THE AIR FORCE PILOTS continued to fly combat missions, and in base family housing, the tension, like the mercury in a thermometer, rose and fell and rose again. You could return from the MiGs and the flak, drive to the store to buy bread and milk and stick them in the refrigerator for the wife, and hurry back to the squadron to take off again to battle, or disappear for a week or two to Refidim, as if you alternated between two different worlds. And whenever I returned home I didn’t know how I would find my Ali, satisfied and at ease, or withdrawn inside herself, cold and prickly, hard on herself and us for no good reason. When I found her in this mood, we would get into a cleaning mode, shaking out rugs and blankets, sweeping and gardening. She would bend over weeds and uproot them mercilessly, her mouth set hard. Sometimes we had to take a breather, and then we drove to visit the family at Givat-Brenner, or took our two kids to the beach for a few hours of relaxation. Sometimes the air force arranged free hotel stays for us—we had no money for that—and then we would go down to the street and look at the wonderful, vibrant city.
The desire to live bubbled in us until we choked on it. One Saturday night we fell into bed dead tired. Long after midnight we woke up. It was a warm early summer night, and the light from a full moon streamed in through the open window along with the intoxicating smells of flowering orange trees. Noisy dance music came from a party that banged at full power in a nearby apartment, featuring the latest Beatles numbers.
“Should we go?” I asked Ali.
“We were not invited,” she answered.
We both got up and stood on the bed, naked. We didn’t know any ballroom steps, but we danced in our room till the moon faded, the window filled with pink and rosy light, and the wail of the record player was replaced by the clink of glasses being washed. In our private memories, this magic night became “Lucy in the sky.” Not that we had any idea of what LSD was, or who were Hey, Jude and Michelle, Ma Belle.
WE ALSO DIDN’T THINK BIG. We thought just a day ahead. One day the whole government visited Hatzor, to look around and have lunch with the base officers and pilots. When our glasses were raised, the host, Colonel Yak, our base commander, gave a short speech in which he presented a strategic idea of his. “Perhaps we should consider a unilateral retreat from the Suez Canal,” he said. “If we let it open for international navigation, a partition might be created, which might lead… ”
Prime Minister Golda Meir shook her head, annoyed. Moshe Dayan, the minister of defense, rose from his seat and said in a scolding tone, “Military officers should stay out of politics.” Yak sat down again on his chair and we lowered our eyes, humiliated, into the hummus on our plates. We didn’t notice that the big-shot general Moshe Dayan was ducking a serious question instead of dealing seriously with it. We were ashamed of our commander’s question. We didn’t grasp the difference between strategy, dealing with vision and thought, and politics, which in essence is the manipulation of people. Some wise guy near me whispered that with such defeatist ideas the air force would lose part of its budget to the artillery. We all thought he probably was right. We thought Yak had lost it, and instead of devising aerial tactics he began dealing with politics.
In truth, Yak was slipping further and further away from us. In discussions, instead of taking an interest in aviation tactics, he sailed into abstract reflections on the best way of war-making, saying it was a mistake to pit aircraft against aircraft, tank versus tank, ship versus ship, like two grindstones that wear each other out. He would pull out his pipe and think aloud on “diagonals,” on “getting out of the mental box.” This wasn’t Yak the MiG-killer anymore. Instead of a fighter commander we had a philosopher. Some sneered behind his back, said he didn’t understand what he was talking about. He acquired a nickname, Yak the Clueless. Only Furman, his deputy, said it was worthwhile to listen to what Yak was saying.
MEANWHILE, SOMEHOW, the Mirages became limited, single-mission fighters. No more were bombs loaded under our wings, and except for a few night scrambles for urgent air-to-ground interventions against artillery shelling on our ground forces in the Suez Canal area, we didn’t aim our gunsights at the ground at all. We were just light fighters for daytime air-to-air missions, and that was it.
