Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  According to his biographer, Elazar also sketched out his longer-term strategy for the Egyptian front. “I want to attack [across the canal],” he said, “but first we will need to defend when they attack us.” He anticipated the Egyptians hurling their heavy armored divisions across the canal, which they were scheduled to do, under their Soviet offense doctrine, once their infantry divisions had fully deployed. “We’ll break that attacking force,” said Elazar, “and when it has been seriously weakened—then we’ll attack.”11

  Sharon met Elazar leaving the command bunker, accompanied by Yitzhak Rabin, the 1967 chief of staff. He immediately began expounding his own basic belief: that it would need a mighty armored fist comprising two whole divisions attacking together to smash through the Second Army and then move down to the Third. One division with the others held in reserve would not be enough. But Elazar rehearsed his view that one division needed to be ready at any time to block an Egyptian advance toward the heart of the country. Sharon countered that the Egyptians were not aiming for Tel Aviv, but rather to consolidate their gains in Sinai to a depth of five to seven miles. They would not want to step beyond their surface-to-air missile coverage deployed on the west bank.

  But Elazar’s mind was made up. “Rabin put his hand on my shoulder,” Sharon writes. “ ‘Arik,’ he said, ‘we’re counting on you to change the situation.’ With that they shook hands with me and disappeared into the darkness.”12 Sharon went down into the bunker and argued his case for trying again during the night to relieve the strongpoints. Gonen, despite himself, seems to have been affected by Sharon’s remonstrations. “He did not turn him down flat,” Bren writes, disapprovingly, in his own book on the war. “He said only that at this stage we were not going to approach the strongpoints, though developments during the night might lead to a change in plan.” This nuance was to grow to critical importance in understanding what went so terribly wrong the following day.

  OCTOBER 8

  Gonen was accused by his many critics of arbitrarily changing Elazar’s plan when he issued his final orders to his divisions. In his first order, issued during the night, he approved plans submitted by the 143rd Division to rescue the strongpoint crews in its sector—Hizayon, Purkan, and Matzmedd—before Bren began his attack. At dawn, however, he reverted to the original order for the 143rd to stand in reserve while the 162nd attacked. But he left in place, in his orders to the 162nd, the goal of rescuing strongpoints and even attempting a limited crossing. This implied, as Elazar’s biographer points out, approaching the canal bank, which Elazar had explicitly forbidden; it implied attacking from east to west, whereas Elazar explicitly and repeatedly ordered a north-to-south attack across a narrow front; and it implied trying to cross the canal, which Elazar had expressly discouraged and hedged with conditions.13

  Bren’s brigades began to move south at 8:00 a.m. But it was far from a divisional armored fist scything through the Egyptian deployments. While one brigade did encounter enemy infantry and armor, and engaged them successfully, the two others drove along in uneventful silence. Chaim Herzog writes sourly:

  In the late morning, it suddenly became clear to Bren that his brigades were not moving in accordance with orders and were, in fact, moving too far to the east, along the Artillery Road, and away from the bulk of the enemy forces. Arieh’s brigade was actually some 20 miles from the Canal at one stage of the operation.

  The result of this mistake was that instead of rolling down the north flank of the narrow Egyptian bridgehead, the massed forces of Bren’s division were moving across the front of the Egyptian bridgehead. Accordingly, when the attack was finally launched, it developed from east to west right into the deployed Egyptian positions—instead of from north to south, where the Egyptians least expected it.

  The result was a veritable rout. Sharon, deployed in reserve to the west of Tasa, writes that he saw the disaster shaping up:

  At about 9:45 I saw them [the 162nd Division]. But they were not moving along the front a couple of miles east of the canal as I had expected. Instead, the dust columns were rising in back of us, seven or eight miles from the front. I watched as Adan’s tanks pressed southward, passed to our rear, and then turned westward toward the Egyptians … I was dismayed by what was happening. Only a relatively small number of tanks were involved, perhaps two battalions charging valiantly into the Egyptian artillery fire. It was not a divisional attack; it was not even a concentrated effort. There was no way it could succeed.

