Qantara. But there would be no conquest of the Canal itself, at least not yet, for political reasons. “Once Gavish gave us our orders,” Yoffee recounted, “the course of the rest of the war became obvious. Though some unexpected turns might occur—the 4th Division might be waiting for us, or worse—we were essentially in a pursuing operation. The battle was already decided.”8

  Egyptian leaders appeared to agree, at least with regard to the military struggle. In the wake of the retreat, Egypt’s emphasis swerved from tanks and guns to political propaganda, specifically the charge of U.S. and British intervention for Israel. Here, at least, the coordination between Nasser and ‘Amer was complete. Both held conversations with Soviet ambassador Pojidaev, evincing the collusion claim as a means of securing direct Soviet support. ’Amer, unable to furnish proof of U.S. and British attacks, accused the USSR of supplying faulty weapons to Egypt. “I’m no expert on weaponry,” Pojidaev replied, “but I do know that the arms we’ve given the Vietnamese have certainly proved superior to the Americans’.” But Nasser left little room for debate. He simply dictated a direct letter to Kosygin informing him that the 6th Fleet, together with U.S. bases in the region, was actively aiding the Israelis. The Jews now stood to reap a great victory unless Moscow extended similar help to Egypt, which was desperately in need of planes.9

  The myth snowballed rapidly as the day progressed, reaching all corners of the Arab world. “British bombers, taking off in endless waves from Cyprus, are aiding and supplying the Israelis,” Damascus Radio declared. “Canberra bombers are striking our forward positions.” Radio Amman claimed that three American aircraft carriers were operating off Israel’s coast. American warships were reportedly sighted off Port Said, in Haifa harbor, and blocking the entrance to the Canal. Other sources spoke of Israelis piloting American planes with CIA-supplied maps of Egypt and of American pilots flying incognito for Israel. Captured Israeli pilots purportedly “confessed” to collaborating with the U.S. Israel, which had attacked Egypt with 1,200 jets, could not possibly have acted alone—so the argument ran. In a widely distributed communiqué, Nasser called on “the Arab masses to destroy all imperialist interests.”

  Within hours of the broadcast, mobs attacked American embassies and consulates throughout the Middle East. In Baghdad and Basra, Aleppo, Alexandria, and Algiers, even in congenial cities such as Tunis and Benghazi, American diplomats barricaded themselves in their compounds and prepared for the worst. Oil facilities were shut in Iraq and Libya, while Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrein banned oil shipments to the United States and Britain. “America is now the number 1 enemy of the Arabs,” proclaimed Algiers Radio, “the American presence…must be exterminated from the Arab homeland.” Americans in Egypt, many of them long-time residents, were given minutes to pack and then, at gunpoint, searched and summarily deported. “This is how people felt on their way to Auschwitz,” wrote Thomas Thompson, a Life correspondent, who was among the hundreds banished. In Cairo, Richard Nolte watched as an angry crowd gathered outside his office. “We are burning all—repeat all—classified papers and preparing for demonstration and attempt to enter building,” he wired. Yet, at the height of this tension, Nolte was summoned and escorted to the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, there to be told the “facts” of the Anglo-American conspiracy with Israel.

  “You say you are against aggression, but when you have aggression of Israel against Egypt you do nothing,” Mahmoud Riad excoriated Nolte. “You say you don’t know who is the aggressor. It is perfectly clear who is the aggressor and there are 90 or at least 80 ambassadors in Cairo who know this to be true.”The ambassador’s only reply was to stress the international sympathy Egypt could reap by accepting a cease-fire resolution that would specifically label Israel as the aggressor. Muhieddin could then come to Washington as planned, and a diplomatic solution could then be found for the Straits. But his words failed to impress the foreign minister, who continued in a similar vein: “If Egypt had been the aggressor, the Sixth Fleet would now be on its shores!”10

  Convinced though he was of America’s complicity in Israel’s attack, Riad opposed any rupture of relations with Washington, with which Egypt would have to conduct the postwar negotiations. Nasser, however, dissented. He recalled Egypt’s embassy staff from Washington and announced the severance of all diplomatic ties with the United States. Six additional Arab states—Syria, Sudan, Algeria, Iraq, Mauritania, and Yemen—quickly followed suit, and ten Arab oil-producing states banned exports to the U.S. and Britain. In Damascus, Ambassador Smythe was given forty-eight hours to leave the country, and until then, was confined to his residence. Nolte wrote, “Thus endeth my meteoric mission to Cairo.”

  Politically, at least, Nasser was succeeding where militarily he had capitulated, rallying the Arab world around his leadership. And yet that victory remained incomplete as long as one Arab state, Jordan, failed to follow Egypt’s lead. Once reviled as an imperialist tool, Hussein had become for Nasser “our heroic and nationalist brother” and “the brave little king.”11 Enlisting the monarch in the charge of Anglo-American collusion would have powerful repercussions in the area, especially among Arab allies of the West. Nasser needed Hussein’s cooperation, but Hussein had concerns of his own.

