Six Days

by Jeremy Bowen

  At Dung Gate, the brigadier gave the order for ‘all ranks get out as best they can and make for east of the Jordan’. The withdrawal was not organised. An officer from Aden who was attached to Jordan’s Jerusalem Brigade walked more than thirty miles to get to safety. At the Inn of the Good Samaritan, about half way between Jerusalem and the river Jordan, he passed the remains of an Iraqi brigade which had been bombed. The Iraqis, like him on foot, were ‘fleeing east’, without, the major believed, ever firing a shot. Brigadier Atta Ali, his officers and men, were blaming Nasser for the defeat as they trudged home – but they also kept accusing Britain and America of providing air support for the Israelis.

  By dawn in Jerusalem the sound of shelling and machine gun fire had faded. It seemed unnaturally calm. Then ‘a tremendous stentorian voice’ called in Arabic over a loudspeaker for the Jordanians to surrender. The British foreign correspondent James Cameron had not had much sleep. ‘All through last night it was remarkably like the old days of the London blitz, the same stumbling around unfamiliar streets in total darkness, the same crump and thud of explosive, the same trying to write by the glimmer of a single candle.’ In Amman the minister of information, Abd al-Hamid Sharaf, ordered Jordanian Radio to start preparing the people for the fall of Jerusalem. His instructions were to emphasise heroic resistance, and slowly introduce the idea that martyrs were sacrificing themselves as the enemy pushed forward.

  Sinai

  The first Israeli forces reached the Suez canal in the early hours of Wednesday morning. They had driven straight down the coast road from Al-Arish. Dayan immediately ordered them to pull back twenty kilometres, perhaps because he did not want reports of the Israelis washing their feet in the canal to hurry up progress towards a ceasefire.

  After the disasters of Tuesday, the generals at Egypt’s Advanced Command Centre decided to move their headquarters back towards the Suez canal, travelling west through the Giddi Pass. The road was packed with troops and vehicles moving away from the fighting. The generals became more and more alarmed. Amer had not got round to telling them about his decision to order a general withdrawal. By 3 a.m. they had found out what was happening. The military police chief told them that the Egyptian army had been ordered to get out of Sinai. It was the first they had heard of it. They were ‘amazed, and became even more’ when they heard that Lieutenant-General Salah Muhsin, the commander of the Sinai field army, had also retreated to the other side of the Suez canal. General Murtagi crossed the canal to find Muhsin. He asked him why he had not asked permission to pull back his command. Murtagi was incensed when Muhsin muttered something about not being able to raise him on the telephone.

  Yahya Saad, whose reconnaissance unit was destroyed by Israeli tanks on the first day, found his way back to the Suez canal by walking and hitching lifts on Egyptian vehicles. On the road to the Mitla Pass the burnt bodies of the crews of self-propelled anti-aircraft batteries were frozen in their seats. On the road there was ‘total destruction and many corpses … when I reached the Suez canal bank I saw General Murtagi staring at the soldiers who had lost their boots walking barefoot. When I got there I threw myself on to the ground and went into deep sleep.’

  Back in Sinai, General Gamasy stood outside the Advanced Command Centre’s new site, watching ‘completely disorganised’ Egyptian troops pouring down the road to Suez. Gamasy knew that a retreat from a battle against an advancing enemy was desperately dangerous. It needed discipline, planning and a fighting rearguard to cover them and aggressively to keep the Israelis back. Nothing like that was being done. A military setback was about to turn into a disaster. ‘I waited and watched on the morning of 7 June and saw the troops withdraw in the most pathetic way from Giddi and Mitla under continuous enemy air attacks, which had turned the Mitla passes into an enormous graveyard of scattered corpses, burning equipment and exploding ammunition.’

