by Jeremy Bowen
Ran Pekker of the Israeli air force was summoned to a meeting of senior officers. His commander got up and wrote 0745 on the board. It was the time that the first air attacks would hit Egypt the next morning. There was not much else to say, except to stress again that secrecy and surprise now mattered more than ever. Pekker drove back to his squadron. He locked himself in the briefing room, going over the details again and again, and rehearsing what he would tell the pilots in the morning. He got home at midnight. His wife, Heruta, woke up. What’s up? she asked. Don’t worry, he told her, we’ll talk in the morning. He set his alarm for 0330.
The pilots were not going to be told until the morning either, because secrecy was imperative and because their commanders wanted them to have a good night’s sleep. There were some exceptions. One of them was Herzl Bodinger. He was the 24-year-old pilot of a French-built Vautour fighter-bomber. His mission, to attack a squadron of Tupolev-16 bombers at Beni Sweif airfield, was right at the end of the Vautour’s range. So, with the three other pilots who would be making the raid with him, he had to move his aircraft the night before from Ramat David airfield in northern Israel to Tel Nof in the south. Every mile closer to Egypt counted. The four pilots’ cover story was that they were instructors making some routine aircraft movements, in case anyone at Tel Nof asked awkward questions. They still did not know the exact date and time. But they were certain that, in a few hours, on Monday morning, they were going to put years of training into practice.
Israel mobilised a phantom unit around Eilat, generating radio traffic and fake vehicle movements in an area which just had its normal garrison. But it is hard to conceal everything an army needs to do before a battle. The Egyptians picked up signs that something big was about to happen. All of them were ignored. On Sunday evening, observers in Egyptian forward positions near the southern end of the Gaza Strip realised that they were watching the Israelis getting ready for an attack. But their warning sent at ten-thirty in the evening that Israel ‘is expected to launch an attack on the land forces in Sinai at dawn on 5 June’ was ignored. The air force’s own intelligence service was in such chaos that a few days earlier Air Vice Marshal Abdel-Hamid El-Dighidi, who commanded air operations in Sinai, sacked all his intelligence people after he decided they were spying on him. He had nothing and nobody to put in their place. One of Dighidi’s men was meant to be on duty at the intelligence desk at his command post late on Sunday night. He had gone home early. King Hussein also had intelligence information that the war was about to start, with an air strike against Egypt. He sent an urgent message to Cairo. They replied that they knew about the attack and were ready for it. King Hussein put Jordan’s tiny air force on full alert.
The Egyptian army was busy with something else. The next morning Field Marshal Abd al-Hakim Amer was going to fly to Sinai to meet his commanders with the air force chief, Sidqi Mahmoud. On Sunday night some of Egypt’s senior commanders left their posts in the field to travel to Bir Tamada airfield in Sinai, so that they would be in good time to greet the field marshal in the morning.
By Sunday the Americans were accepting – and expecting – Israel to take action. President Johnson’s mantra of Israel not being alone unless it goes alone was all but forgotten. Johnson was resigned to Israel going to war by the time he spoke to Harold Wilson on Friday 2 June. Walt Rostow, his National Security Advisor, wrote, ‘It is now increasingly clear that the Israelis will wait only about a week to take on themselves the forcing of the blockade at the Gulf of Aqaba. They clearly envisage forcing Nasser to fire the first shot; they will respond on a limited basis in Sinai but be prepared to fight a war against all the Arab forces arrayed against them without external assistance…’ Rostow ruled out the plan for an international regatta as ‘unlikely to get operational support’. He had one major hope in the crisis – that Nasser would be ‘cut down to size’. As long as that happened, only two extreme scenarios concerned him. The first was the destruction of Israel (which US intelligence reports had already ruled out as a military impossibility). The second was the creation of a bloc united by its hostility to the Jewish state, which would ‘require us to maintain Israel as a kind of Hong Kong enclave in the region’.
The Soviet ambassador to the UN, Nikolai Fedorenko, was at Glen Cove, an estate on Long Island built in the style of a Scottish castle that had been bought at a bargain price by the USSR in 1948. For a time the Soviets had boarded their entire delegation to the UN there, to save money and to make it easier for the KGB to keep an eye on them. By 1967, though, it was a retreat for top diplomats and Fedorenko was its laird. He sat with his expert on arms control, Arkady Shevchenko, discussing the Middle East over a glass of cognac. They had just received a top-secret cable saying that Moscow had advised Nasser not to start a war. Shevchenko doubted Nasser would listen. ‘My previous experiences with representatives of Arab nations taught me that our government followed the Arab line, not the reverse.’ Both men thought a war was coming.
