by David Landau
It was a disaster nevertheless, and Sharon’s officers had no hesitation in bad-mouthing Bren for it. After all, he had assumed overall responsibility for securing the roads to the canal. The episode brought the underlying tensions and recriminations among the generals into even sharper relief. The order that morning, so hateful and misguided in Sharon’s eyes, to stop the crossing had come from both Gonen and Bar-Lev. “As long as there’s no bridge, there’s no crossing” is how Jackie Even remembered Bar-Lev’s fiat. “I’m not transferring the IDF aboard those Gilowas!” Chief of Staff Elazar reacted in the same way—increasingly so during the day as the strength of the Egyptian resistance at Missouri/Chinese Farm became clearer. “As long as we do not have a safe and stable bridge, we will hold on to the west bank with limited forces only,” he ruled.
Elazar was angry that the situation at Missouri was not made clear to him in real time. He was bitter and furious at what he felt was glib and inadequate reporting by Sharon’s division—both about the true state of the roads and about the true intensity of the resistance they had encountered. He was even angrier to hear that Sharon was vociferously criticizing the order to stop the crossing until a bridge was up. Sharon’s officers were saying that a whole division could have crossed on the Gilowas—had the High Command not wasted this crucial day with its overcautious hesitations.43
To Sharon, Elazar and Bar-Lev were indeed squandering the military opportunity that his division had paid much blood to create. The whole strategy of crossing, he argued, was designed to throw the enemy off balance and recapture the initiative. He had successfully plunged through the gap between the two Egyptian armies. Surprise had been total—and was still in effect. Despite Haim Erez’s vigorous rampage on the western shore, the bridgehead on both banks was still amazingly quiet and peaceful. This was the time to exploit the breakthrough by pouring more and more armor and supplies over to the other side. Granted, there was no bridge yet, and no real prospect of getting one up soon. But the Gilowas were doing the job.
OCTOBER 17–22
“October 16 could have been the day of our real triumph,” Sharon writes.
But it was not. Instead, after the previous night’s immense efforts, the advance was halted. That day and more than that day were wasted … That night, exhausted and morose, I went to sleep on the warm engine cover of a tank. Early on the morning of the seventeenth I was awakened by the sound of self-propelled rafts being towed into the yard. They were a welcome sight. With enough of these rafts on hand we would now be able to assemble the bridge. Once that was done, we might finally be able to change some minds about getting our forces across fast, even though by this time surprise was no longer with us.
That last assessment was now violently confirmed with a sudden and intense artillery bombardment of the yard.
Almost simultaneously MiG fighters swarmed over the yard in an attack that turned the compound into an inferno … Suddenly I felt a smashing pain on my forehead. But an instant later my eyes opened and I realized that whatever had hit me was just a glancing blow. Though my head was bleeding heavily, nothing else seemed wrong…
I felt I had to get the command vehicles out of there. The fire was so heavy that our aerials were taking hits and we were in danger of losing radio control. So I ordered them to the gate area … As I looked I realized that while inside the yard we were under artillery fire, outside the vehicles were being hit by direct flat-trajectory tank fire … Through my binoculars I looked toward the road junction several hundred yards away and was shocked to see an Egyptian counterattack of tanks and supporting infantry coming directly toward us. It was an absolutely critical moment. These Egyptians were about to close the yard behind us. The only force I had under my hands at that instant was the command APCs, those five M113s.
Sharon described how they charged the junction, all their machine guns blazing, and somehow held off the advancing Egyptians for a few precious minutes until a rescuing force of Israeli armor swung into view and drove them off.
His forehead swathed in bandages and his heart racing from this narrow escape, Sharon was now summoned to a consultation at a point several miles back from the canal.
When we got to the co-ordinates on the dunes, I saw waiting for me Moshe Dayan, Haim Bar-Lev, David Elazar, and Avraham Adan. As I approached, nobody said a word—except Dayan, who greeted me with a normal, friendly “Shalom, Arik.” I hadn’t seen any of them since the fourteenth. Since that day virtually the entire crossing battle had been carried out by my division alone. But now there was not a single word or an outstretched hand. Just silence.
