Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation

by Yossi Klein Halevi

  ONLY TWO OF the sixteen Israeli forts near the canal remained under Israeli control: Budapest at the northern end, and the Pier at the southern end. Despite constant aerial bombardment and infantry assault, the two dozen men inside Budapest continued to hold out. But the Pier’s defenders, out of ammunition, had decided to surrender. Either that, radioed the Pier’s commander, or another Masada—a mass suicide.

  Exhausted men emerged from the Pier carrying their wounded and dead on stretchers. A photograph of the surrender appeared in Israeli newspapers: it showed a bearded soldier bearing a Torah scroll, an image that recalled the helplessness of exile. The anti-image of the Six-Day War.

  Yet for all the setbacks, the IDF was regaining momentum. On the Golan front, a few dozen Israeli tanks had stopped the Syrian advance and saved the Galilee. In the south, a vast reservist army had formed, much of it spontaneously, ready to take the offensive.

  The songs on the radio were angry, determined, irreverent, reflecting the spirit in the field. It was Israel’s first rock ’n’ roll war. In the instant songs written for battle, the electric guitar displaced the accordion. “Don’t worry, I’m being careful and wearing a sweater,” a soldier writes his girlfriend in one song. “And between the shelling and the bombing there’s even time to rest.”

  TO THE CANAL

  BENT IN HOODED GREEN COATS against the cold desert night, Arik and a team of three dozen men gathered around maps in the prefab dining room of Sharon’s headquarters. Danny had placed Arik in charge of planning the crossing, code-named Operation Brave-Hearted Men. It was set for 20:00, Monday, October 15.

  Some of the men began nodding off. Arik, who himself hadn’t slept more than four hours in the last two days, called a ten-minute break and told everyone to go to the faucet outside and wash their faces. “Hevreh, this is the moment,” he said. “We’re going to pull it off.”

  Everyone understood: the success of the war depended on this mission. If the fighting ended with substantial Egyptian troops on the Israeli side of the canal, and without an Israeli invasion on the Egyptian side of the canal, Egypt would have won. It would be Israel’s first defeat, and the damage to Israeli deterrence and morale would be devastating. But if the paratroopers succeeded in establishing a beachhead that could be widened, the result would be an astonishing comeback, perhaps Israel’s greatest victory.

  So far, though, nothing was going according to plan. The two-hundred-meter roller bridge that was supposed to be stored near the canal and laid across it in time of war was twenty kilometers away and had broken down. Meanwhile another bridge was slowly making its way to the canal. This was a World War II–era bridge made of eight pontoons, each attached to massive cubes filled with polyethylene to keep it afloat. Each pontoon was laid on a flatbed trailer, pulled by a tank.

  The plan now was for the paratroopers to assemble at a position along the Bar-Lev Line known as “the Yard,” a stretch of sand at the point where the Great Bitter Lake fed into the Suez Canal and that had been flattened and protected by embankments for the eventuality of an Israeli crossing. The paratroopers would cross in rubber boats, then spread out and create a beachhead on the opposite shore. And then try to hold out until the pontoon bridge arrived.

  Not quite a suicide mission, thought Arik, but better not to calculate the odds. To get to the canal the paratroopers would travel on an exposed road, within easy range of Egyptian fire. Even if the paratroopers made it safely to the Yard, Egyptians waiting on the other side could easily pick them off in the water. And even if they made it safely across and established a beachhead, the absence of a bridge to transport tanks and infantry reinforcements meant that the paratroopers would face an Egyptian counterattack alone.

  Arik looked around the room. There was nowhere he would rather be than among these men. Civilians, but there were no more dependable soldiers in any professional army. Men who didn’t panic under fire, who charged without waiting for an order, who would risk their lives to evacuate a wounded friend. For all the screwups, the privilege of being one of them made it all worthwhile.

  BUT HOW WOULD they get to the canal? When the brigade’s quartermasters did an inventory they discovered only fifteen half-track personnel carriers, hardly adequate for even half a battalion.

  The commander of the 71st Battalion, Dan Ziv, instructed one of his officers, Hanan Erez, to gather several dozen drivers, find half-tracks, and bring them back to the battalion’s encampment on the sand dunes near the Refidim base. Ziv, a small man with great self-confidence, was a commander in the style of the old Unit 101. In the 1956 battle for the Mitla Pass, he had won a medal for driving into enemy fire and rescuing five wounded paratroopers.

