Tenth Fleet did not create any large new organization. Rather, it brought together smaller units that evolved slowly: The Antisubmarine Warfare Unit of Atlantic Fleet, for example, had come into being in March 1942 at the suggestion of the commander of American escort forces in the North Atlantic, Rear Admiral Arthur LeR. Bristol, Jr. Gradually it began the development of standardized doctrine, incorporating the work of the embryonic operations research group. Its pronouncements carried no weight, however, because they came from what was technically no more than a research-and-analysis arm of a fleet command.
The creation of Tenth Fleet did not bring more talented individuals into the field of ASW than had previous organizations. Dr. Philip Morse of MIT continued to direct ASWORG’s main activities, and the same held true, by and large, of the other sections incorporated into Tenth Fleet. What Tenth Fleet did allow, by virtue of its organization and mandate, was for these individuals to become far more effective than previously.
Interestingly enough, the Germans throughout the war failed to establish a correspondingly efficient organization to conduct anti-merchant-shipping operations. The Luftwaffe and the chief of U-boats, for example, notoriously failed to cooperate with one another, although in some instances (in the Arctic and certain phases of the Battle of the Bay of Biscay) exceptions occurred. Even Doenitz’s own organization, however, despite the centralization that enabled him to deploy the U-boats as part of one fleet, remained amateurishly small and incomplete. Doenitz had a staff of fewer than two dozen officers and no organic scientific research unit until the end of 1943. One opponent would describe it, perhaps too harshly, as “an eighteenth century way of war in a twentieth century age of technology.”90
Yet tiny, undeveloped, and unsystematic as this centralized command was, it gave Doenitz enormous strengths, which his opponents recognized. In addition Doenitz’s remarkable ability to train and inspire his U-boat crews gave him a weapon of exceptional strength and resiliency. The German submariners fought bravely and with extraordinary determination against overwhelming odds, suffering probably the highest casualties of any branch of the German armed services in the war. Aided by a small but efficient signal intelligence organization (which benefited, in turn, from Allied carelessness about the security of merchant ciphers), they not only inflicted heavy losses upon the Allies but seemed to threaten their very ability to continue the war.91 As Churchill would put it: “The U-boat attack was our worst evil,” and, “The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.”92
Later historians would cast doubt upon Churchill’s sense of threat, arguing that had the Germans improved the efficiency and increased the weight of the U-boat attack, the Allies would have reacted earlier, with greater strength and more ample resources.93 To this one can only respond with the words of a great historian of an earlier conflict: “To us of this day, the result of [this] part of the war seems a foregone conclusion. It was far from being so; and very far from being so regarded by our fore-fathers.”94 Certainly, those who fought in the Battle of the Atlantic did not consider it won until the very last moment, and the authors of a secret postwar report warned, “Today we are technologically unprepared to cope with the U-boats which the Nazis had on the point of readiness for operational use in 1945.”95 One can, at the very least, insist that if the Allies had not won the Battle of the Atlantic they could not have won the war, and that the winning of that battle required enormous efforts, resources, and ingenuity on quite the same scale as any of the other campaigns of the war. Furthermore, had it simply taken another year to win the Battle of the Atlantic—victory in 1944 rather than 1943—the war would have looked quite different.
In the winning of that battle, it must be conceded that the United States Navy played a subordinate role to the Royal Navy. Of those U-boats we know to have been destroyed by hostile action (as opposed to accidents of various kinds), during World War II, only a quarter fell to American or American-controlled forces. Consider, however, that in 1942 only a fifth of all U-boats met their fate at American hands, although the most destructive U-boat campaign took place in American-controlled waters. In 1943, 30 percent of all U-boats sunk by the Allies fell prey to the Americans. Although this percentage declined somewhat in 1944, this largely reflects the fact that the U-boat war had moved well away from the ocean areas for which the United States held responsibility. By mid-1943, in other words, the humiliations of the bitter spring of 1942 were well on their way to being avenged.