Then Bar-Lev said, very quietly and deliberately, “The distance between what you promised to do and what you have done is very great.” At that moment I felt tired to death … I knew there was only one thing to do. I had to smack Bar-Lev in the face. I felt I just had to do it.
To this day I do not know how I kept myself from hitting him. Instead, I simply clamped my mouth shut. After a moment more of silence, a short discussion took place and they decided to do what they should have done two days earlier. Very soon the pontoon bridge would be completed. Now we could proceed across the canal. My division would hold the yard, secure the corridor, and proceed north on the west bank of the canal toward Ismailia, and westward twenty-five to thirty kilometers in the direction of Cairo. Adan and Kalman Magen would cross the bridge and would proceed southward around the shores of the Great Bitter Lake to the rear of the Egyptian Third Army. It was a brief exchange. When it was over, Gonen, Bar-Lev, and Elazar got into their helicopter and flew off. Adan mounted his APC to go back to his division. I was there alone with Moshe Dayan … He asked me about my head. It was, at least, a human interaction.44
Perhaps it was the sight of his head that momentarily dehumanized the others. Perhaps they realized that the bloodstained bandage, with Arik’s telltale gray locks peeking out from on top of it, was about to become one of the iconic images of this war—in Israel and throughout the world. With one superficial head wound, Sharon had dealt his rivals a mortal blow in the public-relations race for glory.
The “war council on the dunes” should have been the moment of greatest gratification, when the principal commanders paused to rejoice together as they finally set about turning the tables on the enemy. Instead, they could barely speak a civil word to one another. In the days that followed, as the military situation improved, their relations continued to deteriorate. The cease-fire with Egypt and Syria, on October 22, ushered in an even more public and acrimonious round in the “war of the generals.”
Dayan, at any rate, remained with Sharon for a couple of hours and visited with him in “Africa.” He could scarcely have failed to sense the outpouring of love and adulation for the divisional commander wherever they went. The simplistic but evocative sobriquet “Arik, king of Israel,”m was already making the rounds of the division. Within days it would be on all the soldiers’ lips and on makeshift banners hung from their tanks.
Dayan, describing the “war council on the dunes” in his own memoirs, supplies the recognition and appreciation that the other generals could not bring themselves to utter. “Sharon’s division had fought with total self-sacrifice,” he writes.
It had suffered very heavy casualties, but it had not wavered from its assignments. Its soldiers had conquered the bridgehead on the eastern bank in devastating armored battles. All of the men—from Arik and his staff to the last field unit—were under constant bombardment. In the battles for the eastern bridgehead the division had lost some two hundred men. In Amnon Reshef’s brigade all the senior commanders were killed and replaced twice over. The company commanders were now the “third generation.” Dozens of the brigade’s tanks had been hit and left burned out and destroyed at Lakekan, at Matzmed, and at the Chinese Farm.
Within hours of the “council on the dunes,” tensions were running high again, this time over what Sharon and his staff regarded as Bren’s sluggishness—unpardonable in the circumstances, they maintai
ned—in crossing the canal even once the bridge of rafts was up. “At 1600 the bridge was ready,” Jackie Even recalled, “and nothing happened! Total silence. I’m screaming at Bren on the radio that we’re open for business, and no one comes. For seven hours no one came.”
Bren’s division had been fighting all day against a determined Egyptian effort to break out of Missouri and cut off the Israeli eastern bridgehead by severing both Akavish and Tirtur. In the afternoon, a separate Egyptian attack, by the Third Army’s Twenty-Fifth Armored Brigade, was mounted from the south. Reshef lay in wait for the Egyptian column, and he was supported by two of Bren’s brigades, the 217th under Natke Nir and the 500th under Arieh Keren. It was an important battle and ended in a huge success for Israel with more than eighty Egyptian tanks knocked out.
Regrouping, refueling, and reorganizing after these battles naturally took Bren’s brigades hours, and it was nearly midnight by the time the 162nd Division began its crossing.
