by David Landau
The immediate upshot of Bar-Lev’s appointment was that Sharon grew even more offhand and insolent toward Gonen. The crisis came on Tuesday, the ninth. “After that there was a complete rupture,” according to Yisrael Itkin, who served as the staff sergeant aboard Sharon’s command APC. “Arik ordered me not to reply to Gonen’s calls. For me this was a really weird feeling. I’m sitting over the radio, and the CO of Southern Command calls and says, ‘I know you’re there. Answer me!’ And Arik signals me with his hand not to answer. On the other hand, he was respectful toward Rabin, Tal, and Dayan. He would talk to them every day. From them he was ready to take any criticism.”25
The ninth was to be another dramatic day, fraught with suspicion and recrimination among the Israeli commanders that resonated long after the din of battle died down and the dead were buried. “In accordance with the orders I had received,” Sharon writes, “in the early morning of October 9, I gave instructions to my three brigade commanders—Amnon Reshef, Haim Erez, and Tuvia Raviv—that we would conduct a holding operation, containing the expected Egyptian advance.” Sharon made it clear that he was unhappy with these orders. “For me, this was not the time to sit back and allow the Egyptians to build up their bridgeheads … We should be pushing them, probing them for their weak points, looking for openings to exploit.” He told the brigade commanders that even while they were defending and containing, “I expected them to use their initiative … They should watch for any opportunity to recover the ridgeline positions we had given up the previous day.”
In the morning, Reshef executed one of the most breathtaking operations of the war, rescuing thirty-three survivors from the strongpoint of Purkan under the noses of the Egyptian infantry. Sharon had urged their commander, Major Wiezel, to break out under cover of darkness and head for Hamutal, where he would send tanks to pick them up. Reshef himself led the rescuing force, and though many of its vehicles were hit and disabled, one tank made the rendezvous. “With all thirty-three of them clinging to its hull,” Sharon wrote, “the tank emerged out of the maelstrom looking like something from an alien world.”
Sharon now asked Gonen’s permission to strike out along Akavish Road toward the beleaguered strongpoint of Matzmed.h He also told Gonen, quite without foundation, that “Talik’s invention”—the steel rolling bridge—would be ready that day. (In fact it would not be ready until the twelfth or thirteenth.) He urged the CO to let his division approach the canal at Matzmed rather than Adan’s. “You didn’t let us yesterday. So let us this time. We know the terrain very well.”26 An hour later, Chief of Staff Elazar issued a formal and categorical order to Gonen not to get into tank battles and not to approach Matzmed. Gonen transmitted the order to Sharon. He phoned Reshef directly and stressed there must be no further attacks that risked IDF lives.27
Raviv’s and Reshef’s brigades nevertheless engaged in pitched tank battles during the afternoon in order to retake Machshir and Televizia, second-line fortifications northeast of Matzmed that had fallen to the Egyptians the day before. Gonen repeatedly ordered Sharon to stop. He flew by helicopter to Sharon’s forward headquarters and ordered him personally to stop. But still the battles continued, the Israeli forces losing tanks but taking a heavier toll of the enemy and nudging steadily west. “After this incident,” Herzog writes, “Gonen telephoned the chief of staff asking for Sharon to be relieved of his command.”
By evening, Reshef’s brigade faced the “Chinese Farm.” Reshef ordered the divisional reconnaissance battalion to probe gently forward. “I ordered the probe; Sharon took the credit,” Reshef recalled without rancor. “I told him I’m moving the battalion forward, westward, and he said okay.” The unit moved gingerly to the southwest, reaching the bank of the Great Bitter Lake and then turning north and driving silently up the bank, until close to the point where the canal feeds into the lake at Deversoir, where Sharon had prepared his “yard.” It was a definitive moment. “The probe had revealed the boundary between the Egyptian Second and Third armies,” Herzog affirms, “and the soft underbelly of the Second.”28
“Here if anywhere was a situation that begged to be exploited,” Sharon writes.