  “You have a single assignment,” Ziv said to Erez, “and I couldn’t care less where you find them. Above the ground, under the ground: find half-tracks.”

  “We’re in the middle of the desert,” Erez noted.

  “If you don’t have thirty-five half-tracks by fourteen hundred hours,” said Ziv, “don’t show your face in the battalion.”

  Erez found three dozen half-tracks parked in Refidim. The officer in charge refused to relinquish them without a signed order. Erez pointed his Uzi at the officer’s chest. The half-tracks were released.

  At 13:45, a caravan of thirty-five half-tracks led by Erez drove into the battalion’s encampment.

  DANNY GATHERED HIS OFFICERS. Israeli Phantoms flew fast and low.

  “Whatever happens on the road,” said Danny, “just keep moving toward the canal. Everything now depends on us.”

  Danny had one more request of Arik: that he join the first wave across the canal.

  “I need you as my representative on the other shore,” Danny said. He added, “I can’t tell you to take this on.”

  “Of course,” replied Arik.

  YISRAEL HAREL, ASSIGNED to help direct traffic, approached Arik just as he was about to board a half-track. “I want to take your picture,” Yisrael said. Both men understood the potential significance of the photograph.

  Arik was forty years old, with thinning hair and sideburns. Binoculars hung around his neck on fraying rope. Squinting from exhaustion and single-minded focus, he tried to smile for Yisrael’s camera. Instead, he managed only to open his mouth wide, as if there were something urgent he needed to say.

  AT 16:30 THE MEN of the 71st Battalion, along with the brigade’s command and an engineering company sent along for mine clearing, boarded the fifty half-tracks. All told, perhaps seven hundred men crammed into vehicles able to adequately accommodate half that number. Soldiers sat atop each other, to ensure their place in the crossing. “Can someone help me find my leg?” a young man called out.

  Army chaplains distributed copies of the IDF’s Prayer before Battle, and even many secularists quietly repeated the words: “Be with the soldiers of Israel, emissaries of Your people, who are going to war today with their enemies. Strengthen us and embolden us, fight our battles, hold the shield and rise up to help us.”

  Arik, accompanied by his radio operator and runner, boarded a half-track. Aside from his mini-entourage, he was, for the first time in many years, simply a soldier. For now he had no responsibilities; the brigade’s other deputy commander was in charge of getting the convoy to the Yard.

  The slow-moving half-tracks, led by a company of tanks, reached an intersection linking Sinai’s two main roads. The entire IDF seemed stuck in the intersection: hundreds of flatbed trucks and buses and jeeps and ambulances and civilian vans drafted for the war effort, all seemingly honking at once and none of them moving. Unable to navigate sand dunes, the half-tracks were confined to the strip of asphalt.

  Officers leaped from the half-tracks and pleaded, threatened, cursed. “We’ve got to get to the canal!” There were fistfights. One officer shot at the tires of a truck.

  ARIK LOOKED AT his watch and fought despair: 20:00. They were supposed to be crossing the canal now. The convoy had finally cleared the intersection, but the traffic jam persisted. In
the three hours since it had set out, the convoy had advanced barely four kilometers.

  Arik sat beside the deputy commander of the 71st Battalion, a kibbutznik named Uzi Eilat. Legs pressed against his chest, Eilat told Arik, in a voice that suppressed emotion, “My brother was killed two days ago on the Golan.” Arik listened in silence. “There’s nothing to do but go on,” Eilat added.

  “You’re right,” Arik replied, wishing he had adequate words, “there’s nothing to do but go on.”

  21:30. THE CONVOY reached the rendezvous point where the motorized rubber dinghies were waiting. The men loaded them onto the half-tracks, two on each vehicle. The boats were so heavy that a dozen men were required to lift each one. The soldiers crawled back into the half-tracks under the boats, which they held up as high as they could to deflect the sensation of smothering.

  An empty road lay before them, expansive as the sands. Arik felt relief and foreboding: They’d reached the end of the Israeli line. From this point onward, they were on their own.

