by Herman Wouk
“Nothing more to say!” exclaims Kishote as the planes dwindle off, the motor roars fading. “The rest is being written in the sky! Instead of the yellow star, the blue star! Am Yisroel khai! Israel lives!”
Lieutenant Colonel Elad strides beside him. “Attention!” Sudden rigid postures, absolute quiet among the men, their faces transformed: eager, cheerful, exultant. “Crews to tanks! All personnel to battle stations, maintain radio silence, await orders! Camouflage nets remain in place!”
A sergeant jumps out in front of the battalion: “Alei—”
From the battalion, a youthful bellow: “KRAV!” (“Battle!”)
“Alei—”
“KRAV!”
“Alei—”
“KRAV! KRAV! KRAV!”
The soldiers disperse noisily at a run. Lieutenant Colonel Elad gives Yossi a bear hug and kisses his bristly cheek. “Good, excellent, perfect. Thanks! So, here we go!”
“Yes. Be careful, Ehud.”
“Definitely! We meet again in El Arish, eh? Kishote, I love you.” He strides away.
General Tal beckons to Yossi. He and Gorodish both appear smart and fit: tanned, bright of eye, in well-pressed uniforms and fresh caps, with heavy new tankers’ goggles pushed up on their foreheads. Jewish Desert Foxes, Kishote thinks, Israeli Rommels, and not unaware of it! Tal shakes his hand and claps him on the shoulder. In mock singsong Gorodish, a former Talmud student, speaks yeshiva praise. “Goot gezugt! Yasher koyakh! [Well said! More power to you!] Come with me.”
The airplanes have stung the whole division into violent life. Crowds of soldiers are busy around a thousand vehicles besides the tanks: signal jeeps, command half-tracks, personnel carriers, medical caravans, fuel trucks, maintenance trucks, food trucks, ammunition trucks, a supply tail much bigger than the fighting head.
In his gloomy trailer, Gorodish goes to a map hung in the back. “Now see here, Yossi. Those planes mean RED SHEET is due any minute. Southern Command gave Tal the dirtiest job, and Tal gave us the dirtiest part of it. We won’t break through this morning without bad losses, but we can’t stop, no matter what. I’ll be up forward here”—he raps the map at a road juncture far inside the Gaza Strip—“and I want you to form a second command group, just in case. You understand?”
They look hard at each other. Gorodish is saying that he may be killed or wounded at the outset, or that in the chaos of a first assault he may become trapped. Leading the attack will then be up to Kishote.
“I understand.” Yossi is eyeing the envelopes of sealed orders stacked on the table, topped by a chit with two crayoned words in Gorodish’s careful Hebrew hand: SADIN ADOME (RED SHEET). “Who’ll go first?”
“Ehud with his Pattons, as planned.” Some eighty of these U.S. tanks were obtained by a tricky deal with the West Germans, before the Arabs caught on, howled, and stopped it. “The sharp point of the spear, column open order. I’ll be close behind. You’ll halt and await orders here, while we see how the attack develops.” Gorodish bends over the map, marks a spot, and takes up a ruler and dividers. “Code name for your command group will be Karish [Shark].”
“Shark.” Yossi bares his large white teeth as far as he can. “Excellent.”
Not visibly amused, Gorodish says, “Move.”
***
Flying by dead reckoning, Benny Luria is counting off the minutes before the landward turn. Silence in his earphones, but for crackle of static. The four Mirages are thrumming over the foaming wave tops at four hundred knots. The others are formed up on him as for an air show, Kalman to the right, Itzhik and Ricki to the left. Mark! A sweeping shallow swerve leftward, and the others follow, holding formation. Good boys, reliable as rock. Fuel okay, oil pressure and engine temperature fine, bomb switches on, strafing switches off. The engine could not be performing more sweetly. The familiar fluttering of his stomach at setting out for action has faded away. At the horizon a line of sand dunes appears, on time within five seconds. Colonel Luria is in business, coming in from the north, where least expected, too low for radar detection.