CONCLUSION
We should not conclude that learning failure was the particular province of the United States Navy. In the interwar period the Royal Navy itself failed dismally to study systematically the lessons of the antisubmarine operations of World War I. Although the Royal Navy accepted the biggest lesson—the imperative of convoy—in principle, the many questions of detail (How large a convoy? How fast? Under what conditions should ships be allowed to sail independently? How should air power operate against the submarine?) were not raised, much less resolved, until the onset of the Second World War.96
The United States Navy’s learning failure of 1940–1942 did not prove fatal for two reasons—the fact that the navy did not bear the full or even the largest part of the responsibility for the conduct of Allied antisubmarine warfare, and its own ability to adapt quickly to its environment. Indeed, the ability to adapt is probably most useful to any military organization and most characteristic of successful ones, for with it, it is possible to overcome both learning and predictive failures. In the interim, however, the cost of such failures will be—and in this case was—high, in terms of blood, treasure, and time.
Failure to Anticipate
Israel Defense Forces on the Suez
Front and the Golan Heights, 1973
THE YOM KIPPUR WAR—
COURSE AND CONSEQUENCES
A FEW MOMENTS BEFORE 2:00 P.M. on Saturday, October 6, 1973, the armies of Syria and Egypt simultaneously attacked Israeli forces on the Golan Heights in the north and along the Suez Canal in the south. Before the war it had been universally expected—in Jerusalem, Washington, Moscow, and, to a large extent, even in Cairo and Damascus—that a future Middle East conflict would be a short and bloody affair of a few days, leading to a clear Israeli victory. More to the point, however, most Israeli and American decision makers thought that war would not come to the Middle East in 1973; the Arabs, having no serious military option, would not attempt something so clearly beyond their strength.
These expectations proved wrong: The war lasted two and a half weeks, not one, and inflicted on the Israelis at least 2,569 dead and 7,500 wounded.1 When the fighting ceased, the Israelis had pushed the Syrian Army back some 20 kilometers toward Damascus, which now lay almost within range of Israeli artillery. On the Suez front, however, Egyptian forces retained control of a narrow strip of land on the East bank of the Suez Canal. True enough, the Israelis who had crossed the canal to the west had encircled one of the two Egyptian armies (actually, corps-size formations) on the east bank of the canal. Nonetheless, the Israelis had proved unable to win the quick and elegant victory expected by so many and had endured traumatic losses to boot. One senior general describes the onset of the war as “the most shattering experience in the history of Israel,” and in her memoirs Golda Meir refers to the war as something that came very close to an utter disaster—and she uses the word sboab, which in modern Hebrew also refers to the annihilation of six million Jews by the Nazis.2
The Israelis had, moreover, suffered strategic surprise, an astonishing turn of events given the deserved reputation for excellence of Israeli intelligence. In the wake of the war, students of intelligence failure and surprise turned to the study of the Yom Kippur War in search of lessons about the nature of such calamities and in order to test hypotheses on their origins. We will examine the Yom Kippur War, and particularly the actions on the southern (Sinai) front, as a study in failure of anticipation. What was shocking in 1973 was not simply that the Ara
bs attacked Israel but that the Israelis seemed so poorly prepared for that attack. They did not merely fail to predict the onslaught until the very last moment, they had failed to take reasonable precautions to avoid or blunt it.
THE ORIGINS OF THE WAR AND ARAB STRATEGY
The roots of the 1973 war lie in the smashing defeat suffered by the Arab states in June 1967, when in six days the IDF occupied the Sinai Peninsula, the areas west of the Jordan River, and the Golan Heights. In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, Israeli decision makers expected that Arab states would sue for peace.3 This did not happen; rather, in October 1968, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt resumed the contest as a “War of Attrition” (formerly announced in March 1969) along the Suez Canal; at the same time Palestinian terrorist organizations increased their activities.