Levi Eshkol was having dinner with his wife Miriam, at a house near Tel Aviv operated by Mossad. He said to his wife, ‘Tomorrow it will start. There will be widows, orphans, bereaved parents. And all this I will have to take on my conscience.’ According to Mrs Eshkol, ‘It haunted him. He didn’t want war. He didn’t like war. It was the last thing he wanted in his life. He just believed that if you wanted peace you had to prepare for it.’
In Amman, late in the day, the US ambassador Findley Burns collected his thoughts. War looked inescapable. Washington seemed to have run out of ideas. Perhaps the only solution was to return to some fundamental principles about the Middle East. The crisis over the Gulf of Aqaba was ‘only symptomatic of the basic confrontation’. Everything went back to the Palestinian problem. Solve that and war would be prevented. Otherwise there was no chance. Burns told the State Department that the president should announce immediately, without telling anyone, except possibly the British, that ‘the root of the crisis is the Palestinian problem’. Then the president should assemble a Middle East peace conference to settle the matter once and for all. ‘Wars result in peace conferences, so better to have the conference as the first rather than the last step.’ As for pre-existing commitments, like the promise to keep Eilat open for Israeli shipping that was made in 1957, simply speak privately to the Israelis and to the Arabs, to tell them that ‘guarantees would not apply in the case of an aggressor in hostilities’ until the peace conference had done its work.
Burns was right. Everything did come back to the Palestinian problem, which was about to get much worse.
DAY ONE
5 June 1967
Negev desert, Israel, 0100
Brigadier-General Ariel Sharon was shaving. When he had finished, he looked at himself in the mirror carefully, then put on after-shave lotion. Sharon caught the eye of Lieutenant Yael Dayan, the daughter of the new defence minister, who was sitting in his trailer. She was attached to Sharon’s HQ as a military journalist. ‘We’re going to win the war,’ he told her, radiating confidence. He seemed ‘almost happy. The frustration had gone.’ In the desert there was not much privacy. Dayan had just overheard his last phone call before the battle to Lily, Sharon’s wife. He told her to ‘be calm … kiss the children for me – don’t worry’. An hour later, Sharon left his camp for a meeting with his brigade commanders. As they conferred, Yael Dayan felt confidence and professionalism in the air, ‘and a touch of joy’. By 0400 Sharon’s division was ready to go. He lay on the ground between his command half-tracks. He told them to wake him at 0630 and fell asleep.
Tel Aviv, 0330
Brigadier-General Mordechai Hod managed four hours’ sleep. Now, he was not going to get any more. Well before dawn he was on the road to the Israeli air force command centre, deep below the ministry of defence in Tel Aviv. He prepared a message for his forces, to be circulated as they were going to war: ‘Battle order of the officer commanding. Israeli Air Force. Urgent. To all units. Soldiers of the air force, the blustering and swashbuckling
Egyptian army is moving against us to annihilate our people … Fly on, attack the enemy, pursue him to ruination, draw his fangs, scatter him in the wilderness, so that the people of Israel may live in peace in our land and the future generations be secured.’
Secrecy and surprise were everything. No last-minute leaks were going to be permitted. The day shift came in at six, the doors were locked behind them and they were told the war was about to start. The night team, who already knew what was coming, was not allowed home. Twelve years of planning had gone into the operation that Hod was convinced would win the war for Israel. It had even had its code word – Operation Moked, Hebrew for ‘focus’ – for more than twelve months.
Ran Pekker’s alarm woke him at 0330. He shaved, put on a clean and ironed coverall and polished his black air force shoes. He kissed his sleeping children and turned round at the door of their bedroom for what, despite his confidence, he realised might be his last look at them. Then he headed for his squadron. Pekker arrived at his headquarters at 0345, woke the operations assistant who was there on a night shift and called his two deputies, who like him lived on the base. When they arrived he told them they had three and a half hours until the start of the war. They were to wake the pilots and get them in immediately. The same thing was happening at bases across Israel. Because most of the pilots had not been told what was happening, they were well rested. Everything was going according to plan.