To this day I don’t know how it happened that Mirages—that only three years before had taken out all the military airfields in the Middle East—were totally excluded from the ground warfare in that difficult war. A similar thing happened to the Super Mysteres and Skyhawks. Even though they were aircraft specializing in ground attack, they were limited to second-class missions. We were ordered not to pass the line of the canal, and only Phantoms continued to penetrate deep into Syrian and Egyptian air space and attack the SAM batteries. They began to return with holes in their formations. The Phantom squadrons began to be stressed.
I was not the only one who wondered where all this was going, especially with the stress that began to show in the Phantoms and their crews. Other officers asked this question in a loud and clear voice. The commander of the Mirage squadron at Ramat-David, my buddy Uri Even-Nir, raised his voice once in one of the general briefings and asked, “What is up with those fucking SAM batteries? What in hell requires us to keep our Mirages out of the action?”
But Moti never answered this question. He wanted just one thing from us: MiGs. For Moti, our MiG kills were the only substitute for a real strategy, which he didn’t have.
MiGs were not simple, either. I was also having a tough time. I pushed my notebook with all the nice programs I had planned for the Fighting First to the back of my desk drawer. I was left with time and energy only for one thing: dogfights. I found in my squadron two serious problems: leadership in aerial combat, and the launching of our air-to-air missiles.
THE KEY TO VICTORY and survival in aerial combat lies in flight management—keeping the sections together in combat, not letting them scatter. Two aircraft can defend each other, but a lone aircraft is very vulnerable. I, with my narrow escape from deep in Egypt after I separated from Marom, learned that it is mandatory not to leave a lone aircraft in enemy territory. The other pilots understood it, too—we had a daily reminder of it: Avi Kaldes, a pilot from our squadron, was rotting in an Egyptian prison after his section had scattered and left him alone. Clearly, aerial leadership was the key to victory and prevention of losses.
The requirement was to stay together and not separate, but some things are easier said than done. The essence of Yak’s breakthrough in the 1950s was in separating the section into two independent fighters who fought individually—each one chasing another target—while coordinating their movements by radio. The separation according to Yak was very aggressive and brought excellent results in small dogfights, but led to the opening of large distances between the partners and eventually loss of eye contact between them. Those separations led time and again to total parting, each fighting on alone.
Our difficulties became more serious when enemy aircraft started appearing in ever-larger numbers. The enemy began to prepare himself in advance and to throw into engagements more and more MiGs, and every dogfight soon turned into mass confusion. Time after time we found ourselves few against many, under pressure, and finally ending up alone in enemy territory, against several MiGs. Instead of attacking, we found ourselves defending, and every now and then one of us was hit by a MiG that appeared out of nowhere.
Hard questions began to be asked: What should we do in a multiparticipant dogfight? Did the solution lie in flying in closed formations? This would reduce our aggressiveness and lessen our results. Or was it massing our forces, too? Should we scramble formations of eight and ten fighters? We didn’t have enough force for this, and we didn’t know how such an armada could be led while in battle. The problem was difficult on all levels.
The idea I brought with me to the Fighting First allowed a pair to separate, but prevented loss of contact between them by introducing a new concept: target specification. The idea was to keep our aircraft together by sending both of them agai
nst one target. This idea came to me about a year before, in 1969, thanks to Giora Furman, Yak’s deputy at Hatzor. Furman organized an air force discussion of air battles and assigned me to give a lecture on multiparticipant aerial combat. Furman, the intellectual among us, already knew that if one wants to go deep into a matter one should write about it. I resisted, but he forced me to hand him a lecture written in black and white. I had to think.
First, I had to define what a multiparticipant dogfight was. When did a dogfight become multiparticipant? This was not a simple question; the situation was not defined solely by the number of aircraft. I finally concluded that the answer lay in the level of information: the dogfight becomes a melee when the leader loses his orientation and cannot control the situation anymore. This battle was wholly different from the jousts we knew so well—one against one, two against two, and even a few more. In those limited battles a normal leader could see it all, and control what was happening pretty well, keeping himself above the fray. There he can plan and utilize passing instances with no threat, to employ one of his aircraft to attack and kill.
