The Gaza Strip thus having been cut off from the Sinai, the Israeli forces split. With Dayan still following in its wake, 27th Brigade, having rested a few hours, turned southwest along the coastal road. Meeting no more than halfhearted opposition, they passed through the Jirardi Defile and reached Al Arish by evening; by the time they were ready to renew the assault next morning (November 2), however, the Egyptian brigade had obeyed its orders and evacuated the town. Meanwhile 1st Infantry Brigade had turned in the opposite direction, working northeast toward the town of Gaza. There they linked up with the 11th Infantry Brigade coming up from Israel proper, that is, from the west. Together the two brigades had little difficulty in overcoming the Egyptian (in fact, Palestinian) forces in the area—made up of units that, as Dayan noted, had not been issued with heavy weapons by their Egyptian masters and had never been intended for anything more than purely holding operations.
Having echeloned their offensive in three successive stages, by the end of the fourth day (counting from October 29) the Israelis had effectively broken the Egyptian army in the Sinai. What remained were three sideshows, two of which took place during the critical days (October 30-November 2) and one after everything else was over. On October 31 Sharon, claiming the need to improve his positions against the anticipated counterattack from the north73 but defying Dayan’s orders, sent his men into Mitla Pass. Three companies under Lt. Col. Mordechai Gur mounted their half-tracks and drove forward without attempting reconnaissance or securing the hills on both sides. Contrary to expectations they found the latter occupied by units belonging to Egyptian 2nd Brigade, which had not retreated the previous day. They came under heavy fire from invisible caves and had to be extricated, leading to a murderous battle in which the brigade’s remaining forces outflanked the Egyptians by climbing the hills and then, descending the slopes into the pass itself, flushed them out from their positions among the rocks. This action cost the Israelis thirty-eight dead, almost a quarter of the number killed in the entire campaign. Furthermore, no sooner had the paratroopers cleared the pass than Sharon ordered them to evacuate.
The second sideshow also occurred on October 31 and took place at sea. At 0330 hours an Egyptian destroyer, Ibrahim al Awwal, appeared opposite the coast of Haifa and opened fire; though it fired 200 four-inch rounds, damage was slight. Initially the Egyptian vessel came under fire from a French ship, the destroyer Kersaint.74 Then, retreating (as it was running out of ammunition and considered its mission accomplished), it was engaged by two Israeli destroyers, which positioned themselves between it and its base. Soon the Israeli vessels were joined by a couple of IAF Ouragans. Whether it was the destroyers that hit the Egyptian ship or rockets fired from the aircraft is immaterial. At any rate the steering gear was put out of action and Ibrahim al Awwal hoisted a white flag after its crew tried unsuccessfully to sink it by opening the valves. Strategically this action was entirely without significance. It did, however, serve to raise Israeli morale to new heights—after all it is not every day that an enemy warship surrenders, captain and all.
Finally, it remained to accomplish Israel’s one real strategic objective for the entire campaign, that is, to seize Sharm al-Sheikh so as to break the Egyptian blockade and open the straits to shipping and overflight. Citing a shortage of transport, the local Egyptian commander had persuaded his superiors that evacuation was not practicable; with his naval support also gone (one Egyptian frigate was sunk by the British and another took refuge in a Saudi Port)75 he and his two battalions were left entirely to their own devices. On the Israeli side a motorized brigade, the 9th, had been earmarked for the task and was concentrated at Ras en Nakb just south of Elat. On the morning of November 2 it received orders to proceed down the coast. There was, however, no metalled road, and driving through the sands that covered part of the track proved to be grueling. Meanwhile two companies of paratroopers had been dropped at A-Tur on the southwestern coast of the Sinai. Having secured the airport, they were joined by an airborne infantry battalion and a battalion of comrades who made their way by land; commanded by Eytan, the combined force drove south.