  “But,” Sharon continues, “I did not have much time to worry about it.” In a decision that remains essentially inexplicable to the present day, Gonen now ordered Sharon’s division to pull back eastward to Tasa and drive south down the Lateral Road for some fifty miles with a view to seizing Egyptian bridges opposite the city of Suez and crossing on them.

  This idea seemed to be that since Adan had now rolled up the Egyptian Second Army, I could smash through the unsuspecting Third Army. It was unreal. First of all Adan had not rolled up anything … Second, my division was occupying critical high ground that would cost us dearly to get back if we gave it up. And if we did not get it back we could forget about any future assault on the canal in this sector. Third, the idea that we might fight our way through to the canal in the south and find intact Egyptian bridges there was based on the merest wishful thinking. And even if we did, we knew the Egyptian bridges were constructed for the lighter Soviet-made tanks and would not support ours…

  When I got the order to move south, I called Gonen immediately. In the strongest terms I told him that what he was asking would be a disastrous mistake … The answer was shouted back. If I didn’t obey the order I would be dismissed immediately. Immediately! “Then come down here and look yourself,” I repeated. “No!” Gonen shouted. “You will be dismissed. I will dismiss you right now!”

  I thought about it for a moment, then decided I had no choice except to obey. So I gave my own order for the division to pull back to Tasa and head south … If I had to strike in the south I was going to do it as fast and as hard as I could. But even as I did, I deviated slightly from Gonen’s order. Instead of disengaging completely, I left my divisional reconnaissance unit holding two absolutely critical ridges, one code-named Hamadia, the other Kishuf. These positions were on either side of the Akavish Road, which led to the canal in the region of Deversoir. This was where I had prepared the crossing site five months earlier, with its walled “yard” and its thinned-out ramparts. I was simply not going to hand control of these ridges over to the Egyptians.14e

  Three and a half hours later, and fifty uneventful miles farther south,

  a helicopter overflew the column and landed near my APC. A liaison officer from Southern Command climbed out and told me briefly that Adan’s attack had failed. There had been no Israeli crossing as had been mistakenly reported to Southern Command … We were ordered to get back as fast as possible to support Adan and recover as much of the ridgeline as we could.

  My inner feelings at that point were simply not describable. If on the surface I appeared normal, it was because I was numbed with rage. It was now October 8. Two days earlier the entire division had been called out of their homes and synagogues. In less than twenty-four hours they had fully mobilized and had driven two hundred miles to the battlefield … And now, on this absolutely crucial day of battle, they had spent their time driving around the desert like idiots.

  As the 143rd Division made its frustrating way back during the afternoon, Bren Adan’s battered division was able to regroup and strongly resist Egyptian advances eastward opposite Firdan, taking a significant toll of Egyptian armor and infantry in some of the bitterest fighting of the war. Farther to the south, however, Bren’s forces failed to hold the key area of Hamutal, which commands a section of the Talisman road from Tasa to Ismailia. Here, a tragedy of “friendly fire” was only narrowly averted when Bren’s retreating forces encountered a brigade from Sharon’s division, under Haim Erez, also intent on recapturing Hamutal. Neither b
rigade was aware of the other. “The confusion on and around Hamutal was tremendous,” Bren writes.

  Bren was sharply critical of Sharon’s behavior once the 143rd Division had returned to within striking distance of the battlefield. He accused Sharon of evading appeals from Gonen that he deploy his unblooded brigades to assist the hard-pressed sister division.

