The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War

by Steven Pressfield

  Don’t worry, Cheetah. You are witnessing no balagan. I am simply transposing our plan from the old landing zone to the new one.

  Cheetah Cohen:

  Yes, yes, but what new one? Point 181 is just a spot on the map. To locate it is like flying over the ocean saying, “Go to Wave 181.”

  Off we go. I must find the site in advance of tonight’s assault and mark it with illumination beacons. Otherwise we will never find it in the dark, when we return, ferrying Danny’s paratroopers.

  It’s 16:45. I’m banking in a ravine between dunes, so low that the rotor blast is kicking up clouds of sand. We’re flying directly into the setting sun. I’m thinking, My P-51 Mustang was shot down not far from here in ’56.

  We pick a spot. The pathfinders want me to get as close to the target as possible, so Danny’s paratroopers don’t have to trek for hours through deep sand.

  You mark a landing zone with a beacon called a “trapeze.” This is a three-sided square made of lights, with one open end. The pathfinders plant this in the sand. The lights are powered by batteries and are shielded around their circumference by panels so that they cannot be seen from the side. The lamps point directly up. They are visible only from the air. The open side of the trapeze points downwind. The helicopters enter from this side, so they can land into the wind.

  The pathfinders put down three trapezes. My helicopters will come in formations of three, dropping ten paratroopers from each aircraft—thirty paratroopers at a time.

  Danny Matt:

  A combat commander under Arik Sharon is granted broad independence of action. Sharon tells you what to do but not how to do it.

  I will have my deputy inform him of the changes we’ve made to the plans. But as long as these alterations don’t affect other operational elements in Sharon’s design, I won’t bother him personally.

  I know how Sharon thinks: If I don’t hear from Danny, that means everything is okay. If there is a problem, Danny will contact me.

  Major Eliezer “Cheetah” Cohen, commander of Helicopter Squadron 124.

  Cheetah Cohen:

  Danny will tell you that he and I never spoke in person with Sharon, but I remember the moment clearly.

  In we went, to Sharon’s trailer. Wherever Sharon is, a meal is always cooking.

  “Come in, Danny! Come in, Cheetah! Do you want something to eat? Coffee? Cheetah, can your helicopters take Danny’s guys and put them behind the Egyptian artillery? Danny, from the landing zone you and your paratroopers will cross the dunes and destroy the Egyptian batteries from the rear. Got it, Cheetah? Okay, Danny? Good luck!”

  That’s it. In and out. We never even got our coffee.

  Danny Matt:

  Sinai is a war of roads. Armored columns cannot negotiate the mountains and the belts of sand. To win in the Sinai Peninsula you must command the arteries of transport.

  The road we will seize tonight is the one that runs from Abu Agheila to the Suez Canal. The primary fortifications protecting this locality are centered upon a ridge called Um Katef.

  The Egyptian defenses at Um Katef are based on the British design, overlaid with the Soviet.

  The English believed in “boxes.” A box is a rectangle of desert, often many kilometers across, which has been built up artificially into an obstacle. A box will contain minefields and extensive barriers of barbed wire. Vehicle passage will be impeded by berms, antitank ditches, “hedgehogs,” “dragon’s teeth,” and other obstacles. Infantry, antitank forces, and self-propelled “tank killers” will further strengthen these boxes, while behind them by ten, twenty, even thirty kilometers will wait a mobile reserve of tanks, antitank guns, and self-propelled artillery.

  Each box is sited to support all others in its strategic vicinity. Lanes between boxes will be covered by artillery and reachable easily by the tanks in reserve. This is the British system, developed by her generals Wavell, Auchinleck, Alexander, and Montgomery in the North African desert during World War II. These officers and others passed this wisdom on to their clients, the Egyptians.

  On top of this, Soviet engineers have overlaid the Russian system. Russian doctrine is linear. Its principle is defense in depth. You can recognize a Soviet position from the air by its multiple trench lines, one behind the other. In the rear of the first three trench lines is the artillery.

