The Lion’s Gate

by Steven Pressfield

  Of course, none of us at the pass had a clue about this deep thinking. It was all top secret. Even our brigade commander, Arik Sharon, knew nothing of this. If he had been told that all his paratroopers had to do was jump into Mitla and sit down, we could have broken out the cold beer and enjoyed ourselves. (Although I must say of Sharon that he would have found some excuse to overstretch the mission, no matter what orders Dayan had given him.)

  We flew. We jumped. We set up defensive positions at the eastern end of the pass, at a place called the Parker Memorial. We encountered no resistance. As far as we knew, the whole Sinai Peninsula was deserted; the Egyptians didn’t even know we were there.

  Our jump group was in fact the advance element of a greater incursion. While we in Battalion 890 were digging in at the Mitla Pass, the rest of the brigade was speeding toward us overland, from the Israeli border, by truck and bus. We dropped at 17:00, just before dark, on October 29. The main body caught up thirty hours later.

  Now we had a full paratroop brigade—almost two thousand men—on the ground, all alone at the Egyptian end of the Sinai Desert. We are a long way from Israel and a very short way from the Suez Canal.

  Sharon didn’t like it. The ground at the eastern end of the pass is raw, stony desert; our entrenching tools could barely scratch out a slit trench. We had no cover against air attack. A force of tanks could wipe us out in minutes.

  A lot of crazy stuff went on that day among the commanders that nobody knew about till the war was over, and even then there was controversy that went on for years.

  Sharon wanted to advance into the pass and take the whole thing, all thirty-two kilometers of it. If we held the western end, he reasoned, we could defend ourselves against an attack originating from Suez. Dayan said no. But he didn’t explain why. The deal with the British and the French was secret. Sharon had no clue. He thought only: My guys are vulnerable; I need to take the whole pass. He appealed not to Dayan but to another general, who was chief of operations. This general gave Sharon permission to send a small reconnaissance force through the pass.

  Instead Sharon sent a big recon force—two companies, under Motta Gur, on half-tracks supported by several tanks.

  The pass was supposed to be deserted. The Egyptians weren’t supposed to know we were there. But they did know, and they were there. They had gotten two battalions in overnight. These troops had taken the high ground and had dug into positions on both sides of the road that ran through the pass.

  Gur’s party got most of the way through while the Egyptians were dozing. Suddenly the enemy woke up and began firing with everything they had. They cut Gur’s column in half. The rear element made a U-turn and drove like hell back to the eastern end of the pass, by the Parker Memorial. That’s where I was—twenty years old, just thirty days out of my officer’s course. Our commanders, Raful Eitan and Aharon Davidi, came racing up. They had been taken completely by surprise by these developments.

  I knew Raful and Davidi from the original Paratroop Battalion 890, before the formation had expanded to brigade size. I had been a corporal and later a sergeant during the reprisal operations of ’54 and ’55. Sharon was our battalion commander. Company commanders at various times were Motta Gur, Danny Matt, Meir Har-Zion, Sa’adia Alkayam (Supapo), and Raful Eitan. My friend Katcha Cahaner was there and many others who went on to become legends in the paratroopers. Uzi Eilam was a lieutenant, Sharon’s intelligence officer.

  But back to Mitla. Davidi, who was a lieutenant colonel and Sharon’s second-in-command, had been ordered by Sharon to direct the battle. But Davidi, like everyone else, knew nothing about the area. He didn’t have any maps. He didn’t know where Motta’s companies were sitting or where the Egyptians were or how many men they had. He sent the recon unit forward. They captured the peaks on both sides of the pass. But the enemy was dug in below them and the recon guys couldn’t see them.

  I need a volunteer, said Davidi. His driver was a tough paratrooper named Yehuda Ken-Dror. Davidi told Yehuda to go forward in a jeep. I was sitting twenty meters away; I heard every word. I could see Yehuda turn white. But he jumped into his jeep and took off over the hill.

