by David Landau
o The Free Center, with four members of the Knesset, was a breakaway from Herut, led by the lawyer Shmuel Tamir. Tamir had bridled at Menachem Begin’s autocratic rule over his party and had been forced to secede. By listing the Free Center, Sharon was signaling that he, too, would not be cowed by Begin’s authoritarian ways, which deterred middle-of-the-road voters. The State List, also with four members in the present Knesset, was the rump of Ben-Gurion’s Rafi Party. Its hard core were salt-of-the-earth moshavniks. The Independent Liberals, also a Knesset faction of four, were out-and-out doves, a far cry from the old Irgun “fighting family” who were still the backbone of Begin’s Herut. There was little chance they would join, and when it came to it, they didn’t, but Sharon lost nothing by listing them. Another component of the new Likud was the Movement for Greater Israel, a group mainly of ex-Laborites headed by Sharon’s old friend and commander, Avraham Yoffe.
p A dunam is one thousand square meters.
q Weizman, another avowed and outspoken right-winger, had left the army in 1969 and joined Herut, serving as a minister in the government of national unity.
CHAPTER 3 · DESERT STORM
Sharon arrived at the 143rd Division’s forward base at Tasa, in western Sinai, in mid-afternoon on Sunday, October 7, 1973, to take command of the central sector. Avraham “Bren” Adan was deploying to his north with the 162nd Division, another reserve formation, while the peacetime commander of Sinai, Avraham “Albert” Mandler, took over the southern sector. Shmuel Gonen (still widely known by his original family name, Gorodish), Sharon’s successor as CO of Southern Command, moved with his staff from Beersheba to the forward headquarters at Um Hashiba near the Gidi Pass, which was code-named Dvela.a
The Yom Kippur War was twenty-six hours old. Hundreds of Israeli soldiers were dead on the two fronts, the Egyptian and the Syrian. Hundreds of tanks had been destroyed or crippled. Five Egyptian infantry divisions had crossed the Suez Canal. The first waves of attackers had swarmed across in shoals of small boats. They then set about erecting ten bridges, swiftly and efficiently, down the entire length of the canal. Thousands of men and hundreds of vehicles were relentlessly streaming across. The Egyptian units were digging in on the eastern bank, fortifying bridgeheads two miles deep. Israeli warplanes sent to bomb the bridges and strafe the advancing columns were being picked off with alarming ease by the ground-to-air missile batteries on the western bank. Many of the Israeli canal-side strongpoints were surrounded and under attack. Others had simply been bypassed: they were six to seven miles apart, and the Egyptians poured through the gaps. The beleaguered men were begging for relief. But efforts to reach them had resulted only in more burned-out tanks and more dead crewmen.
“No, Arik didn’t ask me why my tanks had not deployed according to ‘Dovecote.’ ” Colonel Amnon Reshef, whose Fourteenth Armored Brigade bore the brunt of the fighting in Sinai that first night and day of the war, was at Tasa to welcome Sharon. “Dovecote” was the defense plan centered on the Bar-Lev Line. At times of tension, regular army infantrymen were to man the strongpoints, and regular army tank units were to take up positions on ramps and high ground between them, ready to hold off an Egyptian attack until the reserve divisions arrived. On Yom Kippur, the strongpoints were manned by a battalion of 436 reservists from the Jerusalem Brigade, many of them noncombat soldiers. Reshef’s tanks were assembled in the ta’ozim, the fortified rear staging areas miles back from the canal. The other two armored brigades in Sinai were camped even farther back.
“I was summoned to a briefing with Mandler on Saturday morning,” Reshef recalled. “He was called to the phone. ‘H hour is this evening at six,’ he came back and told us. ‘For what—they still don’t know. It may be the end of the Egyptians’ war games; it may be war.’ We suggested moving the tanks forward to their firing positions, but Southern Command forbade it for fear of exacerbating the tension on the front line.”