  But Bren directed the full brunt of his resentment, recrimination, and disdain at Gonen, accusing him of transmitting overoptimistic, inaccurate, and sometimes wholly fictitious reports to the High Command in Tel Aviv. These were based not on the 162nd Division’s reporting to Southern Command, Bren insisted, but on Gonen’s strange misunderstanding of the true situation on the battlefield. “Gonen behaved as if we were conducting some kind of war game, an exercise involving no troops—neither ours nor the enemy’s—and in which there was no battlefield reality. For him the battle ended the moment he had had his say. The moment he made a decision, he could move ahead to the next stage.”15

  Elazar’s approval of Gonen’s wildly optimistic plans came after he had himself presented a wildly optimistic picture of Bren’s unfolding attack to the cabinet. This fantasy world in Tel Aviv was not to be shattered until late in the evening of October 8. “I want to know,” Golda Meir asked her top ministers and generals that night, “has the situation on the canal got better or worse since the morning?” The first, faint reply came from General (res.) Zvi Zamir, head of the Mossad. “My impression is that it hasn’t got better … Our tanks are being consumed.” “And only in the morning they had to ‘hold Arik back,’ ” the prime minister retorted sardonically. The bitter irony in her comment echoes down the decades.16

  In Gonen’s view, the blame for the misreporting up the chain of command lay wholly with Bren, who “never reported to Southern Command on the setbacks he encountered. While he was reporting that everything was all right, key areas of high ground were falling into the Egyptians’ hands … There was confusion, too, within his division. At one point, a brigade commander Natke Nir told Adan that [a battalion commander Assaf] Yaguri might have crossed the canal, when in fact he had already been taken prisoner and his battalion smashed. My sending Sharon’s division south came in the wake of Adan’s optimistic reporting.”

  Gonen denied, moreover, that he had changed the original plan. The main assignment remained destroying the Egyptian forces in Sinai. Bren was ordered, as concomitant assignments, to rescue Hizayon and Purkan and to cross to the other side there. “But the final decision on these was left in his hands, depending on the battlefield conditions, and he acknowledged as much in his response. The failure of his division was not in the assignment but in the execution. He never actually mounted a divisional attack.”17f

  • • •

  Churning beneath all the arguments and analysis of the events of October 8 was an ugly subtext, replete with political rivalries and personal animosities. It ran through the minds of all the major players at the time and continued to fuel passions and suspicions long after. “They’re turning us away [from the canal] deliberately,” Sharon said to the officers in his APC when the order came through to head off to the south.

  “I know what he thought,” the division’s chief intelligence officer, Yehoshua Saguy, recalled decades later.

  He thought—and in fact he said—that they want to head him off because they envisage a great and glorious victory for Bren’s forces. And the plain fact is that they did head us off southward. There was no way we were going to reach our ostensible destination in the south before nine or ten o’clock at night. This is a whole division traveling … hundreds of tanks and APCs and trucks. To launch an attack there at night would have been suicide.

  Don’t forget, Arik’s not just a general. He’s a political figure. He’s just set up the Likud … After the cease-fire, we were called “the Likud division,” and they [the 162nd] were called “the Labor division.” Those were the names people used, even on the radio network.g In addition, the tank men were a junta—Dado [Elazar], Gorodish [Gonen], Bren. They stuck together and supported each other automatically.18

  General Abrasha Tamir, another of Sharon’s staff officers, put it even less subtly:

  Arik thought Bren was an idiot before the war. He thought Gorodish was crazy before the war. And they thought the same about him. But Bren and Gorodish basked in Dado’s favor. He always gave them his backing … There’s a picture of me standing with Arik on the top of a hill on the first day of the war when we reached the front, with him looking ahead through his binoculars and me with my head turned around looking back. I remember he said to me, “What are you looking at? The enemy’s over there” [pointing forward]. And I said, “No, sir. The enemy’s not there. The enemy’s back here, behind us.”19