Coming from two directions at once, the offensive against Sharm al-Sheikh now developed into a race between 9th Brigade and Eytan’s men. In the event 9th Brigade arrived first. Supported by the IAF’s fighter-bombers, which strafed and rocketed, it opened the attack during the night of November 4-5. As usual when fighting from prepared positions, the Egyptian troops put on a fierce resistance even when the situation was hopeless; the Israelis made slow progress. In the end it took almost twelve hours’ fighting to break the outnumbered, outgunned, and isolated Egyptian battalions, and then it was Eytan’s force, coming from the other side, that brought about the decision. Being told by Dayan that the campaign was over, Ben Gurion retorted: “And I suppose you can’t bear that, can you?”76
At the time the Israelis went to war, about half of the Egyptian garrison normally stationed in the Sinai had already been withdrawn, giving the IDF considerable superiority in numbers of men and, even more so, armor. It is true that, having issued their ultimatum, the French and the British delayed the beginning of “Operation Musketeer”; yet only for the first forty-eight hours—until 1900 hours on October 31, to be precise—was the IDF on its own. At that time, out of the three main Israeli attacks, only the southernmost was a complete success. And that one was little more than a feint, mounted against an undefended sector with the aid of a single brigade that could be withdrawn if necessary. By contrast, the central Israeli advance, though it had already captured Kusseima and was threatening to take the main Egyptian positions in the flank and rear, had as yet made no impression on those positions. At that time the “critical” offensive (Dayan’s term) against the Rafah junction had not even begun.
Even disregarding the difficulties experienced on the central axis, whether the IDF would have done as well had the British and the French not launched “Operation Musketeer” is open to some doubt. Much would have depended on the IAF’s ability to identify and forestall Egyptian counterattacks; to judge from the episodes that did take place, like the successful interdiction of the Egyptian 2nd Brigade on October 30 and of the 4th on the next day, it was equal to the task. They were assisted by the three squadrons of French fighters that were stationed in Israel, strafed, dropped supplies, and even reached out as far as Luxor to bomb the Egyptian airfield there.77 Still, and in large part owing to the entire way in which the campaign had been planned, the Egyptian air force was never defeated. After a somewhat slow start it fought back bravely enough, engaging in dogfights and launching several painful strafing attacks on the Israeli columns. Ultimately more than half its aircraft were destroyed by the British and the French;78 but for “Operation Musketeer,” a fight against the IAF alone might have been much more balanced.
However, the most remarkable aspect of the IDF’s conduct of the campaign was its system of command and control.79 Highly intelligent, easily bored, and something of a lone wolf—he hated committee work—Dayan himself was anything but an administrator. Having given his final orders prior to the campaign he spent his time away from headquarters, overflying the desert in a light aircraft, driving across it in his command car, and occasionally taking time to dig up archaeological finds. Attaching himself here to one force, there to another, much of the time he was out of radio contact with the General Staff and unable to influence the shape of the campaign. None of this was a surprise; instead it had been planned that way. Besides two Ugda headquarters, as in 1947-1949 the largest organic unit remained the brigade. Each brigade operated almost independently, having been assigned its objective, provided with supplies sufficient for forty-eight hours, and told to advance and fight continuously without paying heed to whatever happened to its right, left, or rear.80 As two military historians have written, the “system” might have been well adapted for seizing fleeting opportunities in armored operations conducted against a mobile opponent81—except that no such operations took place.
Substituting morale for proper organization, the system was responsible for any number of “misfortunes,” as Dayan euphemistically called them. The first took place even before the campaign started. Taking last-minute pictures of the designated landing zone of Eytan’s paratroopers, the IAF mistook an Egyptian road construction crew for troops; consequently, instead of being dropped west of Mitla Pass as originally planned, they were landed in a more difficult-to-defend plain to the east. Even so, the pilots missed their objective by several miles so that the paratroopers had to march for two hours in order to reach their intended positions. Next Israeli pilots, having been sent to disrupt Egyptian telephone lines, found the tailhooks on their modified Mustangs were not up to the job and were forced to use their propellers and wings instead. While there could be no doubt concerning their bravery, clearly preparations had not been thorough enough.
