by Jeremy Bowen
The Jordanian command post on the eastern side of the city was under heavy artillery fire. The air seemed to be vibrating. Brigadier Atta Ali, the Jordanian commander, and Hazim Khalidi, a member of one of Jerusalem’s aristocratic families who had been an officer in the British army, were discussing the chances of reinforcement. Messages from Amman were telling them that four brigades were coming, but they could not raise the Jordanian army’s West Bank headquarters on the radio. They did not know that it was already pulling back across the river Jordan. Reinforcements that were trying to make it up the Jericho road were attacked and destroyed by the Israelis. The bunker was overcrowded. Several dozen policemen kept pushing into it to escape the shelling. No one had taught them about digging trenches to protect themselves.
Tel Aviv disappeared into a deep blackout. The British journalist James Cameron reported that it ‘might seem a bit excessive in view of this claim to have rubbed out the entire Arab air threat, but the Israelis have lived so long on a razor edge that they take no chances’. The tension of not knowing what was happening at the front was still there, Cameron went on. ‘It has been a day of immense sorrow and apprehension here, where virtually no one exists but has a son or a father in very serious danger.’
Washington DC, evening
Since mid-afternoon Walt Rostow, the National Security Advisor, had been talking to President Johnson about the shape of the post-war Middle East. After a long day, Rostow sat back in his chair in his office in the White House basement, dictating a message to Johnson. He beamed with pleasure and relief. The first day had been a ‘turkey shoot’. He noted: ‘The key to ending the war is how well the Israelis do – or don’t do – on the ground.’
DAY TWO
6 June 1967
Jerusalem, 0100
The Israeli paratroops were being rushed into action. It was urban warfare, fighting house to house, close to the enemy. It was very different from their original mission to destroy the guns at Al-Arish that they had rehearsed until they had it off by heart. They had no maps of Jerusalem, nor the right equipment for street fighting. But General Narkiss wanted to get them into battle fast, in case the Jordanians counter-attacked in the morning or the Security Council passed a ceasefire resolution before they had seized East Jerusalem. Colonel Mordechai Gur, the commander of the 55th paratroop brigade, set up his headquarters in a requisitioned school. General Narkiss struggled down a dimly lit corridor, ‘lined wall to wall with paratroop officers in battle dress’, into the biology lab where Gur and his officers were planning their assault, next to ‘jars and bottles of lizards, grasshoppers, birds, chicken eggs, a goat foetus and maybe a lamb, all swimming in formalin’.
It was decided that Battalion 66 of the paratroops would assault Ammunition Hill and the Police School, which were two connected Jordanian strongpoints blocking the way to the Israeli enclave on Mount Scopus and the northern approaches to the Old City. Two other battalions, the 71st and the 28th, would break through into the Wadi Joz and American Colony districts of Jordanian Jerusalem. From there they would pull right towards the Old City. Narkiss was still itching with frustration that he did not have the orders to get inside the city walls, but ‘we all felt that if everything went according to plan our final objective would be the Old City’.
But first they had to break through yards of barbed wire and mines to get into Jordanian Jerusalem. The high command in Tel Aviv was less impatient than Narkiss. With the paratroops at their start lines for the assault, they debated postponing it until dawn when they would get air cover. While they talked, the Jordanians spotted Battalion 28 waiting to go in and hit them with a highly accurate artillery barrage. The shelling shredded the battalion, which was made up of veterans of the wars and raids of the 1950s. At least sixty men were wounded and eight killed before they even set off. Narkiss and Gur were up on a roof, in an observation position just above Battalion 28, when the attack happened. The parapet was hit by a shell from a Jordanian twenty-five pounder. Flying shrapnel fizzed around them. Waiting in a jeep in the street below Yoel Herzl, Narkiss’s adjutant, saw the roof disappear in a great cloud of dust. He was convinced the commanders had been killed. He guessed other men in the building would be trying to sort out the mess so he stuck to his orders to stay with the jeep, monitoring the radio that was their only link to GHQ in Tel Aviv. The shelling did not stop. With paratroopers shouting and running to evacuate their wounded, he crawled under the jeep, taking the radio headphones on a long cable.
