By 9:00 a.m., the first order went out. By 10:00 a.m., phones were ringing in the homes of thousands of reservists. The call-up would gain momentum over the next few hours.
ONE MIGHT THINK that Zeira’s opinion became moot as soon as the broad call-up of reserves had begun. But a careful look at the transcripts of the Agranat Commission’s hearings, as well as other sources, suggests that in one immensely important matter—namely, the deployment of the regular army forces at the Suez Canal—his mistake had deadly and decisive consequences.
The IDF’s regular-army tank division in the Sinai, the 252nd Armored, was caught unprepared when the assault came at 2:00 p.m. Only one tank squad, which was regularly stationed at Fort Orkal at the northern reaches of the canal, was at battle stations. The other tanks of the front-line 14th Brigade were in various stages of preparing to deploy for battle, while the other two tank brigades, the 401st and 406th, were heading to their forward meeting points.
The division had been on high alert since the day before, and its commander, Maj. Gen. Albert Mandler, believed, on the basis of the intelligence available to him, that war was likely. If he had been given the order to prepare for battle immediately after Elazar had given it to his commander, Southern Commander Maj. Gen. Gonen, Mandler would have gotten his tanks into position opposite the Egyptian crossing points in time. Just how much this would have changed the outcome on the Suez front is a matter for speculation, but there is no doubt that it would have been vastly preferable, from the Israeli standpoint, to what actually ended up happening, which was that almost all of the Israeli tanks engaged the fight while they were rushing to the front, and reached the canal only after the Egyptians had already crossed and set themselves up on the eastern bank.
In the first phase of the crossing, 32,000 Egyptian infantrymen were ferried in 720 boats, each one making twelve round-trips across the canal over a six-hour period. The result of the 252nd Armored’s tanks not being in position was that the Egyptians crossing the canal met with no Israeli tank fire or any serious and concerted counterattack.
Elazar gave the order to Maj. Gen. Gonen to prepare for war that day, with the assumption of a 6:00 p.m. H-hour. The order was given at 7:45 a.m. About twenty minutes later, Gonen called Mandler, the commander of the 252nd, and ordered him to prepare to carry out a plan called Dovecote, which would allow him to defend the line at the canal using regular-army forces, but not to move the forces from their positions. After 10:00 a.m., he spoke to Mandler again. In direct violation of Elazar’s orders, according to which Gonen was supposed to prepare his forces for a war that would begin at 6:00 p.m., Gonen said to Mandler: “What does [the H-hour] mean? Is it the end of their big exercise? Opening fire? Relaunching the War of Attrition? Maybe a full-scale invasion—but that seems unlikely.” In other words, Gonen scuttled Elazar’s order, leaving the forces in the field with a mixed message as to what, exactly, they were preparing for. Even worse, Elazar’s orders spoke of getting the entire Southern Command ready for war that very day, while Gonen ordered the brigades of the front line “not to break routine before 1600 hours.” The result was that when the attack was launched at 2:00 p.m., out of the division’s three hundred tanks only three, at Fort Orkal, were in position.6
The Egyptian forces therefore crossed the canal virtually untouched. One exception was at Fort Budapest, where two tanks that were supposed to defend it reached their posts just minutes before the Egyptians launched their ground assault. They managed to destroy the Egyptian tanks and armored personnel carriers that were preparing to storm the fort, dispersed the troops arrayed to attack, and prevented the fort from being overrun.7
Because of the failure to implement the Dovecote plan, the Egyptians were able to carry out the most critical part of their assault, crossing the canal, with virtually no opposition or casualties. When the Israeli tanks approached their “swim fins,” forward positions from which they were supposed to launch raids north or south along the canal to intercept Egyptian forces crossing as well as those still on the western bank, they discovered that many of these positions had already been taken by Egyptian commandos, who assaulted the tanks with antitank missiles. Scores of Israeli tanks were taken out during the night, as they tried to redouble the fortresses that were already surrounded by Egyptian troops. The final outcome of the initial battles was that by dawn on Sunday, Egypt had managed to cross the canal and establish itself on its eastern bank with almost no losses, while the 252nd Armored Division of the IDF lost fully two hundred of its three hundred tanks without having achieved any of its operational goals.