  Russians love artillery. The Soviet doctrine evolved from defense of the homeland against the Nazis. The concept is one of attrition.

  At Um Katef, Soviet engineers have built three successive trench lines of reinforced concrete, extending from impassable dunes on one side to similar obstacles on the other. Each trench line is separated from the other by three hundred meters.

  Four kilometers behind these first three trenches, the Soviets have constructed a fourth trench line, backed by a tank regiment with sixty-six T-34s and a battalion of twenty-two SU-100 self-propelled guns. Between this rearmost trench and the first three are the main Egyptian artillery batteries.

  These batteries are our objective.

  Tonight my paratroopers will attack these guns.

  The Egyptian position is constituted of between five and seven battalions—approximately eighty artillery pieces—arrayed in line, facing to the front. Minefields and antitank ditches protect all forward-facing approaches, as do the three trench lines manned by infantry armed with antitank guns, bazookas, rifles, and machine guns.

  How will Sharon attack these?

  I have sat with him in enough planning groups to know exactly how his mind works.

  First, he will regard as good fortune the fact that enemy doctrine has concentrated so many troops and so much firepower in one position. “We can kill them more easily when they have brought themselves together in one place.”

  Second, he will ask himself, “How can I attack this locality in a way that its defenders will least expect and to which they will be least capable of responding in the confusion of the moment?”

  One of Sharon’s principles of planning is “complexity at the top, simplicity at the bottom.” This means he keeps the big, complicated symphony to himself. He understands it, and no one else has to.

  Cheetah and I—and all other subordinate commanders—just have to play our violins.

  Of course, the rest of the plan, held in Sharon’s head (and on a jumble of chinagraph-marked code maps), is more complicated than Beethoven’s Ninth. Sharon has already this afternoon sent a battalion of Centurion tanks under Lieutenant Colonel Natan “Natke” Nir (reinforced by infantry, mortars, and combat engineers) in a flanking movement to the north, across dunes that the enemy believes impassable to heavy armor. It has taken the tanks two tries, but they are now in a position to cut off Egyptian reinforcements from the north—and to strike at Um Katef from the flank and rear. At the same time, Yaakov Aknin’s 213th Artillery Regiment is waiting for dark to lay down what will be the heaviest barrage any force of Israeli gunners has ever fired. The three battalions of Kuti Adam’s 99th Infantry Brigade will assault the first echelon of trench lines from the flank, after they have hiked ten kilometers in the dark to get into position. Combat engineers will clear lanes through the Egyptian minefields. Immediately the tanks of Motke Zippori’s 14th Armored Brigade, minus Natke Nir’s Centurions, will assault the enemy.

  The overriding concept is one that has characterized Sharon’s planning since the days when he commanded Unit 101. This is the concept of the tachboulah.

  A tachboulah is a ruse, a stratagem.

  Sharon loves to tell his young officers, “It’s all there in Proverbs 24:6”:

  By a tachboulah shalt thou wage war.

  General Ariel “Arik” Sharon in 1969 as chief of Southern Command.

  I have studied the campaigns of Caesar and Alexander, Hannibal and Napoleon. Believe me, when Sharon one day joins them, they will save a place for him at the sand table. And t
hey will all listen when he speaks.

  A tachboulah, however, is more than just a feint or misdirection. It is greater than simply achieving the element of surprise. The intent of a tachboulah is to compel the enemy to respond, in the moment, under conditions of chaos, in a way that he is not prepared for.

  Sharon loves to tell this story:

  “We captured some Egyptians once after our guys had overrun their heavily fortified position in a matter of minutes. Then later we took a bunch of Syrians prisoner in another fight. We put the Syrians in together with the Egyptians. The Syrians were giving hell to the Egyptians. ‘How could you let a bunch of Israelis overrun you in a matter of minutes?’ ‘These Jews,’ said the Egyptians, ‘they don’t attack by the book.’”

  That, Sharon would say, is the tachboulah.

