Loud and Clear

by Iftach Spector

  I WAS THE TRAINEE WHO had learned the most in the BBN course for advanced leadership. The lectures and the visits, Ran Pecker–style, and especially the intellectual leadership I had to supply for those smart, rebellious Baboons, started new thought processes inside me.

  I took a new, clean notebook and wrote on its cover, “Thoughts about the air force.” On the first page I drew a simple table, like a chessboard, and I labeled the X and Y axes respectively “missions” and “tools.” The squares soon filled themselves in, and I saw it was out of balance. I was surprised to find some of the squares empty. The significance was that some missions had no tools, and some tools had no missions. I began thinking about it, asking myself new questions.

  I was changing fast. Without asking, I got out of the circle of “shouters” and “being shouted at” of my friend Goldie and found myself in no-man’s-land. From just a squadron commander, a lieutenant colonel heading a battalion, I turned into an amphibian, a fighter pilot slouching about with the thoughts and worries of a general officer.

  I told Ali all this and she, laughing, cited Miguel de Cervantes. I wasn’t surprised. Dvorah, my mother from the Galilee, used to call me “Don Quixote.”

  Chapter

  18

  Model

  The Yom Kippur War was initiated by Egypt and Syria on Yom Kippur, October 6, 1973, at 2:00 P.M. Almost all Arab states were in this war, including Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Algeria, Morocco, Libya, and Kuwait, and for the first time the Arab world used oil as a financial weapon. At the end of the war there was danger of a confrontation between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.

  The war took Israel totally by surprise. A total of 2,569 Israeli soldiers were killed, 7,500 wounded, and 301 taken prisoner. The war shocked Israel’s citizens, caught the IDF off balance, and left a deep scar on many souls.

  THE OFFICIAL HISTORY says that this war caught us by surprise. Some say that if we hadn’t been surprised, the air force would have attacked first, as in the Six-Day War, and all would have been different.

  I don’t think so.

  Because when the sirens wailed on Saturday morning, October 6, 1973, at 6:30 a.m., I was seated with the other unit commanders in the office of our new base commander, Colonel Shumi. We had just gone over our preparations for war and only lacked accurate knowledge of when it was going to start. This was the same as in the Fighting First six years before. The base was ready, we had enough people standing by and ready for action, and we had plenty of time: the war began at two o’clock in the afternoon, so we still had a full seven and a half hours.

  Thus when the wailing of the sirens began, Shumi nodded to us and said, “That’s it—to your squadrons.” I started my car and drove very slowly to the Orange Tails. There was no need to race. In my Phantom squadron, all the aircraft were armed and ready for war, according to orders, my readiness crews standing by. The squadron was ready and briefed for the first action. So I drove slowly. And I had another reason: I wanted to show the base personnel, who were peering out their doors in their pajamas, rubbing their eyes on a holiday morning, that the sky had not fallen, that everything was okay. I knew I was their barometer, and I wanted everybody to know that as far as I was concerned, we could start anytime.

  I understand that with Israel’s reserve forces as a whole the situation was totally different. For the hundreds of thousands of citizen soldiers who slept at home, or were praying in the synagogues on this holiest day of the year, during which no one goes anywhere and the streets are literally empty, the sound of sirens came as a shock. But as far as I was concerned—and from what I learned since, for the air force and the IDF high command, this war came as no surprise. Only the soldiers who were not prepared by their officers were surprised.

  NO SURPRISE, BUT WHAT I found on arrival at my squadron was a big mess. All the telephones were ringing, and every call brought contradicting orders, do this and then… no, never mind, do that. All our people were trying to figure out the orders and carry them out on the double. At noon the war still hadn’t started. We made an all-out effort to complete the last munitions changes on all the aircraft, and hurriedly prepared maps and plans for different targets. At the same time, a flood of reservists was pouring in. They filled the aircraft hangars and the corridors of the squadron building, needing rations, mattresses, blankets, and a place to store their gear. They needed to be given jobs. They needed officers to tell them what to do. I felt I was going to lose my focus.

  I called my deputies, Egozi and Krieger, my technical officers, Mike and Jimmy, and the adjutant, Shemer, and told them, “Don’t bother me with administrative stuff anymore. I have to try and see the main thing.”

  And Jimmy asked, “What about the the mechanics?” He knew the mechanics were the apple of my eye. I answered,

  “Their problems don’t interest me anymore. As far as I am concerned they can burn to ash, just let them get the aircraft ready on time.” Now it was clear. There were no more questions.

  AND THEN, IN EARLY AFTERNOON, the balloon went up.

  Shumi, our base commander, received a telephone call. We were in his office. He turned to us, his voice shrill, “Enemy aircraft approaching the base! Get the Orange Tails—everybody—airborne!”

  I drove back rapidly to my squadron and shouted down the empty corridor, “All pilots scramble, fast!”

  I grabbed my flight gear, found a navigator, and we raced to the next hangar. All the other pilots were running ahead of us, so I jumped into the first empty aircraft I found—it was sitting there with a full load of bombs—and started its engines. In all the other hangars other aircraft roared to life, all carrying tons of bombs. Somebody was already taxiing out and passed in front of me, blasting the whole hangar with his heavy jet exhaust on his way to the runway. Objects flew all around us.

