by Barry Sadler
"Here, at Abu Agheila," his finger stabbed the map not far from the Israel Egypt border, “is the enormous complex of fortifications that commands the central axis through the Sinai. Our General Sharon is moving on it now with Task Force Two.
"Meanwhile our General Yoffe with Task Force Three is heading across the trackless sand dunes between Al 'Arish and Abu Agheila to cut off any reinforcement of Al 'Arish from that direction. The Egyptians have left this waterless wasteland undefended because they consider it impassable. And, who knows, they may be right. If my good friend Avraham Yoffe makes it, he will set up a blocking position at Bir al Lahtan."
Casca looked at the enormous area of the Arab territories, the small slice that was Israel, and the minuscule portion of the Gaza Strip that they had occupied. "Well" he shrugged "the day is young yet."
"Yes," the colonel replied, "we should be on the outskirts of Al 'Arish by nightfall." The cheerful grin again lit up his young face. "Fortunately we Israelis have learned to be specialists in night action our army, the Zahal, grew out of the Haganahir and the Night Squads with which we terrorized Palestinian villages during the twenties and thirties. They were developed and trained by a British officer, Orde Wingate, and he did a damned good job."
Casca nodded. "I've had a few fights in the dark myself."
Within the hour Casca's company was on the move. His casualties had been replaced again, and he now had under his command four platoons of foot soldiers and a heavy weapon squad well equipped with machine guns and mortars.
While Samal Harry Russell drove, Samal Tommy Moynihan sat in the rear seat twiddling the dial of his transistor radio and picking up reports of the war from Radio Cairo, the BBC, Israel Radio, Voice of America, and Radio Jordan.
Some of the reports conflicted, but, piecing together the various viewpoints it seemed that Syrian planes had attacked a Haifa oil refinery and an airfield at Megiddo. The Jordanian Air Force had bombed an Israeli airfield. In retaliation the Israeli Air Force, which seemed to be everywhere except where Moynihan would have wished – overhead – had attacked the main Syrian air base near the capital city of Damascus, and the biggest of Jordan's airbases. In both cases, as in the earlier attacks on Egypt, the Israeli fliers had surprised the Arab air forces on the ground and wreaked near total destruction.
But at Al 'Arish there was to be no element of surprise. The Egyptian 20th Palestinian Division had lost fifteen hundred men and countless thousands were wounded in the battle for Rafah on the Gaza Strip. Al 'Arish would be the first battle in the strategically vital Sinai, and the Egyptians were determined not to lose it. They were well prepared, well warned, and ready and waiting when the Israeli vanguard came upon the post's outer fortifications as the sun was setting.
"Oh, b'Jazus," Harry Russell groaned from behind the wheel as Casca's jeep topped the last rise, "this is going to be even worse than I thought."
"Yeah," Casca grunted, "the sun is sure not going to help us too much."
The great, golden orb was glaring directly into the windshield so that they could scarcely see their objective. The Arabs, on the other hand, had the sun at their backs, spotlighting and almost blinding their attackers while they blended into long shadows.
Israeli ambulances were rushing back and forth to where sappers were at work, trying to detonate pathways through the minefields. From the distance Arab gunners were having a field day, pouring heavy fire onto the sappers, who were suffering enormous casualties.
The Israeli artillery was searching for the Egyptian guns, but were probing blind without recon information from aircraft. Now fresh Arab fire opened up, reaching for where Casca and the rest of Colonel Weintraub's regiment had arrived in sight. To be sure, the shells were all falling short, but the Egyptian gunners would soon get that right. Besides, the Israelis had to advance into their guns anyway.
"Where's our fucking air cover?" Moynihan fumed. "Feels just like 'fourteen," Casca muttered, almost to himself, "when we didn't have any planes."
"I thought you were older than me," Harry Russell said, chuckling, "but I didn't think you were that old."
Casca bit his tongue. Yes, he had been thinking of his time in the Great War when the only aircraft had been the rare reconnaissance patrols. Got to watch that.
Suddenly the war was updated as a squadron of French built Vautour bombers appeared out of the Israeli sky. Flying almost on the ground, they swooped on the Egyptian guns and took the heat off the sappers.
A flight of Mystere fighters screamed overhead, coming in, it seemed, just feet off the ground, avoiding all possible detection by the Egyptians. The Arabs heard the engines and the cannon of the Mysteres at about the same time, and the effect was devastating and demoralizing.
One moment the Arabs had the field to themselves, plastering the Israeli sappers at will and laying down a barrage of discouragement for Casca's men. One moment more, and they were cowering amongst the wreckage of their guns.
"Well," came the voice of Moynihan in the back of the jeep, "things is improving a bit in the air anyway."
"But where is the Egyptian Air Force?" demanded a puzzled Harry Russell.
"Retired hurt is what we call it in Rugby," said Moynihan.
"Sure, but they can't be that bad hurt can they?"
The Vautours came back in another pass, unloading another rain of death on the Arab gunners. The sappers made good use of the respite, their practiced eyes now discerning the inevitable pattern in the distribution of the mines. All mine layers strove to avoid any regularity, and the harder they tried the more clearly the pattern showed once sufficient mines were detected.
