by Jeremy Bowen
An Israeli corporal called Zerach Epstein conducted his own private mopping-up operation. He was the man who had offered to cut Drizen’s throat. ‘They shot at me from a dugout and I shot back. I tossed a hand grenade into the trench and raced on … suddenly I found myself all alone among the trees. From beneath one of them a Jordanian sprang out. I shot him and went on running. Somebody called out to me. I stopped and turned back. I saw it was a Jordanian soldier standing about two metres away from me … we pressed the trigger almost at the same moment, but I was just a fraction quicker.’ Afterwards they found the bodies of nine Jordanian soldiers lying along the route he had taken.
Just before four in the afternoon the Israelis blew open the heavy wooden doors of Government House. ‘For the second time in two hours,’ General Bull complained, ‘we found ourselves overrun. On this occasion Israel chose to cut our link with New York.’ Israeli soldiers started clearing the rooms in the approved manner, tossing in a grenade and then spraying them with their Uzis. They were persuaded to stop by UN officers before they harmed any of the women and children who were sheltering there.
Abu Agheila, Sinai, 1500
Abu Agheila was on the way into central Sinai. Tanks can fight in most of the desert, but not without fuel and ammunition. Logistics go by road. War in a desert is about controlling the roads and Abu Agheila is one of the most important crossroads in the Sinai, about thirty kilometres from the border with Israel. In 1967 it was protected by four fortified positions that were connected by barbed wire and minefields. In the 1956 war Israel tried and failed repeatedly to take Abu Agheila. It fell only when the Egyptian troops were ordered to abandon it to pull back to the Suez canal. Israel mapped, surveyed and photographed the area before it pulled out after the war. In the next ten years Egypt strengthened its defences and the IDF made an intensive study of the best way to attack them. In yet another example of their thorough planning for the war, they held exercises up to divisional level, usually at night, concentrating on breaching the position.
Abu Agheila’s defences hinged on a heavily fortified ridge called Um Katef. Behind a minefield 300 yards deep, Egypt had deployed around 16,000 men from its 2nd Infantry Division in three parallel lines of trenches three miles long, complete with concrete strongpoints. Egypt had reinforced the position in and around Um Katef until it had ninety tanks and self-propelled guns and six regiments of heavy artillery, all well dug in. Sharon, taking advantage of years of planning, had his attack ready. Brigadier-General Gavish at Southern Command tried to persuade him to put it off until the morning, when he would have air support. But Sharon loved fighting at night, when he believed Israeli troops had the edge. By late afternoon Sharon’s division was at its start line for the attack above and below Abu Agheila, beginning at ten in the evening with the biggest artillery barrage that Israel had ever mustered.
Ramle, central Israel, 1530
General Narkiss’s mobile headquarters was moving slowly, but it was in the right direction as far as he was concerned – towards Jerusalem. He had his wish. Israel was in a shooting war with Jordan. As well as counter-attacking at Government House, Narkiss had sent tanks to attack the mountain ridge that ran north-west of Jerusalem and he had been told that a crack unit of paratroopers was being sent to him to attack in the city itself. He was certain that he would be able to finish the unfinished business of 1948, and capture all of Jerusalem. ‘Joy engulfed me. I knew that soon these three powerful streams would flood together into a tidal wave, to flow over and drown Jerusalem’s bonds.’
Washington DC, 0715
In the Pentagon, America’s huge, five-sided military headquarters, the phone rang in the office of the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. It was the duty officer in the war room, who was always a general or an admiral. ‘Mr Secretary, Kosygin is on the hotline and wants to talk to the president. What should I tell him?’
One of the innovations brought in after the Cuban missile crisis was the ‘hotline’ between Moscow and Washington. It was a secure teletype line, with American and Soviet equipment at either end. It was the first time that the hotline, which had been there since 1963, had been used in a real crisis. McNamara asked why he was calling him. The Soviet prime minister Alexei Kosygin wanted President Johnson, not the Secretary of Defense. ‘Well,’ the duty officer replied, ‘the hotline terminates in the Pentagon.’
McNamara was aghast that the line installed by the superpowers to handle crises that could, after all, lead to a thermonuclear exchange did not reach the White House. ‘General, we are spending 60 billion dollars a year on defence. Can’t you take a few thousand of those dollars and get these goddam lines patched across the river to the White House? You call the Situation Room and I’ll call the president and we’ll decide what to do.’