The War of Attrition ended on the Suez front in August 1970 with an uneasy but surprisingly durable cease-fire. The trickle of casualties borne by the Israelis along the Suez Canal had inflicted acute pain in a country of some three million, where a black-bordered picture of every soldier killed would appear in the nation’s newspapers immediately after his death. Yet the War of Attrition proved more costly to the Egyptians, who in the end considered it a defeat. Deep penetration raids by Israeli Phantom jets demolished factories and power plants; the war made the cities along the canal uninhabitable; and Israeli raiders scored humiliating coups in daring hit-and-run attacks. In the air, neither Egyptian nor Soviet pilots could match the Israelis, and the Israeli Air Force (IAF) managed to prevent the orderly emplacement of Soviet SAMs near the canal, albeit at a loss of twenty planes in the last six months of the war, including the loss of five Phantom jets in the last month or so of fighting. In the wake of the cease-fire, however, and despite its provisions, the Egyptian armed forces deployed a thick belt of SAMs along the canal zone—a move that would prove of immense operational importance three years later.
Deployment of Forces on Suez Front, 1400 Hours, Saturday, October 6, 1973
SOURCE: From The Arab-Israeli Wars, by Chaim Herzog. Maps and typography copyright © 1982 by Lionel Levanthal, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc., and Arms and Armour Press, Ltd.
Deployment of Forces on the Golan Heights, 1400 Hours, Saturday, October 6, 1973
SOURCE: From The Arab-Israeli Wars, by Chaim Herzog. Maps and typography copyright © 1982 by Lionel Levanthal, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc., and Arms and Armour Press, Ltd.
Egypt’s new President, Anwar el-Sadat, believed that the situation was unendurable. The Suez cities were vacant shells, their populations crowding an overburdened Egypt; the presence of thousands of contemptuous but seemingly necessary Soviet advisers exasperated Egyptians, who had to put up with open-ended compulsory military service, a deteriorating economy, and a galling sense of having been humiliated by the Israelis. Sadat’s first resort, in February 1971, was a peace overture, albeit one that to many Israelis seemed suspiciously like a call for unilateral withdrawal from the Sinai. When Sadat met an Israeli rebuff (despite the misgivings of Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan, who had opposed approaching the canal in 1967 and favored withdrawal thereafter), he threatened war in 1971 and again in 1972. Frustrated by the Soviet Union’s refusal to supply his forces the wherewithal for war, and hoping for an opening to the United States, he suddenly announced the expulsion of Soviet advisers from Egypt on July 18, 1972.4 But despite a flurry of diplomatic activity the situation remained stalemated.
In November 1972, Sadat decided to go to war—an option long prepared and studied by the Egyptian military but one in which many officers lacked confidence.5 Finding Minister of War Muhammed Sadek opposed to war, Sadat dismissed him in January 1973, replacing him with a more willing general, Ahmed Ismail Ali.6 Syria, always one of Israel’s most bitter foes, would gladly join in; the other frontline Arab states, Lebanon and Jordan, had neither the military resources nor the inclination to risk another confrontation with the Jewish state. In December 1972, Sadat restored relations with the Soviets: The Soviets received renewed access to Egyptian ports, and the Egyptians began to get vast Soviet arms shipments. By March 1973, preliminary planning had been completed. In a secret April 1973 meeting with President Hafaz Assad of Syria, the leaders and planning staffs had identified May, late August-early September, and October as possible dates for war. In early May, Syrian and Egyptian planners met to coordinate their attacks, and later that month Egyptian and Syrian forces began large scale mobilizations.7
Although Israeli military intelligence—AMAN, in its Hebrew acronym—deprecated the possibility of war, Chief of Staff David Elazar alerted Israeli forces and conducted preparations for war, although not a large-scale mobilization of the reserves.8 War did not break out. In October it did.
Syria had simple objectives in the Yom Kippur War: regaining a large chunk of the occupied Golan Heights, and with luck all of it. Egyptian objectives—or more accurately, President Sadat’s objectives—were far more subtle and complicated. First and foremost, Sadat thought it essential to break a diplomatic stalemate intolerable for Egypt (and his own position as president); by the very act of opening fire the deadlock would break, and fluidity would return to Middle Eastern politics.9 Anything short of a catastrophic Arab failure, and perhaps even that, would force the United States and the Soviet Union to renew the quest for a Middle East settlement. Sadat’s second set of objectives emerged from his reading of Arab and Israeli psychology. Egypt had to purge itself of those complexes—“whether defeatist ‘inferiority’ ones or those born of suspicion and hate”10—brought about by mortifying Israeli victories. If Egypt could seize and retain even a morsel of Sinai, Sadat thought, its self-confidence and self-respect would return and its honor be redeemed.11 The preconditions on the Egyptian side for a settlement with Israel would then exist.