  “The Egyptian soldier is tough and brave when he knows what is expected of him. But make him improvise in the heat of the moment and he is lost.”

  In tonight’s plan are many tachboulot. If all goes well, Sharon will play them in sequence. Each combat arm—artillery, infantry, engineers, armor, helicopters, paratroopers—will arrive in coordination with every other, so that tachboulah follows tachboulah.

  Cheetah Cohen:

  My helicopters have all arrived, seventeen out of twenty-four. The other seven are evacuating wounded from Gaza, Rafiah, and the Jiradi.

  We will take Danny’s paratroopers into the landing zone thirty at a time. Three helicopters, ten men in each. It’s like a train. The trains of Cheetah. Three Sikorsky S-58s, followed at one-minute intervals by three more, with another three after that. In the LZ, the three trapezes are in place. Each bird will set down in its own trapeze. In and out in sixty seconds.

  Danny Matt:

  At the last minute the brigade rabbi shows up with an armload of prayer cards. He’s passing them out to the guys. You’d be surprised how many tough-nut paratroopers scurry over to grab one.

  My intelligence officer is Yigal Talmi, the son of Emma Talmi, one of the pioneer Zionists and a noted atheist. He passes me now, tucking a prayer card into his shirt pocket. “Yigal, what if your mother should see you doing that?”

  “Danny, this is no time to piss off the Big Guy.”

  Yael Dayan:

  22:30. Sharon stands beside Yaakov Aknin, his artillery commander. “Let the earth shake,” says Arik.

  Our guns open fire. They will shoot six thousand shells in twenty minutes, the heaviest barrage IDF gunners have ever fired. I have never been this close to batteries of 105-millimeter and 155-millimeter howitzers. The gunner yanks the lanyard and the whole cannon becomes airborne. Men with earplugs press their palms against their heads and brace themselves as if expecting to be blown off their feet. They nearly are. They labor like devils in hell. Our force has six battalions in all, including field guns, heavy 160-millimeter mortars, and medium guns.

  “Shake, it shall,” says Aknin.

  But the unhappy fact, as Dov has explained to me, is that our guns are small-bore alongside the mighty Soviet hardware employed by the Egyptians. Though our cannons have been moved forward as far as they can go, taking advantage of the approach of darkness, their range remains too limited to reach the mass of the enemy’s artillery. Nasser’s batteries sit safe, beyond our reach. We are shelling only the Egyptians’ minefields and the infantry hunkered in the three forward trenches.

  Arik’s answer to the distant enemy batteries is to attack them with Danny Matt’s paratroopers, flown in behind the lines by Cheetah Cohen’s helicopters.

  This has never been done before. Not by the Americans, not by the Russians, not by us.

  When I ask Dov, “Will it work?” he answers with a phrase I am becoming familiar with.

  “It will have to.”

  Cheetah Cohen:

  The Egyptian big guns are firing. Airborne in the helicopters we can feel them. The line of batteries is four or five kilometers across. The ascending shells light the sky. I can read my gauges by their illumination. It’s like daylight.

  “My God, Cheetah,” my copilot, Moshe Carmeli, says through the headset. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

  “No one has seen anything like this!”

  We’re skimming the sand at 80 kilometers per hour.

  The battle rages five kilometers to our left. I am not a religious man, but I am praying like mad: Let me find those trapezes!

  Danny Matt:

  I land in the second group of three helicopters. My deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Shmulik Pressburger, is already moving off into the dunes to the south with thirty paratroopers.

  You may ask, How does an officer know in which direction to march? Is it by map? By compass heading?

  These are not necessary tonight. The Egyptian batteries paint a swath of fire in the sky. A blind man could follow it. Even in the troughs of the dunes, we can feel the walloping whoosh and hear the scream of the ascending shells.

  What will go wrong? Something always does.

  First is the direction of the dunes. Dunes run in a specific direction, depending on how the prevailing winds have piled the sand. In two strides we learn that these bastards are running against us. It’s like swimming upstream—two steps forward, one step back. By the end of my career, I will have served for fifty years, in six wars, three of them in Sinai. Never will I labor as I do this night.