As the four planes flash over the swampy green Nile Delta’s villages and canals, farmers wave, not conceiving that these are not an Egyptian patrol. There is the railroad line, with a short train puffing along. The hamlet ahead could be Faqus, the point of departure for the strike, but it is coming in sight three minutes too soon. Another village, far to the left looks more like Faqus, but if so Benny is off course. Quick review of options: If I miss Faqus, alternate point of departure? Course, speed, rate of climb, altitude—? He is peering far ahead for telephone poles, watch towers, any obstacle above the mud that he can smash into in one unwary second…
Faqus! There it is, huts, streets, canal, dirt road all in place. The time is exact, nice navigation. Ahead in the sky, not a sign of a patrolling MiG. Okay, hand signals to the others, full throttle, climb! And there showing up below are camouflage-painted hangars, control tower, squadron buildings, aircraft on the runways, a long-lens reconnaissance photo come to life. The Inchas interceptor base is eerily like Tel Nof, after all. An air base is an air base. Afterburner shooting the craft up like a cannon shell, ears popping, climb indicator racing round and round. Three, four, five thousand feet up into the blue, up in tumultuous steep climb. Six thousand feet! The others are right with him. From now on it is pure rehearsal. Benny Luria goes into a howling somersault, earth and sky whirl around him, and he levels out headed straight for the crowded main runway.
Nosing over to a steep thirty-five degrees, he flips the switches for the special runway-smasher bombs and dives. Sporadic AA fire begins ahead: winking yellow flashes, rising red tracers. The lined-up MiGs in his scope are growing bigger and bigger. Juicy pickings! But not on this pass. Small figures below are scuttling wildly here and there. Keep adjusting controls to dive straight, straight, straight! Altimeter spins down to two thousand feet. He releases the bomb, feels the slight jolt, dives on toward the ground and starts his pullout amid thickening AA explosions. Clicking switches from bombing to strafing, straightening and then swerving left, he swoops around behind the tall hangars to break the antiaircraft fire-control lock on his plane. A quick side-glance, Oo-ah! Towers of black smoke boiling up back there! The papam bombs have done their work, by God…
These bombs are a homemade product. As they fall a parachute deploys, slowing the drop. An automatic control tilts the bomb for maximum penetration, a rocket charge rams it deep below the tarmac, then a delayed-action fuse blows a gigantic hole. Years of innovative Israeli technology for these few seconds of history…
The others join up in an orderly climb and turn. The four planes half circle the base. Through rising smoke, they can see ruined, useless runways, pockmarked by black craters flickering with flame. The aircraft at Inchas are now pinned on the ground, trapped and helpless.
Strafing run! Luria descends at a shallow down angle, ten degrees, no more. At maximum range he opens up with nose cannon and machine guns at the MiG in his scope, his plane bucking and rattling. The fire stream stabs the MiG, and it bursts into a black-and-red bubble of smoke and flame. Not like a victory in the air; still, some spectacle! What a sight, what a reward! Another and another Russian fighter-bomber, more than a match for the Mirage in the sky, a motionless victim on the ground, blows up under Luria’s guns. He is keeping grim count: another, and yet one more, all sure kills, exploding before his eyes, never to fly again. These are interceptors on permanent alert. Chances are the pilots are in them, burning up… hellish thought, but on with the mission. Pass complete. The orders are to make three strafing passes and depart, minutes before the second wave arrives.
As he zooms around for the next pass, the others form up still unscathed; from what he can see, not a shell hole on any fuselage. The AA barrages are thickening, red tracers and black puffs whirl past Luria’s cockpit. But Israeli air doctrine is fixed and stark: ignore the AA, get the runways, then get the planes. Dropping toward the burning, smoking Inchas base for the second strafing
run, Luria sees that the three other pilots have also scored heavily. On a quick count, eighteen, nineteen, twenty blackened MiGs on fire down there!
Plenty of targets left, and as he blasts one MiG and another into a flash of pale sunlit flame, he remembers the French experts who argued that a cannon is wrong for the Mirage, out of date, that missiles are the proper armament. Some experts! What havoc the nose cannon are wreaking, together with these terrific 30-millimeter machine guns, spitting a thousand bullets a minute! Luria served with the Israeli team that overbore those French engineers: Tolkowski, Weizman, Hod, great airmen, great Israelis. Great decision!
Soaring above the tumbling smoke, Benny can see no sign of the second wave coming in yet. Command decision: come around and strafe again. Pile on the destruction, annihilate this menace to the Jewish homeland. Fuel is the limiting factor. He manages two more shallow attack dives into the smoke and the AA fire, now wild and sporadic, then Luria leads his “boys” in a steep climb to ten thousand feet. No need now to slog through thick sea-level air on the return leg.
