A hundred meters down the slope our party strikes barbed wire. Staked entanglements and coils of concertina wire stretch across a shallow basin about 150 meters wide and 200 meters deep. Twenty years of paper and trash have piled up in this junkyard. It’s a mess. Mined, no doubt. Fire from half a dozen Jordanian positions pops and zings over our heads.
I pick a spot and sit down.
War is not like a John Wayne movie. Sometimes the best thing is just to stop, hold still, watch, and listen. After twenty minutes, with heavy fire continuing the whole time, I get the picture.
The Jordanians have machine-gun emplacements on the roofs of buildings and in sandbagged positions on upper and lower floors. They are firing from ground positions and from basement slits. But no one is shooting at us here at the base of Gemul Alley. They can’t see us. For whatever reason, the Jordanians are not covering this low point. Nor do they realize that our battalions have moved into position above on Samuel the Prophet Street. The enemy is firing randomly, to keep his courage up and so that his officers will not yell at him for doing nothing.
This spot is a good one.
It will be our breakthrough point.
An advance party will use bangalore torpedoes to blow a path through the wire and to set off any mines. Then our battalion and Battalion 28 will pour through.
It can work.
If our column of paratroopers can cross this valley quickly, at a run, we can get past the enemy’s forward defenses. We can get behind him before he realizes we have even broken through.
Uzi Eilat, “B” Company commander:
We can’t find the bangalore torpedoes. What the hell? In the dark, two of our buses have taken wrong turns. They’re lost. All our bangalores are on those buses.
Dan Ziv has come back up the hill. Two Sherman tanks have arrived to reinforce us. Dan chases them away. If the Jordanians see or hear the Shermans, they’ll know that this is our crossing point.
My guys are scrounging bangalores from the other companies. Finally, when we get six or seven, the lost buses arrive, except for one or two teams. If I believed in God, I would thank him. We are ready.
Shai Hermesh is a twenty-three-year-old bazooka man in Yoram Zamosh’s “A” Company:
I’m in one of the lost teams. We’re still lost.
Every platoon in an Israeli paratroop company has a “weapons element” in addition to the combat soldiers: two bazooka men (gunner and loader), three mortarmen with a light 52-millimeter tube, and three men with the bangalores.
Our team was ordered into the first buses because our heavy weapons will be needed to support the initial breakthrough. That’s how we got lost. The column of buses came under mortar fire. Two went forward; the others went back. Now we’re separated.
We’re on the street. Seven of us. Heavy mortar fire continues to rain down, scaring the hell out of us. The streets are pitch black. We’re lost. We have no officer, no map. None of us knows his way around Jerusalem.
Our job, we know, is to support the breakthrough. But we don’t know where we are, we don’t know where the breakthrough point is, and we don’t know how to get there.
Meir Shalit, nineteen-year-old sergeant in “B” Company:
One of the buses is still missing. It might have gotten hit by mortar fire; nobody knows.
I’m in the third bangalore team in Uzi Eilat’s company. We’re safe. We’ve reached the assembly point for the assault. A bangalore torpedo team consists of three men—two with the bangalores, one with a Belgian FN light machine gun to cover them.
The first two teams will blow the wire; my team is the reserve. “Push the bangalore under the wire, activate the fuse, run like hell.”
Uzi Eilam, battalion commander:
My plan calls for “B” Company, Uzi Eilat’s, to breach the wire. The next company will race through and take positions facing right and left. Their job will be to protect the flanks. After them, the main body of our battalion—with Battalion 28 immediately behind—will move through as fast as it can, penetrating the Jordanian defenses as deep as possible.
A couple of hundred meters east of the breakthrough point lies the Nablus Road, called on some maps Shechem Road (the ancient name for the city of Nablus). The Nablus Road is our first objective. When we strike this thoroughfare, which runs north and south, half the battalion will turn right—south—and move as quickly as possible to seize the neighborhood of the American Colony and, beyond it, the Rockefeller Museum.
The other companies will continue forward, east, through the neighborhood of Wadi Joz. A wadi is a dry riverbed; Jordanian mortars are firing from somewhere down in the wadi. We will eliminate them, capture the entire quarter, and take up positions at the base of the slope facing the collar of hills made up of Mount Scopus, the Augusta Victoria Ridge, and the Mount of Olives.
To our left, north by several hundred meters, lies Ammunition Hill and the Jordanian Police School. Battalion 66 will assault these positions. We don’t know now, and won’t learn till the sun rises tomorrow, that the fight for these positions will be the bloodiest and most brutal of the war.
Dan Ziv, deputy battalion commander:
Eilat’s company is first down the slope. They will blow the wire. Eilat is solid and smart, without fear. Zeev Barkai has come up, our operations officer, young, another good fighter. And we have Benny Ron, too, Uzi’s friend, another strong hand who is not even part of the battalion but has bolted from his own desk-bound unit to be with us in this fight.
The teams with the bangalore torpedoes scoot ahead. They will slide the explosives under the wire. Behind them in single file crouch the paratroopers—fifty that I can see, a few hundred more above them—along the slope. They’re scared, yawning.
