The Lion’s Gate

by Steven Pressfield

  16.

  THE UNIT

  Unit 101 was formed in August 1953. It was called simply “the Unit.” There were only about forty of us and we served together for only four months. But that single company established the spirit and fighting ethos of the whole Israeli Army. Arik Sharon was the Unit’s commander.

  Katcha Cahaner served under Arik Sharon in Unit 101. He will finish the Six Day War as second-in-command of Paratroop Battalion 28, part of the 55th Brigade, which will liberate Jerusalem.

  The army’s morale was in terrible shape in those days of the fifties. The Palmach, which had been the fighting heart of the Haganah and then the infant IDF, had been disbanded by Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, who believed it was too political. The Palmach was, in his words, “the Labor Party in arms.” If Israel were to have a true professional defense force, this formation had to go.

  But the army had nothing to replace the Palmach’s warrior spirit. Our enemies quickly discovered this. Arab infiltrators began crossing the border at night. These parties would murder families in their sleep, plant mines along roads to schoolhouses, toss hand grenades into children’s bedrooms.

  The IDF had nothing that could stop them. Platoon- and company-sized forces would be sent across the border on night reprisal operations. Too often the fighters straggled back at dawn, carrying one or two wounded, to report that the mission had not been accomplished.

  Moshe Dayan was then chief of the operations branch, the number two post in the army. He wrote:

  I decided to put an end to this disgraceful situation and to the apathy of IDF Command, which accepts these despicable failures and the endless excuses of “we couldn’t” . . . I met with the leaders . . . and informed them that from now on, if an officer reported that he could not complete his mission because he was unable to overcome the enemy forces, his explanation would not be accepted unless he had lost more than 50 percent of his command, killed or wounded.

  Sharon was studying at Hebrew University in Jerusalem then. He was twenty-five; he had eight years of fighting behind him. He had just gotten married and he wanted a normal life.

  Mordechai Maklef was chief of staff. Ben-Gurion called him in and told him he wanted a unit formed that could cross the border and make the Arabs think twice about these terror incursions. Dayan opposed the idea at first; he thought that every IDF unit should have fighting spirit, not just one elite team called in to do the dirty work. Ben-Gurion overruled him. It didn’t take long before Sharon was called in and offered the job.

  Sharon agreed to set up and command the new unit. But he had three demands. “First, I want to pick the men myself, with no interference from higher command. Second, the unit must have the best and most modern weapons and equipment. Third, I want to be a central part myself of all operational planning.”

  I had a friend named Meir Har-Zion. Dayan once called him “the finest commando soldier in the army.” Har-Zion was twenty-two then; I was four months younger. Meir said to me, “Katcha, have you heard about this new commando unit? Let’s go see what it’s about.”

  So we went. That was how it worked in those days. One man vouched for another—“a friend brings a friend.”

  The Unit’s camp was outside an abandoned Arab village called Sataf, near Jerusalem. I was serving then with the Nachal, which was a pioneer outfit. Israel was so poor in those days that the government couldn’t afford to support soldiers to train, so we of the Nachal worked two weeks on a kibbutz to earn our keep, then trained as soldiers for the next two weeks.

  Meir and I got to Unit 101 on a Sunday. Sharon had us and his other picked men training that day and Monday. On Tuesday night we crossed the border into Jordan, five kilometers. Do you know how far five kilometers is at night? It feels like a hundred. I was terrified. I remember at one point some Arabs popped out of nowhere. Civilians. We hit the dirt. My heart was pounding so wildly I was certain the enemy could not fail to hear it.

  Two nights later we crossed into Jordan twice as far.

  What did we do on these operations?

  We did what had to be done.

  Sharon was the best fighting officer in the IDF, then or ever, and he was just as good at intelligence. He knew everyone on both sides of the border, and when he didn’t know someone, he knew someone who knew that someone. He could find out anything. If he learned, say, that a certain Arab was planning to lead a raid into Israel on Wednesday, we crossed the border Tuesday night and paid this man a visit. Or maybe Sharon acquired the identities of some gang that had shot up one of our school buses. We found them all and made sure they never crossed into Israel again.