  We heard heavy fire. All contact was lost with Yehuda. It turned out that he had been shot out of his jeep but had managed to dive into a ditch, where he stayed until dark before he was able to crawl back, hundreds of meters, to our lines. His mates got him to the hospital, but he was too severely wounded; he hung on for three months before he died. He was awarded the Itur HaGvura, Israel’s highest decoration for valor.

  Both commanders, Davidi and Raful Eitan, now turned to me.

  “Now is your turn, Dan.”

  Now is my turn.

  Okay.

  But don’t go by jeep, Davidi tells me. Take an armored half-track, pick five soldiers from your platoon, and now listen very carefully to your mission because I am giving you not one assignment but two. First, drive along the road and find out where the Egyptian positions are. Second, locate Motta Gur’s force, find out what has happened to him and what help he needs, then take his wounded men into your half-track and get back here.

  I say: “Just so I understand, my task is to drive through the Egyptian positions once, then turn around and come back through them again?”

  “And keep your eyes open. Report everything you see.”

  What do I do? The same thing I do every time I go into battle. I raise my eyes to God Almighty. I tell him, Lord, I will be out there with five of my friends. Please look on us with your good eye.

  “Dan, are you ready?”

  There is my half-track. There are my guys. It is our turn now to run the gantlet.

  Somehow we got through. Thirty-two kilometers, out in the open, no cover, with six hundred to seven hundred enemy soldiers shooting at us from twenty meters, a hundred meters, two hundred meters. Some things you cannot explain. No one got even a scratch.

  We reached the other side. I found Motta Gur, took five of his wounded aboard the half-track. I radioed back to my company commander for permission to return. He said, “Dan, are you dead?”

  I told him, “I am living like a king!”

  We race back. I report to Davidi. We are under fire the whole way. Egyptian aircraft are attacking. A mortar truck blows up fifty meters from me, bullets are flying, smoke is everywhere. I’m reporting to Davidi and Raful, both of them lying prone, taking cover. I’m standing. I tell them what happened, where the Egyptians are, where Motta Gur is, how many enemy there are, everything that I can see.

  “So, Dan, what do you suggest we do?”

  I tell them there is only one way. We must get above the Egyptians on the mountain and root them out hand to hand, position by position.

  Meanwhile, Raful is shouting at me, “Ziv, get down! Do you want to get shot! What are you standing for?”

  He’s a lieutenant colonel, my battalion commander, but my job is to report to Davidi, who is running the battle. I get upset. I lose my cool. “Raful, shut up, be silent, don’t disturb me while I am reporting to Davidi!”

  So Raful gets up and stands beside me, in the gunfire. Davidi stays put.

  “Hey, my two heroes! Come over here and get your asses on the ground.”

  So we fought the battle. A terrible fight, all night, killing the enemy with knives and entrenching tools, hole to hole. Awful casualties, the worst ever. So many men fighting with such bravery. Not just us—the Egyptians too. Two hundred sixty dead on their side, forty-six on ours. Horrible. Sharon’s enemies in the army cried for his blood for that. But Dayan would not act against him.

  Dayan was furious at Sharon. And he grieved for the losses of such elite troops, many of whom he knew by their first names. But Dayan believed that to punish an officer for acting with initiative, even such excessive initiative as Sharon had taken, would work irretrievable harm to the aggressive spirit of the Israeli Army. This was the occas
ion of his famous remark: “I would rather have to rein in the overeager warhorse than to prod the reluctant mule.”

  That was Mitla. That terrible night. After that, in four days we destroyed the Egyptian Army.

  Round One had been the War of Independence, 1948.

  The Sinai Campaign in 1956 was Round Two.

  Now it’s 1967. Nasser and the Arabs are saying to themselves: The Jews have beaten us in Round One and Round Two, but we will wipe them out for good in Round Three.

  22.

  LEAVING SINAI

  During the Sinai Campaign of 1956, Moshe Dayan received much criticism for his frequent absences from the command center in Tel Aviv. The army chief of staff is supposed to be at headquarters running the war, people said. But Dayan believed that he could not direct events from the remote vantage of an office at General Headquarters, but must see and hear on the spot, up front with the troops.