The Egyptians had not noticed the reconnaissance unit’s penetration. The path to the Canal beckoned—wide and open. At 6:30 p.m. I contacted Gonen to tell him that we were on the water. “Shmulik, we are near the canal,” I said into the phone. “Shmulik, we can touch the water of the lake”…We were in a position to start bringing assault rafts down from Baluza and preparing the bridging equipment. Right now we could begin organizing for our own crossing. In parallel with Adan’s division, we could grab the whole area and push across. Why just sit back and wait for the Egyptians to discover the seam and close it up?
Elazar by this time was following Sharon’s operations closely. When he learned of the recon battalion’s position and of Sharon’s proposals, he exploded. “Get him out of there!” he shouted. “I say he is not to cross. Not to cross! Not to cross!!”29 At dawn the next morning, Reshef made his reluctant way back to the division.
To Sharon, this reaction to Reshef’s remarkable breakthrough reinforced his worst suspicions. “They” would never allow him and his division to cross the canal. “They” were reserving that honor for Bren, one of their own. “They” were determined to link Bren’s name, not his, to the hoped-for victory.30 To judge from the records of the cabinet consultations cited above, however, these suspicions seem groundless, indeed almost paranoid, at least at this stage of the war. Golda, the ministers, and the generals all clearly assumed in those meetings that when and if there was a crossing, Sharon would be the man to make it.
For Elazar at any rate, the overriding concern at this stage was the fact that the main body of Egypt’s armor, the Fourth and Twenty-First Armored Divisions, had not yet crossed into Sinai. Better, the chief of staff reasoned—and Haim Bar-Lev fully concurred—to wait patiently for the Egyptian armored divisions to cross, defeat them in battle in Sinai, and only then abruptly shift the focus of the war to the other side.
Sharon’s own senior officers also broadly agreed with that military logic, despite their commander’s fulminations. “I thought the considerations of the High Command were totally correct,” Reshef said. “I didn’t feel we were ready to cross,” Gideon Altschuler recalled frankly. “I was a product of the British army, where things were done in proper order. Arik would talk to Dayan … would try to exert influence so that we’d cross earlier than the chief of staff wanted. I wasn’t comfortable with that.”31 Even Abrasha Tamir, who, as we have seen, was entirely at one with Sharon in his conspiracy theory regarding who was to cross, was on Bar-Lev’s side over when to cross. “I thought Bar-Lev was right,” Tamir recalled. “What opened the way to our successful crossing was our destruction, effectively, of the Twenty-First Armored Division on October 14. I recognized at the time that Bar-Lev was right and I told Arik as much.”32
Both Reshef and Jackie Even, the deputy commander of the division, maintained, moreover, that—despite his fulminations—Sharon himself did not seriously intend or attempt to cross before everything was ready and before the High Command gave its assent. Even insisted that Sharon’s talk on the ninth of the rolling bridge being ready was pure bluster. “I was his deputy. I was in charge of this business. And I got no order at all from him throughout that day regarding the bridge or other crossing equipment. He clearly did not have any serious intention of crossing then. He was trying to stabilize a defensive line as ordered. He didn’t talk to me about any crossing; we both knew there was nothing to cross on. The idea of crossing on Egyptian bridges was nonsense, delusional nonsense.”
For his senior officers, the best proof that Sharon was not swept along by his own bluster came a day later, on the tenth. “Sharon presented us three brigade commanders with a plan for attacking the Third Army and trying to drive it off the east bank,” Reshef recalled. “I objected outright, and so did Haim Erez. What is Sharon’s greatness? He knows we object, yet he tak
es us with him in the helicopter to Dvela to present the plan. When Arik submitted the plan to Bar-Lev, Bar-Lev asked, ‘What do the brigade commanders think?’ I said straightaway that I opposed the plan because it would be like banging our head on a wall. I’d already lost a hundred men killed in the brigade. I thought it would be wrong to court more casualties now. Haim Erez also spoke against it.”
“Bar-Lev then turns to me,” Jackie Even said, continuing his account. “I had worked on the plan together with Sharon and agreed to it. I look at Bar-Lev. I look at Sharon. And I say, ‘What I’m hearing from my comrades the brigade commanders is that they’re not ready for this assignment. So I say to you, we’re not ready.’ ” Bar-Lev thereupon ruled against Sharon’s plan and sent the 143rd Division back to its original assignment, so unloved by its commander: containment and waiting. Sharon was furious, but he swallowed it. “He didn’t speak to me for twenty-four hours,” Even recalled. “He could have thrown me out for a thing like that. But … nothing.”