But Sadat thought it equally or more important to destroy through war what he termed the “Israeli Security Theory.” In the Egyptian view, this theory consisted of five propositions: Israeli military and technological superiority must convince the Arabs that they could not achieve their objectives by force; in the event of war Israeli mobility and internal lines, coupled with Arab disunity, would allow Israel to concentrate her forces against one opponent at a time; Israel must immediately move a war into Arab territories; a war could not be permitted to last more than a week; Israel could not tolerate high losses.12 Sadat believed that the breaking of this theory required that the Arabs convince their opponent that “continued occupation of our land exacts a price that is too high for him to pay, and that consequently his theory of security—based as it is on psychological, political, and military intimidation—is not an impregnable shield of steel which could protect him today or in the future.”13 This could be achieved only by “inflicting the heaviest losses on the enemy.”14 Thus, neither the mere fact of opening fire nor the seizure of land would suffice; Israel had to suffer heavy losses in a protracted (by Middle Eastern standards) war.15 Sadat had shrewdly formulated intangible war objectives—the smashing of an enemy’s theory, the resurrection of Egyptian pride, and the alarming of the superpowers—although they could require, as he well knew, massive blood shed. He did not command his armed forces to seize all or even most of the Sinai by force: Indeed, he would content himself with very limited territorial gains, provided Israel suffered enough in battle.
The Arab plans reflected careful, and in some respects unprecedented, studies of their own strengths and weaknesses and those of their opponents. They judged Israeli advantages to lie in the superiority of its air force, IDF skill in conducting mobile operations with large armored forces in open terrain, its high technological level, the quality of IDF training overall, and its support from the United States. Israeli weaknesses, they thought, stemmed from relatively long lines of communication in Sinai after 1967, limited manpower and sensitivity to losses, the fragility of its economy during a long war, and its excessive self-confidence. The key to Arab strategy would lie in launch
ing a simultaneous two-front war, begun under conditions of strategic surprise, which would be gained by rigorous security and a program of deception at many levels. At the operational level, the plans called for a broad-front crossing of the Suez Canal by five infantry divisions and the seizure of a strip of land 10 kilometers deep. Following a pause to absorb Israeli counterattacks, Egyptian forces—reinforced by two armored and up to three mechanized divisions—would attack into Sinai in hopes of gaining the key passes leading from the canal area to central Sinai. On the Golan Heights, the Syrians planned an initial assault by three mechanized divisions to seize approximately half of the heights, with a follow-up attack by two armored divisions to complete the operation and consolidate the Syrian position on the heights, preparing in the event of unexpected success to cross into Israel proper.
The attack plans required at least a fifteen-day period of preparation, yet the beginning of the countdown was known to very few.16 Planning staffs agreed on the date for war in a highly secret meeting on August 22, 1973, yet according to the Egyptian chief of staff, the commanders of Egypt’s Second and Third Armies, tasked with the crossing of the canal, learned of the war only on October 1; divisional commanders on the third; and battalion and company commanders on the fifth.17 According to Israeli sources, the Arab high commands held information even more tightly.18 The Egyptians did not plan to give the Soviets much warning, nor did they; they gave broad hints to Moscow on October 1 and an explicit warning on October 3, only three days before war actually broke out on the sixth.19 The Egyptians did not set the actual hour of the attack (shortly after 2:00 P.M.) until October 3, when War Minister Ali visited Syria.20 Nonetheless, despite their extraordinary security precautions, the Egyptians appear to have expected that Israeli intelligence would know of the attack at least five days before it occurred.21 For that reason, the Egyptian (and one would assume, the Syrian) plans contemplated taking very heavy losses—26,000 men in the crossing of the canal alone.22
Military Misfortunes Page 13