by Jeremy Bowen
On 5 June he was woken by the sound of anti-aircraft fire. Close to where he lived in Gaza City was a battery manned by Palestinians who had enlisted in the Palestine Liberation Army. In Gaza the PLA amounted to a brigade, trained and equipped by Egypt. Their brigade was called Ein Galout, named after the battlefield where the Egyptians turned back the invading Mongol armies in the Middle Ages. A messenger came to tell El Dakhakny that anti-aircraft fire had brought down an Israeli Ouragan. A launch was on its way to pick up the pilot, who had ejected into the sea. A dripping wet Israeli called Mordechai Livon was brought in for interrogation. Livon told El Dakhakny that the Israeli air force was in the process of destroying Egypt’s airfields and every aircraft on them. He was put into a car and sent to Cairo for more questioning.
Negev desert, Israel, 0815
Israeli Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin phoned Brig. Gen. Gavish in the Negev desert. ‘The Knesset session is on,’ he said, the prearranged code authorising him to launch the ground offensive into Sinai. Into his microphone, Gavish said ‘Red Sheet’, another code word which went out to his divisional commanders.
The plan was to hit the Egyptians with three main thrusts. Brigadier-General Israel Tal’s division of two armoured brigades, a paratroop brigade reinforced by tanks and a couple of battalion-sized independent task forces was to take the northern route to the Suez canal, through Rafah at the border of Egypt and Gaza, via Al-Arish to Al-Qantarah on the canal. Tal’s force of 300 tanks, 100 half-tracks and 50 guns included the 7th Armoured Brigade, Israel’s elite tank formation.
Further south, Brigadier-General Ariel Sharon’s division, made up of an armoured brigade, a paratroop brigade and an infantry brigade, was to attack a complex of defensive positions at Abu Ageilah, a strategic road junction, and then go west towards Mitla and Giddi, the two vital passes that run through the Sinai’s otherwise impassable mountains. He had about 200 tanks, 100 half-tracks and about 100 guns. The third division was commanded by Brig. Gen. Avraham Yoffe. It was made up mainly of reservists and had two armoured brigades with 200 tanks, 100 half-tracks and no guns. Yoffe’s first job was to cross sand dunes that the Egyptians believed were impassable to guard the flanks of Sharon and Tal’s divisions.
* * *
Waves of Israeli jet fighters roared over the heads of Ori Orr’s reconnaissance unit at the gates of Gaza. He was going to attack Rafah by way of Khan Younis, a town in Gaza a few miles further east along the Mediterranean. The code word, Red Sheet, came over the walkie-talkie. It meant break radio silence and advance immediately into battle. Orr gave his men a last briefing: ‘This is it. We’ve learned our objectives, we’ve practised them thoroughly. I’m relying on you. Everyone in their vehicles, we’re off.’ The men who were about to go into action were given a few minutes for some last postcards. There were simple messages like ‘It’s just starting. See you later,’ or ‘Don’t do anything heroic. Get down into the shelters when there is an alarm. Look after the children,’ or ‘When you grow up you won’t have to fight.’ The Israeli troops, to a man, believed they were fighting for the survival of their families. One soldier with a sense of humour sent a postcard to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol.
Orr led his two squads out, positioning them between the battalion of Patton tanks and the battalion of Centurions. As they moved, Orr saw the unit’s two clerks, Sara and Nira, ‘left behind in the dust, gathering up the postcards. They wave goodbye through tears. A last memory from another world, from home.’
The battle for Rafah was going to be crucial. In his final briefing Tal told his officers: ‘The one who wins this battle will harbour the spirit of the offensive. The one who loses will feel retreat in his soul … the fate of the State is bound up with what we now do … this battle must be fought, if necessary, to the death. There is no other course. Each man will charge forward to the very end, irrespective of the cost in casualties. There will be no halt and no retreat. There will only be the assault and the advance.’