These were only the beginnings. Driving toward Mitla Pass, Sharon’s convoy lost numerous vehicles (as well as ten of thirteen tanks attached to it) and was almost brought to a halt because nobody thought to bring spanners that fit the nuts on the trucks’ wheels. Once he arrived he sent his men to enter the pass against orders and in the most incompetent way possible, thus bringing about a totally unnecessary battle that also proved to be the bloodiest of the entire war. Farther east the 38th Ugda, consisting partly of elderly reservists who had not been given sufficient time to prepare, attacked the Umm Katef-Abu Ageila area without displaying the proper offensive spirit to satisfy Dayan. Ultimately not one but two out of its four brigade commanders, plus the ugda commander himself, had to go (nine years later he reemerged, this time as a professor of military history at Tel Aviv University).
Next, the officer commanding the southern front used the absence of the chief of staff in order to send armored forces into battle well ahead of time, a move so disruptive of everything the General Staff had planned that Dayan, who went to see a sick Ben Gurion late on October 30, did not even dare inform him that it had happened. Advancing toward Al-Agheila, units from Ben Ari’s 7th Armored Brigade ran into others of 37th Brigade, opened fire on them, and knocked out several tanks before recognizing that their opponents were not Egyptians but other Israelis. True to Dayan’s “system” of supply, the advance of Eytan’s paratroopers from Mitla Pass to A-Tur was made without any logistic preparations at all so that they all but starved on the way. Bypassing the pass by way of En Sudar to the south, incidentally this move served as an additional proof that the battle for Mitla Pass had been totally unnecessary.
Last but not least, the IAF—apparently intent on filling its quota of blunders—opened fire on HMS Crane, which was patrolling Sharm al-Sheikh, causing a fire (according to the pilots’ reports) but inflicting only superficial damage (according to the British captain).82 What’s more, on two different occasions IAF aircraft strafed their own forces, which in typical IDF fashion had taken over captured Egyptian vehicles without bothering to repaint them or even provide them with fresh insignia visible from the air. In this too, Dayan, who seemed to personify the IDF, set the example. Arriving at A-Tur on November 6, he found that somebody had blundered and that no arrangements to take him to Sharm al-Sheikh had been made. Accordingly he and his party commandeered an Egyptian car. Next they headed south and almost got themselves killed when they ran into Eytan’s paratroopers, already on their way back.83
Had even one of these “misfortunes” taken place after 1985 or so, the resulting outcry would have been deafening. At the time, however, they were swallowed up by the combination of en brera on the one hand and censorship on the other. The inadequate performance of 38th Ugda and the resulting changes in command were known only to a select few, given that the IDF was not and still is not in the habit of disclosing the names of its division and brigade commanders. Inside the IDF, Sharon’s unauthorized action at Mitla Pass was sharply criticized by his own men, who accused him of reputation-building at their expense.84 Talking to Ben Gurion, Dayan was almost equally critical, but in his published account of the campaign he was content to write, “I regard the problem as grave when a unit fails to fulfill its battle task, not when it goes beyond the bounds of duty.” Instead of the public attacking the IDF for taking unnecessary casualties, it took Dayan to task for disclosing the matter in “disregard [of] the feelings of widows, orphans and bereaved parents whose loved ones fought and died in the Mitla.”85 To blunt the impression, the story of one of Gur’s paratroopers, Yehuda Ken-Dror, who sacrificed himself by deliberately drawing Egyptian fire, was given wide circulation—thus confirming the old adage that behind every hero there is a blunder.
