Six Days

by Jeremy Bowen

  Millions of television viewers in the United States had been watching the Security Council debates. The superpowers’ ambassadors – Goldberg from the US and Fedorenko from the Soviet Union – had become well known. Arthur Goldberg was a former union lawyer, Secretary of Labour and Justice of the Supreme Court. In private the Russians on the Soviet delegation called him ‘the slick Jew who could fool the devil himself’, but they respected his eloquence and intelligence and regarded him as a ‘vigorous and formidable opponent’. Fedorenko had been a favourite of Stalin. He was one of the USSR’s leading experts on China and spoke the language so well that he interpreted at meetings between Stalin and Mao. Andrei Gromyko, the long-serving Soviet foreign minister, disliked him. By the Soviet Union’s prim standards, his hair was too long and his clothes, including the ultimate bourgeois affectation, a bow tie, were too flashy. He had been on the defensive since the crisis started, often avoiding members of the Security Council when they wanted consultations, emerging occasionally to deploy a sarcastic Russian wit to the TV cameras. When the Canadian delegate seemed to be off beam, Fedorenko told him he was behaving like the man in an oriental proverb: when you show him the moon, all he looks at is your finger.

  Fedorenko’s performance in the first two days of the war served Israel’s purposes admirably. It was not really his fault. Unlike Washington, Moscow had not invested heavily in cutting-edge communications, so Fedorenko and his superiors in the Soviet Union did not know how well the Israelis were doing. Initially, all they had to go on were Egypt’s boasts. The Egyptian high command was already in such a state of panic and paralysis that it was not telling its own foreign ministry what was happening, let alone the people who had provided the equipment Israel was destroying. The Soviets at the UN had to fall back on their standing instructions not to allow any resolutions against Egypt, Syria or Jordan. When at last instructions arrived from Moscow ‘they had a wait and see tone, while generally supportive of the Arab position. We were ordered to consult with the Arabs and condemn Israel in the strongest possible terms.’

  Moscow also took military precautions. It put bomber and MiG-21 fighter units on alert in the evening. One of the officers concerned was convinced they were preparing for ‘real combat’. They were moved to an airbase on the Soviet–Turkish border and were scrambled several times in the next three days. Their plan was to operate out of Syrian airbases. Working indirectly, the Iraqi government asked Turkey the next day to grant overflight rights to Soviet MiG-21s. Permission was refused.

  Fedorenko and his delegation were picking up rumours, but none of the hard information they needed. The Soviet Embassy in Cairo had some around the time that New Yorkers were having breakfast, but it was not passed on. For the first few hours of the war, the Soviets in Cairo had relied on the radio like everyone else. They realised that Cairo Radio’s bragging reports were inaccurate, but assumed they were exaggerations rather than outright lies. Then a group of Soviet specialists came back from Egypt’s biggest airbase, Cairo West. Sergei Tarasenko, who was an attaché at the Embassy, saw them come in looking exhausted, with torn and dirty clothes. Their senior officer came to the point. ‘Egypt hasn’t got an air force any more, and Cairo West base has ceased to exist.’ The bus carrying the Soviet technicians was just approaching the base when the first wave of Mirages attacked. They had time to pile out and take cover. After the first raid, a dozen aircraft survived. The Soviets said the pilots could have taken them into the air. But nothing happened and the next wave of attacks finished them off.

  About the time that the Soviet technicians were getting back to their embassy, a call for a simple ceasefire was going nowhere. India protested about the ‘wanton strafing attack’ in Gaza by Israel that had killed three of its UNEF soldiers. After India tabled its own resolution saying that the ceasefire needed to be followed by a return to the positions of 4 June, the Security Council decided to take a short recess to wait for news from the battlefield. The Israelis, who knew exactly what was happening, and the Americans, who knew almost as much, kept silent. Some of the delegates stayed in their seats in the chamber of the Security Council. Others drifted out to the delegates’ lounge, where reporters milled around trying to find out what was happening. The Council did not reconvene until 10:20 p.m. New York time.