  I began opening my throttles to go after him, intending to take off fast and once in the air to take command and organize whomever I might find into a defense of the base against the incoming MiGs. We still had to figure out where to jettison those dozens of tons of bombs hanging from our bellies.

  Then I got a call on the radio.

  “Spector, where are you?”

  In the IAF we do not use our real names on the radio, just call signs. But in all the confusion, nobody had gotten a call sign. The thundering of the first takeoffs was deafening even through the helmet, and I might not have heard this call hadn’t that voice called my name again and again. “Spector!” and one more time: “Iftach Spector!”

  “Spector here,” I finally answered. “I am in hangar five, on my way out.”

  “Iftach, listen to me,” continued the voice, and now I recognized it was my second-in-command, Shlomo Egozi. “Hold it for a moment. As you were! There is no attack right now.”

  “What?”

  “Let me get some order here!” He was talking fast, but his voice was firm and clear. “Gilutz has already taken off leading a section; they’ll circle the base. That’s enough defenses for now. Stand by with your engines running; be ready to scramble at any moment. Your call sign is Ascot. I’ll get you a four-ship section in a minute.”

  I said, “Okay, take it.” And immediately a series of calls began, identifying the pilots in the aircraft one after another.

  “Krieger here, started up, with Oren.”

  “Gordon here.”

  “Goren.”

  “Kamay here.” the navigator talked for the pilot in his front cockpit, who hadn’t put his helmet on yet.

  And even a voice of one of the “chicks,” the students in the transition course to the Phantom, broke into the radio, “Gino here, standing by.”

  I almost laughed aloud.

  Egozi continued to manage things, fast and serious and very accurately, selecting formation leaders, assembling formations.

  “Gino, exit your aircraft and return to the building. Panay is on the way to replace you in the cockpit.”

  “Roger.” I felt his disappointm
ent.

  I knew we were in good hands, but I was standing in my stirrups. The MiGs were out there on the way, hanging above our base like clouds full of hail, and I worried that too much management might delay our defense and fuck us up.

  “Ascot, how do you read?”

  “Five,” I answered for my whole four-ship formation he had collected for me.

  “Ascot, stand by with your engines running. Every one of you, tell the mechanics around him to unload the bombs off his aircraft, fast.” Every aircraft was loaded with some four tons of bombs.

  “Take note: fuses are in,” I protested. When a bomb is fused it is dangerous; you don’t touch it.

  “Copy that. Do as I said.” I realized that Egozi knew something about authority and responsibility, too.

  “Roger, will comply.”

  The mechanics around me reacted in disbelief to the signals I gave them, then were convinced and came with their yellow carts and got under the big aircraft’s belly. Hard knocks were heard, and the Phantom hopped when four tons of bombs, with fuses, slipped off.

  “Ascot, when you are clean, taxi out to the runway. You will replace the airborne flight.”

  THE ATTACK ON THE BASE never happened. After some time on the runway we were sent back to the hangars, and gave the aircraft back to the mechanics to arm them again with the same bombs. Egozi had prevented us from throwing away huge loads of fused bombs in the expanse of the Negev or into the sea, together with the rare and expensive weapons pylons. Within a short time the Orange Tails was ready and armed again, and I knew I had a young battle commander under me.

  But even though Hatzerim hadn’t been attacked, the war had really started.

  The Egyptians and the Syrians attacked in force, large, armored columns moving toward the Suez Canal in the South and into the Golan Heights in the North. I took command in the operations room, and the squadron began scrambling on various missions. By sunset we began to get some startling reports. Egozi and Duby caught an aerial convoy of Egyptian helicopters full of commandos crossing into the Sinai and shot down six of them. I was happy to learn that my young partner Roy Manoff had been Egozi’s navigator, and with five aircraft shot down, was now officially an ace. An even more fantastic item came from the Far South. A section from our squadron, led by Captain Nahumi, defending the Ophir airfield in the southern tip of Sinai against aerial attack, had shot down seven Egyptian MiGs.

  ‡

  DARKNESS FELL AT HATZERIM, and all our aircraft returned safely. After the noon madness, that good news instilled a feeling that we had gotten off on the right foot in the war. But it was too early to celebrate.

  After the daily debriefing, Egozi sent the pilots to get some sleep and conserve their strength for the next day. We decided to keep all of them in the squadron building, to have them close by. The administration of Egozi and Shemer was excellent: mattresses and blankets were spread in every office, and the squadron’s operations clerks wrote down who slept where and when. That enabled us to dispense with the loudspeaker, and if somebody was needed they would wake him quietly without disturbing all the others. We all stayed in the squadron building; in fact, for the next three weeks, until the end of the war, that’s where we lived. Similarly, the mechanics lived, ate, and slept in the subterranean hangars, by their aircraft. This arrangement prevented any physical or mental distraction. Everybody in the squadron had only one thing on his mind: the war.

