So the same results achieved by 50 Phantom sorties would have been achieved by 95 sorties of the whole lot. This is 45 more sorties, and we still would lose 6 aircraft (according to simulations: 2 Phantoms and 4 others). The same? Not at all! The burden now is shared among 10 squadrons and 190 aircrews, rather than by 2 squadrons with 30 crews. The loss of half an aircraft per squadron is far easier to accept.
Had this been the case, the Phantom wouldn’t have been toppled and certainly not the air force. Had we met the Egyptian challenge of August 8 in this way, I don’t think the Israeli government would have lost its nerve afterwards.
WHEN I WAS PROCESSING the alternative above—this was done long after—I asked myself, “How could it happen that the IAF gave that super-critical mission to just 30 Phantoms, and 163 good fighter aircraft pilots were left on the sidelines, watching their friends get cut to pieces?” I have some assumptions of my own. Here is the first: the air force command didn’t see the War of Attrition as a decisive war, but as a linear series of operations, one following another (this fits in with the general perception in Israel of this forgotten war). Accordingly, our command took every mission singly, and gave it to their best problem solver, which in the case of the SAMs was certainly the Phantoms. A supporting factor in this error was the eagerness of the Phantoms’ squadron commanders to go. They wanted to prove themselves by having the Phantoms do everything.
This eagerness was very praiseworthy, but in this case it was checked neither by the high command, who were supposed to control the situation, nor by the squadron commanders, who were the guardians of their tools. In simple language, we had a command problem.
And another assumption: the process itself led to rapid loss of the psychological capability to attack SAMs by other squadrons. Immediately after January 1970, when the Phantoms took that mission away, the IAF’s groupthink didn’t allow employment of other aircraft against the SAMs. It was just Phantoms, a mission too dangerous for ordinary aircraft. In an odd perversion of logic, dogfights were treated differently. In them we were sent to fly freely everywhere. In this way 85 percent of our air force’s fighters became irrelevant for the most critical missions we had at the time. The protest of Lt. Col. Uri Even Nir, a Mirage squadron commander who stood up and asked, “What makes those fucking SAM sites so different from any other fucking target?” wasn’t even noticed.
And if we allow ourselves an open mind, why shouldn’t we get out of the aircraft box and ask what the IDF at large could have done with all its equipment—artillery and so forth—to help in this critical mission except by sitting on its ass and shaking its head gloomily while the Phantoms were crushed, alone.
THE CARPENTER DIDN’T USE his tools correctly. He had a shop full of machinery, but he put all the hard work on the new, shiny saw he just bought from America. The saw overheated and broke, and the whole shop stopped production. This, in my humble opinion, is the crux of the story of the Phantoms in the War of Attrition.
‡
SOMETIMES I THINK, “Who knows? Had we not been so timid, we might have won that war after all. The rain definitely was falling on both sides; just read the Egyptian reports. And I imagine that after the Egyptian arrogance of August 8, our government stands its ground; the IDF and the air force go out to battle with blood in their eyes, and we hit—all of us, Mirages, Skyhawks, Phantoms, artillery, commando units, and everything else—the SAMs. By then they were close to the Suez Canal and in easy reach, and we chop them up with all the tools at our disposal. We definitely could have done it; all we had to do was exert ourselves just a little more.
Egypt’s president Nasser died on September 28, 1970, just five weeks after we threw in our hand, and Egypt was immersed for some time in other things. Had we done as I indicated above, the War of Attrition would have ended in victory—not a strategic one, but at least a military victory. We would have been spared all the complications dumped on us by that failure.
But then, I remind myself that strategic wars are not won by tactical victories. And the deeper problem—the definition of our national priorities, policy, and strategy—could in no way have been solved by the poor carpenter and all his saws. The deeper problem was the business of the landlord, but unfortunately, the landlord was no better than his carpenter, and didn’t ask himself what was being produced in that shop, and to what end. Even after the cease-fire agreement, and during the three years that led up to the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the strategic question was never raised. We continued playing by ourselves in cloud cuckoo land, and the political and strategic reasons for our failure in the War of Attrition were repressed.