  Ambassador Goldberg spent hours trying to get a meeting with Fedorenko. The Soviet avoided him until late in the afternoon. For the Arabs a bitter irony was in the making. Goldberg and the Americans had concluded that they would have to soften their position. A resolution calling simply for a ceasefire did not look to be enough to get past the Soviet veto. Goldberg wanted to reach Fedorenko to offer him a ceasefire plus a withdrawal of troops, an idea that Israel opposed vehemently. Through gritted teeth the Israeli representative told the Americans that its view of the proposition was ‘frigid’.

  By the time Fedorenko met Goldberg, it was getting on for midnight in the Middle East. During the time that Fedorenko was mostly incommunicado, the first day of fighting had ended with Israel making big advances in the Sinai and towards Jerusalem. Goldberg offered him a new text including a demand for ‘prompt withdrawal, without prejudice to rights, claims or positions of anyone, of all armed personnel back to their own territories, and to take other appropriate measures to ensure disengagement of forces and to reduce tension in the area’. Fedorenko rejected it, because the reference to ‘own territories’ meant that the Iraqis, who had been advancing into Jordan, and other Arabs who had sent troops, would have to bring them all home. Instead, he suggested a demand to pull soldiers back behind the armistice lines. Both of them went away to think about it.

  Fedorenko had stonewalled Goldberg. But in a private meeting shortly afterwards he told the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian ambassadors that it was the best deal they were going to get. Goldberg and Fedorenko met again at 9 p.m. New York time. By then the US had gone even further towards the Soviet position. The new American draft accepted the Soviet language that both sides should withdraw back to the armistice lines. Fedorenko stonewalled again. He could not give an answer before the morning.

  In one day the United States had gone from supporting a ceasefire resolution calling simply for both sides to stop fighting, to drafting a call for a return to the positions that had been held on 4 June. Had the Soviet Union accepted it, they would have scored a diplomatic victory on behalf of their Arab allies. It would have had the added bonus for them of sowing dissension between Israel and the US. Instead, they played into Israel’s hands.

  White House Cabinet Room, 1130

  President Johnson summoned his Special Committee of wise men that had been assembled to handle the crisis. They knew that Israel, whatever it was saying in public, had fired first. But they did not know who was winning. McGeorge Bundy, the committee’s secretary, fretted about the ‘awful shape we would be in if the Israelis were losing. We didn’t really know anything about the situation on the ground.’ The committee realised that if they were losing, the US would either have to intervene or watch Israel being ‘thrown into the sea or defeated. That would have been a most painful moment and, of course, with the Soviet presence in the Middle East, a moment of great general danger.’

  When, in late afternoon, they found out exactly what the Israeli air force had done, the whole atmosphere changed. Bundy was relieved that ‘the fighting was the Israelis’ idea and … the idea was working. That was a lot better than if it had been the other way around.’ The Americans protected the Israelis. They knew a pre-emptive attack would be controversial, especially after Washington’s loud warnings that more time should be given to diplomacy. The State Department’s own legal advice was that Israel’s action could be a violation of the United Nations charter. Walt Rostow thought it was best not to put on the record ‘that Israel had kicked this off from a standing start’. He changed the draft of a letter from President Johnson to Britain’s Prime Minister Wilson, to edit out the suggestion that Israel had moved first. The Americans were pleased that
the people to whom they were drawn instinctively were on top, and that their pre-war intelligence pointing to a rapid Israeli victory had been right. But more than anything else, they were delighted that, thanks to Israel, they were off the hook. Johnson believed he had to find a way to honour the promises that Eisenhower had made in 1957 about keeping the Gulf of Aqaba open. But he did not like their only plan, for a naval operation with such limited international support that it could not have been passed off as anything other than gunboat diplomacy on Israel’s behalf. Now it may be war, but at least someone else was doing the shooting.