Mafrak Airbase, Jordan, 0400
King Hussein’s warnings had, at least, got through to his own air force. Ihsan Shurdom, a 25-year-old captain, and the other pilots at Mafrak took off at dawn, flying patrols over Amman and the Jordanian highlands that fall steeply down to the Dead Sea and the Jordan valley. As the sun came up, they could see the light filling the valley below them and glinting off the spires and domes of Jerusalem away to the west. Most of the pilots’ families, Shurdom’s included, lived on the base at Mafrak, which was ninety kilometres outside Amman on the road that leads to Damascus and Baghdad. Shurdom thought the Israelis would try to raid the base and he was worried about his family. But he told himself that Mafrak had good shelters and slit trenches against air raids. Anyway, he would not have attacked civilians and he expected the Israeli air force, which he respected, to observe the same standards.
Ihsan Shurdom was young and self-confident. He had been trained by the RAF in England. Back home there was more training in aerial dogfights by graduates of the RAF’s Pilot Attack Instructors’ School. Shurdom had read all the books about the RAF’s Second World War fighter aces. Air combat, he believed, had not changed much since the Battle of Britain. The only difference was that they did it in jets, faster. His Hunter was armed with 30 mm cannon and it had no radar. Just like the Spitfire pilots, Shurdom had to rely on his own eyes. He had great confidence in his aircraft, even though it was ageing, subsonic and due for replacement by the more modern supersonic F-104 Starfighter. Six of them, with their American instructors, had been pulled out from Jordan only the day before. Never mind. The Hunters were not as fast as the F-104s, but they were reliable, powerful and highly manoeuvrable, especially at low speeds. The Jordanians were ready to fight, but there was no sign of the Israelis. After a fifty-minute patrol, they touched down again at Mafrak.
Jordan’s air force was efficient, but tiny, with only 24 Hawker Hunters. Just before the war, American military experts analysed the Syrian and Egyptian air strength. The Egyptian air force looked strong. It had 350 jet fighters. But it was in a poor state of readiness. Only 222 aircraft were assigned to the 18 operational fighter squadrons, of which only 2 MiG-21 and 3 MiG-17 squadrons were fully operational. The rest had only 30–50 per cent of their aircraft ready for combat. The Egyptian bomber fleet of 29 Tupolev-16s and 35 Ilyushin-28s was ready to go and was its strongest strategic weapon. Syria had 58 jet fighters and 4 Ilyushin-28 bombers. But of those only one squadron of MiG-17s was operational. The remaining fighter squadrons and the four bombers operated, the Americans said, at less than 50 per cent efficiency – in other words, for more than half the time, they were out of action. Both countries had a shortage of combat-trained pilots. Egypt had 700 pilots in total, but only 200 were considered ready to go into action. For Syria, it was 35 out of 115.
Ekron Airbase, Israel, 0430
Major Ran Pekker, commander of 102 squadron, made sure coffee was waiting for his pilots when they arrived in the briefing room. When they were seated, he turned the blackboard around. 0745, the time the war was going to start, was already chalked up. Next to the pilots’ names were their targets and with whom they would be flying. He ran through the procedures. Radio silence was all important. If an aircraft had a mechanical problem, the pilot was to signal to the rest of the flight by dipping his wings, then without a word, he would turn for home. Even if the aircraft was going down, no Mayday messages were allowed. They would have to eject into the sea and wait for rescue. Pekker kept emphasising that it was not a drill. They were going to war.
Similar briefings were being given at airfields across Israel. Captain Avihu Bin-Nun was deputy commander at Tel Nof, leading a formation of Mysteres. He was talking to his men. The essentials – timing, radio silence – were all the same. Only the target details were different. Bin-Nun was solemn, convinced Israel’s future rested on the shoulders of the air force. He was going to be one of the attack leaders. ‘We trained, exercised and learned our targets by heart. Each formation had several targets, which it practised attacking in complete radio silence. We had reached a point where no words were necessary. We could have executed the plan with our eyes closed.’