The war, confidently undetected by Israeli intelligence until almost too late, was now confidently predicted to begin at 6:00 p.m. precisely. The tanks were to take up their positions at 5:00, and in any event not before 4:00. But the Egyptian bombardment, and the Syrian assault in the north, started at 2:00. Some two thousand artillery pieces rained shells on the Israeli positions across the canal. At the same moment, 240 Egyptian warplanes roared overhead, en route to attack Israeli airfields, radar installations, anti-aircraft batteries, artillery emplacements, and rear bases throughout Sinai. “Over 3,000 tons of concentrated destruction were launched against a handful of Israeli fortifications in a barrage that turned the entire east bank of the Suez Canal into an inferno for fifty-three minutes.”1 Before the smoke cleared, the first Egyptian boats were in the water.
“The next afternoon, I reported to Arik what was happening,” Reshef said drily. “I explained that opposite each company of mine an entire Egyptian division had crossed. By the time my tanks had reached their firing positions, Egyptian commandos were waiting for them with antitank weapons. Arik didn’t cast blame, and he didn’t complain. There wasn’t time for that. The situation was catastrophic. He was focused, businesslike, constructive.”
Reshef was businesslike, too, despite his night and day of relentless fighting. A soldier’s soldier, six feet tall, ramrod straight with a handlebar mustache, he cut a very different figure from the bulky, silver-haired Sharon. His mauled and shrunken brigade was now ordered integrated into Sharon’s division. “I didn’t know Sharon at all. I’d met him briefly just once, years before.”b
In April, the IDF had gone on alert in response to intelligence reports that Egypt and Syria might be planning an attack in May. For several weeks, units in Sinai and on the Golan were beefed up with reserves, trained, and held in a high state of readiness. Sharon, still the CO of Southern Command, made plans for a possible crossing at Kantara and farther south at Deversoir, at the top of the Great Bitter Lake. The huge Israeli-built ramparts were a problem there, but he solved it by hollowing out a section from the inside “so that its outward appearance would remain the same, though in actuality it would be thinner and less dense.” He marked out the section with a line of red bricks. “We also built a large enclosed yard with a hardened floor almost a thousand yards in length and several hundred in breadth with roads going in one side and out the other to facilitate traffic.”2
Dayan urged the General Staff to be prepared for war from the end of June. But nothing happened, and by August the state of alert had been reduced, and the languid, torpid sense of false security had crept over the canal front again. On September 13, a dogfight developed over southern Syria in which the IAF brought down thirteen Syrian MiGs for the loss of one of its own planes. This naturally raised tensions again, and on September 24, at the request of the CO of Northern Command, Yitzhak Hofi, a decision was made to reinforce the front line on the Golan with extra tanks. This was done, in part, by bringing up an armored brigade from Sinai.
The next day, Prime Minister Meir met secretly with King Hussein of Jordan and heard from him an explicit warning that war was imminent. But, reassured by Military Intelligence that the likelihood of war was low, she paid little heed to this neighborly tip-off. The Egyptians had been observed working feverishly behind their canal embankment, moving heavy equipment and drilling troops. But this was confidently explained by Military Intelligence as a large-scale training exercise.
Only near noon on Friday, October 5, as the country prepared to close down for the fast of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish year, did Military Intelligence’s stolid “low probability of war” assessment finally begin to crack. Reports had come in overnight of urgent instructions from Moscow to the families of Soviet personnel in Syria and Egypt to leave at once, and planes were being sent in to collect them. The standing army went on high alert. Mobilization orders were issued to some air force reserve crews. But it was still a far cry from full war footing. The head of Military Intelligence, Eli Zeira, told cabinet ministers called to a hasty meeting in Tel
Aviv that he still believed war was unlikely. Chief of Staff Elazar agreed. The conceptziya, even now, continued to hold sway.
It gave way only during the night, when the director of the Mossad, Zvi Zamir, telephoned from London to say war would break out the following day at sunset. His source was Ashraf Marwan, Gamal Abdel Nasser’s son-in-law and a close aide to his successor as president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat. The Mossad had been running him since 1969. At a dawn consultation in Tel Aviv, Elazar demanded a preemptive strike by the air force. But Dayan balked, and Golda backed him, arguing that the critical factor now was U.S. support. In order to retain it, Israel must be seen not to have started the war. Elazar then demanded total, immediate mobilization of the reserves. But again Dayan opposed him. He suggested two divisions were enough for the moment. At 9:00 a.m., Golda approved the two divisions. Twenty minutes later she approved two more.