  Imwas, West Bank, 1830

  Two detachments of Egyptian commandos prepared to cross the border into Israel from Imwas, a border village close to the main road from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. Their mission was to raid the main international airport at Lod and an airforce base at Hartsour. They had Jordanian guides to get them over the border. After that all they had to rely on was a palm-sized aerial photograph and their enthusiasm. As the last of the evening light faded away, they moved quietly through fields and past farms and villages. Ali Abdul Mursi, one of the officers, realised that the whole country was at war. Most of the men were away fighting. If Egypt had been better organised, large-scale guerrilla operations inside Israel could have done a lot of damage. They trudged on through the fields.

  Abu Deeb, the moukhtar or headman of Imwas, spent the evening sitting and talking with his brother Hikmat Deeb Ali outside their family house. Crisis or no crisis, on Monday morning Hikmat had travelled twenty miles or so by bus from his home village to get to his job on a building site in Jerusalem. He needed the money. But soon the news came through on the radio that the war had started. When they heard gunfire and shelling start in Jerusalem itself, Hikmat, like all his workmates, went back home. When he arrived, his neighbours were ‘looking at each other … waiting. There was no sense of what was next.’

  Sinai, 1830

  By six, Brig. Gen. Avraham Yoffe’s tanks had spent nine hours moving slowly through sand dunes that Egypt, assuming that they were impassable, had left virtually undefended. In places engineers had to dismount to clear minefields, inching their way forward with steel prods. By nightfall they were at B’ir Lahfan, where they came under fire and stopped. Yoffe’s tanks blocked the road to Al-Arish from Jebel Libni and Abu Agheila. Fighting went on for most of the night, as Yoffe’s men stopped reinforcements getting to Al-Arish. The confused fighting at Rafah was over by midnight. Ori Orr looked round his men who had fought there, ‘trying to work out who was wounded and who was killed’. The survivors looked like ‘children who have been forced to grow up in just one day’.

  The commander of Israel’s southern front, Brigadier General Yeshayahu Gavish, tired, with eyes bloodshot from the desert sand, flew south in a helicopter to the advanced headquarters of Brigadier General Yoffe. Amos Elon who was travelling with him, thought the camouflaged military vehicles beneath them looked like a Bedouin camp. When they landed Gavish dusted himself down and went to the war room with Yoffe. It was made of nets strung between two trucks. As the sun set, ‘from the south, rolling over the darkened hills, came the thunder of cannon fire’. Rabin called Gavish, suggesting that they bomb Abu Agheila all night so they could march in when morning came. Doing that, he said, would minimise Israel’s casualties. Gavish – and Sharon – disagreed. Gavish wanted to get his tanks into the position. Sharon protested that he was halfway through the attack. This was no time to break off. And he believed, correctly, that he was playing to Israel’s strengths. ‘The Egyptians do not like fighting at night nor do they enjoy hand-to-hand combat – we specialise in both.’

  * * *

  At 2200 guns from two Israeli brigades opened up on the Egyptian fortifications at Um Katef and Abu Agheila. Ariel Sharon rubbed his hands. ‘Such a barrage I’ve never seen.’ In twenty minutes 6000 shells landed on Um Katef. To the west, Israeli paratroopers, carried the first part of the way by helicopter, foot-slogged through soft sand to get behind the Egyptians, to attack their artillery. They blew up guns and shells and forced the crews to retreat. To the north, Sharon’s infantry and armoured brigades, led by mine-clearing equipment, moved forward behind the barrage. Much of his infantry was transported to the battle in civilian buses, which they smeared with mud, ‘not so much to camouflage them,’ Sharon explained, ‘but to make them appear a little more military’. They advanced the last few miles on foot, carrying coloured lights so they would not end up attacking each other.