Only the carpenter, the air force, blamed himself. He explained everything in terms of his tactical failure against the SAM missiles, so he bought himself new saws, trained hard with them, and hoped for the best.
Chapter
16
Clarity
F-4 Phantom (Israeli nickname: “Hammer”): a U.S.-made, two-engine, two-seat jet fighter. The two crewmen sit in tandem, the pilot in front, and the navigator, officially called the WSO, weapons systems officer, behind. The aircraft was developed by McDonnell Douglas for a wide variety of missions. Its maximum speed is more than Mach 2, twice the speed of sound, attack radius 280 miles, and altitude ceiling more than 50,000 feet. It can carry bombs and air-to-ground missiles up to 7,257 kilograms. It can handle diverse attack profiles. For air-to-air, it has up to eight missiles, an onboard radar, and a six-barreled Vulcan cannon with 640 20mm shells.
The first four Phantoms landed in Israel on November 5, 1969. The Falcons squadron was established in Hatzor, followed by the Hammers squadron in Ramat David a few weeks laer. Other Phantom squadrons were established after the War of Attrition.
A YEAR PASSED AFTER THE END of the War of Attrition, and in August 1971, I was ordered to leave the Fighting First to establish a new Phantom squadron at Hatzerim Air Base. My departure from the First was not a happy one.
I left feeling that I hadn’t succeeded in my previous assignment the way I had hoped. Although I could take credit for the successful operational performance of the squadron during the last months of the War of Attrition, and few other noteworthy things in the following year, the fact was that I had been pushed out. This was never said openly, but I knew that Col. Rafi Harlev, Hatzor’s base commander after Yak, didn’t believe in me. This was not a pleasant feeling, but I suffered more from how relations developed between the squadron’s pilots and me.
In every squadron there is an “opposition,” but the one that faced me in the First consisted of most of the pilots. I knew they respected the operational leadership I gave the squadron. I had never had any difficulties with discipline. But my pilots showed no initiative; they just followed like zombies. My life became unpleasant, especially since this was the opposite of my expectations when I took command of the squadron a year before, at the height of the war. But a year later, after we had gone through a difficult war together and done our jobs well, my squadron became alienated from me. People were distant, dragging their feet. It was difficult to work in such an atmosphere.
NOT THAT I INTENDED to give up on this squadron. I thought long and concluded that it all emanated from the cuts in personnel I had made during the war.
“It’s clear,” I said to myself assuredly, “that my pilots have a grudge against me, since I’ve abused their buddies.” Then it was just a social problem, and the solution to such a problem should be found also at the social level, shouldn’t it? I started an active social program, and we had some good parties and great squadron trips. We took some time off, and the entire squadron went traveling around the Sinai. We spent nights among the dunes, around bonfires, singing with guitars. On camels’ backs we climbed the highest granite mountains, and dived on coral reefs in crystal waters. We held lectures, dancing parties; everybody had a great time, all to no avail. The gray atmosphere appeared again the next day. All this activity did wonders for the squadron’s mechanics and me, but it didn’t
help with my main problem: the pilots. Except for Menachem Sharon, loyal to a fault, gloomy faces still filled the briefing room, and no spark of initiative flared in the vacant faces before me.