Amman, 0850
King Hussein was at home with his family, waiting for his wife, Princess Muna, to join him for breakfast. She had been Toni Gardiner, the daughter of one of the officers in the British military mission to Jordan, when she caught his eye at a fancy dress party. He had been dressed as a pirate. Cheekily, she told him he looked scruffy. Now they had two sons. Before she appeared, though, the phone rang. It was the king’s chief aide-de-camp, Colonel Jazy. ‘Your Majesty, the Israeli offensive has begun in Egypt. It’s just been announced by Radio Cairo.’ The king called the military HQ, which told him a coded set of orders from Field Marshal Amer had come in. It claimed that three-quarters of the attacking Israeli planes had been destroyed and that the Egyptians were attacking in the Sinai. Amer was therefore ordering the commander-in-chief of the Jordanian front to attack. Hussein forgot about breakfast. He drove, fast, to army headquarters.
Ihsan Shurdom stood in a slit trench a short run from his Hawker Hunter fighter at Mafrak airbase. He was getting more and more frustrated. As soon as the news had come that the war had started, he had expected to take off again straight away. But they had waited and waited and they were still waiting. The reasons lay in Egypt’s military HQ in Cairo – which was gripped by chaos and panic – and the chronic lack of trust in the Arab coalition, which made a nonsense of its own boasts about strength and unity. The Jordanian pilots were waiting for the Syrian and Iraqi air forces so they could mount a joint attack. King Hussein kept a record of what was going wrong. The first call to the Syrians was made at 0900. The outbreak of war has taken us by surprise, they said. Our pilots are on a training flight. ‘They asked us to give them first a half-hour, then an hour, and so on until 1045 when they asked for yet another delay which we also granted. At eleven o’clock, we couldn’t wait any longer.’ When the king and the others at the headquarters saw radar screens showing waves of aircraft heading into Israel, they assumed they were Egyptians flying more missions. At that point they still had no idea that the Egyptians were lying to them. At Mafrak they had access to the same radar information. But Shurdom and his colleagues correctly deduced that the planes were Israelis, on their way back to their bases to refuel and rearm. ‘When the balloon went up, we could see the Israeli aeroplanes on radar, coming back, and we said let’s go and engage them. They’re short on fuel. But they said no, because people thought that these were Egyptian aeroplanes bombing Israel … we could have damaged the Israelis, and stopped them launching so many sorties.’
Until the week before the war the Royal Jordanian Air Force had planned to raid Israeli airbases. It seemed like the best way to use its slim resources. But once King Hussein signed the agreement with Nasser, the Egyptians said their planes would do the ground attacks. Jordan’s job was now air defence. The Jordanians swallowed their doubts and started to take the missiles off the Hunters. Then, they thought a little harder and kept the ground-attack missiles on six of them. Now the orders had changed again. They were to link up with the Syrians and the Iraqis to attack targets in Israel. The Jordanians were ready to go. But the Syrians and the Iraqis still had not turned up.
Herzl Bodinger and the three other Israeli Vautours each made two bombing runs on Beni Sweif. They put the runway out of action by hitting it a third of the way from either end, cutting it into three pieces. Their last bombs had delayed fuses so they would explode if they were moved by the men who would try to fix the runway. Then, with no bombs left, they each made three strafing passes. Only then did the Egyptian anti-aircraft batteries recover from the shock, elevate their guns and start firing. Each of the four Vautours knocked out a bomber with cannon fire. It was easy to hit the big Tupolev.
At Inshas base Ran Pekker released his bombs at 1500 feet. He pulled the stick all the way back and waited for his diving plane to respond. As it came up, he passed low over the main runway. Behind him there was a big explosion. When the three other Mirages in his flight had dropped their bombs, they started to attack the aircraft that were on the ground. ‘I could see
the MiGs shining below us, a short dive and a long press on the machine guns, the MiGs on the runway were ready to go, now they are in flames with their pilots in their cockpits.’
Pekker’s 102 Squadron claimed twenty-three kills during the war, the highest score in the Israeli air force. Six were shot down by one man, Lieutenant Giora. Only one aircraft was lost, flown by the station commander, who was rescued by helicopter from Syria.
At Bir Tamada the Egyptian generals, in their trenches, realised that salvation was not coming from the sky. They embarked on a nasty drive overland back to their posts, while the Israelis hammered home their attacks. Murtagi’s command post was only about three kilometres away. He swore to himself the whole way back, blaming Amer and Nasser for getting them into what looked like a serious mess. When he reached his headquarters, news was already coming in about the size of the Israeli raids. Over the next few hours the full picture emerged. The mess was much bigger than he could ever have imagined.