Dead and wounded soldiers were lying in the street. A young officer yelled at Herzl to hand over the jeep to take casualties to the hospital. When he refused the officer, surrounded by his men, cocked his weapon and threatened to shoot him. Herzl told him that the jeep belonged to General Narkiss and its radio connected them to the general staff in Tel Aviv. Furious, the officer grabbed the headset, tore it out of the radio and stormed off. Herzl went off to borrow tools from the civilians who were sheltering in their basements. By the time Narkiss emerged, dusty but intact from the building, he had fixed it.
Battalion 28 had only a few minutes to reorganise themselves. Arie Weiner was given the sergeant major’s job. His friend Shimon Cahaner became deputy battalion commander. They were both veterans of Unit 101, the irregular force founded by Ariel Sharon in 1953 to carry out cross-border reprisal raids. Weiner had escaped from Romania as a child after most of his family were killed by the Nazis. The British put strict controls on Jewish immigration to Palestine so, with thousands of other Jews who had survived the Holocaust, he was interned in a camp in Cyprus until he was smuggled into the promised land. Holocaust survivors did not get a warm welcome from most ‘sabras’, the native-born Israelis. The sabras saw themselves as the new, fighting Jews. They had grown up in a macho, often cruel, secular culture where self-reliance was everything. Many of them refused to understand why so many millions had gone, in the phrase that was often used, like lambs to the slaughter. Weiner saw all this and decided to join the paratroops to do what he could to break the image of the Holocaust survivor. (Thirty-five years later Cahaner, a famous Israeli fighter, heard all this and grunted his approval: ‘Arie carried the image of the Diaspora Jew on his back.’)
Jerusalem, 0200
Ammunition Hill was a fortress. Concentric lines of trenches ran round it, surrounded by razor wire and minefields. Dozens of well-camouflaged concrete bunkers studded the entire position, all with overlapping fields of fire. The Israeli plan was for a frontal assault, supported by tanks. Israel had good intelligence about Ammunition Hill, but it was under lock and key in the headquarters of the Jerusalem Brigade. None of it reached the paratroopers before they went into action. They assumed, wrongly, that the Police School next to it, also heavily fortified, would be their worst obstacle. Jacov Chaimowitz was ‘scared to death. My throat completely dried up. We had to cross one hundred metres of minefield. I knew they could not have cleared all the mines, so I tried to run on tip-toe. There was noise, shooting, shouting, we followed the commander one by one in single file, concentrating on small jobs – checking the weapons, keeping the right distance from the others.’ The Jordanians, who were from the second battalion of the King Talal Infantry Brigade, kept up a devastating rate of fire from their bunkers. Most of them were Bedouins. Their commander, Captain Sulamin Salayta, was a Palestinian. At the beginning of the battle, already lightly wounded, he told his men: ‘Today is your day. Jerusalem is calling you. God is calling you. Listen and obey! Live long, but let’s have hell rather than shame.’
Both sides had hell during the battle, and neither had shame. The Israelis pressed forward even though they were being cut down by accurate Jordanian fire. Most of the Jordanians fought to the death. For Colonel Gur ‘this was fighting of a sort I had never experienced. The men had to break through at least five fences before they reached the emplacements … the fighting was going on in the trenches, in the houses, on the roofs, in the cellars, anywhere and everywhere.’ Towards the end, as the Israelis closed in
, the Jordanians called artillery fire down on their own positions. The sound of the battle was deafening. A mile away in the Old City, Abdullah Schliefer thought that Jerusalem’s walls were being assaulted. ‘No sleep for anyone,’ cabled a hollow-eyed Hugh Pullar, the British consul-general. ‘Very heavy rocket, mortar and automatic weapons engagements…’
Two hours into the battle, Chaimowitz was ‘like a robot – I felt nothing – I was just thinking about fighting well to survive’. His officer had been killed and by now he had taken command of his squad. He peered round the corner of the trench, and saw the silhouettes of four men with British-style tin hats. Jordanians. He shot one. The others ducked away. Suddenly he was scared again. ‘For a moment I was so frightened I felt like I was in the sea, out of my depth. I shot two bullets to make me feel more confident.’ He pushed on, throwing grenades into bunkers and firing. When he ran out of grenades, he let the man behind him through to lead and dropped into a bunker to look for some more. Inside was chaos. It was full of wounded Israelis. One of them said he had crawled into the bunker because he could not go any further forward as everyone else in his squad was dead. No grenades were in the bunker, but there was a Jordanian heavy machine gun. Chaimowitz had the urge to burst back into the trench firing it from the hip. ‘I had seen Audie Murphy doing it in films to the Japanese. It weighed more than ten kilos. I tried to fire it in the bunker, but it wouldn’t shoot and I couldn’t fix it.’ Chaimowitz left the bunker without the gun and for a while was on his own. Ahead of him a big concrete bunker was holding out. Some of the other Israelis had 20 kg satchel charges which they had been given to use on the guns at Al-Arish. Chaimowitz crawled with the explosives under heavy fire to the entrance of the bunker. He handed them to another soldier, who was standing behind the position. They kept firing at the bunker while they laid the charges, to stop the Jordanians getting out. Once the detonator was set, they moved back under cover and blew the charges. Firing was still coming from the ruins of the bunker. Chaimowitz charged inside and killed whoever was left alive.