  The Charnel House

  “That night was hell,” Hussein recounted in his memoirs. “It was clear as day. The sky and the earth glowed with the light of the rockets and the constant explosions of the bombs pouring from Israeli planes.” In the darkness, the king shuttled between his headquarters in Amman and his still-secure positions at the front. The latter were dwindling steadily. />
  In Jenin, where Col. Khalidi’s infantry and Maj. ’Ajluni’s three surviving tanks were holding off substantially superior Israeli forces advancing from both the north and the south, relief arrived unexpectedly at 4:00 A.M. in the form of two battalions from the 40th Armored Brigade. Having slipped through undetected by the Israelis, the 4th Armored Battalion reinforced Khalidi in defending the city, while the 2nd Battalion blocked the Israelis at ’Arabe, to the east. At the cry of “Fight for Allah!,” Brig. al-Ghazi’s Pattons charged with every gun blazing. A mechanized battalion—the Amir ’Abdallah—equipped with M-113 armored personnel carriers also joined the fray. One after another, Israeli vehicles burst into flames, and the tide began to shift. “The enemy allowed our forces to get within close range and fought us bravely and stubbornly,” remembered Moshe Bar Kokhva, the Israeli brigade commander. Al-Ghazi was already thinking of moving from a defensive to an offensive strategy, consolidating the remainder of the 40th’s Pattons and driving the Israelis back across the border.

  Then the sun rose, and the Jordanians were again exposed to the sky. Israeli jets and artillery dropped a two-hour barrage on al-Ghazi’s men, killing 10 and wounding 250, many of whom had to be left on the field. Only seven tanks—two without gas—and sixteen APC’s remained to limp eastward to the Tubas road and then south, toward Nablus. Bar-Kokhva’s armored forces, together with Avnon’s infantry, meanwhile blasted their way into Jenin. Resistance proved obstinate, especially around the city’s police fort, where Bar Kokhva himself was wounded. Not until noon could the Israelis claim functional control over the city, the key to the northern West Bank.12

  The Jordanians were losing ground in the Jerusalem theater as well, in the hills west of the city. Though one of Harel’s column ran into strong opposition outside Bidu—one Israeli and twenty Jordanians were killed—and another lost most of its tracked vehicles to boulders, five Shermans reached Nabi Samwil at 2:55 A.M. Waiting for them there was a company of Jordanian Pattons which, after a fifteen-minute battle, were driven off with their external fuel tanks aflame. The road was now open to Beit Hanina, a suburb of East Jerusalem situated only 500 meters from the Ramallah-Jerusalem highway.13 Mount Scopus was virtually secured.

  Gen. Narkiss, however, could not afford to believe that. He was convinced that the 60th Brigade still posed an imminent threat to Jewish Jerusalem—soldiers on Mount Scopus reported hearing tanks approaching—and had begged for additional air strikes. Bar-Lev at first declined the request, explaining that Israel’s pilots were exhausted, having flown five missions in less than twenty-four hours, but Narkiss could not be put off. Without air support, he argued, Jerusalem would be lost—“tired or not, they have to knock out that armor.” Yet, even after the IAF wrought havoc among Brig. bin Shaker’s tanks, the Central Command chief remained skeptical. Unsure how many enemy vehicles survived, he refused to take any chances with the fate of Mount Scopus. The garrison would be relieved, as planned, by the paratroopers.

  Blocking that effort were the strongest fortifications in Jerusalem, a ganglia of trenches, bunkers, minefields, and concrete obstacles known since World War I, when Gen. Allenby stored his ordnance there, as Ammunition Hill. The Israelis perceived the bastion as a direct threat to Mount Scopus and the western half of the city, while for the Jordanians, it represented a first line defense against any Israeli assault on the east. The soldiers on both sides of that line, Israelis and Jordanians, had been under continuous shellfire for many hours. Yet their morale remained commensurately high and their vital supplies undiminished. The scene was set for a grueling battle when, at 1:25 A.M., Motta Gur’s paratroopers moved quietly into position.

  Gur’s men were to divide into three forces. The first would cross the noman’s land near the Mandelbaum Gate, the UN checkpoint between the two sectors of the city, and assault the Police Academy that guarded the southern approaches to Ammunition Hill. The second group would proceed east through the neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and the American Colony to reach the Rockefeller Museum, while the third followed the ravine of Wadi Joz up to the Augusta Victoria Hospital, on the ridge midway between Mount Scopus and the Mount of Olives. At battle’s end, it was hoped, Israel would not only be free of any Jordanian threat but also be poised to enter the Old city. “Jerusalem is not al-‘Arish,” Narkiss told the paratroopers just prior to the attack. “Let’s hope this time we’ll atone for the sin of’48.”14

  At 2:10 in the morning the Jerusalem sky was again illuminated, this time by intense Israeli artillery, tank, and mortar fire to soften up the enemy line. Giant searchlights placed atop the Labor Federation building—West Jerusalem’s highest-further exposed the Jordanians and effectively blinded them. Thus heralded, Battalion 66 under Maj. Yosef “Yoffe, a farmer in civilian life and a veteran of the 1950s retaliation raids, crept up to the first line of barbed wire and blasted their way through. But beyond that row lay another, and four more after that, none of which appeared on the IDF’s maps. The attackers were caught in no-man’s land, in a blistering crossfire and under a rising moon. “We made our way, Bangalore [torpedo] after Bangalore, fence by fence, squad by squad,” Arik Akhmon, the paratroop intelligence officer, remembered. “And the most difficult battle had yet to begin. Before us lay Ammunition Hill.” Seven Israelis were killed and over a dozen wounded before the last of the wires were cut. Only at 3:10 did Gur, anxious about the approaching dawn, receive the signal that Off’s men had broken had broken through to the Police Academy. Gur replied, “I could kiss you.”