It was the IDF’s worst military defeat since the failed attempts to occupy the Latrun police station during the battles of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. But as opposed to 1948, now the IDF had superior weaponry and training to that of its enemy. And its soldiers’ morale was certainly no lower than it had been among the fighters in 1948. In 1973, the IDF’s failures were entirely a failure of understanding, of intelligence, that prevented the IDF from recognizing the threat and preparing for it in the days before the attack, and specifically the confused and mistaken orders of Maj. Gen. Gonen in the hours before the battle.
How can we understand Gonen’s behavior? How did a general reputed to be the biggest stickler for authority in the entire IDF fumble the chief of staff’s explicit orders? Gonen later testified that he was thrown off by the assessment that the chief of Military Intelligence, Eli Zeira, had given him in the hallway before the meeting of the General Staff that morning—before Elazar had ordered him to prepare for war. Zeira had “explained that he still didn’t think there would be a war, and that moving IDF troops could actually cause one.”8 From Gonen’s words to Mandler at 10:00 a.m., moreover, we get a strong echo of Zeira’s comments from the General Staff meeting on Friday, when he said that if the Egyptians did anything at all, it would be “either a [minimal] exchange of fire, or some kind of helicopter assault . . . least likely is an exercise to cross with the aim of capturing both banks of the canal.”
From the wealth of evidence, it appears that the catastrophic situation that developed at the Suez Canal during the first day of the Yom Kippur War, and which had far-reaching consequences for both the battle on the Golan Heights and the bungling of the IAF’s efforts to take out antiaircraft positions on both fronts, was the direct result of Zeira’s insistence on clinging to the old paradigm even after all evidence suggested it should be abandoned. And since Gonen preferred to act in light of the assessments of the head of Military Intelligence rather than just follow the orders of the chief of staff, those seven hours that, because of the warning of Ashraf Marwan, could have allowed him to properly deploy the tanks of the 252nd Armored Division were wasted.
ALTHOUGH THOSE PRECIOUS hours were wasted in terms of rebuffing the initial assault on the Suez Canal, there is no doubt today that Ashraf Marwan’s timely warning, and the emergency call-up of reserves that resulted, nonetheless prevented Israel from facing a far worse situation on the battlefield. This was felt most obviously on the Syrian front.
By midday on Sunday, October 7, less than twenty-four hours into the fighting, the Syrians were on their way to routing the IDF on the Golan Heights. The limited defensive line in the southern Golan held by the IDF’s 188th Armored Brigade had collapsed the evening before, and during the night the full strength of the Syrian 5th and 9th Infantry Divisions had taken over the entire southern Golan. In the morning, Col. Tawfik al-Jahani, commander of the Syrian 1st Armored Division, gave the order to advance toward Nafah Junction, where the IDF’s 36th Armored Division was headquartered. If the Syrians could take Nafah, that would give them control over the whole central Golan and allow them to cut off the IDF’s 7th Armored Brigade, which was defending the Golan’s northeast. Moreover, taking Nafah meant that Syrian tanks could then make their way west, toward the Bnot Yaakov Bridge, where they could straddle the sources of the Jordan River and prevent IDF reservists from reaching the Golan.
Conquering Na
fah, in other words, meant conquering the entire Golan Heights. Once taken, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the Israelis to get it back.
At 11:00 a.m., following Al-Jahani’s order, 250 Syrian T-55 and T-62 tanks made their way in two columns toward Nafah. At this point, Israeli commanders still had no idea what was happening on the ground. The battlefield chaos had prevented the officers in the IDF command center on Mount Canaan, responsible for running the show in the north, from realizing that the defensive line in the southern Golan had broken. Now that they knew it, they were still under the false belief that the Syrians would use their success to move directly west, toward the Sea of Galilee, when in fact they were heading north toward Nafah Junction. The fact that some initial reserve units had, since the early morning hours, managed to keep a hold on the roads leading directly west toward the Sea of Galilee had given the officers of the Northern Command a false sense of hope. The chief of the Northern Command, who hadn’t slept in over forty-eight hours, allowed himself to believe that the worst was behind him. Now that reserve forces were entering the war, the tide of battle would turn in the IDF’s favor.
Two hours later, when he finally understood what was happening, the general’s optimism was replaced by a sense of foreboding and failure. At 1:10 p.m. on Sunday, the following note was made in the records of the Northern Command: “Syrian tanks at the perimeter of Nafah Base.”
