In this way the main battle doctrine of the Israeli Air Force collapsed the moment it started. The IAF broke into the Golan Heights in many formations, helter-skelter, and found itself skimming over Syrian armored columns that had advanced into the heights the night before. Their antiaircraft artillery shot the hell out of us.
WE, THE ORANGE TAILS, had a unique advantage, and not by luck this time. A few months before, when the planning of Operation Model was reaching its completion, we had stubbornly insisted on penetrating our allotted targets in the missiles array from the rear, not by frontal attack, as planned. I preferred a circuitous, indirect approach. My battle experience—even from my Mirage period—taught me to avoid crossing “hot” front lines at low level. Just like my Uncle Aronchik at El-Hamma in 1946, I believed that it was much easier and safer to cross into enemy territory somewhere else.
We argued about that approach, and I was ready to give up the advantages of a direct approach from the front with all the others. And indeed the Orange Tails’ attack routes, unlike everybody else’s, went around the missile arrays and penetrated from the rear.
THE SQUADRON TOOK OFF formation after formation, and I, after some management duty, happened to be the last leader from our squadron to take off, leading a three-ship section; we lacked a fourth ship. We entered the missile array from behind, as planned. As I had anticipated, nobody expected us to come in that way, and everything was quiet. No one shot at us, but we found nothing where our SAM-6 battery was supposed to be. The place was empty. The battery, like most of its kind, had deployed forward with the attacking Syrian Army, in the direction of the Hula Valley in Israel.
All I saw around were columns of armored infantry. I found myself in the heart of the Syrian ground forces. Groups of vehicles were driving west, and antiaircraft farted smoke balls shooting west. I flew over there, and the Syrian soldiers looked up at me; my target was nowhere to be seen, and I felt like an uninvited guest at a party. So I pulled up and made another, higher circle, searching, hoping to find that battery somehow.
This was the moment when the Baboons began paying off on that investment—I was not at a loss. In their trials they had analyzed techniques of tempting missile batteries and threatening them to make them launch a missile and expose themselves. It was totally clear to me that circling around in easy radar range and in the heart of the fire zone, my navigator and I were juicy bait, and I hoped the idea would work. And at last somebody nearby woke up and launched a missile at us. The missile’s fire and trail of smoke exposed his location. But I was not just bait but also a threat, carrying eleven half-ton high-explosive bombs. As soon as the missile took off—Erel saw it first and pointed it out—I rolled down and dived right on its source. My wingmen, who had seen the SAM the same time we did, pulled up from ground level and came in after me. And indeed when I put my gunsight there, I could see a group of vehicles comprising an SAM-6 battery there. They shot another, smaller missile at us. We needed no extra assurance that this was indeed our target. All three aircraft unloaded all our ordnance on the site, blowing it to kingdom come. Then we turned back and went home very satisfied with ourselves.
And only when we landed, overjoyed to see that all our pilots were back safely from the Golan, were we stunned to hear that all was not well. Not only had the air force missed most of the SAM batteries and bombed vacant land, it also had lost seven Phantoms in this operation. The Syrian SAM-6 array—except for the minute part that we probably took out—was essentially untouched. Operation Model, which was planned to deal with the fixed SAM batteries, failed miserably when it met the mobile array.
‡
WELL, I THOUGHT WHEN I understood what had happened, we’ll just refuel and rearm and go back to the Golan Heights and finish the job.” I had seen the Syrian army on their way to the Hula Valley, and I knew firsthand that the Galilee in northern Israel was in real danger. It was already afternoon, very little daylight was left, and we hadn’t accomplished anything yet. But then came the next incredible order: “Fly at top speed—TOP SPEED—to Egypt.”
“Egypt? What about the Golan Heights?”
“Forget the Golan Heights.”
“Do we go back to Operation Defy from the morning?”
No. This time this was not the continuation of Defy. Now it was to attack the bridges that the Egyptians were laying over the Suez Canal to bring armor into the Sinai.
“Bridges? What bridges?”