From his vantage point atop a twenty foot dune, Casca saw the pattern, too, and discerned the safe, or anyway half safe, track through the minefields. "Let's go," he said without thinking about it further. "The sooner we get there the sooner we're through with it.”
Billy Glennon seemed fired by the same idea and had his foot hard down on the accelerator almost before Casca finished speaking. The trucks charged forward to keep pace behind Casca's jeep.
"Any idea where you're going?" Casca shouted to Billy. Glennon shot him a quick, worried glance, then returned his attention to what the sappers had accomplished ahead of them.
"I thought I saw the safe line," Billy said, a tinge of uncertainty in his voice. "Didn't ye?"
Casca laughed and hoped his voice sounded confident. "Yeah, we're going right – I hope."
But had his seat in the jeep permitted it, Casca would have been kicking himself in the butt.
"Let's go," was easy enough to say. If you happened to be a major leading a company of combat experienced, disciplined troops, it was just as sure that they would follow. But where the hell were they going? And what were they going to do when they got there?
Casca shrugged off the thought. From the first he had never really understood too well what he was doing as he went into battle, and two thousand years of experience had not enlightened him.
"Let's go. Let's go. Let's go." His repeated shout was taken up by everybody in the jeep, and then by all of the others.
There was a tremendous explosion behind them as one of Casca's drivers strayed a few yards from Billy's lead and encountered a mine.
"Keep going," Casca shouted, looking back.
The disaster was already under control. The following truck had stopped and its troops were already pulling wounded from the wreckage. Two ambulances were racing for the position. The other trucks had deviated gingerly in single file to avoid the wreck, and were now back on the tail of Casca's jeep and catching up fast.
Farther back Casca saw tanks, APCs, and trucks full of infantry rushing to follow his lead. Colonel Weintraub's red helmet was in the lead armored car.
Glennon twisted for a moment in his seat as he heard a tank find another mine.
"One thing," he gritted between clenched teeth, "every one we find is one less to look for."
"Yeah." Casca tried to laugh but it didn't quite work. He h
ad lost quite a few men. He wasn't going to think about who they might have been or how close they were to him. Whoever they were they were now lying in assorted bleeding pieces behind him, and, who knew, maybe this was a half assed maneuver anyway.
A junior field officer with a few infantry in open trucks and jeeps leading an armored attack on an extremely well protected fortress was not just unconventional, it might well prove suicidal. But they were well and truly committed now.
What the maneuver had achieved was an astonishing turn of speed. They were now passing the last of the sappers and they left the minefield for the home ground of the defenders. Casca signaled and his trucks fanned out to either side of the jeep as Billy Glennon increased speed. Some way behind Casca's company came Colonel Weintraub's armored car, and he too was signaling to his infantry trucks to move up ahead of the armor.
Casca offered a little prayer to Mars. He knew well that the very worst ideas could be just as contagious as the best ones. History was littered with graveyards to prove it with names like Balaclava, Gallipoli, Stalingrad, Arnhem, and he had personally experienced several of them.
They were now close to some Egyptian artillery and machine gun emplacements. The Vautours' bombs and the Mysteres' cannon had turned these bunkers to ruins in a few brief seconds. But the destruction had not been total. Casca could see men running about trying to haul guns back into firing positions.
He looked over his shoulder. They had far outdistanced the rest of the Israeli attack. Casca's company was out on its own.
Farther back the other trucks full of infantry were fanning out across the desert, and, way back were the slow moving armored vehicles. The Red colonel's armored car, its engine no doubt close to disintegration, was keeping pace with the second wave of infantry trucks.
As he watched, Casca saw the blond head as Weintraub snatched off his red helmet and waved it in an unmistakable signal. "Let's go," Casca yelled, and again his troops took up the shout.
They raced forward, two hundred throats shouting: "Let's go. Let's go. Let's go."
They were still shouting as the Egyptian guns opened up and Casca brought the vehicles to a halt. Leaping from the jeep before it stopped, he ran forward, shouting into the guns, two hundred screaming devils with him, all yelling in a frenzy: "Let's go! Let's go! Let's go!"
The sun was now a blazing disc on the edge of the desert. The Arabs were trying to collect themselves in the shadows, blundering about in the half dark amidst the broken guns and bodies, twisted steel and concrete. To their front, lit blood red by the setting sun, came a host of screaming crazies armed with nothing but small assault rifles, but getting closer, terrifyingly closer, every second.
And behind these crazies there now were dozens of other trucks spilling hundreds more infantry onto the sand and they were all racing forward screaming.
And, farther back still, outlined against the darkening sky, the whole horizon was spread with the red silhouettes of Israeli tanks.
And, in the middle ground was a racing armored car, turret open, a blond head and red helmet waving like a battle flag.
It was too much.
In fact, the Arab machine guns were killing a lot of Casca's men, and, in cooler hands, might have killed all of them. But, in the bunkers, among the groans of the dying, the screams of the wounded, the stench of blood and piss and shit and cordite and petrol, there were no cool heads. Every Egyptian had alongside him a corpse or a moaning, dying comrade. And from out of the desert more death was coming in an endless, blood red wave.