They put the line through to the White House. The first sentence of the first message from the Soviet Prime Minister asked if the American president was standing near the machine. Johnson’s reply was addressed to ‘Comrade’ Kosygin. The American hotline operators had sent a message to Moscow asking the Russian operators what was the proper way to address Kosygin. When the message went through, addressed to ‘Comrade’ Kosygin, the top Russians at the other end looked at it sharply. Was Johnson making fun of them?
At 0730 a presidential aide knocked on Johnson’s door. The most powerful man in the world, he noted, was ‘quiet – watching TV. Pres gave no indications of it being anything but a normal day – showered, shaved, dressed and left for SitRm [Situation Room].’ He noted Johnson breakfasted on tea, grapefruit and chipped beef, a delicacy which GIs during the Second World War called ‘shit on a shingle’ when it came on toast.
Mafrak Airbase, Jordan, 1530
Hassan Sabri, a maintenance engineer at Mafrak, looked out on to the smoking wreckage that the Israelis had left behind. The runway was unusable. The stores and most of the technical areas had been destroyed. In the craters on the runway were timed bombs, set to go off at random intervals. Sabri, who spent a year at the RAF training college at Cranwell on an armament engineering course, found out they also had a mercury switch which was set to explode if they were moved. All they could do was explode them where they were.
The atmosphere on the base was transformed. Excitement and expectation had been building up ever since the crisis had started in May. That morning most of them had believed every word of the radio reports of the triumphant progress of the Egyptian armed forces. The humiliation and dishonour of 1948 was about to be avenged. But by early afternoon, the war, for the air force at least, was lost. Officers and airmen whose families lived on the base in married quarters rushed to find them a safer place. Sabri, the engineer, knew what the Israeli raids meant. The radio reports were lies. Something similar must have happened to the air forces of Egypt and Syria. It meant the Jordanian army – and the rest of the Arabs – had been stripped of their air cover. Sabri was filled with despair. What could the army on the ground do, if Israel controlled the skies?
Jerusalem, 1600
After the capture of Government House, Israeli troops cleared the ‘Sausage’, a major Jordanian position that controlled access to southeast Jerusalem. Squads of men jumped into the trenches at one end, firing ahead of them and moving along until the defenders were captured. Without taking a single loss, they killed thirty Jordanians. After that they rolled up another elaborate trench system known as the ‘Bell’, which they were able to approach from the rear. Once again, the Jordanian infantrymen fought bravely, often to the death, but were not able to reposition themselves effectively enough to beat off an Israeli attack that was coming from an unexpected direction. But just as Lieutenant-Colonel Drizen and his men thought the entire Bell position had been cleared, they were ambushed by four or five Jordanians. Drizen, who was standing on the edge of a trench, was hit in his good hand. Two men who had been on either side of him were killed. A platoon commander was shot through the eye. Corporal Zerach Epstein fired back at the Jordanians, giving other soldiers en
ough time to throw grenades to kill them.
Jerusalem, 1700; Cairo, 1800; Washington DC, 1000
Teddy Kollek, mayor of Israeli Jerusalem, picked up Ruth Dayan, the wife of the defence minister, from the King David hotel, where she had been sheltering in one of West Jerusalem’s more comfortable bunkers, the hotel’s La Regence restaurant, two floors down and well sandbagged. They went to the Knesset, a mile-long dash by car down Jerusalem’s empty streets. The corridors of the Knesset were packed with ministers, MPs and journalists. The big question was whether Israel should now take East Jerusalem. ‘The mood was momentous and exciting … to advance on the Jordanian-held sector of Jerusalem was, of course, more of a political risk than a military one. Each of us knew in his heart that once we took the Old City we would never give it up.’ People were lining up in the Knesset lobby to ask David Ben-Gurion what he thought. He wanted Israel to seize its chance.
On the Arab side of Jerusalem, Palestinians had spent the day listening to predictions of victory on Voice of the Arabs from Cairo. At a forward command post an elderly aristocrat, incapacitated by gout, was carried in dressed in breeches and armed with pistols, dagger and rifle. ‘We will dine in Tel Aviv,’ he announced.