I remind the men up front of what every soldier knows: In a breakthrough, the first ten minutes are everything.
See the Jordanian machine guns?
See the houses they’re shooting from?
Get through, get behind them, hit them from the direction they least expect.
Benny Ron has joined Battalion 71 from an administrative outfit:
I’m not even part of the battalion. My unit is research and development, an office job. When the war orders come on June 5, I tell my boss there’s no way I’m going to be kept out of combat.
I bolt to Uzi. “Can you give me a job?”
Uzi and I have been friends forever. He says, “Sure, Benny. Let me think up a title for you.”
That’s the way it works in this army. Old-timers from a battalion, retired guys—they just show up. They can’t stand not to be part of it. Others fly in from the States, from England, from South Africa. “Put me to work!”
Uzi assigns me to Dan Ziv’s team, to help organize the breakthrough. You can learn a lot watching a soldier like Ziv. He did not win his Medal of Valor for nothing. Ziv’s body language projects fearlessness. It says to the young troopers, “I am in no hurry. Watch me do my job. Do yours the same way.”
The neighborhood we’re in is called Sheikh Jerrah. Houses are sparse. Jewish families live up top on Samuel the Prophet Street; Arab neighborhoods spread downhill across the wire. Arab houses are built high, with thick walls, like forts. The top story is where the sons in the family will live when they take wives. You can tell an Arab house because the rooftop is flat and unfinished.
02:25. H-hour. Mortar and machine-gun fire opens up along the whole line. Powerful projectors mounted on rooftops light up the city, seeking targets for the artillery. Eilat’s men creep forward, ignite the bangalores.
Nothing happens.
Duds.
Our guys behind are cursing.
“What’s the holdup, guys?”
“What are you idiots doing?”
Our mortars have set up their firing pits a kilometer north, in the neighborhood of Sanhedria. Gideon Bikel is the weapons officer. Dan Ziv has
given him orders to blanket no-man’s-land with fire, to make the Jordanians keep their heads down.
Amid the dust and smoke, Eilat’s bangalore teams try again to blow the wire. This time the charges detonate, only the wire rises straight up in a big, tangled mass and lands right back where it started from!
Somehow we get it cleared.
The paratroopers stumble down the slope and into the gap. We go too. There’s some kind of industrial yard a couple of hundred meters ahead. A brick factory, we’ll learn later. The enemy has at least one heavy machine gun in there, maybe two. North of the brick factory, invisible now in the dust and smoke, squats a bastion that our fellows will come to call the House of Death.
43.
THE HOUSE OF DEATH
The battalion has broken through. I am heading on foot back to the casualty collection center. Our command group, with one company, has reached the Nablus Road. But there are problems in the rear. They must be dealt with before we can move forward.
Uzi Eilam, Battalion 71 commander:
Our medical officer, Dr. Igal Ginat, has commandeered a house and made it into a triage center. He and his medics have been overrun with casualties. At the breakthrough point, as our men of Battalion 71 moved forward to dash through the wire, soldiers of Battalion 28 advanced into their places behind them. Suddenly a barrage from a battery of Jordanian 81-millimeter mortars began. Rounds fell directly upon the concentration of troops. Sixty-four men were wounded and killed, a catastrophe in a battalion of only about five hundred men. Dr. Ginat and his medics stayed at the breakthrough point for an hour, getting the wounded men treated and evacuated. Now he has come forward across the wire into Jordanian territory. He and his team have set up a medical station in a yard adjoining an Arab house and in several rooms inside. On the ground I see prone forms, motionless. Blankets cover their bodies and faces. Boots, protruding, are paratrooper red.
In combat there is no time for grief. A commander must act. He must project decisiveness and certainty. No matter how grim the situation, he must act as if it is under control. If your soldiers read fear on your face or discern irresolution in your posture, you have failed them.
I thank Dr. Ginat and his medics. I commend them on their extraordinary efforts. The worst is over, I assure them. Our lead companies have reached the Nablus Road. Elements of Battalion 28 have joined us. The enemy is on the run. Our combined force is moving forward.
The combat commander must be an actor sometimes. This is war. You must use everything. Everything.
Dan Ziv, deputy battalion commander:
When I call my soldiers to me, I explain how this type of fighting feels to the enemy. I want to ease my young men’s fears. They must understand that the Arab Legionnaires are scared, too. “I would not trade places with them. They are done for and they know it.”
I make my young paratroopers hear me:
Where are the Jordanians? They are in houses. On roofs. In basements. Do you think these positions are impregnable? The night is dark. The enemy can’t see a thing. This house he is using as a machine-gun emplacement? People live in this house! It is not a bunker or a pillbox that he has built and cleared fields of fire for. It is not designed to fight from. The enemy defender has had to move the family out, find a window where he can put his gun. Invariably the weapon covers only a portion of the field. He and his team are surrounded by blind spots, dead ground, and approach angles that attackers can use to get at them.
The enemy knows he is a sitting duck. If the walls of his house are thick, he is blind and deaf. If they are thin, our small-arms fire will rip through them. For sure these civilian hideouts are no protection against a heavy machine gun or a bazooka or a 106-millimeter recoilless rifle.