AT 1:30 P.M., Brig. Gen. Rafael Eitan, commander of the IDF 36th Armored Division defending the Golan Heights, left his bunker at the Nafah base, taking his staff with him. Under Syrian fire, they headed north to Tel Shiban. Within twenty minutes, the last soldiers defending the base were ordered to clear out as well. Crammed into two half-tracks, they headed west to the Bnot Yaakov Bridge. The base was abandoned, with only a few IDF tanks remaining in the area to try to keep it from being completely overrun. Most of them were hit within thirty minutes.
In the “Palace,” the code name for the command center at Mount Canaan, it became clear now that only a miracle could save the Nafah Junction. All eyes turned to the 679th Armored Brigade, a unit of reservists under the 36th Division. The fate of the Golan Heights was in their hands.
THE CALL-UP OF the reservists of the 679th Brigade had begun at 10:00 a.m. the day before, on orders from its commander, Col. Ori Orr. The tanks were old British-made Centurions. They ran on unreliable gasoline engines that turned every tank into a potential firetrap, and their poorly designed transmissions failed repeatedly. Of the hundred or so tanks kept in emergency storage at the Yiftah base near Rosh Pina, fewer than fifty ended up making it into battle. Of the rest, some broke down before reaching the front, some never made it out of the base, and others were taken out by Syrian fire. And those that did make it to battle were not in any shape to fight. Because of the pressure of time, they were manned by teams that weren’t the original ones assigned to each tank, but instead had been cobbled together according to the order in which the soldiers had shown up for duty. They were low on ammunition because there hadn’t been enough time to load the shells that had to be brought from another camp. Much of their communications equipment either didn’t work at all or hadn’t been calibrated to the right frequency, and many of the tanks didn’t even have time to adjust their sights, the minimal preparation for shooting straight. But thirteen hours after the war started, at about 3:00 a.m., a twenty-five-tank force of Brigade 679 started making its way up the Golan under cover of darkness. They took a position at around 10:00 a.m. in the Quneitra area, along the eastern border of the northern Golan. This was a mistake, since the Syrian armored fist was thrusting up the middle of the Golan, toward Nafah from the south.
By 10:30 a.m., another force of twenty-two tanks organized themselves and set out to the front. At around noon, when they were a mile south of Nafah Junction, they got an order to turn south toward Hushniya. Half an hour later, they encountered dozens of Syrian T-62 tanks from the 91st Brigade that were planning on going around Nafah and attacking it from the north. The Israeli tanks were caught by surprise, but within a few minutes they returned fire. Thus began one of the most important battles of the war.
Despite taking heavy losses, the Israeli tanks managed to slow the advance of the Syrians northward. But the latter nonetheless circumvented Nafah from the east. At the same time, Syrian tanks of another brigade entered the abandoned base from the south. The pressure from the Syrian tanks increased from minute to minute.
At this critical moment, three tanks from the IDF’s 679th Armored Brigade, the very last tanks to leave Yiftah, reached the outskirts of the base at Nafah. There they saw ten Syrian tanks about 900 yards away, and started taking them out. Soon after, about fifteen of the IDF reservist tanks that had been mistakenly sent to Quneitra finally reached Nafah and began attacking some of the tanks of the Syrian 91st. At the same time, additional smaller reserve IDF units began putting pressure on the Syrian 51st. The number of disabled Syrian tanks grew steadily, as did the Israeli counterpressure. By about 4:00 p.m., the Israelis had gained significant momentum, which continued until the battle drew to a close at nightfall. The exhausted IDF reservists, mostly tank teams from the 679th Brigade who, twenty-four hours earlier, had been fasting and praying in their synagogues, managed to turn the tide of the battle. The Syrians lost about forty tanks and were forced to pull back from the Nafah base and its surroundings, including the crucial road from the Bnot Yaakov Bridge to Quneitra. The next day, the Syrians tried taking the central Golan Heights a second time. Again they failed, and the IDF readied a massive counterattack.
The battle for the Golan Heights had been decided in Israel’s favor.
DESPITE THE MANY EFFORTS by historians and retired officers to reconstruct the battles of the first days of the Yom Kippur War, one question that has rarely been asked is this: What would have happened if the order to call up reserves had come not at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday but had waited until the war was launched four hours later, at 2:00 p.m.? What, in other words, if Ashraf Marwan hadn’t warned Zvi Zamir about the war, if Zamir hadn’t then gotten Freddy Eini to rouse everyone from bed, if the decision makers hadn’t awoken at 4:30 a.m. and started meetings at 6:00 a.m., culminating in the prime minister’s approval at 9:40 a.m., over the objections of her defense minister, of the full-scale call-up of the entire reserve force of the IDF?