  For many of our young troopers, this is their first experience of combat. A lieutenant tells me he has instructed his men to bring twice as much ammunition as they think they will need and twice as much water. This weight now becomes hell in the soft sand.

  It will take us from eight till midnight to cross the four kilometers that separate us from the Egyptian batteries.

  Cheetah Cohen:

  The train of helicopters takes a different route out from the one it took in. We’re flying a great circle around the battlefield, if you can call it flying when the birds are so low that sand is collecting on the decks of the cargo bays and so close to the walls of ravines that the tips of the rotors are abraded by the flying grit. The air force has rules against this. I have rules against this.

  Tonight we are breaking all of these rules.

  We touch down by the lamps of the trapezes. The paratroopers leap to the earth from the right side of the helicopter, single file, in darkness, into a storm of rotor blast and howling driven sand, with two more helicopters touching down simultaneously, all without landing lights and all with tail rotors, invisible to the paratroopers in the dark, waiting to liquefy their skulls if they don’t dash away in the prescribed manner.

  The insertion goes on for an hour and a half before Danny calls it off when shells from the Egyptian artillery begin to fall dangerously close to the landing zone.

  Danny Matt:

  We have reached the Egyptian positions. The enemy has between five and seven battalions, each constituted of three batteries of four guns apiece, along with whatever supplementary firepower he has been able to bring up. The line stretches out of sight, between three and five kilometers long. The sight of the big guns is spectacular. The barrels are glowing orange, so furiously have the cannons been firing.

  We attack the closest batteries first.

  Artillerymen are not trained to defend their posts by themselves. Special infantry squads are detailed to do this. The gunners’ role is only to fire their cannons. In their minds, the enemy is miles away. When they see my paratroopers suddenly rushing upon them from the rear, out of the darkness, slinging grenades and firing automatic weapons, they don’t know what to do.

  I have a photo in my possession to this day of Egyptian infantry shot dead on their trucks. The soldiers had no time even to get to their defensive posts. We took them completely by surprise.

  My paratroopers have carried explosive charges to blow up the cannons. But after we attack the first few batteries, the enemy artillery stops fir
ing. The gunners along the rest of the line run away.

  The three battalions of Kuti Adam’s infantry are attacking the Egyptians’ first three trenches from the flank, supported by Motke Zippori’s brigade of M50 and M51 Shermans. Egyptian defenders are the three infantry battalions of the 12th Infantry Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division.

  The Egyptians have about ninety tanks arrayed in the Soviet defensive posture. Zippori’s armored brigade gets into a furious firefight with them. Our IDF tanks are equipped with powerful projector spotlights, which they use to locate and sight upon the enemy. My guys are caught in the middle. We are getting shot at by our own soldiers. At one point it gets so crazy that some commander—it might even have been me, I can’t remember—simply orders all Israeli tanks to cease firing. When they obey, we can see which tanks belong to us and which to the enemy.

  Natke Nir’s Centurions attack now too.

  Our work is done. My paratroopers withdraw to the flank, in a formation shaped like the Hebrew letter het, a three-sided square with the wounded in the middle. We start back through the dunes.

  Egyptian soldiers are running away in the same direction. They’re moving a lot faster than we are.

  Cheetah Cohen:

  I have landed back at Sharon’s camp. It’s past midnight. The landing zone for the helicopters is half a kilometer clear of all troop or vehicle concentrations. From this site, my crews and I have an unobstructed view to the west, toward the enemy positions.

  Here is what we see:

  The sky, which had been lit up like daylight by the firing of the Egyptian artillery, now goes black, one section at a time.

  I’m standing on a rise with the other pilots, copilots, and aircrew. As we watch, the right side of the line goes dark; then the middle; then the whole line. It’s a rolling blackout, like a city when the power fails in one neighborhood after another. The only lights remaining on the battlefield are the searchlights of our IDF tanks, darting this way and that like the site of a movie premiere in Hollywood.