At this altitude his circle of vision takes in much of the rich green Nile valley, the gray sprawl of Cairo on both sides of the river with the toylike pyramids and Sphinx nearby, the mottled delta, the blue sea beyond, and tan desert sands stretching eastward toward the Suez Canal. Pillars of black smoke, boiling high into the translucent morning air, tell the story. Abu Sueir, Fayid, Kabrit, Cairo West, all are torched like Inchas. A thought strikes and thrills him: By God, it’s Midway!
Benny has studied all the historic air strikes, and most vivid in his memory is the picture of Midway, the scattered Japanese carriers aflame here and there on the sea, sending skyward the funereal fire and smoke of their own immolation; a cataclysm which, in five shattering minutes, turned the course of the war and of history. “Elohim, we’ve won the war,” he exclaims aloud, striking a fist on the bubble of the cockpit. “We’ve won!” He glances at the clock. Start to finish, they have been seven minutes over Inchas. He seizes the microphone and breaks radio silence. Why not, now?
“Tabor, Tabor, this is Slingshot Two, returning from Sunflower…”
***
Through the loudspeaker distortion of reports in the underground air force command post, Luria’s exultant tone reverberates. Uniformed girls wearing earphones scrawl excitedly with orange grease pencils on a glass partition.
“And now Inchas!” Dayan exclaims to Rabin, as both smile and shake their heads in wonder. “If all this is accurate, Yitzhak, that makes seventy-one planes destroyed so far, just in the first wave!”
Rabin draws heavily on a cigarette. Butts are piled in the tray on his chair arm. The mortal tension in the underground command post is just starting to abate. “Encouraging, even if sixty percent true.”
“Miracles and marvels!” says Ezer Weizman, the former air chief, now Rabin’s chief of operations, grinning from ear to ear. “The boys sound like Arab pilots, reporting such crazy figures, but who knows?”
Motti Hod is drinking from a huge upended water jug. He puts it down with a resounding thump and raises a hand. The hubbub among the officers in the chamber cuts off. Officers hurrying in and out halt where they are. The air chief turns around to Rabin, who is sitting directly behind him. “In action Benny Luria is a cold fish,” he almost snaps. “His report is reliable! In fact”—he waves a hand at the orange-marked partition—“you can believe all those numbers. MOKADE is going according to plan.”
Pasternak at Rabin’s elbow says, “I believe them.”
“I must confirm RED SHEET,” says Rabin, getting up.
“By all means,” says Dayan. He turns to Pasternak. “Sam, call Northern and Central Command. Even if fired upon, no advance into Syria or Jordan.”
“Moshe, those are their orders.”
“Yes, yes, but Syrian artillery is bound to open up, maybe Jordan, too. Once any of our units cross the borders, it’s too late to recall them. We return fire, but from static positions only.”
“Yes, Moshe.”
“Also report at once to Abba Eban what’s going on. We’re already in a new international political situation. And to Eshkol, of course.”
Again Dayan is ignoring protocol, falling back into their KADESH relationship, when Pasternak was his deputy. Pasternak does not mind, though they have been going separate ways for years, while Moshe has been dabbling with little success in politics. Paunchy, getting bald, Dayan wears this morning a new majestic air. To look at him, he is not only Minister of Defense, but the real Prime Minister. Number One.
“Ben Gurion, too?” Sam inquires.
Dayan shrugs. “As you wish. Now, Arab reactions are crucial. I want to know what Radio Cairo and the others say. And the leaders will be phoning, or conferring by wireless. You’re monitoring them?”
“Blanketing them. You’ll get half-hour summaries. Anything special, at once.”
Dayan nods and turns away. In an anteroom Pasternak shuts the door and makes the calls. Through a window he can see the girls writing up a report from the Cairo West strike.
“You catch me half-dressed,” says Levi Eshkol, “but go ahead, go ahead, you sound cheerful… Oy, really? Sam, Sam, mi darf makhen shekyanu [this calls for the blessing on good news]! Should I come down to the Kirya? I guess I’ll wait awhile. Have you called Abba Eban?”