Some of the Egyptian pilots did manage to take off. Film taken by Israeli gun cameras shows that they were not well trained for aerial combat. Israeli aircraft shot them down with cannon fire at a range of 2–300 yards. It was not just that the Israelis were better trained. They knew exactly what the MiG-21 could and could not do. On 16 August 1966 an Iraqi pilot, Captain Munir Rufa, had defected to Israel, flying a MiG-21 C, codenamed ‘Fishbed’ by NATO, at the time the Soviet Union’s most modern fighter. It was one of Israeli intelligence’s greatest coups. ‘It never rains but it pours,’ Hod commented cheerily at the time. ‘We set up exercises. We gave the MiG-21 to each squadron for a week, to dog-fight and to learn all its tricks and capabilities.’ Among the weaknesses they found was a small fuel tank under the pilot’s seat which was used to start the engine. In dogfights, they tried to aim for it.
Egypt’s entire air defence system had been effectively shut down in case it attacked Field Marshal Amer, General Sidqi and the other VIPs by mistake. The Egyptian anti-aircraft gunners had not been given the morning off – they were still at their posts – but they had been told to exercise great caution. Even if they had been ready to blast at everything that moved, it would not have made a great difference. The Israeli pilots came in low, at less than a hundred feet, below Egyptian radar cover and well below the lowest point at which its batteries of SAM-2 surface-to-air missiles could bring down an aircraft.
Tel Aviv
In Tel Aviv an ecstatic General Ezer Weizman phoned his wife, Re’uma. ‘We’ve won the war,’ he shouted. She said, ‘Ezer, are you crazy? At ten o’clock in the morning? You’ve gone and finished the war?’ With waves of Israeli planes coming in, Field Marshal Amer was still in the air. His pilot could not find a place to land. Every airfield in Sinai and Suez was under attack. Israel’s air force commander, Mordechai Hod, thought about attacking Amer’s aircraft, but decided there was no need. By now he had forgotten the anxiety that he had suffered earlier on when he feared Amer’s pilot might spot his jets and raise the alarm. Hod and his assistants sat in their bunker in Tel Aviv, plotting the field marshal’s progress, ‘laughing and curious where he would land’.
In the end, Amer’s pilot took him back to Cairo International airport. It was also being bombed by the time they got there, but its concrete runways and taxiways were too big to block. For ninety minutes Egypt’s top soldier and the head of its air force were out of contact. The lost hour and a half was one of a series of thin excuses that were later used to explain the Egyptian air force’s vulnerability that morning. Nasser’s close associate Mohamed Heikal told his readers in al-Ahram newspaper that while they were in the air, ‘many things had happened, making it impossible to act quickly and strike a strong counter-blow’. It is hard to see what they could have done had they been at their desks, in the face of such a well-planned onslaught. But it was yet another bonus for the Israelis on a morning when everything was going right for them.
Herzl Bodinger limped back to Ramat David, his home base. His Vautour had been hit by shrapnel as he pulled away from the smoking ruins of Beni Sweif airfield. On the way back he too was listening to the radio. Pilots would give their call sign and then report their results. It was already looking a great victory. After some rest, he was told to head back to attack Luxor airfield. Israel believed some Egyptian warplanes had been evacuated there. In contrast to his carefully plotted first mission, attacking an airfield so well known to him that he could draw its layout from memory, this raid would have to be improvised. All they had for navigation were tourist road maps. On the way to Luxor they would have to pass a base that was equipped with MiG-19 interceptors. To protect the Vautours, which would be flying at high altitude leaving clear vapour trails, the plan was that Israeli Mirages would destroy the interceptors’ base. As they passed it, Bodinger could see plumes of smoke rising as the Mirages dropped their bombs. He was ordered to activate a new secret device that would jam Egyptian radar-guided weapons systems. To get at the switch Bodinger had to flip up a red plastic cover that was secured by wire. He found the engineers had used steel wire that he could not break. In desperation he tore off the plastic. The raid on Luxor was a success. They destroyed twelve state-of-the-art Tupolev-16 bombers.
