1973: The Yom Kippur War: Egypt Regains Some Pride
The basic story of the 1973 Yom Kippur attack is well known. The Egyptians, flush with Russian equipment and training carry out a surprise attack across the Suez Canal on October 6th, Yom Kippur, 1973, the time when the Israelis will find it most difficult to respond. The Egyptians have 48 hours of success but do not follow through and after a week of bungling and losng their heads the Israelis begin to get the upperhand and Ariel Sharon leads a crossing of the Suez which traps the Egyptian armies and the Americans and Russians call a halt to the proceedings. In the Golan Heights a tremendous tank battle is won against astonishing odds that highlight the Syrian command's ineptitude. Almost 1,200 new Russian tanks are destroyed by the Israelis.
I have used Ariel Sharon's autobiography to provide the details. The Isrelis are not super soldiers. They made many mistakes in their ongoing war with the Arabs but the Arabs made many more mistakes. Sharon is not afraid to highlight Israeli mistakes, even his own.
I had thrown all the influence I could muster behind Bar-Lev. But when Bar-Lev did gain the appointment, he and I once again found ourselves locked in a fierce dispute, this time over the questions of how to defend against any Egyptian attempt to cross the Suez Canal. … our response to Egyptian artillery attacks and plans for an offensive should be a series of fortifications built along the bank of the canal. These would, they believed, protect our soldiers from the shelling and provide us with forward observation posts. In an attack they would also help stop the Egyptians on the water line, before they could establish any significant presence in the Sinai. … From the beginning I felt that such a line of fortifications would be a disastrous error. … if we built the proposed chain of strongpoints we would be committing ourselves to a static defense.… This debate between me and Bar-Lev became harsher and harsher, especially after a large-scale surprise Egyptian artillery attack on September 8, 1968, caused severe casualties.
As I walked down the corridor, I knew with absolute certainty that I was right and they were wrong, that the Bar-Lev Line was bound to bring us disaster. But it was no pleasure when four years later it did exactly that. … But after these preliminaries it came as no great surprise to find that Commander-in-Chief Bar-Lev refused to approve my re-enlistment.
Under cover of the cease-fire, in 1971 and 1972 the Egyptian side of the canal became a beehive of activity. We watched as they constructed more and more bunkers and gun emplacements, as they moved their missiles forward and carved out launching sites for amphibious craft. In some places they built ramparts on their bank that towered well a hundred feet high. Despite our own ramps and fortifications, we knew we were under continuous observation. All our approaches were covered by firing positions on the high Egyptian banks. We felt naked. The shelling and ambushes had ended, but we had the eerie sense that every patrol, every exercise, every move we made toward the canal was being watched and charted.
At the same time Egyptian units trained constantly. Over and over they practiced moving troops and tanks up to the canal bank, deploying equipment, constructing pontoon bridges-rehearsing in detail each separate component of an assault across the canal. Faced with the problem presented by the sloping barrier on our side, they experimented with methods of breaching sand and earth walls, especially with ultra-high-pressure water hoses. South of Kantara, where the canal splits into two branches around El Balah Island, they built replicas of our barrier wall and strongpoints and conducted crossing operations. Hundreds of times we saw them run through the exercises, launching their assault boats, breaching the wall, laying their bridges, moving their units through.
What particularly concerned me in all this was the discipline with which the Egyptians conducted themselves. More officers were present than ever before, and there was no question that their troops were acting purposefully, in accordance with specific training goals. Their movements were marked by determination and initiative, and even the details indicated meticulous planning. I noticed that soldiers training in different areas always wore the right color camouflage uniforms. A transformation had come over the Egyptians since the Six Day War. This was an enemy with a clear mission, concerned about analyzing its problems, finding solutions, and preparing thoroughly for its task. It was no longer the silk underwear army we had broken five years earlier.
The moment I arrived, I called my divisional headquarters to check in, then rang up my intelligence officer, Yehoshua Saguy, who had served as chief of intelligence for the entire front when I was commander. Saguy came over immediately, bringing with him air photographs and other material. One look was enough. Near the canal the Egyptians had concentrated all their crossing equipment, a massive deployment that was quantitatively different from the exercises we had gotten used to watching. "There's no question," I said. "This time it's war."
Calling southern front headquarters, I asked if any changes had been made in the plan of response that was in place when I left the command. "No," I was told, "it's still the same." In essence that meant our tank reserves were supposed to be concentrated no farther than twenty miles from the canal and that the Bar-Lev strongpoints would be evacuated the moment the Egyptian assault began. Perhaps most important, any counterattacks were to be carried out in strength. Tanks would be used in "armored fist," battle groups of battalion size or greater, insuring maximum impact. Satisfied, I called Shmulik Gonen, the southern front commander, to tell him that I was ready and that I considered the intelligence conclusive. War would break out soon.
Sharon criticises Bar-Lev and Gonen not only for their early bungling and lack of knowledge of the frontline situations but for their delays in approving the crossing of the Suez Canal. It is obvious he thinks that Bar Lev should have been censured not only for the disastrous Bar-Lev Line fiasco but for his (in)actions during the war but was saved by the MAPAM Military Mafia Old Boys network. Sharon was never part of that in-group and his personality was abrasive rather than accomodating.
A short time later on that hard morning I was ordered to come to a meeting with the upper command at a position in the desert several miles from the canal. In my APC we drove back along Akavish, the road that supposedly had been cut off behind us. When we got to the co-ordinates on the dunes, I saw waiting for me Moshe Dayan, Chaim Bar-Lev, David Elazar, and Avraham Adan. As I approached, nobody said a word-except Dayan, who greeted me with a normal, friendly "Shalom, Arik." I hadn't seen any of them since the fourteenth. Since that day virtually the entire crossing battle had been carried out by my division alone. But now there was not a single word or an outstretched hand. Just silence.