  “During such engagements,” he wrote in Diary of the Sinai Campaign, “I like to be at the forward command post of the fighting unit; battle is after all the army’s business. I do not know if the unit commander ‘enjoys’ finding me at his elbow, but I prefer, whenever possible, to follow the action—and if necessary even intervene in its direction—close to the scene and while it is happening, rather than read about it in a dispatch the following morning and reveal the wisdom of hindsight.”

  Neora Matalon-Barnoach was an eighteen-year-old lieutenant when she first went to work as secretary for Chief of Operations Moshe Dayan in 1953. Her memoir, A Good Spot on the Side, recounts nearly three decades of service and friendship with Dayan.

  Dayan ran his operation unlike any other staff commander—in fact, unlike any commander of any kind. Entering his office on my first day of work, I was shocked at the informality of the place. There was no desk, only a campaign table covered with an army blanket and a pane of glass. Chairs were the camp type. The place looked like a field headquarters. The only thing missing was an inch of sand on the floor.

  On December 6, 1953, when Dayan was promoted to chief of staff, he converted the big office, the throne room of the outgoing chief, into a conference room. He himself took the space where the administrative officer used to sit. His office was smaller than mine. The outgoing chief had been chauffeured about in a big American Lincoln. Dayan got rid of it. He drove a Plymouth.

  This was the ethic that Dayan instilled into the entire army. He cared nothing for military display or spit and polish. “Our job is to produce fighters, not soldiers.”

  He admired the American Marine Corps in all aspects except its emphasis on the parade ground and close-order drill. On one trip to the States, Moshe was a guest in the reviewing stand at a formal military parade.

  The Marines performed the complicated drill flawlessly and won excited applause. I applauded too but I couldn’t help thinking it was almost an insult the way they used combat warriors as marionettes, as if they were chocolate soldiers at the opera. From the moment I started my military service I regarded foot drills, parades and lineups with skepticism bordering on hostility. The soldier was meant for war, and war does not happen in a straight line.

  Dayan’s physical courage was legendary in the army. Arik Sharon said of him, “He is brave to the point of insanity.”

  Nothing elicited Dayan’s respect more than valor under fire, or inspired his love more than sacrifice for a comrade-in-arms. He could forgive anything from a fighter who seized the initiative in the face of danger. He protected Sharon after Mitla. He loved Meir Har-Zion and Katcha Cahaner. His passion was not limited to commanders of brigades and divisions. He cared as much for the lieutenants and sergeants and private soldiers.

  When Dayan delegated a staff assignment, he gave his subordinates the broadest possible latitude. “I would not be assigning you this task if I did not have complete confidence that you can do a better job than I can.”

  He expected his officers to take the initiative, solve the problem on their own, and not come back until they had finished.

  “I want to do no job myself that can be done by somebody else.”

  Dayan wrote all his own speeches. He would labor at his desk until he was too exhausted to continue. He would say (and I learned to say with him), “No more milk will come from this he-goat tonight.”

  Dayan reserved time to think, and he did his thinking alone. When he had arrived at a plan or an idea, the door to his office would open. “What do you think of this?”

  The worst thing a staff member could say was, “Moshe, I agree one hundred percent.” Dayan’s eye would darken. “Why?” he would say. “Tell me why you agree.”

  Once he asked my opinion and I hesitated. “The moment you think twice before answering,” he said, “our work together is over.”

  He liked it when people contested him. He listened. “Only a donkey,” he would say, “never changes his mind.”

  Dayan was not a reader, except of poetry (much of which he committed to memory and recited on specific occasion), particularly the works of Natan Alterman and Rachel of Kibbutz Kinneret, Israel’s unofficial poetess laureate.