  Sharon led many of these operations himself. He would take us across the border in darkness so thick you could not see the man trekking in column in front of you. In enemy territory you never travel in a straight line. By the time we had penetrated five kilometers, we would have diverted, backtracked, and jinked so many times that none of us knew where we were going or where we had been. Sharon would call us in a whisper to gather round. “See those lights there? That’s a truck moving south on Route 1 at Kilometer 106. That dark shape beneath the hill? That’s the Arab Legion camp at Nebi Samuel.”

  Sharon knew every meter of ground, and he made us work till we knew it as well as he. He taught us to navigate without maps and without compasses. We had to know the land, period. To locate a single house in an Arab village, one house and no other, is no easy task. To get to it is even harder. Dogs bark. Sheep and goats take fright. Armed lookouts stand watch. What trail do you take to get in? By what path do you get out?

  One night our patrol was ghosting along a hillside in Jordanian territory when we spotted a raiding party of fedayeen, twelve in all, moving along a wadi toward the Israeli border. We dropped to the ground silently and let them pass. I could see the muzzles of the raiders’ slung rifles and the rolls of detonator wire they carried on poles between them. Sharon knew by the trail the enemy was taking that they must pass beneath a certain hill several kilometers west.

  We were waiting for them when they got there.

  That was Sharon. He expected greatness. He didn’t have to preach it. He made you feel that the safety, the honor, the survival of the nation, and even that of the Jewish people around the world, was on your shoulders. In the Unit it was unthinkable that you could be stopped or would turn back before completing a mission. You would rather cut off your arm. If I am creeping along a trail at night, alone or with one other soldier, and I see five or seven of the Jordanian Arab Legion coming from the opposite direction, I will choose death before going back to face Sharon and have to tell him, “There were too many—there was nothing we could do.”

  This spirit you see today. It has spread to the whole army. This spirit came from Sharon, and no one else.

  17.

  BLACK ARROW

  On February 25, 1955, a party of Arab fedayeen crossed the border and murdered an Israeli civilian in the town of Rehovot, about thirty kilometers north of Gaza. On the body of one of the infiltrators were found documents linking the terrorists to command elements of the Egyptian Army.

  Three nights later, picked men of Israeli Paratroop Battalion 890, commanded by Arik Sharon, launched Operation Black Arrow—sometimes called the Gaza Raid—in reprisal.

  Lieutenant Uzi Eilam was a platoon commander in Operation Black Arrow in 1955. He was wounded leading the assault on the Egyptian camp and awarded the Itur HaOz, Israel’s second-highest decoration for valor. As a major in 1967, Eilam will command Paratroop Battalion 71 in the liberation of the Old City of Jerusalem.

  A number of factors must be made clear if the significance of this action is to be understood.

  First, until official documents were found in the possession of an Arab infiltrator killed in the commission of an act of murder, the Egyptian government had denied all responsibility for cross-border terrorism—despite the fact that over nine hundred such incidents
had been recorded during 1954 and 1955.

  The documents proved that this was a lie. Egyptian army intelligence was not only aware of these terror attacks, but was funding, arming, and training the attackers.

  Second, orders for the reprisal operation came from the highest levels of the Israeli government, from David Ben-Gurion, prime minister and minister of defense, and from Moshe Dayan, chief of staff of the army.

  Third, the speed of the response was calculated to leave no doubt that the blow was linked to the provocation. The reprisal came within seventy-two hours. The message was: “Strike produces counterstrike.”

  Fourth, the response to the Egyptian attack was directed not at randomly selected citizens or civilians, as had been the case in the initial Arab murder raid. It was not terror-for-terror. Instead, the reply was targeted at the sponsoring government entity. Because the terror attack could be traced to the Egyptian Army, Israel’s response could and must be directed at this body exclusively. It had to be clear to all that our reply was mounted in direct retaliation for the murder three nights earlier—and against only those responsible for the crime.

