The extremely high prestige of the IDF also made it possible to use the armed forces for achieving a variety of social goals. Germany, France, Italy, and Japan (from about 1870 on) and Russia (after the 1917 revolution) regarded their armies as “the school of the nation.” Accordingly they entrusted them with all kinds of missions, from acquainting workers with the blessings of rural life by means of milking competitions (the German army before 1914) through technical training to political indoctrination in the virtues of republicanism or unity or Shinto or whatever. The same was true of the IDF, except that it went farther than most. Already in 1949, Ben Gurion had written that “the army must serve as an educational and pioneering center for Israeli youth—for both those born here and newcomers. It is the duty of the army to educate a pioneer generation, healthy in body and spirit, courageous and loyal, which will unite the broken tribes and diasporas to prepare itself to fulfill the historical tasks of the State of Israel through self-realization.”6 As late as 1991 a retired brigadier general argued that “the army is probably the last national framework within which it is possible to have an impact on Israeli youth and to influence the values that will accompany them throughout life.”7 In between the two dates similar ideas concerning the educational role of the military have been repeated a thousand times in every possible forum.
Like most modern armies, the IDF carries out its internal and external propaganda activities by various means, including countless lectures, “cultural events,” shows, open days, a range of publications, and a radio station popular among young people in particular.8 However, it has also developed a series of unique instruments that have no parallel in other countries and that need to be briefly discussed here. The first consisted of special courses for conscripts—most of them from Oriental countries—who did not know Hebrew or had not completed elementary education.9 Somewhat similar courses were provided to civilians, often females and the mothers and sisters of those very soldiers, who had immigrated from Oriental countries and who, in addition to being even shorter on formal education than their menfolk, supposedly did not yet understand the meaning of Israeliness. The instructors were young female soldiers who after receiving a brief training course fulfilled their period of service in this way. In teaching civilians they were often sent to live in villages and townships.
The second program run by the IDF in its nation-building role is GADNA (Gdudei Noar, or Youth Battalions).10 Originating in the prestate days when high-school students were often used for auxiliary tasks such as running messages, in principle GADNA was supposed to inculcate all Israeli youth with love of country, self-confidence, and a modicum of premilitary training that would make it easier to adjust to army life when the time came. Subjects taught included drill, fieldcraft, topography, and the firing of subcaliber weapons. From time to time hikes were organized, during which selected members proudly carried rifles and even light machine guns. Some youths spent a full month of their summer vacations taking a sort of basic training course, after which they would be formally appointed GADNA corporal. All these activities were fully incorporated into the school system, which set aside one hour each week for the purpose and even graded students on GADNA activities. Attempts were also made to reach youths who had dropped out of the formal education system, although on the whole they were less successful. The instructors and needed equipment were provided by the IDF.
The IDF’s third major nation-building instrument was the previously mentioned NACHAL. The idea that settling the land also constituted a form of defense activity had deep roots in prestate days, when it was a question of “delivering” the land from its desolation and, as often as not, its Arab inhabitants. Between 1941 and 1948 it was embodied in PALMACH; indeed more so than the IDF would have liked, because many PALMACH personnel left the army after 1949 and returned to their kibbutsim. When Ben Gurion first proposed the Chok Sherut Bitachon (National Service Law) of 1949 to parliament he had in mind a system whereby every IDF soldier would spend a year doing agricultural work after receiving basic training. 11 This did not go over well with his centrist coalition partners, however, and in the end a compromise was struck. In theory, to this day every IDF conscript is liable for a year’s agricultural work. In practice, NACHAL was limited to volunteers of both sexes (males were grouped in an elite infantry brigade). The number of volunteers, most of them kibbuts members or graduates of various youth movements, has proved sufficient to involve the IDF in a sustained colonization effort. Over the years it has produced dozens of settlements both inside the green line (the pre-1976 armistice line) and, since 1967, the Occupied Territories.