I recalled a lesson Ran Pecker gave us in the BBN leadership course. “Esprit de corps derives from operational success,” he had told us, but somehow this didn’t help either. After the war, when we introduced the Dagger missile and had outstanding results in aerial combat, we continued to maintain the highest operational activity: we took over the reconnaissance mission and equipment from the Bats—who replaced her Mirages and became the third Phantom squadron—and began crisscrossing the Middle East, taking photographs. Wearing pressure suits like astronauts, we soared the heights and watched Egypt from altitudes of more than seventy thousand feet. Then we flew at low level to take pictures in all the countries surrounding Israel. We flew operations almost every day. And if this was not enough, when headquarters decided to disconnect the Mirage’s airborne radar and take us out of night readiness, our Fighting First didn’t give up the right to be operational twenty-four hours a day. After a serious recalibration of radars and pilots, we demanded a nighttime showdown against the new king of the mountain: the Phantoms. In a night of competition using our outdated French Cyrano radar, our Mirages managed to “hit” the same number of “enemy targets” as the American monsters. This was truly operational black magic, and while the other Mirages went to sleep at dusk, we proudly remained night fighters.
All along we did a lot of training. We initiated and organized “war days” and “activity nights,” where we attacked simulated enemy opponents in the air and on the ground. We trained new Mirage pilots, and our level of flying was high, with no accidents whatsoever. The squadron was in excellent condition. Still, I got no enthusiastic feedback from my pilots. What else could a squadron commander do? I began doubting myself.
I concluded that in everything involving flying I knew what I was doing, but on the command side something was missing. I felt stuck. I didn’t know how to command. I understood I had to go.
It was clear to me that I was to part with my beloved Mirage and the green lawns of Hatzor. This change was taking me down a new path in life. I knew that from now on I would not be dancing in the air anymore, but would be attacking ground targets with heavy bombs and struggling with SAM missile batteries. I knew Ali didn’t like it at all, though she said only a few words about it.
And I was leaving someone else.
“Goodbye, Hassan,” I thought. “Now we are done forever. I shall leave you in the capable hands of Gonen, Epstein, and their friends.”
Well, what did I know?
I DID ONE IMPORTANT THING in the last weeks at the Fighting First: some serious soul-searching.
I opened a new notebook and wrote on the cover: “Establishment of the Orange Tails.” The first pages were devoted to a severe self-criticism of my first tenure as squadron commander, where I had succeeded and where I had failed. For some deficiencies I could devise possible remedies, but on a few I just threw up my hands—they seemed to be faults rooted in my nature. It was my capacity for leadership that remained a mystery. So I decided to stop agonizing and moved on. This will take care of itself; time will tell.
Then came the list of decisions: against each line item I wrote what I was going to do differently in the Orange Tails. This process reminded me of my youth, when I had devised my “decisions for life”—always positive, all inside, etc.—but now these weren’t decisions of a young dreamer anymore. I was thirty. I had made mistakes in the past; I analyzed them and drew appropriate conclusions, and I was going to do something about them.
WHEN I LEFT THE PODIUM after I had passed the squadron’s flag to Maj. Avi Lanir, there were cheers and affectionate cries from the mechanics. As anticipated, the pilots stood silently. On my way out I stopped my car near a Mirage hangar. I climbed the ladder onto one of them, and the gentle fighter nodded its beak to me, as always. The Phantom that I was now learning to fly was cumbersome and heavy, and when I climbed aboard, it didn’t notice my coming at all. I patted the Mirage, and drove down to Hatzerim.
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE Orange Tails fighter squadron was difficult and full of problems.
First, there was a delay in the arrival of the aircraft we were supposed to get from America. The Americans were annoyed with us for some reason by then, and at one time they even announced that the contract for the Phantoms was canceled. The whole concept for establishing the Orange Tails was shaken, and my small team, which assembled every Thursday in a small office in Hatzerim, wondered whether our transfers from our units, and all the work we were doing, was going to be for nothing.
And the work was endless. We had to build a fighter squadron from scratch. There were the five of us, each coming from a different part of the air force—three pilots, one technical officer, and one nineteen-year-old female adjutant. No one had Phantom experience, so we started by deciding that each had to go out to see what people were doing in the other Phantom squadrons.