AND AGAIN, LADIES AND gentlemen, pardon me for the politically incorrect utterances you hear here. I was not in the high command at the time, and I know only second-hand about the pressures they were under. And I heard our leaders arguing later that they had been much firmer than it appeared from down below, and that perhaps we were so whipped only because we were just the knot at the end of the lash.
Well, maybe.
When I last visited Benny Peled, a year before his death in 2002, he tried to convince me that this indeed was the case. He even gave me a good show, reading from some document or other (it turned to be a high command protocol from that time) and playing various roles in bass and soprano voices, stopping at times to fix me with his angry lion’s eyes and draw some oxygen into his poor, emphysema-clogged lungs. Indeed, according to Benny’s show, some of the top brass had stepped up to the plate. But I still don’t think this was the whole truth. I don’t believe that the high command assessed the situation coolly, setting priorities for its limited aerial force. I find it hard to believe that only we, down at the squadron level, were confused. No. Mass hysteria had reigned on our side, from the top down.
The military problem was, of course, how to get out of it and make the enemy hysterical, the enemy that was continuing to penetrate the Golan Heights in the North and the Suez Canal in the South. This was not a simple thing, even if you had Phantoms. The enemy had foreseen our reactions, and we were paying a high price in casualties and matériel from all our running around trying to clean up spilled milk. This price was the result of our intellectual laziness during the years since the end of the War of Attrition, and no “but we were surprised” excuses can cover it up.
SO THERE WERE BRIDGES on the canal.
I didn’t know what a “military bridge” was and how it should be attacked. This was something that if somebody had thought about it before the war, we pilots never heard about it. Bridges were at Waterloo, over the Yarkon Brook in Tel Aviv, and over the River Kwai in the movies. If you read about the war in Vietnam, you would know that the Americans were continually bombing the Paul Doumer Bridge in Hanoi and had been unable to knock it down or even stop traffic over it. Rumors had it that the IDF was developing secret bridges to cross into Egypt, but this, of course, was not for pilots to know. My men and I knew nothing about bridges. And headquarters also had nothing clever to add.
But we did have Phantoms and iron bombs. So we loaded our aircraft with as many bombs as we could carry. It was reasonable to expect that bombs, if they hit a bridge, would do some damage. Now, since we didn’t accomplish anything with Operation Defy—that is, we hadn’t taken out the Egyptian SAMs—the Suez Canal was a hot spot for us. We had to enter the heart of the missiles’ killing zones to attack those bridges. Still, this was not the problem. Entering the SAM killing zone in Operations Defy and Model required exactly that. And if this time the target was going to be bridges instead of missile batteries, so what? After all, there always comes a moment in battle when the soldiers have to stand and take fire. My men showed no signs of being upset by this idea.
But the truly serious problem was again location: nobody knew where those bridges were. They could be anywhere along the 150 kilometers of the canal. How many bridges were there? Ten? A hundred? Nobody knew. We were left with the problem of how to enter the zone, search, find, and destroy however many bridges there were. And even their looks and size were not clear. Were they large or small? Yellow or green? Nobody knew anything. There was only one way: go there and find out for yourself.
And ev
en though the problem we faced was similar to that of finding a mobile SAM battery, the Baboons’ hunting solution for SAM-6 arrays was not relevant here. You can’t tempt a bridge to get it to show itself. And anyway, this was in the afternoon. No hunter would hunt birds with the sun in his eyes. But we had to attack those bridges now. There was nobody else to do it but the IAF’s Phantoms.
So we put together as many formations as we could and improvised some attack doctrine. And so, with Roy Manoff in my backseat, off we went to the Suez Canal. We left the rest of our formation to wait outside and came in alone at low level, avoiding radar detection, then pulled up above the band of water with the setting sun in our eyes. We circled over a section of the canal. You had to go over to the other side to see anything. We ignored the black flowers of ack-ack that bloomed around us and the smell of burning cordite that filled the cockpit. And so we scanned kilometer after kilometer but found nothing. We cleared out of the fire zone and flew back over the safe dunes of the Sinai, took a breath, and returned for a second look.
