by Jeremy Bowen
The speaker of the Egyptian National Assembly, Anwar El Sadat, was in high good humour. He had heard on the radio that Israel had attacked. ‘Well,’ he thought as he shaved, ‘they’ll be taught a lesson they won’t forget.’ He took his time selecting an appropriate suit and tie, then drove himself to GHQ. He had ‘unshakeable confidence’ in an Egyptian victory. At the headquarters building he saw that the Soviet ambassador’s car was there already, ‘so I thought that he had called to congratulate us. “What’s the news?” I asked. Some officers said we had shot down forty aircraft so far. “Splendid,” I said.’
Mafrak Airbase, Jordan, 1150
The Jordanians gave up waiting for their unreliable allies. Sixteen RJAF Hawker Hunters took off on a mission to bomb Israeli bases including the one at Netanya, a town on the coast north of Tel Aviv. They came back half an hour later claiming they had destroyed four enemy planes on the ground, without loss. But they were the only aircraft they saw. The Israeli air force was still concentrating on the Egyptians. But the planners in Tel Aviv were about to switch their attention elsewhere. Hod gave the order to go to the next phase of Operation Focus, the attack on Syria and Jordan.
Damascus, 1200
In Damascus in the morning tension was high. Civil defence personnel were called to their posts after the news of the raids on Egypt came through. Ports and airports were closed. Students who turned up for their summer examinations were told they had been called off. They milled around in the streets, waiting for something to happen. They did not have to wait long. An hour or so later, Mirages started to bomb Damascus airport. Heavy anti-aircraft fire blasted back at them. The border between Syria and Israel was the least active front in the first four days of the war, but there were heavy artillery exchanges, instigated by Syria and answered by Israeli air strikes.
Israel’s deception campaign continued. In the United States it was still very early in the morning. At 5 a.m. Gideon Rafael, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, telephoned his American counterpart Arthur Goldberg to tell him that Egyptian forces had penetrated the Negev. Israeli foreign minister Eban told the US ambassador Walworth Barbour that Egyptian ground forces had started the fighting by shelling Israeli border villages. The Israelis were both lying for their country, as was Prime Minister Eshkol, who sent President Johnson a message about Egyptian aggression ‘culminating in this morning’s engagements and the bombardment … in Israeli territory’.
Cairo GHQ, 1200
Sidqi Mahmoud and Amer had arrived back from Cairo International airport, where they had finally been able to land. As soon as he reached his desk, Sidqi was swamped by reports of devastating Israeli attacks. Within minutes he telephoned Nasser to tell him what was happening. The full extent of the disaster was becoming clearer with every damage report that came into GHQ. Nasser started to feel that the battle was lost, before it had even properly started.
Anwar El Sadat went down to the basement of GHQ. He found Field Marshal Amer standing in the middle of his office ‘looking around with wandering eyes. “Good morning,” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear me. I said “Good morning” again, but it took him about a minute to return my greeting.’ Sadat’s good mood disappeared. Something, he realised, had gone wrong. Other officers told him that the air force had been completely destroyed on the ground. Nasser came out of another room. Amer started talking, blaming the Americans. Nasser answered: ‘I am not prepared to believe this, or to issue an official statement to the effect that the USA has attacked us, until you’ve produced at least one aircraft with a wing showing the US ensign.’ Nasser left.
Around 11 o’clock Amer was visited by Abdul Latif Boghdady, who had commanded the air force in the wars of 1948 and 1956 and was now one of Nasser’s vice-presidents. Boghdady did not want to get in the way. He said he would come back later if the field marshal was too busy to brief him. Amer, expansively, insisted Boghdady took a seat. Of course he had time. The commanders in the Sinai had everything under control. Why, Amer exclaimed, once we have the air battle out of the way, I’ll have nothing to do! Boghdady noticed that Lieutenant-General Sidqi Mahmoud, his successor as air force commander, kept telephoning. He seemed, as far as the vice-president could tell, to be crying. Amer told him more than once to pull himself together.