  AFTER EVERYBODY HIT the mattresses, the managing crew remained in the operations room. We looked at each other. We had only a very partial picture of what was happening, but we knew well that our squadron’s successes were just local affairs, just defensive reactions. We got the news that the Egyptians and the Syrians were attacking from the south and the north, and because the defending Israeli units had only skeleton personnel on the line because of the Yom Kippur holiday, they probably had already crushed them. It was clear that defense alone was not going to get us to victory. The big game had just started, and things were going to change. We waited for orders for the morning attack so we could arm our aircraft accordingly, draw the required maps, and prepare our briefings.

  But that night was different from what we expected. Beginning at midnight, orders began to arrive, and the craziness of the previous day was repeated: as we were figuring out the first order, and had awakened all our men to get ready, the telephone rang again.

  “Stop! The mission has changed.” We stopped the mechanics and ordered them to strip and then rearm all the aircraft with new ordnance, and the navigators had gone to prepare their maps, when the teleprinter clattered and out came a new roll of crap. Do it all over again—truck new weapons from the stores, undress and rearm the aircraft—the navigators threw their maps away and spread new, clean ones on the tables. The intelligence officer repacked his target files and tore open new envelopes from the safe. The duty officer erased the boards and began to draw new briefing instructions on them—and the telephone rang again.

  At three o’clock in the morning, with all the squadron red-eyed and frazzled, I decided this had to end. I instructed Jimmy to load all the aircraft with simple iron bombs, eleven half-ton pieces on each, and that was that. No matter what target we were going to attack on the morning’s first sortie, this was what we were going to use. I sent my pilots and navigators to get some sleep. They were left with only one hour of sleep, and one more hour to plan and draw maps for whatever mission we got before dawn. I had no intention of updating the chain of command about my decision.

  And so we learned how this nocturnal war had to be fought. On subsequent nights we let our people sleep. The duty officers in the ops room went through the stream of orders flowing in, from which they gleaned some idea of what was on their minds at high command. Then they took notes and filed them. We took seriously only orders that came in after three o’clock in the morning. This method required our technical and operational staffs to be very efficient; they had to prepare anything—everything—within two hours, come what may.

  I was not worried; the Orange Tails knew their business.

  WHEN DAWN NEARED ON October 7, the second day of the war, air force command finally knew what it wanted to do today. They decided to start with Operation Defy and eliminate the Egyptian array of SAM batteries along the Suez Canal. This was the right thing to do to attain air superiority there and attack the Egyptian army, which was crossing the canal and encircling our positions on the east bank.

  Operation Defy required the full involvement of the whole air force for a day or two. We rolled up our sleeves and went out to do our part in the first sortie. At first light I took off, leading twelve Phantoms, and we crossed into Egypt and attacked Beni-Suweif, a fighter airfield south of Cairo. This was part of the necessary preparations before attacking the missiles. The MiGs had to be grounded so they wouldn’t interfere with Defy. We hit the airfield’s runways hard, and the first job of the day was done as planned. Then we went home, ready for a fast turnaround for the real thing, to begin knocking out the SAMs waiting for us at the canal.

  As we landed, more madness: Defy was canceled.

  “Everybody take off on Operation Model!”

  Model was a different operation in the opposite direction—attacking SAMs in Syria. This time there was no preparation, just hysteria.

  “Hurry up, hurry up, we have to knock out the Syrian missiles as soon as possible!”

  I ADMIT THAT WORDS SUCH AS “madness” and “hysteria,” which I use above to describe the first days of the Yom Kippur War, offend my ears. A lot of time has passed since then, and as it happens after every disaster, we all have internalized some formulation of what happened. The past has rearranged itself by itself; the uncertainty is gone. Today there is a view of the whole situation, and there is an explanation for everything that took place then. True, one still remembers even after thirty years that it was hard, but one is not supposed to exaggerate in words and tone; it’s not proper, not respectable.

  Well, believe me
that I am not writing hysterically now, just as the sailors from Pearl Harbor and the firemen from the Twin Towers were not hysterical when they were writing their memoirs. But in the war itself, in our squadron’s operations room in Hatzerim, we had no view of the whole. We saw the world through a straw, and it broke on us in a series of surprises. When I landed back from Beni-Suweif on the morning of October 7, no one told me that Gen. Moshe Dayan was saying to the air force commander, “Benny, the Third Temple is falling.” (A reference to the First Temple, destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, and the Second Temple, by the Romans). I didn’t hear the tone, nor understand the reason for Benny’s spontaneous reaction to throw whole the air force at the Golan Heights.

  But when I saw how a well-organized operation to attack missiles in Egypt turned into everyone running amock to attack missiles in Syria, I had doubts about the stability of my world.

  ‡

  NOTHING IN THAT FLIGHT resembled anything I had seen before.

  The missile attack operazia that I had been so pressed to agree to in its totality was thrown to the winds once it was really needed. What was taking place now was a catch-as-catch-can kind of flight. The clock was ticking, so there was no time for briefing. Everybody grabbed an envelope from the safe and ran to his plane while the mechanics were still arming it, and tore his envelope open to study the procedures and his target while being strapped in the cockpit. And once in the air, the pilots spread the maps on their knees, trying to find their way while maneuvering to avoid other aircraft racing north.