Even recalled:
At last, Bren arrives with his command unit and another brigade. And Natke Nir also begins arriving. The Egyptians must have twigged what was going on, and a bombardment from hell opens up on us. The whole area seems to be burning. It’s midnight, but it’s light like day. I say to myself, “Whether you die or not, if this operation doesn’t succeed, everything is lost.” After Bren and the first brigade are across, the bridge is hit and breaks apart. A tank on a raft is hit and sinks with its crew inside. Gilowas—now ferrying Bren’s tanks across—are hit and several sink. I’m in the middle of the bridge, on my own with no engineer officers. Our people are being killed and wounded all around me. I maneuver a bridging tank into position to span the break in the bridge—and the division continues to cross … The cries of the wounded mingle with the crashing of shells, but I say to myself, “We’ve won the war.” Getting the 162nd over to the other side, to join the force already over there, was the event that won the war. I had this feeling of sudden, total relief. We’d won.45
The next day, in hard battles against Egyptian reinforcements rushed in from around Cairo, the 162nd Division broke out of the west bank bridgehead and surged west, intent on swinging down the coast of the Great Bitter Lake to the south and cutting off the Third Army from the rear. It was joined later by elements of Magen’s division, striking out farther to the west and then sweeping south. Together in the days ahead they would advance down the coast and cut the Cairo–Suez road that was the Third Army’s vital supply route. An attempt to take the city of Suez itself ended in costly failure.
“Of course,” Sharon writes bitterly, “by the time Adan broke out of the bridgehead the Egyptians had managed to concentrate forces opposite him. And what could have been done so easily on the sixteenth and even on the seventeenth became a hard and costly job on the eighteenth.”46
Back in Tel Aviv, Dayan batted away renewed efforts by Gonen and Bar-Lev, working through Elazar, to engineer Sharon’s removal. With the end of the war in sight, the defense minister told the chief of staff, it simply wasn’t going to happen.
Sharon, meanwhile, was preparing to send Reshef’s brigade across the canal at last, to join Erez. Crossing was no longer a problem: the huge roller bridge was finally dragged to the canal, and on the morning of the nineteenth it spanned the two banks about half a mile north of the pontoon bridge made from the self-propelled rafts. Reshef and Erez, together with Danny Matt’s paratroopers, were to press north toward Ismailia. But Gonen still wanted the bulk of the 143rd Division to stay on the east bank and keep attacking Missouri in order to widen the bridgehead and push the Egyptian artillery out of range.
Sharon argued, more and more vehemently, that attacking Missouri would be costly, misguided, and unnecessary. “On the contrary, the most effective thing to do would be to move northward along the west bank of the canal, behind the Egyptian positions. As we moved up behind them toward Ismailia, the Egyptians would be so menaced themselves, they would not even begin to think about threatening our lines of communications.” But he was ordered to bring back forces from the west bank to beef up the projected assault. Sharon kept dragging his feet. On the afternoon of the nineteenth, Gonen once again asked Elazar to fire Sharon on the grounds that he was defying Southern Command’s orders.
These were not without logic. The area of the bridgehead was still under constant, heavy shelling, and the toll on IDF lives was unbearable. October 19, Dayan writes, was the worst day of the war in terms of casualties, with one hundred dead and more than four hundred injured, most of them in the bridgehead area.
But Dayan himself was becoming increasingly disenchanted with Southern Command’s adamant insistence on attacking Missouri. The Egyptians, now seriously alarmed at their situation, had begun urgently lobbying their Soviet patrons to procure a cease-fire. Henry Kissinger, the American secretary of state, seemed inclined to go along with it. Prime Minister Meir believed they had three days left before the two superpowers, working through the UN, issued a joint ukase bringing the war to an end. The priority now, Dayan advised her, must be on shaping the cease-fire lines.
“We need to focus on our offensives west of the Canal,” Dayan told the prime minister. “We need to push northwards and southwards, and try to reach Ismailiya and Suez.”
Nevertheless, Dayan was still not prepared to intervene directly on Sharon’s behalf in his struggle against the order to attack Missouri. “I fought it,” Sharon writes.