“I will when I hang up.”
“Yes, yes, he must tell our people in Washington and New York right away. He’ll be waking them up in black night, but for this it’s worth it, hah? They must get ready for a big fuss. Sam, it’s wonderful! Congratulate Motti for me! Ai, Sam! It should only end as it’s beginning! And listen, call Ben Gurion. He’s entitled.”
This is Levi Eshkol, Pasternak thinks; considerate of the great old man, once his boss, now his most venomous critic. He dials Ben Gurion first, then the Foreign Minister.
***
Gorodish emerges from the trailer. “RED SHEET!” he roars at his signal officer, in the half-track bristling with antennas. “Open all radio networks, and distribute orders!”
In a bombinating racket of engine exhaust and loudspeaker blare, runners with sealed envelopes dart through the serried lines of tanks. Camouflage nets are coming down, crews swarm into the hatches, turrets swivel back and forth, guns elevate and depress, and the tanks start to move. Helmeted commanders signal with handheld flags half obscured by churned-up dust plumes.
Yossi Nitzan takes his command group, a platoon of Centurions with half-tracks and jeeps, to a station near the border, a mere wire fence strung along the level sand. The long column of Gorodish’s brigade comes rolling up with the Pattons in the lead, tracks clanking, sand swishing into the air. Ehud Elad, erect in the turret, is shouting into his helmet microphone as his tank crushes the fence. Seeing Don Kishote in his command half-track, he waves and throws him a salute. At that moment fire flashes along the horizon, followed in seconds by the THUMP-WHUMP of heavy enemy artillery. The surprise of the air strike is over, and as Tal has said a thousand times, to win a war the armor has to capture the real estate.
***
Shayna’s Canadian suitor is driving her to the bus terminal in Jerusalem when a scary sorrowful wail fills the air. “What’s that?” he exclaims.
“It’s the Egyptians,” Aryeh says at once. “They’re attacking Jerusalem.”
She holds him close, in the back seat. “Don’t be frightened, Aryeh.”
“Me? I’m not afraid of Egyptians.”
“Turn on your radio, Paul.”
The wedding of a girlhood friend, like herself almost an old maid, has brought Shayna to Jerusalem, and now she and Aryeh are about to take the bus back to Haifa. The news is just coming on.
“The voice of Israel from Jerusalem. It’s ten o’clock. This morning at 0745 hours Egyptian planes again violated Israeli airspace. The air force has driven them off and all our planes have returned safely. All forces remain on highest alert.”
The rest of the news, brief and innocuous, i
s followed by a sound-drink commercial, which Paul shuts off. “Well, that doesn’t sound exactly like war,” he shouts over the continuing howl of the siren. “Does it?”
“No, it doesn’t. Maybe they’re testing the siren. Let’s go ahead.”
On the Jaffa Road shops are mostly shuttered and the usual truck jam is nonexistent, since the country’s mobilized trucks are off at the borders. Distant hard thumps sound through the howl of the alarm. “Listen to that!” he calls. “Maybe it is an air raid, for a fact.”
“That’s artillery.”
“Artillery!” The plump black-bearded face looks around at her. “You mean Jordan is attacking us?”
Shayna notes his tribal use of “us.” “Well, they seem to be bombarding us.”
“Maybe you’d better not try to get back to Haifa just now, Shayna. The roads will be jammed by the army, and dangerous. You and Aryeh can have my flat. I’ll sleep in the yeshiva.”
“Why? If we must we’ll stay with my mother.”
“Pretty cramped in that one room.”
“We’re simple people here in Jerusalem.”
Off in the distance an explosion, and rising smoke. More thumps, the siren still screaming. Aryeh says, “We’ll beat the Jordanians. We’ll beat all the Arabs that attack us.”
“Let’s go to my mother’s house, Paul.”
“Okay.”
Shayna’s widowed mother lives in a thick-walled Arab house in an old religious section. The Ezrakh allows her to come down once a week to cook his Sabbath meal and clean his cellar lair, lined floor to ceiling with tomes. For this she is much envied and honored by the other old women of the shabby neighborhood. Paul turns into a side street, where laughing children are lining up at a shelter entrance. “Shayna, if it’s war, what can I do, how can I serve?”
“Yeshiva boys just go on studying Torah.”