Gonen and Bar-Lev, not disposed like Sharon’s admiring officers to discern between his bluster and his obedience, would still have been happier to get rid of him. But Dayan, vacillating and unassertive about so many decisions in the war, stood firm on this one. “I have to admit,” he told Elazar, in response to Gonen’s demand on the ninth to fire Sharon, “I prefer Arik’s pressures and initiatives tenfold to the hesitations and excuses of other divisional commanders.”
On the twelfth, Bar-Lev tried his hand. He, too, urged the chief of staff to fire Sharon. Elazar, after all, had specifically asked his “personal representative on the southern front” to make a recommendation on this fraught matter. But Elazar would not act on his own authority. Once again, he took it to Dayan, knowing, presumably, what the response would be. And sure enough, Dayan demurred. In Chaim Herzog’s words, “Dayan said that such a move could create political problems.”33 Bar-Lev, never one to ventilate his emotions, took this expected rebuff in stride. His biographer has him going off to sleep at one point during this waiting period, with the explanation that “a tired general is a stupid general,” and leaving orders “to wake me only if Arik makes trouble.”34
During the four days that now followed of relatively low-key warfare on the southern front, from October 10 to 13, the Egyptian infantry pushed forward time after time in local attacks, backed by armor and artillery. Each time they were driven back, often with heavy losses. They made no further territorial gains.
As the IDF regained its balance and its confidence, Dayan’s idea of a strategic withdrawal to the passes finally receded. The cabinet and the High Command waited anxiously for the Egyptians to commit their main armored strength to the battle for Sinai. Time was becoming critical. If the two superpowers jointly resolved to impose a cease-fire, their client-protagonists would hardly be able to balk. The Syrians certainly had nothing more to gain from an extended war. Their forces had been pushed back beyond the prewar line, and Israeli long-range artillery threatened the suburbs of their capital, Damascus. Israel, too, could not long go on hemorrhaging the blood of its young men.i The home front, laboring under near economic paralysis, had yet to assimilate the true figures of dead and wounded sustained thus far.
Yet without a turnabout on the canal front, the war in the south, if it ended now, would end as a defeat. It would be Israel’s first-ever battlefield defeat—with all the psychological and political ramifications that that could entail. On October 12 in Tel Aviv, the top ministers and military commanders convened to grapple with this quandary. As good luck would have it, the first intelligence reports of an Egyptian crossing started to come in while their meeting was still in progress. Units of the Fourth and Twenty-First Armored Divisions were beginning to move across the canal. There were indications that they intended to mount a major attack and try to strike deeper into Sinai. Presumably, Anwar Sadat was acting to take the pressure off his Syrian ally, now reeling under IDF counterattacks. This was the news the cabinet had been waiting for.
Both divisions in central Sinai, the 143rd and the 162nd, now braced to take on the Egyptian armored columns. This occasioned a visit by Bren to Arik’s headquarters, where, he writes primly, he was “reminded that ‘civilization’ still continued to exist.” First, Amnon Reshef talked him into taking a shower at the empty base camp of the Fourteenth Brigade nearby. “I’d gotten used to the dirt and the unshaven cheeks,” Bren writes, “and had almost forgotten there were showers in the world.” Then, as he waited for Chief of Staff Elazar to arrive at Sharon’s bunker at Tasa, “one of Sharon’s officers turned to me and said it was time to taste some of the delectable cheeses. And, indeed, there was a rich and impressive assortment to choose from.”35
The great armored encounter, when it finally came on October 14, was “one of the largest tank battles ever to take place in history,” according to Herzog, “with some 2,000 tanks locked in battle across the entire front.” Once again, Reshef’s brigade was in the thick of the fighting. But this time the tide of battle was unmistakable. Deployed on higher ground in front of Hamadia and waiting patiently until the vast Egyptian armored column rolled into range, Reshef’s tanks culled dozens of the enemy armor. He used the divisional reconnaissance battalion, reinforced by additional tanks, to hit them from the flank. By the end of the engagement, the Egyptians had lost more than a hundred tanks to Reshef’s three. The First Brigade of the Twenty-First Armored Division was effectively destroyed.