  Built by the British during Mandate times and later passed to the UN, the Police Academy was believed by the Israelis to house ‘Ata ‘Ali’s main headquarters and was therefore heavily defended. In fact, the area was manned by a single company, 140 men, of the 2nd al-Hussieni Battalion under Capt. Suliman Salayta. With the covering fire from two Shermans borrowed from the Jerusalem Brigade, Israeli engineers cleared a path for the assault units which, over the next two hours, destroyed some thirty-four bunkers and machine-gun nests. Still, the Jordanians fought, stalling the Israeli charge just fifteen meters from Salayta’s position. The captain, with seventeen killed and forty-two wounded, ordered an artillery barrage on his own position, and with those of his men still able, fell back to nearby Ammunition Hill.

  The battle for the Police Academy also proved costly for the Israelis, only a squad of whom remained fit for further fighting. Reinforcements arrived, however, and the paratroopers proceeded to Ammunition Hill, attacking it from three directions: west, east, and center.

  “Sir, the enemy has succeeded in penetration the area to the left of the Police Academy,” Pvt. Farhan Haman reported to Maj. Mansur Kranshur, in

  charge of the Ammunition Hill defenses. “There is a tank column and two companies of infantry. The platoon commander says he has things under control but requests artillery support.” But the artillery barrage proved insufficient to stop the oncoming Israelis; nor did reinforcements from the Police Academy arrive, only Jordanian wounded. Still, the defenders managed to thwart the attack, throwing grenades and charging with Bren guns, hollering “Allah Akhar”—God Is Great.

  The point Israeli squads were all but annihilated. One of their three Shermans was knocked out; the other two could not depress their guns low enough to fire at the submerged Jordanian positions. Unable to call for artillery support without endangering themselves, with their packs too wide to maneuver through the enemy trenches, the paratroopers were compelled to advance without cover over open ground, and one by one they fell. Fire leaped at them not only from Ammunition Hill but also from what the Israelis called Mivtar Hill, another Jordanian stronghold, across a wadi to the west. “Most of our casaulties were not from hand-to-hand fighting but from grenades and gunfire from more distant positions,” testified one of the battle’s veterans, Yohanan Miller. Soon, nearly all the Israeli offers and NCO’s had been hit and their units scattered. Yet improvised attack terms continued to advance, through trenches clogged with bodies. By 4:30, first li
ght, they had reached Kranshur’s bunker.

  “The battle is now hand-to-hand,” the major radioed ‘Ata ‘Ali, “ammunition is running low. You will no longer hear from me, but I hope you will hear about me and my men.”‘Ata ‘Ali responded, “May you have a long life, my friend,” and approved Kranshur’s request for an artillery bombardment of the entire area. Though badly wounded in the leg, Kranshur exploited the diversion to gather his surviving troops, and escape through the last open venue—north, to Shu‘afat ridge. Behind him, employing twenty-one pounds of TNT, Israeli engineers blew up his bunker. The battle for Ammunition Hill, one of the bloodiest in Arab-Israeli history, was over by 5:15 A.M. Seventy-one Jordanians were killed and forty-six wounded, most of them seriously. Thirty-five Israelis, a full fourth of Yoffe’s force, also died.15

  While Yoffe’s men began the conquest of Ammunition Hill, the paratrooper brigade’s remaining battalions crossed the city line. The 28th Battalion under Yogi Fradkin, while waiting for the sign to advance, was ravaged by 81-mm mortar fire and suffered sixty-four wounded and dead. Severely delayed, short on men and equipment, the battalion nevertheless managed to cut through noman’s-land to East Jerusalem’s American Colony. From there, the paratroopers were scheduled to move toward the Old City via the lightly defended Salah al-Din Street.

  Though highly experienced in combat during the 1948 and 1956 wars, Fradkin had never fought in Jerusalem. “Our soldiers almost never knew what was expected of them,” he told fellow officers after the war. “They didn’t know where we were taking them. They didn’t know the place.” Instead of heading down Salah al-Din Street, he made a wrong turn onto Nablus Road, where the Jordanians were waiting in force. Having spotted the Israelis’ advance from Ammunition Hill, Maj. Kranshur called Cap. Nabi Shkhimat, commander of the Nablus Road sector. “The enemy’s tanks are coming in your direction,” Kranshur warned him, “be prepared to fight on a large front, house to house, to the last man and bullet.”