Then Bar-Lev said, very quietly and deliberately, "The distance between what you promised to do and what you have done … is very great." At that moment I felt tired to death. After all those terrible battles and casualties, with our dead still on the field where we had been unable to bring them out, when I saw this group of neatly dressed, washed, clean-shaven people, and when I heard that sentence: "The distance between what you have promised to do and what you have done is very great," I knew there was only one thing to do. I had to smack Bar-Lev in the face. I felt I just had to do it.
To this day I do not know how I kept myself from hitting him. Instead, I simply clamped my mouth shut. After a moment more of silence a short discussion took place and they decided to do what they should have done two days earlier. Very soon the pontoon bridge would be completed. Now we could proceed across the canal. My division would hold the yard, secure the corridor, and proceed north on the west bank of the canal toward Ismailia and westward twenty-five to thirty kilometers in the direction of Cairo. Adan and Kalman Magen would cross the bridge and would proceed southward around the shores of the Great Bitter Lake to the rear of the Egyptian Third Army.
It was a brief exchange. When it was over, Gonen, Bar-Lev, and Elazar got into their helicopter and flew off. Adan mounted his APC to go back to his division. I was there alone with Moshe Dayan, who had very obviously not liked the discussion but nevertheless had said nothing. I told him that Zevele (who was from Dayan's moshav) had been wounded and I hoped he was still alive. He asked me about my head. It was, at least, a human interaction.
THE BATTLE THAT DECIDED THE WAR SUEZ CANAL
SURPRISE CROSSING BY SHARON'S DIVISION , 1973
The IDF could prevent Arab victory in the Yom Kippur War only by crossing the Suez Canal in order to threaten the Egyptian forces in Sinai from their rear. This mission was given to Sharon's division, which attacked on the night of October 15. Exploiting the unprotected "seam" between the two enemy armies, a paratroop brigade crossed the canal by boat, followed by a tank brigade using rafts. Close by, at the "Chinese Farm" and "Missouri" areas, the rest of Sharon's forces fought the bloodiest battle in the history of the IDF.
Dayan had no intention of leaving; he wanted to be taken to the canal and then to the other side. Once inside my APC, he began talking about the urgent need to put troops across. He knew that the rafts had been operating for thirty hours, that the bridge itself was all but finished, and that nobody had crossed other than Danny Mat's paratroops, Haim's original tanks, and some other tanks of Haim's I had spirited across to make up his losses. Dayan was practically beside himself about the lack of movement. "You have to urge them to start crossing," he told me. "We are wasting time!" I had a sudden flashback to our discussion in the yard of that ma'oz during the War of Attrition. "Moshe," I said, "give them an order!"
For the next hour and a half Dayan was with me. Together we crossed to the other side and looked at what was happening in the bridgehead. Apparently after Dayan saw the situation himself, he made up his mind. At four-thirty on the afternoon of the seventeenth the bridge was completed, but still nobody was crossing. Late that afternoon, when he returned to the Southern Command, Dayan issued a direct order to Bar-Lev and Elazar to get forces moving across the canal immediately. But even then it took many hours. It was not until 11:30 P.M. that Adan's units began to cross, almost two days after our original crossing and seven hours after the bridge was completed. For seven hours it had stood there vacant. And even then the tanks that did cross waited until the following morning before launching their assault.
Of course during those two days the Egyptians had time to fully comprehend their predicament. By the time Adan broke out of the bridgehead they had managed to concentrate forces opposite him. And what could have been done so easily on the sixteenth and even on the seventeenth became a hard and costly job on the eighteenth. By then Adan had to fight his way out in a slogging match that would find him just short of his objective when the first cease-fire went into effect four days later.
Tuvia mounted his abortive attack on Missouri on October 21. By that time Adan and Kalman Magen had swept around the western shoreline of the Bitter lakes and were on the verge of cutting off the Egyptian Third Army. Six days earlier Sadat had considered the Israeli crossing a "television operation," staged only to make a momentary dramatic effect. Now, with the Third Army almost isolated and with my forces sixty miles from Cairo and at the gates of Ismailia, the Egyptians were in a panic. Their pressure on the Soviets to arrange a quick cease-fire had resulted in an invitation from Leonid Brezhnev for Henry Kissinger to visit Moscow. On the twenty-first - the same day Tuvia attacked Missouri - Kissinger and Brezhnev concluded an agreement. Early the next morning their efforts were embodied in a U.N. Security Council resolution that called on both sides to stop fighting.
Sharon discusses the myth that the USA saved Israel in the Yom Kippur War.
Yet the general conviction was that Israel had desperately needed the emergency resupply to carry on the war, that in effect the United States had saved Israel. And this, fortunately, was just not so. At the front we had heard that Moshe Dayan had told the Knesset that "the ammunition we receive at night we use in the morning." But everyone involved in the fighting knew that, whatever Dayan thought, this was impossible. After the war I checked into the supply situation carefully. During the two and a half weeks of fighting, Israeli forces had used 25 percent of their small-arms ammunition, 55 percent of their artillery shells, and 48 percent of available tank shells. It was only ammunition for the big 175-mm field guns that had really been depleted, and we had only a small number of these. The anxiety in the political echelon about supplies was induced in part by the fact that our military storehouses were indeed empty. But that was so only because the distribution system had worked almost exactly according to plan. From the first moment of war the supply pipeline had begun funneling ammunition via huge convoys out of the main depots toward the preplanned staging areas and forward dumps. Supplies were not in the storehouses for the excellent reason that they were positioned precisely where they should have been, feeding the front lines.