A few Arabs had second thoughts about their Jihad, and their hands faltered at the guns. Their rate of fire slackened. They couldn't see the numbers of the attackers who fell. The sun only lit the ones on their feet, getting closer and closer, and now pouring fire into the bunkers.
As the first of the attackers' bullets took effect, the defenders stopped firing. They stood and backed away from their smoking weapons and the screaming remains of their friends. Then more of them were falling to the hail of fire from Casca's men, and the Arabs broke and ran.
As in most armies, Egyptians officers led from the rear, only young boy subalterns being with the troops in the first line of fire.
Subaltern, NCO, or private, by now all the heroes were dead, and the wave of terrified humanity that was pouring back out of the gun emplacements was through with any idea of heroics.
The Jihad, the Holy War that guaranteed eternal Paradise for those who died in it, was no longer of interest to any of these men.
Having your testicles torn off, your guts ripped out, your own leg blown clear of your body to have your falling boot kick you in the head, to taste the bitterness of your own waste as you fell face down into the mess of your dangling intestines these were too high a price to pay for Paradise. There must be a better means to get there or else Paradise was going to be very sparsely populated.
The officers at the rear were overwhelmed by their retreating troops, and, no matter how they felt about it, were swept back in the retreating wave or simply trampled underfoot.
All along the line of the Egyptians defense, man's most powerful emotion spread like a brushfire. Sheer terror swept the line and mindless panic ensued.
Here and there among the defenders a cool head prevailed, and some of the Israelis met fierce resistance, but by the time darkness fell most of the outer defenses of Al 'Arish had fallen.
Not even David Levy, nor the most devout of the Orthodox Jews, paused for their nightly prayers. Nor did Casca hear anywhere the Muslim ritual call to prayer. What he mostly heard were the endless wails of the wounded, the despairing groans of the dying, incessant pleas of: "Water, water. In the name of Allah, give me water."
The adherents of two of the world's great religions were too busy killing and dying to pause to pay their respects to the god for whom they were doing it.
But at last the dying did get their water. The Israeli water wagons were right behind the ambulances, and men crowded around them gulping from their canteens, refilling them, then gulping them empty to refill them again.
Compassionate Israeli medics moved among the mainly Arab wounded, distributing water as they went.
There never seemed to be enough water, Casca thought, to slake the raging thirst that tore at one's throat as soon as a battle ended.
Not that the battle had, in fact, ended.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Or even taken pause.
Once inside the outer perimeter of the Egyptian defense, General Tal scattered his armor and men out in the broadest possible line, presenting in the gathering darkness the most difficult of targets for the defending gunners.
The inner defense positions, on the other hand, offered easy and concentrated, if well protected, targets for the Israeli guns.
Colonel Weintraub set up his H.Q. in one of the Egyptian bunkers, and he held a brief conference of war with his field officers as they wolfed down their food.
The tactic he proposed for his sector of the line was simple enough, and Casca endorsed it readily.
Weintraub divided the defense line into ten sections. He proposed that every possible piece of artillery, howitzers, self-propelled guns, the tank cannons, and every possible captured gun and tank were to be concentrated in turn on each small section of the enemy line.
The concentrated fire coming out of the darkness from dozens of different directions would be very difficult for the Arab gunners to answer. Large sections of the Egyptian line could momentarily be left unattacked as they would be wasting most of their firepower trying to find the widely scattered Israeli guns.
Once the artillery had sufficiently damaged one section and silenced its guns, the big guns could move on to concentrate on another section. In this way, one tenth of the Egyptian defense would progressively come under attack from all of the Israeli guns.
Then, as one of these sections was silenced, the infantry's heavy weapons squads, recoilless rifles, machine guns, and mortars would move forward to complete
the harassment of each section.
And, finally, as always, the PBI, poor bloody infantry, would storm the position, wrest it from its defenders, and eventually turn its firepower on the nearest defense position.
Weintraub asked the ritualistic ``Any questions?" got none, and went on. "Let's see if we can raise the Star of David here for sunrise. Move 'em out."
He turned to lead the way out of the bunker and clapped his hand on Casca's shoulder as he passed him. "Great show, Lonnergan. Your infantry breakthrough was an inspired move. You want to take the first section?"
He didn't wait for an answer, but waved his red helmet to his officers and was gone, sprinting through the darkness to where his armored car waited. The gears grated briefly, the motor roared, and Weintraub was already charging back into battle. His field commanders hastened to catch up with him.
Casca hurried to where his officers and NCOs were eating together and quickly passed on the orders.
Before the last of the light had faded he had seen that the ridge of one great rolling sand dune swept up almost to the enemy walls, and it was here he decided to set up his heavy weapons. He had attached Sergeant Billy Glennon to the heavy weapons squad, which was commanded by an Israeli lieutenant.
There had not been a moment of silence since the first action in the afternoon, but now the noise of the guns reached a deafening crescendo. Hundreds of cannons were trading shells across the small expanse of desert between the inner defenses of Al 'Arish and the perimeter, which was now entirely in Israeli hands. The night sky was lit by the red and orange that belched from gun barrels and exploded from shellbursts.