The commander of the 679th Armored Brigade, Ori Orr, got his orders from the chief of the 36th Armored Division at 10:00 a.m. Later on, Orr would become the IDF Northern Commander and, after leaving the IDF, deputy defense minister of Israel. In his estimation, without Marwan’s warning, the delay in Israel’s ability to field any reserve units would have been a minimum of four to six hours. Nafah Junction, as well as the command camp of the 36th Armored Division at Nafah, would have fallen basically without a fight. It is highly likely, moreover, that by the afternoon of Sunday, October 7, the Syrians would have fully encircled and cut off the 7th Armored Brigade, which was positioned in the northeastern Golan. Other scholars have come to the same conclusion.
In retrospect, Ashraf Marwan was single-handedly responsible for enabling Israel to prevent the Syrian conquest of the Golan Heights in the Yom Kippur War. Retaking the Golan afterward would have required not only a prolonged and grisly battle but also redirecting major forces from the Egyptian front, increasing the likelihood of a more aggressive Egyptian push in the south. Israel would have sustained not only far more casualties than it did, but also a greater loss of territory by the time a cease-fire was called. On the northern front, at least, the “draw” at the end of the war would have looked a lot more like an Israeli defeat.
BEYOND THE DECISIVE impact of Marwan’s warning on the battle for the Golan Heights, however, there were also two additional, crucial moments where Israel took huge advantage of the Angel’s help.
In the first minutes of war, Egyptian Tupolev Tu-16 “Badger” bombers flying out of the southwest launched two air-to-ground Kelt missiles in the direction of Tel Aviv. Accord
ing to the Egyptian war plans, these missiles were aimed directly at IDF headquarters, as a warning to the Israelis to refrain from attacking deep in Egyptian territory, as they had done during the War of Attrition. A pair of Israeli Mirage fighters had been scrambled from the air force base in Hatzor, in what was apparently the first sortie of the war, to patrol the Mediterranean near Ashkelon, southwest of Tel Aviv. At a certain point they received instructions to turn west—straight for the Egyptian bombers. When they approached, they saw the flames of the launching missiles. Maj. Eitan Karmi, who flew the lead plane, was ordered to go after the missiles rather than the bombers. One of the missiles, apparently, dropped into the sea. The other was taken out by Karmi’s cannon and plunged into the water just off the coast of Tel Aviv. The plume of water that billowed up after the missile exploded was huge.9
The Egyptian war plans, delivered by Marwan, had explicitly revealed the intention to launch such missiles on Tel Aviv. Without that information, the second missile, carrying a one-ton ordnance, would likely have landed in central Tel Aviv. The effect of such a strike, both on the morale of the Israeli populace and on the way the conflict developed, would have been significant.
The other event concerns the fighting along the southern front in the days that followed the first day of war. Although the Israelis failed to take advantage of Marwan’s warning during the opening hours of fighting in Sinai, the importance of his information would soon become clear. Military Intelligence had sent out, just a few minutes before the war began, a report that clarified, on the basis of Marwan’s report from the night before, that in the first phase Egypt did not intend to move its armored divisions across the canal or to go for the Mitla and Gidi Passes. This was a confirmation of intelligence he had passed along a few weeks before.
Yet from the moment that the attack was launched, the officers of MI-Research ignored this crucial bit of information and went back to assuming the war plans that they knew best, namely, that the Egyptians planned on moving their two armored divisions, and not just the five infantry divisions, across the canal; and that their operational goal was the capture of the Mitla and Gidi Passes. Stunned by the assault and by the initial results on the ground, their intelligence assessments became hurried and confused. Overconfidence was replaced with something close to panic. Thus, on the basis of just one or two data points, MI mistakenly reported to the IDF chief of staff a few hours into the fighting that the Egyptian 4th and 21st Armored Divisions “have crossed and are crossing” the Suez Canal. An MI compilation that went out at 1:30 a.m., nearly twelve hours into the war, included among the enemy’s achievements the advance of the two armored divisions across the bridges.10 Only on the morning of Sunday, October 7, did MI correct its assertion that the divisions had crossed, but it still continued to ignore consistently the updated war plan that Marwan had passed along and assessed the enemy’s moves according to the older, outdated plan.
The Angel Page 23
