Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon

by David Landau

  Directly south of Akavish was the undefended seam between the two Egyptian armies, so we had plenty of maneuvering room on that side. But on the northern edge of the seam, Tirtur Road skirted the perimeter of the Second Army bridgehead, and this perimeter was very heavily defended. Here the Egyptians had established a major fortified base known as “Missouri,” whose southwestern anchor was an area we called the “Chinese Farm”—an agricultural station set up with Japanese equipment years earlier. This Chinese Farm … sat on the Tirtur Road and on the junction of Tirtur and Lexicon, the communication road that ran parallel to the canal bank. The deep irrigation ditches and the mounds of dirt thrown up when they were excavated made this a natural defensive site where machine guns and anti-tank weapons could dominate the field.

  The strange, slightly comical code names—akavish means “spider,” tirtur means “clatter”—were to become etched on the Israeli public mind like Antietam and Monte Cassino, with all the pride but also all the grief and the heart searching that those names evoked among the victors of those terrible battles. The technical, euphemistic term that Sharon uses, “secure a corridor,” was to translate into bloody and costly fighting in the nights and days ahead.

  My plan … was to attack at dusk and fight the main battle during the night. Tuvia Raviv’s tank brigade would assault Missouri from the east, a head-on thrust that would appear to the Egyptians very much what they expected. But in fact Tuvia’s attack would be a diversion, meant to draw their forces and attention. At the same time, Amnon Reshef’s brigade would execute a hook to the southwest through the unoccupied gap between the Egyptian armies, then north into the rear of the Egyptian base area. Here his missions were to secure the yard as a crossing site, push the Egyptians northward, and open up Tirtur and Akavish from west to east—that is, from behind. With the roads clear, Danny Matt’s paratroop brigade would move into the yard along with the assault boats and cross the canal. Once the paratroop bridgehead was secure, engineers would push the bridges across.

  It was a brilliant plan, reminiscent in its daring and complexity of the multipronged nighttime attack on Abu Agheila in the Six-Day War. And despite every form of snafu and misfortune, the glaring lack of battlefield intelligence, and the yawning gaps that opened, perhaps inevitably, between the plan and the reality, in essence it worked. By dawn of the sixteenth, the paratroopers were across, fortifying their eerily peaceful bridgehead. So were Haim Erez’s tanks, foraging as deep as eighteen miles into the countryside, overrunning missile batteries and radar sites, cutting a swath of Israeli control through the Egyptian rear.

  But as Sharon outlined his tactics on the morning of the fifteenth, speaking with fluent confidence, the unresolved dilemma lurked into focus.

  SHARON: The order of crossing will be 421 (Erez), and then 600 (Tuvia) and then 14 (Reshef).

  BAR-LEV: Just a minute. How’s that? How’s that?

  SHARON: 421’s at the bridge already…

  BAR-LEV: No, no. You’re not transferring three [brigades]?!

  SHARON: No, no. I’ll leave [forces] here. I suppose I’ll leave a battalion of tanks. It depends…

  BAR-LEV: No, no. You’ll leave a brigade.

  SHARON: Okay, then I’ll leave 600 Brigade.

  Sharon continued talking, assuring his superiors that the operation is “complicated but doable.” He talked about the rolling bridge and the self-propelled rafts and the Gilowa amphibious tugs cum rafts, and the need to get the forces across to the west bank “on whatever is available” as soon as they reached the canal shore. But Bar-Lev, as slow speaking as Sharon was fast, hauled him back to the east bank again.

  BAR-LEV: Now, regarding the brigade that remains here … who secures the bridgehead?

  SHARON: 600 does the containment.

  BAR-LEV: And what infantry remains here to secure the bridgehead?

  SHARON: I’ll leave a battalion of paratroopers…

  BAR-LEV: Have they got those LOW [antitank] missiles?38

  The contours of the looming dispute are already discernible: Who crosses? Who stays to defend the eastern bridgehead? Who breaks out to the west and cuts off the enemy army? The war against Egypt was about to be turned around. It was a great martial triumph for Israel. But the triumph was marred—some claim actually diminished—by the “war of the generals” that seethed within the Israeli camp.