  EXPLOSIONS SHATTERED THE SILENCE. The sky turned red and white. Just north of the road, barely two kilometers away, a terrible battle was under way. Dozens of tanks were burning.

  The IDF’s assault on the so-called Chinese Farm—an Egyptian agricultural station before 1967, where massive Egyptian forces had now concentrated—was intended to divert the enemy’s attention from the paratrooper convoy and clear the road leading to the canal. Hundreds of Egyptian and Israeli tanks mingled blindly in the darkness, shooting at each other at point-blank range.

  Several shells exploded near the half-tracks, but those appeared accidental. The convoy continued, undetected.

  ARIK, LISTENING IN on the brigade’s radio, heard the commander of the tank company leading the convoy, whose name was Yochi, request permission from Danny to join the battle. “My guys are fighting there,” he said.

  “Shalom,” said Danny, releasing him. “Thank you.”

  Arik mentioned to Uzi, the deputy commander who had lost his brother, that Yochi the tank commander was heading toward the Chinese Farm. “Ah, that’s Yochi?” said Uzi. “He’s a friend of mine from the kibbutz.”

  Ten minutes later they heard massive explosions. The tank company had been ambushed. Among those killed was Yochi.

  A PEACEFUL SHORE

  ARIK INHALED THE SMELL of salt water. It was 01:00, five hours after the scheduled time for the crossing. The half-tracks entered into a large clearing fronted by high sand embankments: the Yard. Just beyond lay the dark, placid waters of the Suez Canal.

  Soldiers rushed up the embankment, carefully raised their heads, and looked across the narrow waterway. In the light of a waning moon, they could discern reeds along the opposite shore, barely two hundred meters away. They opened fire, expecting a massive outburst in return. But from the other shore, only silence.

  An explosion. “I’m hit!” someone cried.

  Everyone fell to the ground. But there were no more explosions. A stray shell from the Chinese Farm. The paratroopers still hadn’t been detected.

  The injured soldier turned out to be Arik’s runner, a kibbutznik named Amos. Arik checked his wound: shrapnel in the leg. “Nothing terrible,” Arik reassured him.

  “I’m afraid the war is over for me,” said Amos.

  Sweating despite the cold, the men unloaded the rubber boats. Arik joined a group dragging a boat filled with crates of ammunition up the steep embankment. The decline was even worse. The men continually slipped, and at any moment the boat seemed about to slide down and off into the water.

  The first six boats were lowered into the canal. The men stood in the water, holding the boats steady to prevent them from drifting with the flow southward. The motors, covered with dust, failed to start. One boat began to sink. Engineers were summoned and within minutes all six boats, filled with paratroopers, were moving toward the western shore.

  Arik, pressed against nine other men, watched the moonlight fragment in the gently flowing water. Though he wasn’t wearing a jacket, he didn’t feel the night’s chill. He wished he could remove his ammunition belt, which he’d secured too tightly, and which was loaded with extra bullet clips that pressed into his stomach.

  They can sink us now, no problem— But if there were Egyptians waiting, they were holding their fire.

  The boats halted in a tangle of reeds.

  A sapper laid explosives and blew a hole in the barbed wire fence. Engineers rushed through.

  Paratroopers followed, firing as they ran. Still no return fire. They organized into two units and headed in opposite directions, to secure the immediate area. Two landing points, perhaps 150 meters apart, were marked with light reflectors mounted on stakes, to guide the next wave.

  In the moonlight, Arik discerned mango and palm trees, reeds as tall as a man, a lushness stunning after the starkness of the desert. He felt almost welcomed.

  Arik radioed Danny: The beachhead is secure.

  THE RELAY OF rubber dinghies began, each crossing more efficient than the last. Within a few hours, some seven hundred paratroopers had crossed.

  The paratroopers had slipped through undetected, but their luck was sure to end soon. Inevitably, the thousands of Egyptian soldiers on this side of the canal would find them. As the paratroopers widened their patrols, seeking to destroy bunkers and missile bases, they were inviting discovery. How long would they be able to hold out then, without a bridge in place to provide reinforcements?

  Danny Matt and his staff crossed the canal. Arik greeted them. “Nothing can move us from here,” he said.

  THE BEACHHEAD WIDENS

  05:30, OCTOBER 16, day one of the crossing.