When the battle was lost, Captain Salayta, the Jordanian commander, managed to break out and escape with three of his men. The last Jordanian soldier left fighting on Ammunition Hill was Staff Sergeant Ahmed al-Yamani, who kept firing and killing Israelis until he was killed. Chaimowitz went back to the discarded Jordanian machine gun and tried to work out why he could not fire it. His respect for the Jordanian’s fighting qualities deepened even further when he saw that the soldier who dumped it had disabled it first.
Both sides showed great courage. In the end the decisive difference between them was the Israelis’ tactical flexibility. They used initiative and daring to overcome dogged Jordanian resistance. Had the Jordanians been able to get reinforcements to the area, and had they been trained to leave their positions to counter-attack, the result might have been different – at least until daylight, when the Israelis would have brought in the air force.
After the battle, as the sun came up over Jerusalem, 106 Jordanian dead and at least as many wounded were left on the battlefield. Israel had lost 37 men. A smell of burnt flesh rose up from some of the smouldering bunkers. Major Doron Mor, the deputy commander of Battalion 66, started to collect the Israeli dead. Many of them were his friends. Paratroopers who had survived the battle sat on the ground and did not offer to help. They watched Mor and a mechanic lifting bodies into a Jordanian trailer. ‘It was a very hard job. The soldiers were in shock – tired and angry, so I didn’t order them to help us. It took two hours to move the bodies.’
Some Israeli officers thought their soldiers were sacrificed unnecessarily in a rushed and badly prepared attack at Ammunition Hill. Colonel Uri Ben Ari, who was heading towards Ammunition Hill from the east with his tanks, was very critical. ‘Tank fire could have finished the battle of Ammunition Hill in a minute. That was the mistake, to tell them to continue and continue and continue. You have to change your plans when the battlefield develops differently than you thought. That was a mistake. The paratroopers paid dearly…’
* * *
At the same time that their colleagues from Battalion 66 were fighting at Ammunition Hill and the Police School, Battalions 71 and 28 broke through around half a mile closer to the Old City, into the district of Sheikh Jarrah. Once they went into action, their orders were to move along the Nablus Road towards the city walls. It was a heavily built-up area. The Jordanians made them fight house by house. If they tried by-passing houses, to go faster, they were shot from behind. Until it was light, big searchlights on the roof of the Trade Union Federation building, West Jerusalem’s highest, were beamed at the area, cutting through the smoke of battle. Yoseph Schwartz, one of the paratroopers, was conscious that civilians were inside cellars and stairwells along what looked like an otherwise empty street. ‘You’d approach a house, want to throw a grenade, but you’d hear a baby crying. It’s very difficult when you don’t want to hurt civilians.’
One of the Israeli paratroops caught up in the street fighting found himself face to face with a Jordanian soldier. He recorded the horror he felt as he killed for the first time.