  When the British defence attaché, a veteran of the campaign in the desert against the Germans in the Second World War, was flown over the Mitla Pass by the Israelis he saw destruction that was ‘devastating over a four- to five-mile stretch of road running through the defile. All vehicles were nose to tail and in places double and treble banked. There was considerably more destruction than I had seen after the Axis retreat from Alamein. So far as can be ascertained, this destruction was the result of continuous air attack.’ Along the route of the retreat the British foreign correspondent James Cameron saw hundreds of wrecked tanks ‘strewn across the miles of wilderness like broken toys’. The Mitla Pass was even worse. ‘A couple of miles of road suddenly looks like a thin strip of hell. Anything up to a couple of hundred vehicles, caught in the Mitla Pass, are trapped, burned, exploded, demolished; they are strung along in a caterpillar of ruination, upside down, inside out, fragmented, terrible. Some – desperately leaving the road altogether – have been delicately picked out on the desert.’

  Yoffe’s tanks drove all night, going headlong towards the Giddi Pass. They fought a series of running battles with any Egyptian who got in the way, blasting their way through and pushing on. In the darkness so many Egyptian vehicles were on fire that some of the advancing Israelis saw that ‘as far as you could see, burning Egyptian vehicles were turning the night into day, with a noise that was a terrible symphony of destruction’. The wreckage was on both sides of the road and in a wadi below it. Away from the fires, there were vicious encounters along the dark desert road. An Israeli tank crew, heavily outnumbered, attacked a truckload of Egyptian soldiers with their Uzis. It turned into a hand-to-hand fight after the Israelis’ ammunition ran low and the Egyptians managed to climb on to the tank. ‘We began to hit with the butts of our Uzis on the heads that stuck out and the hands that grasped the sides of our tank … All one could hear were a few shouts, groans, and the dull sounds of butts on bodies. One of our men broke the butt of his Uzi and drew a knife.’ In the confusion the survivors on both sides disengaged.

  The Israelis set up a blocking position at the entrance to the Mitla Pass. Egyptian tanks ‘came up fast – escaping from the death behind them into the death that was lying in ambush for them … all the morning we continued pouring fire on hundreds of vehicles that were streaming past from all directions…’

  At dawn air strikes against the retreating columns resumed. One of the pilots was Uri Gil. He had felt no pity and had not hesitated to shoot down a Syrian in a dogfight on the first day of the war. But this felt different. ‘It was the greatest vehicle cemetery I ever saw. I was not happy about the situation. They looked like humans, like victims. I blew up a fuel tanker at close range. There was no fire from the ground. It was slaughter. I didn’t think it was necessary. The war against Egypt was finished. I think they wanted to destroy as much as possible to teach the Egyptians the price of war. That was a mistake.’

  The general staff in Cairo tried to salvage something from the chaos that was sweeping across the Egyptian army in Sinai. Belatedly, they tried to improvise rearguards. Part of the 3rd Infantry Division was told to stay in its trenches and bunkers at Jebel Libni. The infantrymen fought hard before they were ‘outflanked and obliterated’. What was left of the 4th Armoured Division was ordered to fight a delaying action at the Bir Gifgafah crossroads. They had some success against a small blocking force of Israeli AMX tanks, whose shells bounced off the armour of the Egyptian T-54s. An Israeli paratrooper was woken around midnight ‘by a groaning clanking sound of tanks approaching. Then suddenly we saw more than forty Egyptian tanks with their headlights blazing.’ In the end, though, Tal encircled the Egyptians and his tanks destroyed an entire brigade. But the fight bought time for the Egyptians. The rest of the division – about a third of the force that started the war three days before – escaped relatively intact across the canal.

  Jerusalem, 0530

  Finally, General Narkiss was ordered to capture the Old City. Israel’s deputy chief of staff, Haim Bar Lev, told him: ‘We are already being pressed for a ceasefire. We are at the canal. The Egyptians have be
en carved up – don’t let the Old City remain an enclave.’ It was a moment for which Narkiss had waited since 1948, when he could not stop the Jewish quarter falling to the Jordanians. His war room was ‘completely awake and tense with excitement’.