On the way back from Luxor Herzl Bodinger’s squadron leader radioed him to say that he could see fuel spraying from one of his engines. They decided he would climb as high as possible while he still had two engines, hoping he would sink slowly enough to be able to make it to Israel. His left engine flamed out and he sank to 25,000 feet. With only a few drops of fuel left, he landed on the short tarmac runway at Eilat, at Israel’s southern tip. Locals around the airstrip rushed towards the Vautour. There was no ladder, so he climbed out on the back of the aircraft and jumped down into the crowd from the wing. Bodinger was carried off as a hero and given lunch. His hosts were desperate for news. Israelis knew the war had started, and had heard boasts from Cairo Radio that dozens of Israeli aircraft had been shot down. No details had come from the Israeli side. Bodinger told them he was on his second flight of the day and that Israel had won the war. The Egyptian reports were rubbish. It was two in the afternoon.
* * *
At Egypt’s base at Bir Tamada, there was chaos. It was every man for himself. Ali Mohammed, a nineteen-year-old driver, had like the rest of the soldiers there been preparing for Amer’s visit for days. A special bunker had even been constructed in case the great man needed to take shelter. It had not been needed, since Amer was not able to land. But it had received a direct hit from one of the Israeli bombs. Mohammed waited for orders about what to do next, but nobody issued any. More waves of Israeli bombers set about what was left of the base and its aircraft. He noticed that vehicles were being commandeered and driven away packed with men desperate to get out of the firing line. Mohammed took his own decision. He managed to get hold of a truck and drove it out, full of soldiers who were as anxious to get home as he was. The road back to the Suez canal was like a race track. Military vehicles were being driven at breakneck speed by panicking conscripts who wanted no part in the war. There were collisions, injuries and deaths. No one stopped. By the evening, Mohammed was safe.
The Egyptians had also been bothered by the heavier than usual morning haze, putting back some training flights an hour because of it. At 0845, as Vice-President Shafei’s plane was coming in to land at Fayed airbase, the Sukhoi pilots boarded their aircraft for their delayed training flight. Then Zaki, the commander of the Sukhoi squadron, heard jet engines coming in fast. For a moment he was paralysed by surprise. All he could do was watch. Something was badly wrong. Two grey Israeli Super Mysteres started bombing the runway. Shafei’s aircraft was still taxiing when the first Israeli bomb exploded. Then came another and then another. The VIPs tumbled out of the planes as soon as they could and took cover behind a small earth bank. The second plane in Shafei’s group did not escape. It took a burst of cannon fire as it was coming into land. Its pilot managed to pull away from the battle. Eventually, he made a fo
rced landing at a base near the Suez canal. Many of the people on board, mostly bodyguards and officials, were killed.
By now the main runway at Fayed was cratered and unusable. But the side runway was only blocked, by Shafei’s plane, which was burning. Some of the Sukhoi pilots started up their aircraft to try to manoeuvre their way past it and take off. Zaki ran across, shouting and waving his arms to stop them leaving. Vice-President Shafei lay behind his small hummock and watched what was happening. ‘It was an unforgettable sight. Our fighters were lined up in rows and the Israelis took them out with single bursts from their guns. They were an easy target.’ The Israeli pilots flew so low that Shafei could see their faces. Zaki and ground crew and construction workers who had been working at the base tried to push some of the Sukhois out of sight, behind buildings or under the trees. ‘There were explosions everywhere but we kept going and managed to save a few planes although some of the men doing the pushing were killed.’ Zaki sent a pilot in a jeep to get Shafei and the Iraqi deputy prime minister out of the trench and into the base offices. After the jeep had careered to a halt outside the building and Shafei was dusting himself down inside, he was faced with a group of furious Egyptian pilots, who had watched their fighters being blown to pieces. Before the attack the air force had been full of the supposedly secret information that the previous Friday Nasser had ordered Sidqi Mahmoud to ride out an Israeli first strike. Now they were getting hammered. Look what you’ve done, they told him. Are you happy with this? Why didn’t you let us strike first? Outside some of the anti-aircraft gunners had recovered themselves sufficiently to open up on the Israelis. Other soldiers were firing into the air with rifles and machine guns. Somehow, one of the Israeli aircraft was brought down. Tahsen Zaki, the squadron commander, went out to inspect the wreckage. The dead Israeli pilot was still strapped into his seat.