Arik Sharon, busy all week running the Likud election staff from an office in Tel Aviv barely half a mile from IDF headquarters, knew nothing of the secret deliberations in the government and the army. On Friday morning, he took a call from Southern Command suggesting that he come down to look at some intelligence data that had been coming in. “One look was enough,” he writes in Warrior. “Near the canal the Egyptians had concentrated all their crossing equipment, a massive deployment that was quantitatively different from the exercises we had gotten used to watching.” “There’s no question,” he told his divisional intelligence officer, Yehoshua Saguy. “This time it’s war.”3
The next morning at 7:30 they both received their mobilization calls and headed for the division’s base camp outside Beersheba. “During the three months since my retirement I had visited the division regularly,” Sharon writes, “and only a short while before, I had conducted a training exercise with them. Knowing how competent the headquarters staff was, it was no surprise to find everything in order when I arrived at the base and the mobilization proceeding calmly.”
This was one of Sharon’s taller war stories. A less tendentious depiction of the scene at the divisional base was “near chaos.” There had indeed been an exercise a short while before, and much of the equipment had not been re-stored or, where needed, repaired. “[A young officer] shot the lock off a storeroom with his pistol, and the crew of the command vehicles and the divisional war room charged in and grabbed whatever equipment was lying around … Technicians repaired communications gear as best they could.”4
The tank and armored personnel carrier (APC) crews climbed aboard “and set out on the long drive to Refidimc—on their tracks.” There were no flatbed tank transporters at this base and no time to wait for any available ones to be sent. The crews also lacked “goggles, personal weapons, fireproof overalls, torches, blankets.”5 In other reserve bases around the country, the picture was no different. This was not an army primed and poised for war, but rather one that had grown lax and decadent, basking in its overconfidence. The state of the IDF’s emergency stores on that fateful Yom Kippur was to be one of the grave episodes of negligence investigated by a commission of inquiry, under the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Shimon Agranat, once the war was over.
“The strongpoints were strongpoints as long as the east bank of the canal was in our hands,” Moshe Dayan writes in his memoirs. “Now they became traps for the units caught inside them and surrounded by Egyptian forces.” All the passionate struggles over the Bar-Lev Line for years before the war and during the first, terrible days of the fighting are encapsulated in the defense minister’s morose observation. The strongholds were still in with a chance, Dayan continues, “if we could succeed within a very short time either in evacuating them or in pushing the Egyptians back out of the east bank. The chief of staff and the CO of Southern Command seemed to think we could. I, sadly, did not share their optimism.”
This unshared optimism apparently prompted both Gonen and Mandler to decide against ordering any of the strongpoints to be evacuated during the first twenty-four hours. “The soldiers were begging to be brought out,” Sharon wrote, “but the tanks could not do it.”
They had their orders—not to extricate them but only to support the strongpoints and relieve the pressure. Some of the tanks were able to take wounded out. Others simply roared into the Egyptian lines blazing away in a futile attempt to push the enemy back. Suffering terrible losses, the tank crews continued to assault as long as they could. And as second-echelon tanks arrived they too were fed into the carnage … In the first twenty-four hours we lost two hundred of our three hundred first-line tanks.
…It was outrageous that those men had been left in the strongpoints in the first place. But sending the tanks to support them in that fashion was a clear sign of panic and of an inability to read the battlefield. Instead of gathering our forces for a hard, fast counterattack, we were wasting them in hopeless small-unit actions … I began to feel that Gonen’s headquarters was not comprehending the situation on the ground.6
As soon as he arrived at the front, Sharon began pressing to reverse the no-evacuation order and get the beleaguered men out. This quickly became an early flash point of tension between the 143rd Division and Southern Command. Making matters worse—and unforgettably poignant for everyone who heard those radio exchanges and lived through the war—the men in the strongpoints began addressing their increasingly desperate appeals to Sharon personally. “We recognize your voice, ‘40’ ”—this was Sharon’s designation on the divisional network—“we know who you are. We know you will get us out of here. Please come to us. Please send us help.” One soldier in Purkan, the strongpoint opposite Ismailia, recalled “a moment of exultation when we heard Sharon had arrived. If we’d had champagne we’d have opened it. Just his voice on the radio was like salvation.” Sharon for his part promised them, for all to hear, that he would help them get out.