To the north, Bren’s division made major gains, too, blocking and crushing Egypt’s Twenty-Third Mechanized Division. In the south, another Egyptian armored brigade, advancing toward the Mitle, was ambushed by armor and infantry forces under Magen, while the Israeli Air Force, beyond ground-to-air missile range in that theater, pounded them from above. “Within two hours,” Herzog writes, “some sixty Egyptian tanks and a large number of APCs and artillery pieces were in flames.” Bar-Lev telephoned Golda. “It’s been a good day,” he reported. “Our forces are themselves again and so are the Egyptians.”36 For Dayan, the final tally of some 260 Egyptian tanks was still lower than he had hoped. Not all the top-of-the-line Egyptian forces had yet been committed. But the IDF had shown that it was finally learning to deal with the Egyptian infantry’s antitank missiles, particularly the wire-guided Sagger, which had been deployed to such devastating effect in the first days of the war. Israel’s own infantry, moreover, was proving effective with its SS11-type antitank missiles.
The cabinet convened that evening for what everyone present understood would be a fateful meeting. Dayan, previously hesitant, now unequivocally recommended approving “Noble Hearts,” the plan for an Israeli crossing at Deversoir. Some of the ministers were still worried by the thought of a sizable Israeli force being stranded on the far side of the canal. Elazar said the issue of bridges was still the weak point. Could they be gotten there in time? How would they survive Egyptian bombing and shelling? But they would have more than one bridge, he assured the ministers. “My best analysis of all the facts tells me the prospect of failure is very low and the chances of success are good.”
The cabinet sat and pondered till long after midnight. In the end, taking Prime Minister Meir’s lead, almost all of the ministers voted in favor. But what precisely did Noble Hearts, in its current form, envisage? More specifically, how many divisions were to cross? One or two? If two, then when? And in what order? These key questions were not unequivocally and explicitly answered. Elazar told the cabinet on the night of the fourteenth that “in the first stage only one division will cross, and if it carries out its assignment successfully it will open the way for the second division.”37
The discussions on the fourteenth, both in the cabinet and within the army command, seemed to assume a one-divisional crossing—by the 143rd Division. But even before the first soldier had set his boot down on “Africa,” the commander of the front, Bar-Lev, suggested vaguely that perhaps both the 143rd and the 162nd—Arik and Bren—should take part in the operation, with Bren’s div
ision crossing the canal while Sharon’s division broadened and defended the eastern bridgehead.
This obfuscation, as we shall see, became the cause of friction, suspicion, and jealousy for the remainder of the war and long thereafter. Sharon, his senior officers, and his political “hinterland” back home accused the High Command, and especially the Labor Party minister Bar-Lev, of deliberately holding him back and pushing Bren forward in order to deny him, the Likud politician, the glory of the victory. Conversely, Sharon’s rivals accused him—the Likud politician—of deliberately pushing himself forward and attempting to deny Bren his rightful place in the roll of honor.
OCTOBER 15–16
At Tasa the next morning, Sharon went over his plans with Bar-Lev and Gonen:
My division would break through the Egyptian lines, secure a corridor to the canal, and establish a crossing point at Deversoir on the east bank—at precisely the location where the reconnaissance unit had penetrated six days earlier. Meanwhile, rubber assault boats would be brought forward to ferry Danny Matt’s paratroop brigade to the west bank. Once the paratroops had secured the area, a pontoon bridge would be laid across the canal and Haim Erez’s tank brigade would cross. The great reconstructed rolling bridge would also be towed into place and pushed across.
On the northern edge of the opening, two east-west roads ran to the water line … One, code-named Akavish, connected Tasa with the shore of the Great Bitter Lake. About five miles to the east of the canal another road started and ran parallel to and north of Akavish. This road, code-named Tirtur, had been especially laid out for towing the 600-ton steel roller bridge to the canal. Its terminus on the water line was just above the enclosed yard I had prepared in May as the staging area for a crossing. These two roads, Akavish and Tirtur, would constitute our corridor to the canal. Along them we would have to move two divisions and all the crossing equipment.