  October 15 was the fifth day of the eight-day Jewish festival of Sukkot, or Tabernacles. “As we headed toward the front,” Sharon writes, “we passed dozens of jerry-rigged Sukkot huts. Traditionally these huts are made of branches and foliage and are hung with the season’s harvest. Often they are elaborate and elegant. But for this Sukkot in the Sinai, ammunition cases and packing crates were the main building material, supplemented by an occasional scraggly bush the soldiers had managed to dig up from the desert.”

  Amnon Reshef’s much-mauled brigade had been beefed up for this operation with additional units. He had four tank battalions under him and three more of mechanized infantry. “We knew they had two divisions at Missouri, the Sixteenth Infantry and the Twenty-first. But they were just large eggs on our maps. We didn’t know precisely how and where they were deployed. I hoped to slide through like a knife, from the rear, where we were least expected.”

  The reconnaissance battalion slid through, the sound of its clanking treads drowned by the din of battle raging to the north where Raviv’s 600th Brigade had launched its diversionary attack on Missouri. The battalion swung out wide, crossed Tirtur, and headed on toward the canal shore at Matzmed, ready to assist the paratroopers’ crossing. Reshef himself, with two other tank battalions, now also crossed Tirtur from the south, also without incident, and hurried north to engage the Egyptian positions in Missouri. The next battalion, however, the 184th, suddenly found itself under murderous fire as it followed north. “I’m with half the brigade,” Reshef recalled, “and we’re in a major tank battle north of Akavish. Tanks are exploding and burning all around. I’m looking at Egyptian tanks from a range of two meters. I’m looking at dozens of Egyptian soldiers.”

  Click here to see a larger image.

  “Unknown to Reshef,” Chaim Herzog explains, “his force had moved into the administrative center of the 16th Egyptian Infantry Division, to which the 21st Armored Division had also withdrawn after being so badly mauled on October 14. His force found itself suddenly in the midst of a vast army … Pandemonium broke out in the Egyptian forces. Thousands of weapons of all types opened fire in all directions and the whole area as far as the eye could see seemed to go up in flames.”39

  Behind Reshef and his troops, the Tirtur-Lexicon crossroad was blocked by intense and sustained Egyptian fire. Efforts by Reshef’s infantry battalions to open Tirtur from west to east resulted in repeated, costly failure. The reconnaissance battalion, fighting to free up the crossroads, also sustained mounting casualties.

  “From 9:00 p.m. to midnight we fought like madmen,” Reshef continued:

  I was shooting nonstop, and every one of my men likewise. From Sharon—hardly a sound. This was his greatness. If he trusted someone, he’d let them get on with it and didn’t pester. Once or twice, pleasantly and politely, he would say to me over the radio that it was really important that we opened Tirtur. And I’d say, “It’ll be all right, Arik. I’m working on it.” And he said, “I always know that with you there everything will be all right.” He heard how we were fighting, at ranges of half a meter. It was like inside hell. Thousands of men fighting for their lives.

  At one juncture, Reshef, in his command tank, believed he was joining one of his own companies when suddenly, at a distance of fifty meters, he saw they were enemy tanks. “I knocked out all five of them,” he recalls matter-of-factly.

  “Did you contact Sharon and tell him?”

  “I told him I’d knocked out three.”

  “What was his reaction?”

  “He was pleased. I told him in order to boost his morale.”40

  Morale, that intan
gible but all-important substance, was what decided the 143rd Division’s battle that night, and with it the war. As Reshef and his brigade fought their vastly more numerous foe, Sharon himself, just a few miles to the south, led Danny Matt’s paratroopers into the “yard.” “Unnoticed,” Sharon recalls in Warrior, “we entered into the protection of the yard’s sand walls. Though we did not know it, behind us the reconnaissance battalion was dying in a barrage of Sagger missiles and tank fire. By 1 a.m. lead elements of the paratroopers had started crossing to the west bank in their rubber assault boats. On the other side of the canal the troopers found the area almost deserted. We had taken the Egyptians utterly by surprise. As they established their beachhead, the paratroopers radioed back the code word Acapulco—Success.”