‘He kept asking him how many planes he had shot down so far. He’d answer with a figure which Abdul Hakim [Amer] would repeat loudly so we could hear it. Then he would say, so why are you upset then? Then Sidqi would call again, repeating that wave after wave of attacks were coming in on our airfields. Sidqi said there the Americans and the British must be helping the Israelis. They just did not have that many planes on their own. Abdul Hakim asked him to get proof of what he was saying.’
Field Marshal Amer clutched desperately at the suggestion that the big powers were involved. If it was going to be like Suez all over again, there might be a way out. He was losing himself in a world of panic and fantasy. No coherent orders were coming out of GHQ. The forces in the Sinai did not know if they were supposed to defend or attack, and sat in their positions while the Israelis picked them off.
The next phone call came from Nasser, who by now was back at his villa, from which he did not emerge for two days. When he asked how many planes had been lost, Amer would not give a straight answer. When Nasser insisted, he said forty-seven, of which thirty-five were usable at a pinch. All the rest could be repaired. It was another bare-faced lie. By lunchtime on 5 June, Egypt had lost all its heavy and light bombers and most of its fighters.
Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, the editor of al-Ahram, Cairo’s leading newspaper, who was so close to Nasser he was considered his mouthpiece, claimed no one had the courage to tell the president the whole truth about what had happened. Heikal says while Nasser was at GHQ he was given the same exaggerated figures for downed Israeli planes as the public. He did not find out what was really happening until around four in the afternoon and it was not until the evening that the enormity of what had happened really came home to him. It seems clear, though, that Nasser knew long before that. General Hadidi says he knew ‘within minutes’. Although GHQ in Cairo was Amer’s domain, Nasser had his own people there, from the chief of staff General Fawzi, who was his appointee, down. Even if Amer had tried to keep the whole truth from him while he was visiting the headquarters building, Fawzi, a professional who took his responsibilities very seriously, would surely have told Nasser the truth.
Nasser had an eyewitness report at 2:00 p.m. Vice-President Shafei, whose plane had landed at Fayed airbase moments before it was bombed, had driven straight from the Sinai desert to Nasser’s house in Cairo. On the way he had passed three major airbases, all of which had been on fire. Shafei hammered on Nasser’s front door. The president himself answered. Standing on the doorstep, Shafei told him everything that he had seen. Nasser told him to go to see Amer, and went back inside. Shafei went to GHQ, which was a ‘total mess’. Amer gave an impression of ‘total carelessness’. He seemed to be finding it hard to concentrate, not taking in everything that was being said to him.
At least Shafei was able to walk in on Amer. At the foreign ministry Mahmoud Riad had been trying to get through to Amer on the phone all morning. In the end he managed to speak to one of his aides. Riad suggested setting some sort of liaison between the foreign ministry and the military headquarters. His request was ignored by GHQ, where ‘panic and confusion reigned supreme’. Riad had been trying to follow what was happening on the radio in his office. As foreign minister he knew as much about the war as the journalists in the press centre and the excited crowds on the streets. All he had, like them, were the communiqués from the military command claiming that more and more Israeli war planes were being shot down. But he wanted accurate information so he could work out a political strategy. In the end, Nasser telephoned and gave him the ‘shock of his life’ when he told him what had really happened.
Sinai, 1300
Command and control on the Israeli side of the lines was comple
tely different. General Gavish, commander of Israel’s armies in the Sinai, followed the action and directed it from a mobile headquarters unit based around a small command convoy. Where necessary, he would take a helicopter for a face-to-face meeting with his divisional commanders. Before the war, Gavish had tested his war plan against Egypt in big military exercises. One of them put a division of 10,000 men and 250 tanks into the field for three days, to check everything they could think of – mobilisation and deployment, war fighting, supplies of food, ammunition, and fuel. Scenarios for war against all Israel’s main Arab enemies were constantly honed, sometimes on maps, sometimes in field exercises, sometimes with just a few command cars representing armoured formations. They had practised so much that now that his men were finally in the Sinai, one of his soldiers told Gavish that he felt he had been there before.