  0600

  David Rubinger, a photographer for Time magazine, let himself into his family home in Jerusalem. Until the night before he had been with the Israeli troops in the Sinai. He had been there right through the three weeks before the war, but he was disappointed with the pictures he had shot in the first forty-eight hours. Ironically, he had been too close to the action, where it was hard to capture what was happening. What he needed to photograph, he decided, was not all-out war, but the consequences of war. On Tuesday evening he had heard rumours that Jerusalem was about to fall. It sounded promising. He jumped on a helicopter that was evacuating wounded soldiers, ignored an airman shouting at him to get off, and made it back to Israel. He picked up his car and a hitchhiker to do the driving so he could sleep, and headed for Jerusalem. As Rubinger finished breakfast with his family he heard from the rumble of the guns that the war was picking up again. As he kissed them goodbye, shrapnel was pinging into the roof of the house. He drove as close as he could to the Old City then set off to walk down to Dung Gate, which was the closest to the Wailing Wall.

  0800

  From his garden the American journalist Abdullah Schliefer could see Israeli aircraft bombing the Jordanian positions around the Augusta Victoria, a towering and beefy piece of Prussian architecture that had been built by the Kaiser while he was eyeing Jerusalem hungrily at the end of the nineteenth century. It commanded the ridge of land that connected Mount Scopus to the Mount of Olives. By 1967 it was a hospital. Two hundred Palestinian doctors, nurses and patients retreated to its cellars, hoping that the building’s heavy bones were strong enough to protect them. They could feel the building shaking around them. When the air raids ended, Schliefer saw Israeli paratroops advancing under heavy artillery cover towards the Augusta Victoria from Mount Scopus and straight up the Mount of Olives road from Wadi Joz.

  Hamadi Dajani, a Palestinian trader, had moved his family into the Indian Hospice, a solid two-storey stone building in the densely populated Muslim quarter of the Old City. The hospice is on a rare patch of open ground just inside Herod’s Gate, a narrow opening close to the north-east corner of the city walls. It was built by the Muslim authorities for pilgrims from the Indian sub-continent. The Dajanis could still hear the sounds of the battle, Israeli planes were overhead, but it was well organised and felt safe. They were welcomed because Hamadi’s wife Amina was half Indian. They had three children, a daughter Manal, who was five, and two sons, Mohammed, who was four, and Ahmed, three. More than a dozen other people were sheltering there. The women had brought food. They prepared a meal of Palestinian salads. Thirty-five years later Ahmed fancied that he could still taste it.

  At the Indian Hospice the Dajani children had pestered their parents to let them play just outside the door to the solid stone building that was being used as a shelter. The boys were wearing white shorts. Their sister Manal wore a white dress. Then they heard jet engines screaming. The children’s father yelled at them to run inside. Before they could even turn, the first bomb crashed through the roof of the hospice and exploded. The Dajani family were very close to the explosion. Shrapnel and shards of Jerusalem stone torn out of the walls of the hospice blasted them. Mohammed Dajani, the four year old, was killed. His grandmother, who had been nursing another child on her lap, was decapitated. The child was unharmed. In the yard Ahmed and Manal lay close to the door in pools of blood. Ahmed’s left hand was smashed and his body was covered with shrapnel wounds. Manal was much worse off, with a badly damaged arm. Their father Hamadi was unconscious, with serious shrapnel wounds. Amina Dajani saw her mother and son killed and her husband and two other children badly wounded. She rushed into the courtyard to help them. Another bomb fell, and she was killed. A Jordanian mortar position close by seemed to have been the target of the Israeli attack. The surviving Dajanis – and other witnesses – claim its crew had abandoned the position nine hours before it was bombed.

  0830

  The sun had come up over the Judean desert and crept across the Mount of Olives. It was burning away the shadows around the minarets of Jerusalem’s mosques and the towers of its churches. Colonel Mordechai Gur, commander of the Israeli paratroop brigade, looked down from his position on the Mount of Olives. The Old City, the ancient walled heart of Jerusalem, was laid out below him. Gur’s view of the Old City was dominated by a great mosque, the Dome of the Rock. Muslims believe it marks the spot where the prophet Mohammed ascended to paradise on a staircase of light. The Dome had been the first sight of Jerusalem for every traveller coming over the crest of the Mount of Olives since it was built at the end of the seventh century – and for every invader. The Crusaders, the Ottomans and the British had all stood on the Mount of Olives, coveting the holy city laid out below them. And now, on another beautiful June morning, it was the turn of Colonel Gur and his paratroopers.