At last Hawkeye Manoff saw a bridge. Believe me, it was hard to see. I was stunned to discover that these bridges were nothing like the Golden Gate Bridge. These were just two steel ramps for vehicles set on submerged pontoons. They were very thin threads, like sewing lines on the black water, almost invisible, especially in the dim light and the hazy air just before dusk. But we found one.
And then we called the rest of our formation waiting outside—ready to replace us if we were shot down, and continue the mission. All three of us went in and bombed that bridge.
And more formations from our squadron acted as we had improvised just an hour before, and attacked nearby. Perhaps we disrupted something or scared the Egyptians down there. There were other formations from our sister squadrons operating in other sections of the canal, but I don’t know how they found their targets and made their attacks.
And this time it was dumb luck that the Orange Tails ended this mission without losses. October 7, the second day of the war, ended with a few night sorties, and some bombs dropped in the dark in the general area of the canal. Perhaps they interfered with the Egyptians resting on their laurels.
After this day ended we gathered in the briefing room to find out what happened to us during this long day. Many eyes were fixed on me, so I tried to move slowly and speak little and in a low, manly voice, so they could all see that everything was okay—just another one of those wars.
I was hiding from them what I knew, that the command structure above us had collapsed.
THE TERRIFYING AND WORRYING thing in those first days of the war from my point of view as the commander of a fighting field unit was neither the enemy nor the missiles. For these I was prepared. Also, the madness didn’t terrify me. I could handle the toilet paper that came rolling out of the teleprinter, and deal with the craziness of “load/unload ordnance” that harassed my mechanics during the long night. And even racing from one front to the other didn’t scare the interceptor pilot in me. Ours was a superb fighter squadron (that day I began to realize how good it was) and was built to handle such things. We knew how to improvise, and when all the rules were thrown in the trashcan and procedures torn up, the Orange Tails found ways to survive in the heart of danger and do our jobs.
The terrible thing was the loss of trust in my superior officers. I couldn’t grasp what had happened to them—they seemed to know nothing, their voices were hysterical, their instructions incoherent. They didn’t listen to feedback from below and made the same mistakes over and over. The ground I stood on was crumbling under my feet, and I didn’t know what tomorrow would bring.
This was like an earthquake for me. I hadn’t the slightest idea of what was going on in Tel Aviv in those days, no notion of the tumult and loss of collegiality that reigned in the high command of the Israeli Air Force. I didn’t know about the hysterical running around in the poisonous atmosphere of cigarette smoke inside an underground bunker, of the pale faces of senior staff when every hour brought news of the collapse of another part of the front—the gains of Syrian armor in the Golan Heights and Egyptian infantry crossing the Suez Canal into the Sinai Desert, about the fall of encircled positions and the collapse of their own plans and expectations. I knew nothing about the shouting and the arguments.
That day had shaken something in me. From that moment until the middle of the war I suffered from a chill up my spine; I felt alone and the entire world around me full of simmering kettles, not all of them enemy-made. I felt alone in battle.
All I had was the Orange Tails.
Chapter
19
Room for Decision
THE MISSION OF THE ORANGE TAILS in the Yom Kippur War was long and complicated and lasted nineteen days and nights. There were 760 battle sorties. This work was done by a rather small group of pilots (one in five were cadets training on the Phantom) and even fewer navigators, and maintained thanks to a couple of hundred mechanics, most of them reservists.
Of the two dozen Phantoms we had when the war broke out, four were lost, and three others were seriously damaged and grounded. Many others were damaged, some several times, but were fixed and returned to fly and fight. Three used Phantoms arrived during the war from America, were absorbed into our fleet, and replaced lost aircraft. The squadron attacked enemy airfields and SAM batteries in Egypt and Syria, and gave our ground forces close air support. We shot down twenty-two enemy fighters and seven helicopters.
We all got to the end, some a bit battered, with two of us in the hospital.
It seems I was not alone.
As soon as war broke out, like an animal sensing danger, the Orange Tails woke up and began thinking and functioning. As if by themselves, original fighting techniques grew in the Orange Tails. Some new ideas were extremely important, and got funny names such as High Society, or Kettles, or Living Map.