  Israeli foot soldiers worked their way through the Egyptian trenches, some men inside them, others above the parapet, shooting down into them. During the fighting at Abu Agheila, Egypt tried to send reinforcements from Jebel Libni, in the south-west. Brig. Gen. Yoffe’s division was already at B’ir Lahfan to stop them getting through. The tanks fought all night. The Egyptians were overwhelmed after Israeli mechanised infantry came racing from Al-Arish to take their western flank.

  Israeli wounded from the paratroop unit that was assaulting the defence lines on the road to Abu Agheila started coming in. One of their doctors ‘was scared until I had to treat the first wounded … Soldiers lay legless, their hands crushed, a bullet in the neck, fragments in the stomach. We had only ten stretchers and some of the wounded insisted they could walk or limp along without help. The difficulty was to make sure that the infusion needles stayed in place while we advanced under fire.’

  As usual, the Egyptians fought bravely in their fixed positions. But, as usual, their officers were not flexible enough to turn them around to deal with Israeli attacks from the rear. Junior officers and NCOs were also unable to organise effective counter-attacks against the Israelis who invaded their positions. But, in the end, the biggest reason for Israel’s victory at Abu Agheila was Egypt’s failure to commit its reserves until it was too late. They were close enough to hear the battle going on but were spectators for most of the night until Israel got round to surrounding and attacking them. Egypt had an armoured brigade in a good position to attack a task force of Israeli Centurion tanks that managed to chug its way through the supposedly impassable sand dunes north of Um Katef. But it did nothing, presumably because they did not have any orders. The Centurions’ commander, Lt. Col. Natke Nir, was badly wounded in both legs, but his tanks turned the northern end of the Egyptian defences and managed to get in behind them. By eight in the morning, with smoke from burning vehicles and exploding Egyptian ammunition drifting across the sand, the battle was won. One of Yoffe’s brigades was waiting to continue the advance. The road was blocked with the hundreds of civilian vehicles that had transported Sharon’s infantry to the battle. They were pushed off the road and on to the sand, so Yoffe’s men could continue to their next target, Jebel Libni.

  Cairo, evening

  Crowds poured into Cairo from the provinces to celebrate a great victory in buses and trucks provided by the Arab Socialist Union, the ruling party. Many of them had transistor radios. By 8:17 p.m. Cairo Radio was claiming that eighty-six enemy aircraft had been destroyed and that Egyptian tanks had broken into Israel. At the headquarters of the Sinai front, General Gamasy listened ‘with growing horror’ to what he knew was a pack of lies. At Central Command, General Hadidi slumped into his chair, convinced that the war was at least half-lost. The US Embassy did not trust the ‘repetition of vague and universally victorious communiqués’ on the radio. They recommended that Washington apply the ‘usual coefficient of mendacity of 10, giving the total number downed as something like 9’.

  Anwar El Sadat could have told them they were not being suspicious enough. Like Nasser, he had retreated to his villa, where he had spent the day ringing Nasser and Amer and trying to follow what was happening in the air and at the front. Late in the evening he rang Amer again, who told him ‘drily and irritably’ that the Israelis had captured Al-Arish. Sadat, at a loss, went for a long walk through the streets of Cairo. He watched Nasser’s loyalists marching up and down Pyramids Road. Sadat was ‘dazed and broken-hearted’, as they c
hanted and danced to the fake reports of an imaginary victory.

  Jerusalem, evening

  The BBC had refused to run the world exclusive of its own correspondent, Michael Elkins. He had only just started work with the Corporation, and he was an Israeli. The editors in the newsroom in London thought that he might, as they delicately put it, have ‘spoken with the tongue of the prophets’. By the evening they relented, and put out Elkins’s story, which had already been broadcast coast-to-coast in the US on CBS. He beat the military censorship with careful words: ‘… less than fifteen hours after the fighting began at dawn this morning, there was every evidence that though fighting will continue, Israel has already won the war … I may not now report where the Israeli armed forces stand, but the place names will be familiar to anyone who has read a good account of the first five days of the 1956 Sinai campaign. This time Israel has created the nearest thing to instant victory the modern world has seen.’