The stationing of the new squadron at Hatzerim was another problem. The Negev base lacked resources for our incoming personnel and their families. In the early 1970s Hatzerim was just five years old, a small, dusty place, limited in just about everything. The roads to the Negev desert were few and patched. There was nothing green or shady there, and the nearby town, Beer-Sheva, was just a border town, with a few narrow streets in which our women could find no shopping. The best restaurant was Romanian Maurice’s Chorba Soup Corner. As a substitute for theater and dancing you could wait in line at Sarussi’s slaughterhouse till the chicken you had selected for Friday’s dinner flew out of the door headless to dance its last in the yard among the rubble and the putrid puddles. No wonder almost nobody in the Phantom community wanted to join us.
Our main lack was in professional air and ground crews. Air force headquarters supplied us mainly with rookies who had just finished flight and technical school. Instantly, even without seeing them in Hatzerim, we directed them to the older Phantom squadrons for training on their jobs. We, of course, had no Phantoms or professional technicians at our disposal. Everybody was aware of our questionable future. Would we be a squadron or not? When I came to our sister Phantom squadrons to learn to fly the aircraft, I was met by standoffish looks. They thought, Who knows? He might use his time with us to steal our experienced crews. Similar suspicions followed the other members of my team. These were false suspicions. I didn’t try to lure anybody, and I strongly forbade any of my men even to allude to anything like that. I had no interest in anyone who didn’t ask to come on his own initiative. They should come and beg.
WE HAD NO IDEA WHEN—or if—we would get our promised Phantoms so that we could create a new squadron. And so, in some perverse exercise of logic, we worked even harder. We wanted to create facts. Our efforts bore the stamp of a challenge, as if everything would be created from inside us. We strove to be seen and heard, and turned our lives exemplary. We wrote everything and published lessons and conclusions immediately after every stage. People laughed at our openness, but the materials that accumulated began to create a clear agenda of the process of creating a squadron, and every decision we took we could base on preceding actions.
Our base had several subterranean hangars for the new aircraft. Those hangars had been standing empty for a long time, and the systems of infrastructure—fuel, electricity, communication—were out of order. Some were just big holes in the ground, their concrete floors covered by sand dunes brought in by the wind. Then we brought back to Hatzerim all our people who had found no place to study the Phantom, and established a company of renovators. They put on utilities and began cleaning, whitewashing, and pulling electric cables. When parts and supplies began to arrive, we opened a warehouse in one of the hangars and then a shop for treating Phantom components.
We got base housing for our squadron offices. It stood at the far rim of the base, past the runways. It was a lone, empty building, vacant perhaps
from the time of its construction, and the rooms were deserted and shabby. There was no telephone or electricity, so for the time being the virtual Orange Tails squadron continued to be run from a small office at base headquarters, near the offices of the rabbi and the welfare officer. In the whole air force there was no written material that could teach us how to build a squadron from scratch. No guru knew what was needed and from whom to get it, what should be done, and in which order to do it. The base commander, Col. Shaike Bareket, was very smart and didn’t try to interfere in the process. He would smoke a cigarette with us, listen for a while, and leave with a few words of encouragement. We had been thrown into the water to sink or swim, and it was no wonder that at times we felt alone.
THEN AIR FORCE HEADQUARTERS saw there was no end in sight and decided to give us two Phantoms from each squadron, to start us off with six aircraft. Then the opposition to the Orange Tails peaked. Everybody was short of aircraft, professional teams, equipment, munitions—and money. At staff meetings in Tel Aviv we were openly characterized as a “toy squadron” that was screwing things up for the other Phantom squadrons. Each time we were called to discuss another facet of the Orange Tails’ establishment, the participants would produce lists of their own needs, and somehow they always matched what we were to get. Staff officers began to vaccilate, and soon I felt a lack of assurance spreading. Orders to pass men or equipment to us were delayed.
Once, I entered the office of my former base commander in Hatzor, Colonel Harlev, and told him that in spite of a clear order from headquarters, we hadn’t gotten a shipment of Dagger missiles from his base. These missiles were needed to enable us to enter operational readiness.
“You’re not getting them,” he told me.
Loud and Clear Page 28