  What he did read was military material, particularly combat reports and intelligence analyses. He knew intimately every raid and battle from our own wars, as well as every fight from Europe and Russia and the North African desert in World War II. He could speak in detail about campaigns from the Bible, particularly those of Joshua, with whom he identified. He had walked the ground of the ancient battles meter by meter; he could explain how the Amorites utilized formations of infantry or trace, step by step, the route Jonathan employed to attack the Philistines and open the pass between the cliffs of Bozez and Seneh.

  But the principles that informed Dayan’s tactical doctrine came from the moderns—primarily from the Russians, the British and the Americans, and, with an irony of which he was not incognizant, the Germans.

  All these factors figured prominently in the Sinai Campaign of 1956, as did two further elements: the influence of world opinion and the political self-interest of the superpowers. Another passage from Diary of the Sinai Campaign:

  I stressed the point that speed was the key factor. We must end the campaign in the shortest possible time. The longer it lasts, the greater will be the political complications—pressure from the United States, the dispatch of [Russian or Communist bloc] “volunteers” to aid Egypt, and so on. It must take no longer than two weeks, at the outside, and within this period we must complete the conquest of the whole of the Sinai Peninsula.

  When the campaign ended with Israel’s lightning victory, Moshe Dayan became an icon. The black eye patch, which he hated, became a symbol of a new kind of Jew. In Israel, he had become Joshua. He had stopped the sun.

  But neither he nor Prime Minister Ben-Gurion could stand up, in the end, to world opinion and to the political pressure applied by the Soviet Union and the United States.

  Sinai must be given back to Egypt.

  The desert will be demilitarized, pledged the Soviets and Americans. UN peacekeepers will replace Israeli troops. No tanks, warplanes, or heavy weapons may be deployed between the Suez Canal and the eastern armistice line between Israel and Egypt. The Straits of Tiran shall remain open to all shipping.

  The last man out of Sinai was Moshe Dayan. Watching the lowering of the Israeli flag that had flown over the municipal building in El Arish, Dayan was asked by a reporter why he had made a point of traveling to witness this dolorous event.

  “IDF commanders must taste all the dishes,” Dayan replied. “The bitter along with the sweet.”

  When we saw him next in our offices, he had no quip to offer. “What I have feared most has come to pass. Military victory has become political defeat.”

  The memory of this bitter reverse stuck with Moshe Dayan and affected profoundly the decisions he made during the Six Day War.

  BOOK THREE

  THE WAITING,
PART TWO

  23.

  A PLAN FOR TOTAL WAR

  I was a twenty-seven-year-old captain, deputy head of Air Force Operations in late 1962, when my boss came into my office and said, “Rafi, the chief wants us to draw up a plan for total war.”

  Rafi Sivron is the planner of Operation Moked—“Focus”—the preemptive strike that will destroy the air force of Egypt in three hours on June 5, 1967.

  In the years between 1956 and 1967 every officer in the Israel Defense Forces knew that another war with Egypt was coming. It was only a matter of time.

  The Soviets under Khrushchev and later Kosygin were vigorously upgrading Nasser’s air force with MiG-17s, MiG-19s, and the latest, most lethal fighter in the world, the Mach-2 MiG-21.

  The Egyptians had Tupolev and Ilyushin bombers that could reach Israeli cities in under an hour. Their armored divisions were being modernized with new T-54 and T-55 tanks. And Soviet engineers had totally redesigned the Egyptian Air Force’s radar and early-warning systems.

  Russia and the United States had compelled our forces to give Sinai back to Egypt in 1957. The promise was that the peninsula would remain demilitarized. UN troops would man the frontiers, guaranteeing a buffer zone of two hundred kilometers between Egypt and Israel. Still, a squadron of Tupolev bombers could take off from Egyptian soil and strike Tel Aviv in thirty-five minutes. Israel was vulnerable and everyone in the IDF knew it.

  In 1962 Ezer Weizman was commander of the air force. His operations chief was Yak Nevo, the legendary fighter pilot. Ezer was a brigadier general; Yak was a colonel. I was Yak’s deputy. My office and his were next to each other; he and I had lunch together every day. I admired him greatly.