No opening to a war had been better rehearsed than Operation Focus. The idea behind it was simple. If Israel could destroy the Arabs’ air forces before the fighting had even started properly, it would win. The Israelis had first thought about a devastating air strike on Egyptian air force bases at the end of their war of independence in 1949. In those days the Israeli air force was still tiny, equipped with Dakotas and Spitfires, which had just replaced Messerschmidts, to the enormous relief of the first Israeli fighter pilots like Ezer Weizman, who thought the German fighters had ‘an evil nature’. But in 1949 David Ben-Gurion thought the air force was not strong enough and, besides, the war against Egypt was as good as won. France and Britain proved the idea worked in 1956, when they destroyed most of the Egyptian air force when it was drawn up in neat lines at its bases. Weizman was frustrated and angry in 1956 that Britain and France had taken the lead in the air. When he became head of the air force in 1958, he made the pre-emptive strike the centre of the Israeli air strategy for the next war. He worked on the idea constantly, pushing the government to buy the right aircraft and demanding the best training. To relax he would fly a black Spitfire, which was kept for his personal use until he retired after the 1967 war.
By 1963, when the young and ambitious pilot Herzl Bodinger graduated from flying school, the idea was well-established. Every few months, Bodinger’s routine training included simulated operations to bomb Arab airfields and to destroy parked aircraft by strafing. Every six months the entire air force rehearsed going to war. The pilots made models of their targets, based on intelligence reports, marking out the runways, main hangars and the positions of anti-aircraft batteries. The models were used to finalise and polish their tactics. Once the crisis started in May 1967, rehearsals stopped. Reservists were mobilised, the aircraft were fuelled and armed and put on stand-by for immediate action. But as the days went by, training resumed so the pilots could go through their missions yet again. They rehearsed by flying in attack configuration exactly the distance they would have to cover to get to their first targets. Herzl Bodinger, who was to attack Beni Sweif airfield in Egypt, would run up the same mileage by flying south from Ramat David airfield in northern Israel to the Egyptian border at Eilat, back north to the Lebanese border, turning round and going back to Beersheba before attacking a simulated airstrip in the Negev desert.
Bodinger, who had moved down to Tel Nof the n
ight before, woke at 0430 on 5 June with the rest of the pilots. He phoned his wife to tell her that the war was starting in a few hours. He told her to take their baby from their married quarters at Ramat David to her parents in the Tel Aviv suburbs. ‘She wasn’t worried. She had been an officer in air force intelligence and she was as confident as we were that the plan would work.’
Hod and his commanders did not think of Focus as a gamble. For them it was audacious and sound. That morning, Israel had 197 operational combat planes. Only four were held back to defend Israeli airspace. One of the pilots who had to stay at home was Uri Gil. He had known for two weeks that he would be in an interceptor, waiting to see if there would be an Arab counter-attack. Gil told himself he was proud that his skills as an expert dogfighter had been recognised. But he was jealous when he saw his colleagues preparing for their missions. For a fortnight, he had been sitting in his jet, ready to be scrambled, while the pilots who were on bombing missions seemed just to be hanging out, playing ping-pong and waiting for their moment of glory.
Air Force Command Centre, Ministry of Defence, Tel Aviv, 0600
The next stage of the deception plan was put into action. Five flights of the Israeli air force’s Fouga Magister trainers took off. It was meant to look like just another day. In the skies above Israel they used the radio channels and call signs normally allocated to the front-line strike aircraft to play tapes of radio conversations between fighter pilots and their controllers to make it sound like routine training. The plan was that they would be picked up, as the IAF’s manoeuvres were every morning, by the powerful Jordanian radar station high above the Mediterranean in the mountains at Ajloun. They stayed in the air until 0745, H-Hour.
Israel–Gaza border, 0600
The soldiers of the reconnaissance unit of Israel’s 7th Armoured Brigade had risen before dawn. Their jeeps, armoured cars and tanks were lined up along an avenue of eucalyptus trees on a road leading to the border with Gaza. The company commander, Ori Orr, knew that his men had spotted him coming back late the previous night from a briefing at regimental headquarters. He had already told them that his gut feeling was that war would start this morning. He knew they would be wondering whether it would. The morning was very quiet, no aircraft overhead and no shelling. Complete radio silence was already in force. The only walkie-talkie turned on in the whole company was in Orr’s armoured command car, and it was set for listening only. Orr’s senior NCO, Sergeant Bentzi Zur, was in the command car making some last checks. Everything was ready.