“It took years,” Sharon reminded the commission of inquiry in his testimony months later, “until the IDF established the norm that we don’t leave the wounded on the battlefield and we don’t leave men to fall into the enemy’s hands. To me, this matter is of cardinal importance.” He said that he had submitted a detailed rescue plan on the afternoon of October 7, “based on the experience of the night before. We would break through on a very narrow front, creating a virtual moving box of fire with tanks and artillery. When we approach the strongpoints, we send a small force in, they get the men out, and we disengage.”7
“Not only would they [the Command] not approve any attempt at evacuation that afternoon,” Sharon recalled bitterly after the war to another of the men trapped in Purkan. “They told me to come and talk about it in the evening, and then they didn’t send a helicopter for me. I waited for hours on some sand dune at Tasa until they deigned to send one to take me to Um Hashiba. They deliberately delayed so that I should not be able to raise the subject of the strongpoints at the meeting. I had called the minister of defense and told him that in my view it was possible to rescue the men from the strongpoints.”8
This delayed helicopter—the Command’s explanation was technical problems—became the next point of friction in the already-worsening relationship between Sharon and his erstwhile-subordinate-now-superior, Shmuel Gonen. Sharon repeatedly urged the CO of Southern Command to come up to the front and see the situation for himself. But Gonen preferred to run things from Um Hashiba. Now, on the night of the seventh, with the reserve divisions more or less deployed, they were to have a first war council there in the underground war room and decide on how to parry the Egyptian thrust. Thus far, as Dayan records in his stark, unvarnished tone, “We had not only failed to prevent the Egyptians from crossing; we had hardly hurt them at all. Their casualties … were negligible. Hardly any of their equipment had been destroyed. We had barely disrupted their crossing operation.”
By the time Sharon arrived, close to 10:00 p.m. for the meeting scheduled for 7:00, the key decisions had been made. Dayan, who did not attend, had been lugubrious all afternoon, trying to persuade the army and th
e cabinet to abandon the canal altogether and withdraw to a new defensive line based on the Mitle and Gidi passes.
On the Syrian front, where Israel’s lines had been breached, too, the defense minister believed there must be no withdrawal.
It will be hard—but possible. In the south, though, I propose that we stabilize a new line … thirty or more kilometers from the canal. I propose that tonight we give orders that those strongpoints which we have no chance of reaching should try to evacuate … Those that can’t should leave the wounded and try to escape. If they decide to surrender—then so be it. We should say to them, “We cannot reach you. Try to break through or else surrender.” Every attempt to reach these strongpoints means losing more tanks. We should withdraw from the canal line with the intention not to return … The war will continue. The Mitle line has its advantages and disadvantages. The canal line, at any rate, is lost.9
Chief of Staff Elazar was far from such despondent thinking. He believed the IDF, despite its early and heavy losses, would be able to beat back the Egyptians and eventually take the battle to them across the canal. He did, however, agree with Dayan that the talk—from Gonen and also from Sharon—of Israel crossing the canal in an immediate, large-scale counterattack was premature, unrealistic, and dangerous. If the IDF were to commit the bulk of its depleted southern forces to a cross-canal operation and get bogged down there, there would be precious little preventing the Egyptian forces already in Sinai from marching on toward Tel Aviv.
It was this strategic thinking that lay beneath Elazar’s plan for the next day’s fighting on the canal front, which he envisaged as an initial, limited counterattack on the Sinai side. He unfurled it before Gonen and his generals (minus Sharon) in the command bunker at Um Hashiba. Bren’s division was to attack the Egyptian Second Army along the east bank of the canal, pressing its assault from north to south, starting in the area of Kantara. Sharon’s division, deployed around Tasa, would serve as a reserve, supporting Bren if needed. Assuming Bren’s attack went well, Sharon’s division would then swing into action, attacking the Egyptian Third Army, also from north to south, along the shore of the Great Bitter Lake. Mandler’s division would continue blocking attempted breakouts in the south and would support Sharon’s attack if needed. “Two feet on the ground,” Elazar said repeatedly, “and the third up and attacking.”10