  Gur had just sent three companies of men down to the walls of the city. His main objective lay deep inside the Old City, just beyond the Dome of the Rock. It was a narrow lane in the Moroccan quarter. Muslims called it al-Buraq road because they believed it was where Mohammed had tethered the winged horse of that name that had brought him to Jerusalem from Mecca. A high wall ran along one side of the lane. It was built of massive, evenly cut smooth stones. It is known as the Wailing Wall. For Jews it was the holiest place in the world to pray. Two thousand years earlier it was the western wall of the compound surrounding King Herod’s second Jewish temple. It was torn down and most of Jerusalem’s Jews dispersed by the Romans after a revolt in the first century. But detailed descriptions of the temple survived in Jewish holy writings. It had been a splendid place, massive, stone-built and decorated with gold. Now, in 1967, the Jews were fighting their way back. The founding generation of Israelis were mainly secular socialists. Ancient symbols had not, at first, meant that much to them. But as they drew closer to the heart of Jerusalem, they seemed to matter more and more.

  Velni and Ronen, two journalists from Israeli army radio, were on the roof of the trade union building in Jerusalem, monitoring the battlefield radio traffic on army walkie-talkies. Suddenly they recognised Gur’s voice, giving orders to occupy the Old City: ‘Come in all battalion commanders. We are sitting on the mountain range which looks down on the Old City and are about to enter it. All our generations have been striving and dreaming about the Old City … We will be the first to enter it … tanks will enter the Lion’s Gate. Move to the gate! Rendezvous on the open square above it.’

  With them was the chief rabbi of the Israeli army, Shlomo Goren. He had arrived back from the fighting in Gaza the day before, his face covered in soot, telling Narkiss: ‘Who cares about the south? Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, they are what count! You’ll make history!’ Now Goren dashed to his car to catch up with the soldiers. The two young reporters jumped in behind him.

  Opposite the Mount of Olives is St Stephen’s Gate, one of the seven great entrances to Jerusalem. It is also known as Lion’s Gate because the king of the beasts is carved into its stone portico. Gur could see his men running up the steep road behind the tanks. He got into his half-track, and raced down to join them.

  ‘I told my driver, Ben Zur, a bearded fellow weighing some fifteen stone, to speed on ahead. We passed the tanks and saw the gate before us with a car burning outside it. There wasn’t a lot of room but I told him to drive on and so we passed the burning car and saw the gate half-open in front.’ Gur wondered for a second whether the gate was booby-trapped. Then he gave another order: ‘Ben Zur, move! He stepped on the gas, flung the door sideways and to hell and we crunched on over all the stones that had fallen from above and blocked our way.’ The Israelis were inside the Old City.

  The Sunday Times photographer Don McCullin was playing catch-up. He was tearing u
p the road to Jerusalem with a reporter called Colin Simpson. Now that Israel was close to an historic victory, it had given up its strategy of blacking out the news. McCullin, Simpson and a few others had been picked up by an elderly Israeli De Havilland Rapide in Cyprus and flown into Tel Aviv. The Jerusalem road was so peaceful that they started to worry that they had missed the war completely. On the radio the BBC quoted reports that the Old City had already been taken. In Jerusalem McCullin and Simpson bumped into a group of soldiers from the 1st Jerusalem Regiment. They explained to the forward company commander that, ‘If he was set upon making Jewish history, it was only fit and proper that the Sunday Times should be with him to record it. We were accepted right away, and moved off with them through the olive groves.’

  Also driving up from Tel Aviv was Ava Yotvat, whose husband Moshe had been wounded outside Ramallah. The road felt quiet and tense. At midnight an officer had knocked on her door to tell her the bad news. She found her husband at Hadassah hospital at Ein Karem in West Jerusalem. It was treating so many casualties from the street fighting that she thought he was being ignored. She took him back to Tel Aviv, where the main hospital had prepared hundreds of beds for casualties who had never materialised. Delighted to be doing something, doctors swarmed around him.

  McCullin followed the soldiers from the Jerusalem Regiment as they advanced towards Dung Gate, one of the southern entrances to the Old City.