Gavish sat at a small table loaded with maps, surrounded by his staff and communications experts. Egypt’s command and control very rapidly reduced itself to Field Marshal Amer’s panicky phone calls. Gavish could be patched through not just to divisional commanders but to front-line units too. A reporter from the Israeli army newspaper followed him through the day. ‘War noises leak out of the radios – assaulting tanks, crossing mine fields, a face-to-face fight while mopping up resistance, an exhausting journey of infantry walking in deep sand … the general asks to be out in touch with the commander on the southern axis: “Who is talking … where are you … were you in contact with the enemy?…” The general listens and says, “OK, don’t get any closer to it, wait for them to come and then give it to them immediately.”’ Gavish was also in touch with Rabin, the chief of staff, in Tel Aviv, calling when necessary for air cover: ‘The enemy is moving … if we can calm it down with some planes it will be very good for the Jews.’
In contrast to Gavish’s tight and mobile team, Egypt had two sets of generals in Sinai. General Salah Muhsin was in charge of the army’s well-established Eastern Command. It knew the territory and had made offensive and defensive plans. But just before the war Amer suddenly decided Muhsin was not good enough. Instead of relieving him, he invented a new Sinai headquarters, under General Murtagi, one of his favourites. Murtagi had no forces and no experience as a commander in Sinai. His exact relationship with Muhsin’s Eastern Command was never clarified. Muhsin had all the fighting troops. Murtagi was told that he was setting up an advanced headquarters for the field marshal, who would take over when the battle started. Amer always assumed that at the war’s outbreak he would have a good forty-eight hours to shift himself and his cohorts to Sinai. The confusion created by the two parallel headquarters made a big contribution to the collapse of the Egyptian army as a fighting force. The two rival generals were reduced to competitive telephone calls to Amer, trying to sell him their ideas. Other Egyptian generals looked on with despair at the unfolding mess and at the spectacle of two of their colleagues fighting each other. After the war Murtagi tried to absolve himself of responsibility by admitting that his role and his command were unnecessary.
Another huge weakness was that just before the war Egypt’s long-established plan for the defence of Sinai, codenamed ‘Qaher’, had been abandoned by Nasser. It envisaged pulling invading Israeli forces into a killing ground in central Sinai, between well-prepared defensive positions. Not all the positions were ready, but from a military point of view, it was a sensible scheme. Qaher sacrificed territory to draw the Israelis in, which Nasser, at the last minute, decided was not acceptable. He ordered a forward defence on the borders. It meant chaotic reorganisation and redeployment when the Egyptian army should have been digging in.
Egyptian military incompetence compounded the damage caused by Israel’s efficiency. Somehow, six Tupolev bombers had been airborne when their base was raided and had escaped the attacks. Instead of looking for a friendly airfield – Sudan was suggested – they were ordered to land at Luxor. The message was intercepted. Not long afterwards a wave of Israeli warplanes, one of which was flown by Herzl Bodinger, destroyed them on the ground along with another eight Antonovs.
Elsewhere in the Middle East it was getting nasty for Westerners. In Libya the US Embassy in Benghazi was being attacked. Inside, as diplomats were burning papers, they sent out a message in such a hurry there was no time to encrypt it: ‘Mob broke into Embassy. Staff locked in vault. Threw tear gas to hold the mob off.’ Two hours later, a little calmer, they reported that British troops were on their way to make sure it was safe for them to come out of the vault. The message chattered off the teleprinter: ‘Have completed destruction files and double checking make sure we have done job.’ In Yemen, once news of the attacks broke, Yemeni and Egyptian military guards took up positions outside the US Embassy in Sanaa. Two Egyptian armoured cars deployed on the approach road to the Embassy. The radio broadcast nationalistic and military music and calls to arms. In Basra, in southern Iraq, a mob invaded the US representative’s compound and buildings and smashed up the rooms until the authorities restored order.