High Society rose on its own out of the midlevel of the squadron. These were the more prominent leaders—pilots and navigators. They were involved in everything. Their voice was heard in the briefing room, in the ops room, in my office. These seven or eight guys—formerly our squadron’s loyal opposition—gathered around me, and took the weight with me and my officers. They backed us and added to our collective brainpower.
This might sound like a trivial thing, but what else do you expect soldiers to do in war, if not give their commanders their hearts, brains, and loyalty? Maybe, maybe not. I know of other cases. But in our case, my High Society led and the squadron followed. It showed faith in me and in itself, and suddenly I could do anything, make any decision, initiate and demand any kind of effort, and take any risk, and found all my pilots and mechanics behind me. As a result the squadron functioned beautifully. We only got better.
But there was something else, something almost spiritual: the Orange Tails gave me something I never asked for and wasn’t expecting. Since its inception all I wanted from the Orange Tails were clarity and efficiency. And suddenly, in the hardest moments of that war, I found the men themselves. I was like Saul, who looked for jackasses and found a crown.
Everything was the opposite of what I had experienced in the Fighting First; back then I wooed the men, tried to pull them with me, and the squadron was lost. But in the Orange Tails, where I had given up on PR and was interested only in the core mission—the operations—it all came to me on its own, and the squadron pushed ahead, with me in the front.
In the beginning I didn’t expect this boost, this strong approval I received from my men. I was suspicious, fearing to enjoy it. I asked myself, “How did I get so popular suddenly?” I looked to be proven wrong, to find out that this was just a passing fad. But nothing went wrong.
ONE EVENT FROM THAT WAR still cries out for closure. The story is not new, but for the first time ever, I’ll tell what really happened.
It happened on October 9, the fourth day of the war. We came back to land at dawn after attacking the Egyptian airfield Kutmiya, halfway between Cairo and the Gulf of
Suez. On the way back Gilutz and Yaari’s Phantom was hit, caught fire, and went down in the Red Sea. After some time the two injured pilots were rescued, taken to the hospital, and the Red Sea gave up two points to me. When we landed after Kutmiya, a new mission was waiting for us: to attack Syrian headquarters in the center of Damascus.
Our eight-ship formation was supposed to hit the target after another eight ships from the Bats. The time for preparation was short, as usual, but it was necessary to prepare well—the air defense array around Damascus was formidable. Ten missile batteries surrounded the city, and flying in there at high altitude was totally out of question. But we were lucky to get an excellent flight plan to the target. Our route passed over Lebanon, over mountainous and forested areas, and the final approach was between mountains. In this way we could fly down the last slope into Damascus very low, under the missile radars. Then we would burst out of the wadi and appear over them all of a sudden, taking the antiaircraft batteries by surprise. A quick dive on the target, and then out over the mountains again.
I was well acquainted with the Damascus area. In the last year before the war I had led several sorties into the region. We attacked terrorist camps there, successfully eliminated the missile battery at Sheikh Maskin, and more. And in this war, too, I had already managed to roam around the city once or twice. I had a feel for the area. And my navigator for this mission, Kamay, could be trusted completely. So I gave my crews a short briefing, emphasizing the importance of flying low, right until the last moment.
“Use the land for protection,” I told them seriously, as I had told Khetz long ago. And then I had another order. “Aim carefully this time. This is a city, not a military base. Don’t scatter your hits!”
WE CROSSED OVER THE BEACH at Ashkelon and went out to sea. The morning was blue and beautiful, and our eight-ship formation coasted north at medium speed in total radio silence. Going deeper into the Mediterranean, the Israeli coast vanished behind us and we cruised calmly, alone over the high seas. Once in a while we passed a lonely ship. And when the clock and the navigation computer came to agree in some nowhere between sea and sky, Kamay turned me southeast, in the direction of Lebanon. The second element of our formation, four ships led by Gordon, slid back into line astern, and the heavy Phantoms were moving to the target in two elements, one after another, Ascot and Dubek.
Loud and Clear Page 34