  By this time, the first Gilowas were lumbering into the yard. With the traffic backed up for miles on the road from Tasa and only one of the two access roads to the canal open, Sharon had ordered his deputy, Jackie Even, to have these amphibious tugsj “jump the queue.”

  Inside the yard the bulldozers had been unable at first to breach the wall, until I pointed out the red bricks that marked the specially thinned area. Now they were digging fiercely at the ramparts, while the engineers had already started wrestling with the bridging equipment. A unit of antiaircraft machine guns had taken up positions on the walls ready for the air attacks that we knew would come in the morning. Elements of Haim Erez’s tank brigade were also crowding into the enclosure, waiting to join the paratroopers on the other side. Akavish was open; it was along that road that the paratroopers, rafts, and tanks had made their way into the yard. But Tirtur—crisscrossed by the Chinese Farm—was still shut tight.

  Tirtur was extremely important. It was only along this road that the giant rolling bridge could be towed to the canal, while the extension of Tirtur to the canal bank itself had been especially prepared as a launching site for the bridge … But as Amnon’s units hammered all night at the Egyptians in the Chinese Farm, it became clear that we simply did not have the strength to dislodge them from Tirtur itself. For the moment, at least, we would have to rely on Akavish to conduit men and armor toward the crossing site.

  The morning of October 16 dawned on the most terrible sight I had ever seen … As the sky brightened, I looked around and saw hundreds and hundreds of burned and twisted vehicles. Fifty Israeli tanks lay shattered on the field. Around them were the hulks of 150 Egyptian tanks plus hundreds of APCs, jeeps, and trucks. Wreckage littered the desert. Here and there Israeli and Egyptian tanks had destroyed each other at a distance of a few meters, barrel to barrel. It was as if a hand-to-hand battle of armor had taken place. And inside those tanks and next to them lay their dead crews. Coming close, you could see Egyptian and Jewish dead lying side by side, soldiers who had jumped from their burning tanks and died together. No picture could capture the horror of the scene, none could encompass what had happened there. On our side that night we had lost 300 dead and hundreds more wounded. The Egyptian losses were much, much heavier.

  …At almost the same moment … the bulldozers broke through the last of the ramparts, opening the yard to the canal. And now, directly in front of us across two hundred yards of water was Egypt … On our side everything was barren sand and dust. On theirs the palm trees and orchards grew in lush profusion around the Sweet Water Canal. From where we stood it looked like paradise.

  During the night we had managed to get Danny Matt’s entire paratroop brigade to the western side of the canal. Now they were quickly joined by a number of APCs and twenty-eight of Haim Erez’s tanks, which were ferried over on rafts. As soon as they landed, Haim’s armor raced westward, destroying the surprised Egyptian units and positions that had the misfortune to be in their path. By nine o’clock they reported they had eliminated five ground-to-air missile sites, tearing a gaping hole in the Egyptian anti-aircraft umbrella that had effectively closed this area to Israeli jets. Now they were marauding at will, picking off the last Egyptian units in the area. Nothing stood in their way; the region west of the canal was virtually empty. Haim’s voice came over the radio: “We can get to Cairo”…

  Inside the yard and in the canal opening, engineers were working like mad, directing traffic, widening the breach, getting tanks, men, and supplies onto the rafts and across to the other side. A race was on. The Egyptians were still not aware of what we had done. They were not trying to interdict the crossing, and as yet there was no pressure on the yard itself.

  It was right in the middle of this frenzy of activity that an order came through from Southern Command that was so outrageous I at first refused to believe it. All crossing activity, it said, was to cease immediately. Not a single additional tank or man was to be transferred. According to them, we were cut off, surrounded by Egyptian forces.41

  The next battle in the “war of the generals” was shaping up, threatening to dull the heroism and sacrifice of the night’s titanic struggle.