But a melee is a fight loaded with chance encounters, a boiling soup where opportunities appear unexpectedly. And risks, too. Of course, the example in my memory was the mad dogfight with me and Gordon.
Labeling a serious air battle a “red-hot melee of surprises” revealed to me the need to create “cool bubbles”—intervals with no threat. We had to give the pilots in the melee a chance, even for a moment, when they could be relatively safe and could concentrate on a target in relative calm. This could be achieved through planning how the pair would work together.
For a few days all this churned around in my brain. Then I took to the air and did some training experiments, and finally I presented Furman and Yak with a new idea I called one-target specification. It worked like this: The section leader chose one of the adversaries in the area and defined it as the pair’s target. They both attacked the same target but from different angles. The adversary, trapped in a pincer, would turn to deal with one of them, leaving his six exposed to the other one. The kill should be quick. All through that process—since we both were after the same target—we would be working together. Eye contact would be maintained continuously, and each could clear a MiG off his buddy’s tail and warn him or come to his assistance in time of need. In fact, in this one-target specification method we created a bubble with three objects in it: both of us, and the MiG. Anyone who tried to enter the bubble could be seen, and we would both operate against him in the same way.
“Independent, self-supporting sections in battle,” I told Yak and Furman, “override the issue of the size of the opposing force in the area. Each two-ship section is supposed to fight against any opposing force, in any size, and there is no need to send larger formations. In principle,” I added, “one can describe the proposed method as ‘work in line’: the section shoots one MiG down, then the section shoots down another MiG, and so on. Send more pairs to battle only if you want more kills.”
Target specification was the one plan I drew from my notebook the moment I came to command the Fighting First. On the first day of my arrival I declared it a mandatory battle tactic. My senior officers, Sharon and Epstein, followed suit, and the method was immediately taught in class and aerial training. This was a not simple, inflexible way of fighting, and it required strong aerial discipline. It was so much easier to pursue targets of opportunity. Some of my pilots didn’t like this new method, and called it mockingly “the old bull method.” They had some good theoretical reservations, too, but I stood my ground and warned my pilots that if any section leader’s pair got separated in a dogfight, there would be hell to pay. They had to do it my way, if they wanted to stay in the First. In this way, in an instant, the First changed its fighting stance.
THE PROBLEM OF LAUNCHING air-to-air missiles was a totally different issue.
When I dug into Marom’s safe I found a top-secret document I hadn’t known about, with a report on all the air force’s missile launches against enemy aircraft. The results achieved by the Fighting First’s pilots were very bad, worse than all its sister squadrons. Most of the missiles launched missed their targets.
I was not upset because our missiles missed. My expectations of the air-to-air guided rockets we were carrying beneath our Mirages’ wings were pretty low anyway. The First operated antiquated missiles, even Soviet Atoll rockets we found rusting in the Egyptian munitions dumps at Bir-Gafgafa. The worst thing in my eyes was how my pilots treated them. I found out that most missiles were fired beyond the minimum conditions necessary for a hit. It was as if you shot at a bird without aiming at all. My pilots dumped missiles into the trash. They didn’t respect them; sometimes they didn’t even hide their shooting them lightly without precise aim. They called them “miss-siles,” and some joked about the missile “making like a flare,” just light and noise. I suspected that some of the launches were done just to get rid of the extra drag of the missiles, to blow them out on the first opportunity and clean the Mirage to go in for a cannon attack. Our squadron prided itself on gun kills, which are much more glamorous.
Besides being immoral, such behavior seemed to me dangerously anachronistic. As aerial combat became more and more massive, fast, and lethal, the long, tedious closing to gun range endangered my pilots’ lives. The future clearly lay in air-to-air missiles, which enabled pilots—at least theoretically—to launch from a distance and finish off the enemy in seconds. I was facing a discipline problem.
I gathered the pilots and reminded them of the situational requirements for a successful missile launch, and then announced that this was mandatory in our squadron. No missile could be launched unless the shot fell within the situational envelope: speed, range, angle off, etc. I warned them that if any of them launched a missile out of that envelope, I would wash him out of the squadron.