We looked at each other for half a second and I knew that it was up to me, personally, to kill him, there was no one else there. The whole thing must have lasted less than a second, but it’s printed on my mind like a slow-motion movie. I fired from the hip and I can still see how the bullets splashed against the wall about a metre to his left. I moved my Uzi slowly, slowly, it seemed, until I hit him in the body. He slipped to his knees, then he raised his head, with his face terrible, twisted in pain and hate, yes, such hate. I fired again and somehow got him in the head. There was so much blood … I vomited … we were all just machines for killing. Everyone’s face is set in a snarl and there’s a deep growl coming from your belly …
The Jordanians had a strongpoint in a small alley called Chaldean Street that ran into Nablus Road. They killed four Israeli soldiers and wounded several others who were trying to cross the entrance to the alley before themselves being killed by an Israeli tank. Some Israeli paratroopers called Chaldean Street ‘death alley’. Yoseph Schwartz called it ‘mistake junction’ because so many men died. His unit started the night with 107 men. By the time they had fought their way to St George’s, Jerusalem’s Anglican cathedral, only thirty-four were still going. Inside, the archbishop, his staff and their families had taken to the cellars, where all night they listened to the sounds of fighting and shelling. One of them wrote: ‘The noise was deafening, the electricity failed and the shelling intensified throughout the night. It was terrifying – first a distant rumble and seconds later a crash.’ They heard tanks rolling along Nablus Road and soldiers talking in Hebrew. The Palestinians in the cathedral cellars were petrified, especially one of the maids, who had survived the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948. A teacher from the cathedral school was so scared he shut himself in a cupboard. When they looked out during a lull, dead soldiers lay on Nablus Road and buildings were on fire. Before the Israeli troops secured the whole area between Sheikh Jarrah and the Old City, the governor of Jerusalem, Anwar al-Khatib, Brigadier Atta Ali, the Jordanian commander and Hazim Khalidi, the Palestinian who had been a British officer, managed to cross into the Old City on foot. The last twenty-five yards were under fire, in a dash towards Herod’s Gate. The three of them made it. The next man who tried was killed.
Latrun, 0300
Moshe Yotvat, whose wife Ava had started the singing in their shelter in Tel Aviv, was back at Latrun, where in 1948 he had fought the bloodiest battle of his youth, and where Israel had suffered one of its worst defeats of the war. Then, the Israelis thought the position was held only by local Arab militias. Some units, including Yotvat’s, rushed into a badly prepared attack. Others that were supposed to support them arrived late on the battlefield. Instead of armed villagers they came up against a well-dug-in battalion of professional infantry from Jordan’s Arab Legion. The Jordanians won a decisive victory, killing scores of Israelis. Yotvat he
lped carry the wounded from the battlefield, among whom was a young, already heavy, Ariel Sharon. By 1967 Yotvat was forty-three and a colonel in the reserves, commanding a brigade. Three days before the war he had been ordered to ‘snatch’ Latrun if fighting started in Jerusalem. This was one piece of unfinished business from 1948 that Israel was determined to put right. Yotvat was certain he would end Jordan’s ownership of the Latrun salient. It jutted out into the heart of Israel and commanded the main road to Jerusalem. He did not think he would be going much further. The army had only given him local maps.
Yotvat remembered the direction from which they had attacked in 1948. Assuming that the Jordanians did too, he decided to do the opposite. At 0300 a battalion of Israeli artillery opened fire on the Jordanian positions at Latrun. Then forces from the local agricultural settlements mounted a diversionary attack. Among them was Yossi Ally, a member of Kibbutz Nachshon, the nearest Israeli settlement to Latrun. At midnight he was woken up, and told to take his car to Yotvat’s brigade headquarters. The idea was to make the Jordanians believe an armoured column was heading their way. Two military vehicles went first. The rest were private cars, four to five metres apart, with their headlights full on, driving from the kibbutz along a border road. Ally was driving his ‘Susita’, an Israeli vehicle made of fibreglass. (It was widely believed that fragile Susitas abandoned in the desert were eaten by camels.) Afterwards he wondered whether he should have felt more like cannon fodder. But at the time he was excited. Once the fake convoy had rumbled past the Jordanian positions, he drove back to the kibbutz to watch the rest of the operation from a safer distance.
Fifteen minutes after the diversion the Israelis turned large searchlights on the old British police fortress, a four-square building made of concrete and steel, of a type that they had left all over Palestine. It was the centre of the Jordanian defences. The artillery pounded the fortress and the positions on the slope behind it that led to Jerusalem and the West Bank. The monks in the Trappist monastery of Latrun, which was around half a mile from the police fortress, took cover as shells crashed into the hills around them. Hikmat Deeb Ali, who lived in Imwas, one of the three small Palestinian villages within the Latrun salient, heard the shelling too, and realised it was starting to go very wrong for the Arab side.