  The final factor to be understood is the tactic of reprisal itself.

  Reprisal, as Dayan and Ben-Gurion conceived it, was not vengeance killing. It was not a biblical exercise in “an eye for an eye.” Reprisal was a political tactic within the greater strategy whose object was the survival of the nation. As Dayan explained it in 1955, speaking with officers of the IDF:

  We could not defend every water pipeline from being blown up and every tree from being uprooted. We could not prevent every murder of a worker in an orchard or a family in their beds. But it was within our power to set so high a price for our blood, a price too high for the Arab community, the Arab army, or the Arab governments to think it worth paying . . . It was in our power to cause the Arab governments to renounce “the policy of strength” toward Israel by turning it into a demonstration of weakness.

  No officer could have been better suited temperamentally or militarily to implement a policy of reprisal than Arik Sharon. Sharon was ever on the lookout for pretexts for operations. One night in 1954, near Jerusalem, a patrol of Battalion 890 got into an unplanned firefight, killed a Jordanian soldier, and brought his body back. Another commander might have been angry at the dragging home of an enemy corpse, or even employed the body by returning it with the proper chivalry as a means of reaching out with goodwill to the foe. Not Sharon. The border had been quiet for several weeks, but now, he knew, the Jordanians would be eager to seek vengeance. He instructed our company and two others, including “D” Company under Motta Gur, to set ambushes all along the border. His aim was always to produce contact. Each skirmish or firefight was a pretext for further action—and evidence of enemy hostility that Sharon could take to the General Staff to gain authorization for even more reprisal operations.

  I came to Battalion 890 the same way Katcha Cahaner and Meir Har-Zion had come to Unit 101. A friend brought me. Other comrades vouched for my abilities. “I asked the guys,” Sharon told me. “They said you’re all right.”

  That was it.

  I was in.

  I was assigned as a squad leader in “A” Company under Sa’adia Alkayam, whom we called Supapo, and who was already a legend in the paratroops.

  Both Unit 101 and Battalion 890 were armed with different weapons than the conventional army. Each trooper was issued an American Thompson submachine gun and a commando knife. The Tommy guns used high-caliber 11.43-millimeter ammunition (.45s, like in American gangster movies), in contrast with the 9-millimeter cartridges used in Uzis. The Tommy guns were heavy—five kilograms as opposed to the Uzi’s three and a half.

  Company commanders in Battalion 890 were Meir Har-Zion (Supapo took over from him when he was temporarily suspended for the unauthorized revenge killings of a gang of Arabs who had raped and murdered his sister and killed her fiancé), Danny Matt, Motta Gur, and Rafael “Raful” Eitan. Every one of these officers went on to command brigades or divisions. Sharon’s second-in-command, Aharon Davidi, taught me a lesson that changed forever my conception of command and my view of the role of an officer.

  The night raid had begun. Our force had crossed the border. The objective was the central Egyptian army base in Gaza—a fortified encampment guarded by perimeter defenses including barbed wire, security fences, and antivehicle ditches. Approaching this camp, my unit—“A” Company under Supapo—became disoriented in the darkness. The enemy spotted us and opened fire. Supapo was killed. Alarms began blaring in the Egyptian camp; searchlights came on. All surprise had been lost. I was deputy company commander, so it was my job to take over. Half our men had been wounded; the rest were sprinting with me, under fire, for cover. We scrambled into a ditch with bullets flying everywhere. It seemed that within seconds we would all be killed.

  Suddenly I looked up. There was Davidi, standing over me amid the whizzing rounds. “What has happened?” he asked. I told him that Supapo had been killed and our company was under attack.

  “Well,” Davidi said, as calmly as if he and I had been sipping an espresso at a café on Dizengoff Street. “What are you going to do about it?”

  I said, “I’m going to continue the attack.”

  And I began issuing orders.