AND SO, ONE MONTH AFTER I decided to shelve all my plans to change the First, I found myself shaking it up. To the filtering out of a full third of the pilots, I added target-specification tactics and missile-launching limitations. It all fell on them within a very short period, and came as a tough order given today, to be applied tomorrow. It was clear to me that the pilots were feeling some pressure—and they said it to my face, that the squadron knew how to fight well enough before I took over. That was offensive but didn’t surprise me; I knew this squadron well for years. But now it was my call. We were in a war that was accelerating fast toward a peak, and I didn’t have time for a PR campaign. I couldn’t give them any time to adjust. Their criticism would just have to hang fire for now.
Only Ali remarked once, dryly, that I was gradually becoming like Shosh. My mother lived in Acre, a city on the northern coast, where she managed the national academy for merchant marine officers. She was famous for her high hand there.
HARD MEDICAL OPERATIONS don’t always pay off, but on July 10, 1970, I received a small reward for the hard work I had done on my squadron.
We were sent to an integrated battle of two squadrons. The goal was to catch some MiGs. A four-ship division of Super Mysteres from the Scorpions crossed the canal first and began turning for a bombing approach in Egypt. Another four-ship division, of Mirages from the First, followed the Super Mysteres at low level, discreetly.
I had set up a great team for that mission. My wingman was Moshe Hertz, a relatively young Mirage pilot; this was to be his baptism of fire. Menachem Sharon, my deputy, led the second pair, and his number two was Baharav. We went over again the procedures for target specification and the right way to launch missiles. Thirty kilometers inside Egypt, over the Manzala Marshes, we gained altitude and saw the Super Mysteres below us, racing east as planned. The pursuing MiGs came right to us; the battlefield was set.
Right away a four-ship division of MiGs came at us, fast and high. I divided the work between our two sections, and we were ready. I had two MiGs in front of me. Again I divided the work within my own section, and defined one MiG as the targ
et. I sent Hertz up to the “observation position” to gain altitude and be ready to replace me on our joint target while I came in hard under the MiG’s belly. And so, while I was still closing on that MiG, grunting under the high g-force, and beginning to pull my gunsight toward his tail, Hertz kept watch on our “bubble.”
“Vapor trails approaching fast from the west,” he announced.
I looked up and saw them, too, and I saw that Hertz was clean. The vapor trails were still remote, and both our MiGs flew before me. Hertz watched my six, and I had time to do my thing calmly. I fired, one MiG was hit and caught fire, and I passed near it, canopy to canopy. There I had the rare sight of the pilot in his white helmet looking aside, meeting my glance, and then tensing his body, lifting his hands, and pulling on the ejection handles. His ejection seat fired, flew out of his aircraft, and was lost behind me.
We changed target and jobs—I pulled up to the observation post, and Hertz passed in front of me on his way down to get the other MiG. Far lower, under us, Baharav and Sharon were closing their pincers on their pair of MiGs. Just then the radar controller called on the radio,
“Abort battle! Everybody turn east.”
“Abort battle,” in the IAF’s lexicon, required absolute obedience. When you heard those two words, you had to drop everything and return by the shortest route to our area.
I understood what motivated the controller. He had just seen the approaching enemy force on his radar screen. But my view was better than his. I saw those four white trails coming at us at top speed from the west, and I could estimate when they would reach us and in what direction we would meet them. Even though I didn’t see Menachem and Baharav with my own eyes, I heard their communication on the radio and knew where they were, and on which heading they were flying down there under me. It was clear they were together on their two MiGs, and defending themselves from any surprise. I had a complete grasp of time and space, and knew everything, including things I didn’t see physically. The circle we were drawing in the sky was leading us to a head-on pass with the new MiGs—a classic opening situation. On the other hand, the order to abort combat and turn east would have put the approaching MiGs right on our six. The right thing to do was to continue the same turn another full circle—from the west to the west—and this was exactly the time needed to finish the job on the MiGs we were dealing with.
Loud and Clear Page 23