  Looking across toward the Yard, Arik saw bulldozers breaking through the embankment. Then, through the breach, plastic barges on wheels rolled into the water. Fastened together, they began ferrying tanks across the canal. The bridge hadn’t yet arrived. But the army had found a temporary alternative: a dozen secondhand French-made amphibious rafts, able to hold a small number of tanks.

  Arik guided the tanks to shore. All told, twenty-eight tanks were brought across—hardly the massive armored force envisioned in prewar scenarios of a crossing. Still, a beginning.

  Danny dispatched three tanks to secure a nearby airfield that the Egyptians had turned into a logistics base. “Arik will go with you, he has a map,” Danny said to the tank commander, Giora. Arik climbed atop Giora’s tank and acted as guide, his body outside the hatch. “Don’t fire randomly,” he told Giora. “Our guys are patrolling.”

  Giora’s tank led the way. Ten minutes later they came to a gate. The tanks turned onto the runway, firing at amphibious vehicles lined up alongside. The Egyptian soldiers seemed too stunned to return fire.

  Arik ordered the tanks back toward the beachhead. “We’ll send a unit to clean up later,” he said.

  As they tore through a thicket of reeds, Arik heard a gunshot behind him. Oil sprayed his back. A sniper had shot a jerry can affixed to the side of the tank.

  A short distance later, Giora told Arik that he intended to rejoin his unit, which had meanwhile headed west, searching for missile bases. “I’ll drop you off here,” Giora said. “We’re not far from the beachhead.” In fact, they were a about a kilometer away, in an area where they had just been shot at. Arik wished Giora luck and began walking east.

  AVITAL GEVA AND his mini-convoy had been on the road for two days and nights. They passed charred tanks and trucks, and dozens of sukkahs, some made of ammunition crates and covered with palm fronds.

  Avital had heard of course about the crossing—everyone on the road was talking about it—and he was heading for the other side of the canal. But Company D’s three trucks were stuck in a traffic jam that seemed without end. For long hours they simply stood still. Avital pleaded with drivers to let him pass: “We’re trying to get to our brigade, the hevreh that crossed the canal.” Brother, he was told, we’re all trying to get somewhere.

  The traffic jam was a purposeful
surge, the anarchic expression of the IDF’s remarkable comeback. Everyone was trying to go west, toward the front. The IDF’s turnaround was due mostly to initiatives taken by field officers like Avital, who didn’t wait for orders but did what they had been trained to do, what their instincts as IDF soldiers told them to do: seek out the Egyptians and push them as far back as possible from Israel’s borders. Survivors of decimated tank units spontaneously created new units and returned to the inferno, waving from their turrets.

  THE BATTLE OF GOG AND MAGOG

  AT DAWN OF the second day of the crossing, a heavy fog covered both banks of the canal. Unlike the early-morning fog in Sinai, this fog lingered.

  It cleared around 08:00. And then the shelling began. The paratroopers on the western coast of the canal had enjoyed thirty hours of relative quiet before the Egyptians realized they were facing a full-fledged invasion that threatened to cut off the supply route to their forces in Sinai. The Chinese Farm had still not been entirely cleared of Egyptian forces, and the bridge could not be safely brought to the Yard. Still, several thousand men, and several dozen more tanks, had managed to cross.

  Arik was with Danny on his half-track, parked on a hill beneath the eucalyptus trees—“God’s Little Corner,” paratroopers were calling it. The sand erupted in explosions, and the two men leaped off the half-track into foxholes. When quiet returned, they lifted their heads and caught each other’s eye. Wordlessly, they smiled and shrugged: Still alive.

  PING-PING-PING OF STRAFING MIGS, whooshing streaks of Katyusha fire: thousands of explosives were fired at the four kilometers of the expanded beachhead.

  As their men penetrated deeper into Egyptian territory, Danny and Arik confined themselves to the beachhead. There they faced a new danger. The Egyptians possessed a Soviet-made device that could detect the source of radio transmissions: within fifteen minutes of a broadcast from Danny’s half-track, an Egyptian shell would crash at precisely the point where the half-track had stood. Danny and Arik were in regular communication with the paratrooper patrols. And so they needed to be in constant movement, day and night, driving in slow, repetitive circles. Like rabbits, thought Arik.