  When I looked around, Davidi was gone.

  I have wondered often, in the years since, if he had in fact been there at all.

  The Black Arrow raid killed thirty-eight Egyptian soldiers and wounded fifty-two, an enormous number for a reprisal operation undertaken by a force of only seventy men. It humiliated Nasser in the eyes of his countrymen and those of the other Arab states for whom the Egyptian president presumed to stand as an inspirational leader. The bulk of the enemy casualties came at the hands of Danny Matt’s “D” Company, the blocking force, which ambushed a convoy of reinforcements hurrying to the aid of their comrades.

  The Black Arrow operation was a masterpiece of planning. It contained a number of Sharon’s signature elements of misdirection and ruse, including having the party embark on trucks in civilian attire accompanied by a number of girl soldiers, singing loudly and pretending to be out for a night of fun (the females were dropped off en route) and the use of Danny Matt’s ambush force as the primary killing element.

  I served as Battalion 890’s intelligence officer and, later, when the structure was put in place for expansion to brigade size, I continued as brigade intelligence officer. In my 2011 memoir, Eilam’s Arc, I wrote the following:

  I never imagined the level of schooling that awaited me, not just in intelligence, in which Sharon was a master, but in tactics and the meticulous and creative planning of military operations . . .

  Regardless of whether they were ultimately executed or canceled at the last moment, the long list of operations that Sharon planned constitutes an incomparable source of material for the study of military tactics. Each of Sharon’s plans was a work of craftsmanship, based on his understanding of the field, his precise knowledge of the enemy’s forces, and a wise assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of their defenses. But in addition to the typical military situation assessment . . . every Sharon plan had a twist of some kind that made it special. In some cases it was the unique way the forces were organized; in others it was a unique route to the target or the way we went about sealing off the area of operations from the possible intervention of external enemy forces. Sharon was obsessive when it came to integrating variety and innovation into planning his operations, and this enabled him to keep surprising the enemy with new tactics every time.

  Arik Sharon, left, and Aharon Davidi, center, during Operation Black Arrow.

  Paratroop Battalion 890 and guests, November 1955. Standing left to right: Lieutenant Meir Har-Zion, Major Arik Sharon, Lieutenant General Moshe Dayan, Captain Danny Matt, Lieutenant Moshe Efron, Major General Asaf Simchoni; seated left to right: Cap
tain Aharon Davidi, Lieutenant Ya’akov Ya’akov, Captain Raful Eitan.

  I worked closely with Sharon every day and came to appreciate not only his genius as a military tactician, but his gift for politics, which was in evidence even then, decades before his election as prime minister. Sharon manipulated two constituencies to keep his operations going. The first was the enemy. The second was the Israeli General Staff.

  Headquarters had to approve all operations proposed by Sharon. Not infrequently, the ministers lacked his zeal for provocation and confrontation. To counter this, Sharon maintained an unofficial intelligence scheme directed at our own political superiors that was every bit as thorough and sophisticated, though contained entirely within his own head, as the operation he employed against infiltrators from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.

  The object of reprisal operations was, in Sharon’s mind, twofold. First, such audacity provided a model of initiative and enterprise for the rest of the army. It took guts to cross the border at night and carry the fight onto the enemy’s doorstep. This was “venturing outside the fence.” It stood in the valorous tradition of the Haganah, of Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squads, and of Yitzhak Sadeh’s “Flying Squads.” It was the torch from which the rest of the IDF lit the flame of boldness and resourcefulness.

  Every soldier of spirit wished to serve under Sharon and to wear the red beret of the paratroopers.

  Second, the policy of reprisals kept the enemy on the defensive and bought time for the fledgling Israeli nation to put down roots. Sharon called this “practical Zionism.” He meant that, within the secure perimeter provided by our soldiers’ enterprise, our countrymen could create “facts on the ground”—farms and cities, schools and railroads, ports and highways that would in time come to be viewed, not only by the Arabs but by the world at large, as permanent and ineradicable.