What is the enemy hoping for? His fondest wish is to hold off these crazy Jews for even a few minutes, then pack up and get the hell out, because he knows if he stays too long, twenty guys with red boots will be pounding down the steps to his burrow, coming at him from all sides, from the roof, from the house next door, and the next thing he knows, a hand grenade will be rolling across the floor and stopping between his knees. Time always works against the defender. The enemy is waiting to be killed and he knows it.
Uzi Eilam, Battalion 71 commander:
In battle you must always go forward. Has a seam opened? Run through it. Don’t stop at ten meters; keep going for a hundred. The deeper you thrust into the enemy’s rear, the more you disorient him and the more you sap his fighting spirit. The foe may be brave, he may be well trained, he may be led by officers of courage. But when he hears your men’s voices on his right and left and in his rear, he will grab his kit and flee.
At the same time, you may not press forward so recklessly that you leave your rear exposed and vulnerable to counterattack. The commander must keep moving among his fighting elements. Go to the spot. Feel the ground. The more you move, the more you see your soldiers and the more they see you.
Are my officers conducting the fight wisely? Are they in control? Are they aggressive? Do they have a picture of the field and of their own and others’ positions on it?
Sometimes, issuing instructions to your soldiers, you see that adrenaline and fear are so strong in them that they can’t hear your words, they can’t understand your meaning.
Keep your questions simple.
“Where is your commanding officer?”
“From which direction is the enemy fire coming?”
Make your orders even simpler.
“Go there.”
“Do that.”
In battle, soldiers hide. Officers hide. They are afraid. They don’t want to be killed. Someone has ordered them to capture a certain house. But they have seen six of their friends enter that house and none has come out. So they make themselves invisible.
This is how an advance stalls. An officer is not willingly acting the coward; he’s trying to gather himself for a minute, to collect his men and his thoughts. But sixty seconds becomes twenty minutes and pretty soon two hours have passed and that house is still killing your men.
You have to go there. You must find the officer on-site. When he sees you, he will act. If he cannot, you must replace him. Right then.
The commander has graver responsibilities than any man in the battalion. He has to acquire and hold in his mind a picture of the entire field. He must know where he is, where each of his companies are, where all elements of the enemy are, and how that dynamic is changing and evolving.
You are receiving reports from runners, from radio operators. A problem persists here; an opportunity has opened up there. You are holding the battle picture in your mind, not in three dimensions but four. The fourth is time.
What you cling to is initiative. Your forces are attacking. They are dictating the action. What you fear most is an enemy counterattack, because it shows that the foe’s spirit is strong. Your struggle, remember, is not with your enemy’s men or his positions but with his fighting spirit. That is why we break through, why we rush into the foe’s rear: to sow terror and confusion, to disrupt his rehearsed schemes, to compel him to decide and to act amid fear and chaos.
At the medical station, I learn that one of my company commanders has been wounded. Where is his deputy? Missing. What has happened to his soldiers? No one knows.
Zeev Barkai, my operations officer, is with me. I know now, from radio reports and from firsthand accounts, that two enemy strongpoints in our rear have not been reduced. They are still killing our soldiers. One is being called by our men the House with the Burnt Roof. The other, the House of Death.
My watch reads 03:20. We must be past the Nablus Road by sunrise. I assign Barkai to take care of the House with the Burnt Roof. He takes several men, including our intelligence officer, Barry Hazzak, and Gideon Bikel, our mortar platoon commander.
Zeev Barkai is operations officer of Battalion 71:
I am trying to find
the House with the Burnt Roof. As our party nears a thoroughfare—which could be the Nablus Road, but who the hell knows—out of the darkness comes a column of paratroopers from Battalion 28. I recognize the commander. He’s a friend from Kibbutz Deganiah Alef, near my home. He has been wounded. His head is bandaged.
“Barkai?”
“Nachshon, are you okay?” My friend’s name is Nachshon Ben-Hamidar. His father was the principal of my elementary school.
I radio to Uzi, alerting him that a column from Battalion 28 is in his rear. The last thing our guys want is to start shooting at each other.
“Nachshon, how would you like to help me clear a house of Jordanian snipers?”
He laughs. “Good luck, Barkai!”
And he leads his guys away down the road.
Before my group advances another fifty meters a grenade explodes out of nowhere. Bikel is hit. Barry and I carry him, lifting from under his shoulders, back to the casualty collection center.
This is the insanity of fighting at night in a place with buildings and roads. You cannot have an imagination. If you do, you’ll be paralyzed with fear, because every window and shadow may hold your death.
No one has told me the problem with the enemy strongpoints in our rear. It’s not hard to figure out, though. Men get scared. Their buddies have been killed entering a house and they don’t want to go back in.
What’s screwing everything up is that the enemy has pulled out of his original defensive positions and taken cover in various civilian houses. These new posts are no longer operating as pillboxes or fighting positions. They’re just four or five Legionnaires trying to survive. This makes them very dangerous. You don’t know where they are or when they’ll hit you. You pass along an alley and suddenly the man in front of you falls dead.
The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War Page 29