The extent of Western involvement in the war, including the presence of three French fighter squadrons and one of transport, was also downplayed. With very few exceptions the Israeli public felt delirious with victory—telling itself that this five-day, two-division campaign had been “one of the most brilliant of all time” (Shimon Peres)86 and “unequaled since the days when Hannibal crossed the snowy Alps and Genghis Khan, the mountains of Asia.”87 From cabinet ministers down, hordes of visitors descended on the Sinai in a holiday mood, seeking remains of the Exodus and using a passage from the sixth-century Byzantine author Procopius to convince themselves that it was somehow Israeli territory. Ben Gurion himself at one point ranted about his plans for retaining Sharm al-Sheikh and founding the “Third Kingdom of Israel”; whether this was seriously meant or merely represented a starting point for the inevitable negotiations remains immaterial. 88 The inevitable popular songs appeared as if out of nowhere, were broadcast on the radio, and sold on records. “This is neither legend nor dream my friends,” the best known among them thundered, “this is the people of Israel face to face with Mount Sinai.” Having defeated its enemy, the IDF, riding sky-high, felt it could face its future with confidence.
Building a Modern Army: motorized column on maneuver, 1965.
CHAPTER 10
BUILDING A MODERN ARMY
ALTOUGH MILITARILY a success, the Suez campaign of 1956 did not fundamentally change the balance of power between Israel and its neighbors.1 If anything the opposite was the case; the war was one more demonstration of Israel’s inability to translate military victory into political achievement. Not only was there no question of forcing the other side to change their policy and make peace; Israel was unable to retain any of its gains. Coming under heavy international pressure, it was compelled to withdraw early next year.
To be sure, the campaign was not altogether without benefits. The power of the IDF to defeat its enemies had been demonstrated. The objective of opening the Straits of Tyran to Israeli traffic, both naval and airborne, was achieved. The Sinai Peninsula was demilitarized, and a small UN peacekeeping force was inserted between Israel and its most powerful enemy. Moreover, Israel was allowed to remilitarize Nitsana, a small but strategically important border area opposite Abu Ageila. Once back to its own borders, however, the state reverted to being “a small island in an Arab sea.” It also retained all the old vulnerabilities, including a long and wide-open border, an exceedingly narrow strategic “waist,” and of course the overall disparity between it and its much larger enemies, who surrounded it on all sides except the western.
Against this geopolitical background, easily understandable to anybody who so much as bothered to glance at the map, the feeling of en brera not only survived but grew even stronger. As before, Israeli public opinion continued to see the IDF as the one great organization standing between it and death. Even more than before, it was prepared to do its utmost to ensure the army’s success by providing the necessary resources in terms of materiel and the very best manpower at its disposal (that originating in the kibbutsim, which, rightly or not, was considered by themselves and others to constitute the crème de la crème.2 The rejection of diaspora “cowardice” intensified; year in and year out the most important question tens of thousands of schoolchildren were asked when confronted with the Holocaust was not how it could have happened but why “the Je
ws” had gone ka-tson la-tevach (like sheep to the slaughter). For those who joined the IDF as eighteen-year-old conscripts there was now a new generation of former Sinai heroes to emulate. Israeli-born and for the most part without religious sentiments, they were, in the words of the well-known writer Amos Oz, a race of “circumcised Cossacks.”3
Under these circumstances, the highest praise one could bestow on anything was to say that it was kmo mivtsa tsvai (like a military operation). Far from doffing their uniforms when on leave, Israeli youngsters liked to wear them even on social occasions, when anybody sporting the insignia of an officer’s rank considered himself at least a demigod. As Ezer Weizman wrote, combat aircraft were admired not just for their performance but for their supposed beauty,4 an attitude that sometimes led to excess, as when air force mechanics set out to decorate planes at a financial cost that no military organization, let alone the IAF, could tolerate.5 In the late 1960s the El Al Airlines office on London’s Regent Street was even decorated with triangles suggestive of diving Mirage fighters. However, perhaps the best place to observe the difference in outlook between Israel and the rest of the world was the Four Days March. Held in the Netherlands each year, the march was a popular sporting event. To thousands of participants from various countries it was an innocuous occasion in which to walk and socialize. Not so the platoon of IDF men and women who participated each year, armed with Uzi submachine guns. They would storm the twenty-five-mile course as if their lives depended on it, always insisting on arriving first and, upon crossing the finish line, breaking into the mandatory hora dance to show what a lark it had all been.
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