  • • •

  The rolling bridge, or “the 600-ton monster lying on its belly,” as the 143rd Division’s deputy commander, Jackie Even, dubbed it, was a doubly beached whale that night. Tirtur, the ruler-straight access road forking off from Akavish, remained closed. And the tank battalion detailed to drag it along was neither trained nor qualified to do so. “We were Pattons,” Even explained. “American M60s. The tanks originally trained to drag the bridge were British Centurions from the Seventh Brigade. But they had been sent to the Golan before the war to reinforce positions there.”

  During the morning, Sharon kept hurling the remnants of Reshef’s brigade at Tirtur, bolstered by battalions from the 600th and the 421st. But to no avail. Even when Reshef finally took the crossroads at Lexicon, the road east remained impassable, at the mercy of the Egyptian artillery and armor deployed in Missouri to the north. He suffered still more casualties. Sharon asked for reinforcements from Bren’s division.

  By now, the High Command had decided on a radical change to Noble Hearts: Sharon’s division would not be crossing the canal; Bren’s would instead. Sharon’s division would be tasked with widening the eastern bridgehead and defending it. For the moment, Bren’s division would help with this while preparing to cross.

  In the late afternoon, Reshef and Sharon, both bone tired and both at once exultant over the initial crossing and devastated over the casualties, met on the battlefield, overlooking the crossroads. It was a moment of profound emotion and of intense comradeship. It remained engraved on Reshef’s memory, despite the subsequent vicissitudes in their relationship—and despite the incongruity of the gourmet feast they consumed amid all the carnage and destruction:

  We’re sitting on the tank engine. His guys bring us food. Arik had two four-by-four Wagoneers. One for milk and one for meat! Because you mustn’t mix swiss cheeses with Hungarian horse-meat sausages! It’s not kosher!! Anyway, he had two separate vehicles full of food. It was Lily’s doing really.

  They hand up the food … all sorts of delicatessen, and the two of us are talking and eating. He talks, and I fall asleep. I talk, and his head lolls. Somebody comes and tells us that they’re sending in the 890th Paratroop Battalion—attached to the 162nd Division—into the Chinese Farm, attacking on the east side of it. He was pretty astonished, I think. He couldn’t understand it. But both of us were too tired to analyze it anymore. We didn’t have the facts.

  Reshef said he wanted to cross, too, and Sharon said he wanted him to as soon as possible, as soon as his brigade was relieved. “In the end, it took several days—because they didn’t let our division cross,” Reshef recalled, dredging up the old recriminations decades later.

  They transferred the other division first. Arik wanted us to cross first. He believed in us. He wasn’t going to send me across in defiance of his orders, but he wanted me to be relieved so I could cross. And so did I. I’d taken a sort of oath: I was the one who tried to stop the original Egyptian onslaught on Yom Kippur, and now I wanted to cross over first into Egypt. Yes, Erez had crossed al
ready. But Erez was our comrade, from our division. I wasn’t jealous of him. But I wanted to be next in line after him. Yes, someone’s got to fight against Missouri. But I’d been doing that since the first day of the war.42

  The paratroop attack on the Chinese Farm that night, which Sharon and Reshef spoke of but failed to take action to prevent—it was under Bren’s command—became, for Israelis, one of the most famous and tragic battles of the war. The heroism of the men of the 890th Battalion under Yitzhak Mordechaik furnished books, songs, and legends for a generation and more. The battalion was cut to pieces. Forty of its men died in fourteen hours of incredible tenacity against hopeless odds. A hundred more were injured. Historians and old soldiers still pick over the records, trying to understand what went wrong. The core mystery centers on the informational lacunae. How was it possible that word of the 143rd Division’s desperate battles there the night and day before, involving both armor and infantry—including paratroopers—apparently failed to reach the 162nd Division, deployed nearby?

  It was a near-suicidal assignment, probably superfluous, and plainly conceived in profound error. But it could justly be crowned a success, indeed a historic victory. While the paratroopers fought and died to try to free up Tirtur, just behind them on Akavish a convoy of uni-float raftsl was being tenaciously dragged and pushed toward the canal. Together they would form the bridge on which, the next day, the 162nd Division crossed into Egypt, thus finally clinching the turnabout in the war. The blood of the paratroopers had not flowed in vain.