Colonel Uri Ben Ari had other ideas. He commanded the mechanised brigade that Narkiss had ordered to swing round to the north of Jerusalem. He planned to have breakfast in one of the villages outside Jerusalem, if there was time. Ben Ari arrived in Israel as a young German Jew called Heinz Banner in 1939, when he was fourteen. His entire family, except an aunt who had married a German officer in the 1920s, was exterminated by the Nazis. Ben Ari had been with Narkiss and Rabin when the Jewish quarter fell in 1948. He too had unfinished business in the holy city, where he had fought with great courage. Ben Ari was one of Israel’s most gifted tank commanders. He studied the theories of the German Panzer General Heinz Guderian, the man who formulated the ‘blitzkrieg’ – lightning war, based on fast moving armoured divisions backed up by mechanised infantry. He applied Guderian’s theories with great success in the Sinai in 1956, before leaving the army prematurely to become a publisher. Narkiss called Ben Ari back in 1967. He shook up his brigade in short order, drilling them until they could move from a standing start in five minutes. On 5 June they started their decisive push to Jerusalem at five in the afternoon.
His mission was to take the high ground that ran along north of Jerusalem. If he succeeded Israel would control all the main roads to the north, east and west of the city, cutting off any chance of Jordan sending in reinforcements. But in the way were strongpoints at Sheikh Abdul Aziz, Beit Iksa and Radar Hill that had repeatedly thrown back Israeli fighters in 1948. He selected four routes for his tanks to use to climb the ridges. Instead of stopping to regroup at the foot of the hill, Ben Ari ordered them to drive straight on. It was harder to hit a moving target. Some of the routes were little more than goat tracks, heavily mined and under the Jordanian guns, but they had been carefully reconnoitred before the war. At first the fighting was hard and the going was tough. An Israeli tank commander who had done most of his training in the desert said ‘we were fighting two enemies and I don’t know which was worse – the Jordanians or the terrain’.
The Jordanians fired down at the advancing Israeli tanks. Soldiers riding on them had to jump down to clear the mines. All ten Centurion tanks in one Israeli unit were disabled, along with many Shermans. But Ben Ari brought his armour up behind the Jordanian positions. His unorthodox idea of splitting his force into four worked. He thought they would break through on at least two routes. In the end, they did so on all four. Many Jordanian officers abandoned the fight. Afterwards, the Israelis found no one with a higher rank than sergeant among the Jordanian dead.
By dawn on the second day of the war, Ben Ari’s men were north of Jerusalem, cutting the roads, as they had planned.
The road to Al-Arish, Sinai, 1700
At about five Lieutenant Avigdor Kahalani of Israel’s 7th Armoured Brigade was rolling down the road to Al-Arish. He planned to be the first into the town. First they had to get through a pass known as the Jirardi Defile. A soldier jumped out in front of him. Kahalani was about to shoot him when he realised he was Israeli. The man flagged him down, warning that Egyptian tanks were ahead. Kahalani climbed up on a ridge to take a look. Suddenly the tank bucked. It was on fire and Kahalani was burning. He could not find the strength to push himself out. ‘The smell of burning and a wave of intense heat swept the tank … what’s happening to me, I screamed, I’m coming apart.’ With a final supreme effort he forced himself out and rolled out onto the engine cowling. ‘Mother, I’m burning, I’m burning, I’m burning…’ He threw himself into the sand dunes, rolling around to put the fires out. Kahalani wanted to sleep, but then realised that tanks were tearing through the sand around him and shells were exploding. All his clothes except part of his underpants and shirt were burnt off him. The sock in one of his boots was on fire. He pulled himself into the loader’s compartment on a Patton tank, which took him, badly burnt and by now stark naked, to a medic.
An anti-tank gun knocked out the Patton behind Kahalani’s. Two others were stopped by mines. Sergeant Dov Yam, the commander of one of the tanks in the minefield, kept on firing his gun until another anti-tank shell hit his tank and blew off his hand. He ran back to the brigade commander’s half-track and collapsed on a stretcher, muttering, ‘I think I did everything I could.’ Major Ehud Elad, the battalion commander, took the lead, ordering his men to disperse further into the sands to try to outflank the position that was holding them back. Like all Israeli tank commanders in 1967, Elad believed he did his job best if he sat up in the turret, exposing his body but giving him an all-round view of the battle. ‘Driver, faster,’ he shouted through the intercom. Then the men in the tank heard a thump. Elad’s body dropped down into the compartment of his tank, his head blown clean off. Before they forced some tanks through the pass with a frontal assault down the main road, the Israelis lost the battalion commander, three company commanders and their operations officer. Behind them the Jirardi Defile was still blocked. It took four hours of hard hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches that protected it to subdue the Egyptians.