  One high-ranking officer who rejected this political subtext, at least as regards the events of October 8, was Sharon’s old commander from 1948, Asher Levy. Levy, by now a brigadier general, served as operations officer (the No. 3 man) in the 162nd Division during the first week of the war, after which he was transferred to a senior post at Southern Command headquarters. His appraisal of Bren’s performance on the eighth was devastating. He insisted, though, that Elazar’s decision to split the two divisions rather than launching a combined two-divisional attack was made “because he genuinely believed we needed to sweep up the Egyptians all the way down the canal. The purpose was not to prevent Arik from crossing on Egyptian bridges … The ‘war of the generals’ started later.”20

  In Tel Aviv the day’s disaster gave new impetus to Moshe Dayan’s suggestion that Israel abandon the canal and pull back to a new line of defense deep inside Sinai. Other ministers and advisers now seemed prepared to consider it. But Golda Meir was rocklike in her resistance. “I warn us all against planning new defense lines. They won’t hold. If we move to some new line inside Sinai, it will not hold.” If there was no choice, she said, then of course they would have to dig in farther back. But that was not the situation at the present time, and she would not hear of withdrawal.21

  The news from the Syrian front was better—though still far from good—and a consensus evolved that Israel must press home its counterattacks on the Golan while containing the Egyptian bridgeheads without initiating further risky and costly operations against them at this stage. This meant the air force would continue to devote most of its efforts to support the forces in the north and to bomb strategic targets inside Syria. Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon said it was important to defeat the Syrians quickly so as to deter Jordan and Iraq from entering the fray.

  OCTOBER 9–14

  The next morning, back from visiting the headquarters in Sinai, Dayan was still grim. “In my best judgment,” he reported, “there is no chance of crossing the Canal. In the immediate future we should not try to cross, nor even to approach the Canal and drive back the Egyptians. We’d pour out our life’s blood and it wouldn’t make any difference … Even Arik agrees that crossing the Canal now will not radically change things.”

  Elazar, once again, refused to be drawn into despondency. The day before had been a failure, he admitted. Now the divisions in Sinai would be on the defensive. But he hoped the Egyptians would attack—and be broken. Eventually, he insisted, the IDF would cross the canal.

  GOLDA: But when Arik’s on the other side, won’t he be in a trap?

  ELAZAR: In certain circumstances—yes. Right now, it’s not possible. But it might become possible by Wednesday night or Thursday … or Friday…

  GOLDA: Tell it to me in plastic terms. He crosses; they’ve got tanks, etc., there; what happens?

  ELAZAR: They’ll attack him. He’ll go in with two hundred tanks. They won’t have aerial superiority…

  GENERAL AHARON YARIV: He will neutralize the missiles; he’ll destroy a lot of them. The Egyptians will direct part of their force to confront him. If it works, it will be very good.

  GOLDA: What I’m afraid of is if it doesn’t work. It’ll be a catastrophe. He’ll be stuck over there, in
their hands.

  ELAZAR: Anyway, it’s not doable in the present situation. Only if things improve.22

  One area where Dayan and Elazar did see eye to eye was the creaking command structure in Sinai. “I don’t think Gonen can handle it,” the defense minister told the other ministers bluntly, “especially with Arik under him.” At a predawn meeting with Elazar, he proposed that either Sharon or Bar-Lev be appointed to head Southern Command.

  Elazar, unsurprisingly given their various past histories, plumped for Bar-Lev. The eventual decision was not to depose Gonen but to appoint Bar-Lev over him as “personal representative of the chief of staff”—in effect, commander of the front. For Sharon this was “the last thing I needed to hear … I felt I was in a hornets’ nest.”23 But for Golda and the ministers, the slow-talking, unflappable Bar-Lev inspired confidence.

  Bar-Lev took up his new posting in Sinai on the morning of the tenth. Uri Ben-Ari, Gonen’s deputy, later described to army historians the sense of calm he felt almost palpably descending on Southern Command from the moment Bar-Lev took over. “It began at HQ and spread instantly over the radio. Before he came, staff meetings were one long shout from Gonen. Bar-Lev put in place proper work methods. No one questioned his authority. The country owes him a great deal.”24