I railed against it. I tried every way I knew to get the order rescinded. It would be a useless gesture, an absolutely needless waste of lives. But at the end I was not able to change it. On the twenty-first I obeyed the order.
The morning of the attack I stood on a rampart on the western bank and watched Tuvia’s tanks and APCs rush the Egyptian positions. I saw them penetrate deep into the defenses, and as they did I saw them hit by a torrent of RPGs, Saggers, and tank fire. One after another Tuvia’s vehicles stopped and burst into flame. It was a sight that sickened all of us who were watching…
That evening Southern Command ordered me to attack again … to take forces from the western side of the canal … and transfer them back to the east to take part in a battle that should never have been fought in the first place … It was generalship of the worst kind. But I am afraid that it was more than just bad generalship … To this day [sixteen years later] I cannot free myself from the feeling that one of the reasons they were pressing me to attack the Sixteenth and Twenty-first divisions on the east side of the canal was not because they considered the corridor too narrow, but because they wanted to keep my troops on the eastern side. They would allow me to proceed north, but they did not want me to have sufficient forces to do it effectively. These are hard things to say. But my strong impression then was that the antagonisms of years between myself and those in command (Bar-Lev and Elazar), augmented now by political considerations, played a considerable role in the military decisions.47
“Do you intend to reinforce Tuvia?” Gonen yelled at Sharon on the radio that night.
“No way,” came the laconic reply.
“So I say reinforce!”
“No way!”
“You should know—this is insubordination.”
“Oh come on, leave me alone with that kind of talk.”
Bar-Lev got on the radio and gave Sharon a specific order to transfer forces back to the east bank and to attack Missouri again in the morning. Sharon transferred five tanks. But now, at last, Dayan stepped in. Sharon called him to appeal Bar-Lev’s order. Dayan called Yisrael Tal, the deputy chief of staff. “An appeal like that from Arik can’t just be ignored,” he said. He asked Tal to review the arguments and “issue appropriate orders.” “Fifteen minutes later,” according to Chaim Herzog, “Tal phoned Gonen to transmit an order from the minister of defense not to attack Missouri.”48n
Dayan, having exercised his waning authority at last, did not make do with that. At dawn he flew down to Sharon’s division, heard his side of the story, flew on to the Sout
hern Command headquarters, and poured out his wrath on Gonen (Bar-Lev was not in the war room). “You told him to take Missouri. That is scandalous. Attacking Missouri is suicidal. There is a conditioned reflex in this Command against every suggestion from Sharon.”
GONEN: Arik is conducting his own private war.
DAYAN: There are those who say that it’s this war room that has been infiltrated by political considerations.49
By now, the cease-fire was imminent. Sharon’s division had the Ismailia–Cairo road within its gun sights, but Sharon wanted the town itself, and he pushed his armor forward. The column was stopped by two battalions of Egyptian commandos dug in around a sewage plant on the southern outskirts. A desperate battle developed. The cease-fire hour agreed to by Israel, Egypt, and Syria, 18:52 on the twenty-second, came and went, but the fighting outside Ismailia raged on until close to midnight as the Israelis sought to evacuate all their dead and wounded.
“It wasn’t till the last night that the Command allowed us to attack Ismailia,” Abrasha Tamir recalled.
What can you achieve in an attack that you mount helter-skelter at the last minute? I’m not saying Arik’s behavior all through the war was right, his tantrums, his not answering on the radio, and so forth. But the fact is that Southern Command forbade us to transfer more of our forces to the west bank and forbade us to go onto the attack against Ismailia until the twenty-second. It wasn’t because Bar-Lev and Gorodish really thought the eastern bridgehead needed widening. They simply didn’t want us to attack! They wanted the only attack to be accomplished by Bren and Kalman, while we stayed with the bridgehead … All in order that Arik shouldn’t strut around as though he were the victor.50
Tamir’s judgment was shared, to a greater or lesser extent, by other key figures on Sharon’s staff. “If you’ve decided to cross, then cross!” said Yehoshua Saguy, the divisional intelligence officer.