At Al-Arish Brig. Gen. Tal told his brigade commanders that during the first day of fighting, through Rafah and into Egypt, they had scored a decisive victory over the Egyptian 7th Infantry Division. Before the battle Tal ordered them to throw everything into the fight. Getting the breakthrough and psychological as well as physical dominance over the Egyptians was critical, ‘irrespective of the cost in casualties’. Now he told them to be more cautious, trying first what could be done with long-range gunnery, pushing only a battalion forward at a time. He did not want them taking on any more all-out battles without his express permission. Tal ordered Colonel Shmuel Gonen, the commander of the 7th Armoured Brigade, to swing south to attack B’ir Lahfan, a major Egyptian defensive zone.
Egyptian civilians were caught up in the fighting. Mrs Fathi Mohammed Hussein Ayoub was travelling to Al-Arish in the afternoon. Her car was hit, she thought by the Israelis, killing her four-and five-year-old daughters and her eight-year-old son. The driver was cut in two by the explosion.
* * *
Field Marshal Amer at GHQ in Cairo had gone from paralysis to verbal incontinence. He made call after call to his divisional commanders, all of which were monitored by Israeli intelligence. He ignored General Muhsin, the commander of the field army, and General Murtagi, the commander in chief of the front, until he needed Murtagi to send reinforcements to Abu Agheila and Al-Arish. Amer could have revived Plan Qaher, which was supposed to deal with exactly the kind of thrust that Israel had made into the Sinai, but he seemed to have forgotten about it.
State Department, Washington DC, 1000
At the State Department in Foggy Bottom the spokesman Bob McCloskey gave a briefing to correspondents. He was asked whether the US was neutral in the Middle East war. McCloskey obliged. ‘We have tried to steer an even-hande
d course through this. Our position is neutral in thought, word and deed.’
It had seemed like a straightforward answer to a simple question. It was not. Israel’s supporters were outraged. Jews at a union meeting hissed when they heard the US was calling itself neutral. The US, they believed, should support Israel. Mrs Arthur Krim, one of the president’s close friends, told him that his administration looked as if it was washing its hands of the war at a time when Nasser seemed to American Jews to be a second Hitler. Mrs Krim suggested he made a ruling that the US would never re-establish diplomatic relations with a government headed by Nasser. David Brody of B’nai B’rith, the Jewish anti-defamation league, also used his access to senior officials in the Johnson administration to protest. He wanted a promise that the US would not force Israel to withdraw from any land it captured without first getting assurances of a real peace.
United Nations Security Council, New York
The Soviet delegation had heard that war had broken out before dawn, when Hans Tabor, the Danish ambassador who was taking his turn at the rotating presidency of the Security Council, called the Soviet estate at Glen Cove. Nikolai Fedorenko, the Soviet Ambassador to the UN, agreed to a meeting of the Security Council and drove to their mission in Manhattan with his arms control adviser, Arkady Shevchenko, where he was expecting to find instructions from Moscow. They waited close to their secure teletype machines. Nothing came through, so they went to their offices at the UN headquarters. The Egyptian ambassador, Mohammed el-Kony, who in Shevchenko’s opinion was a ‘total mediocrity’, was confident, telling them that ‘we deceived the Israelis. They bombed some of our false airfields, where we deliberately placed fake plywood airplane models. We shall see who wins this war.’
The Israeli ambassador to the UN, Gideon Rafael, knew how well his country’s air force was doing. He had been told ‘the stimulating news’ in a secret cable that Israel had destroyed 250 Egyptian planes by lunchtime. Tabor, the president of the Security Council, never understood how Rafael seemed so unworried at a time when everyone else thought Israel was in great danger. Rafael’s instructions were to carry out a ‘diplomatic holding action. The strategic outcome of the fighting was a race between time and space. Our armoured divisions would cover the space as fast as they could and our diplomatic corps would provide the time for them to reach their objectives.’ In case he needed relief Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban was on his way. As he was kissing his wife goodbye on his doorstep in Jerusalem a piece of shrapnel fizzed down to the ground near them. It took him three hours to get to the airport because tanks and troops were jamming the road. The only aircraft available was a small one designed for domestic flights. Late on Monday evening it took off from Tel Aviv and flew across the Mediterranean, almost as low as the attack jets that had bombed Egypt in the morning. By the time a queasy Eban decided it was safe to look out of the window, he saw dawn break over the Acropolis in Athens.