At GHQ in Tel Aviv the General Staff was still worried about an Egyptian ground attack. Aharon Yariv, the head of military intelligence, told Rabin at 1300 that ‘great attention should be given to the possibility that the Shazli force will try to cut the Negev’. Saad el Shazli was a 43-year-old major-general. Under his command were a tank battalion, an infantry battalion and two commando battalions, fifteen hundred men in all who had been causing the Israelis some anxiety. But while Yariv was briefing Rabin, Shazli himself was in a car, trying to rejoin his troops. He had travelled by helicopter to the ill-starred meeting with Field Marshal Amer at Fayed airbase. After the arrival of the Israelis broke up what Shazli remembers as ‘a nice reunion’, it took him until three in the afternoon to rejoin his men. He found they had only suffered two air strikes, with negligible casualties. No orders had come through from Cairo. He tried to raise Cairo on the radio. Nothing. Shazli moved his forces just over the border into Israel, where they hunkered down in an L-shaped defile, well sheltered from air attack. They stayed there until midday on 7 June. No orders came from Cairo. Shazli realised his men would be cut to pieces by air strikes if they went into the open desert. He decided not to try any ill-conceived initiatives of his own.
Mafrak Airbase, Jordan, 1230
Ihsan Shurdom was still waiting in his flying kit, in a trench near his aircraft, still on stand-by for action. He had not been sent on the Netanya raid and he was still seething about not being allowed to scramble to attack the dots on the radar screens, which he was convinced – correctly – were Israelis returning to base low on fuel and ammunition. All the pilots had their transistor radios constantly tuned to the reports of the Arab triumph which, that morning, originated in Cairo and were then embroidered across the region. Suddenly, one of Shurdom’s friends turned to him.
‘He said we’re losing this bloody war. I asked why. He said, “Because they’re claiming they’ve shot down twice the number of Mirages Israel has.”’
The field telephone in Ihsan Shurdom’s trench rang. Scramble. Israeli planes were approaching. He was out of his trench and running. His Hawker Hunter was twenty yards away, ready to go. His first instinct, get airborne … much safer than sitting helplessly in a jet-powered aluminium coffin on the runway. Shurdom’s Hunter was armed with twenty-four rockets for air strikes or for close support. But he had been scrambled for air defence, to intercept incoming Israeli jets. First priority, he thought, get rid of the rockets. As soon as he was in the air, he fired them into the ground. Then, he looked round and saw the Israeli jets approaching the airfield. He remembered the techniques he had learnt from the RAF. He knew about ‘scissoring’, where you aim to turn your enemy into your guns, how to use ‘speed breaks’. He knew how to manoeuvre the Hunter using the flaps and how to use the sun to disappear. Most important of all, though, was to see the enemy first: then ‘you gained the advantage, because you either went high or started manoeuvring … Air combat is decided within one minute.’ Shurdom claims two kil
ls, both Israeli Mysteres. One exploded over the airfield, one went down slightly to the north. Israel admits only one Mystere lost over Mafrak. Another, badly damaged, limped home. Later, another Jordanian pilot shot down two more.
Below them on the runway, the aircraft that had bombed Netanya were refuelling and rearming. A plan to disperse the planes to various airstrips in the desert had been made in peacetime. But in the excitement of the morning nobody had thought about implementing it. The maintenance crews had been listening to the radio reports. So many Israelis had apparently been shot down over Cairo it was hard to see how they could have planes left to attack them. When they saw the Israelis approaching, they assumed that they were friendly until they opened fire. Jordan had no hardened shelters for its aircraft. Most of the Jordanian Hawker Hunters were caught on the ground and destroyed. The squadron commander, Major Firass Ajlouni, who just an hour before had led the raid on Netanya, tried to follow Shurdom into the air. As he was trying to take off, his Hunter was hit by a burst of cannon fire and he was killed. The next pilot on the runway jumped from his aircraft and ran to the trench to take cover as the Israelis strafed and bombed the airfield. In a few minutes the Jordanians’ only fighter base had been destroyed.