Militarily speaking none of these efforts amounted to much; then and later, NACHAL in particular was regarded by some as a waste of the country’s best manpower, which went out to play with tractors instead of training for war. But socially they indicated the extent to which the Israeli public was prepared to regard the IDF as an educational institution par excellence, allowing it a role in settling the country as well as the indoctrination of youth and the integration of new immigrants. Rightly or not, the IDF was seen as a cardinal part of the nation-building effort—whereas conversely anybody who for one reason or another had not served might suffer discrimination in obtaining everything from public employment to a driver’s license. All this fitted in rather nicely with the so-called development theory then current among sociologists in Israel and abroad.12 Its central tenet was that, thanks to its cohesion and supposed familiarity with things technical, the military was one of the important institutions by which newly independent nations could pull themselves up by the bootstraps and achieve rapid modernization. Accordingly, and often backed by U.S. encouragement and finance, attempts were made to export IDF methods to numerous newly independent countries in Asia and Africa with whom Israel wished to establish good relations.13
The IDF’s high social prestige apart, the other factors that permitted it to continue rapid development were the extraordinary rates of demographic and economic growth achieved during those years. At the time the War of Independence broke out, the Yishuv population stood at 650,000. Less than twenty years later it had more than trebled to about 2.4 million. About two-thirds of the increase consisted of new immigrants, most of whom entered the country during the first few years of independence; the remainder resulted from a comparatively high birthrate and rapidly improving standards of health, housing, social welfare, and the like. Compared with Western Europe and, a fortiori, the United States, Israel at the time remained a poor country, and life for many Oriental immigrants in particular was desperately hard. Still, between 1957 and 1965 a growing population enabled the economy to surge at close to 10 percent per year—remarkable even for the fast-growth 1960s and greater than that of any other country except Japan.
The upshot was that military expenditure rose from $141 million in 1957 (already twice the average spent annually during 1953-1955) to $458.5 million in 1966; from 1959 to 1965, moreover, expenditures were supplemented by substantial amounts of arms received free from West Germany. Although overall the Israeli-Arab economic balance remained heavily weighted in favor of the latter, relatively speaking the former was gaining. Thus, in 1951 the gross national product (GNP) of Egypt (the largest Arab country) exceeded that of Israel 4:1; in 1966 the gap had shrunk to 1.6:1. More significant still was per-capita income; Israel’s advantage grew from approximately 3:1 to 7.5:1.14 These were two entirely different societies, one increasingly modernized and forward looking and the other still largely agricultural and traditional.
After four years and one month during which he acted as the IDF’s dynamo, the talented but controversial Dayan—he seldom accepted responsibility for his actions and was extraordinarily adept at turning his subordinates against each other—resigned in 1958. His replacement was Chayim Laskov, an almost equally experienced officer with no fewer than five terms as aluf (brigadier general) behind him. During the Sinai campaign he had commanded the northern ugda that took the Gaza Strip; until July
1957 his post was chief of the General Staff. By nature and temperament he was as different from his predecessor as could be: quiet, methodical, extremely honest, and inclined toward philosophical reflection (his favorite poem was Kipling’s “If”). His appointment presaged the growing importance of the armored corps, armored forces being the prime instrument by which the Israelis and others have sought to wage blitzkrieg warfare since the late 1930s.
As noted earlier, Israel’s armored corps originated during the War of Independence. During the first months it was a question of producing homemade armored cars—in reality, lorries with layers of steel plate with concrete in between—for use in the Battle of the Roads. Later what tanks, armored cars, half-tracks, and jeeps could be scraped together were used in various operations beginning with the abortive assaults on Latrun; on at least one occasion an immobilized Syrian tank was sent into battle by being loaded on a truck, thus demonstrating both the IDF’s poverty and its ingenuity. 15 Toward the end of the war Sadeh’s 8th Armored Brigade was even evincing clear signs of switching its tanks from an infantry-support role (as at both Latrun and Iraq Suedan) toward mobile, deep-strike operations on the models of military innovators Guderian, Manstein, Rommel, and Patton. On their side of the hill, the Arabs used their armor exclusively for infantry support, as did the Jordanians at Latrun, the Syrians at Degania, and the Egyptians in their attack against Negba. Thus shin be-shin (armor against armor) warfare failed to develop even at this late stage (to which must be added the plain fact that when the war ended, the IDF possessed exactly four operational tanks).16
Although Dayan personally had successfully commanded “armor”—in reality a battalion containing a variety of armored cars, half-tracks, machine-gun carriers, and jeeps—during the operation against Ramla and Lyddia, he remained an infantryman at heart. To him the ideal fighting formation consisted of a self-contained brigade with artillery and tank support, the kind of formation that had been employed at Stalingrad and that, had it only been available, might have been equally useful in the built-up area of Jerusalem where he commanded during the second half of the war. At Kalkiliya in October 1956, he had ruled out the use of armor, thereby leading to unnecessary casualties;17 when the first plans for the Sinai campaign were being drawn up he even raised the absurd proposal that the tanks should be made to follow the infantry on transporters.18 Indeed the IDF’s regard for the armored corps was so low that when Dayan offered Laskov the commanding job in July 1956, the latter considered it a calculated insult (which it may well have been) and came close to tendering his resignation.19 In the event he was persuaded to stay, but only after Ben Gurion intervened and promised that his position as Dayan’s heir apparent would not be affected by the appointment.
In September 1956 the question of armor versus infantry was thrashed out at a top-level meeting presided over by Ben Gurion himself. The chief of operations, Col. Uzi Narkis, and the chief of Northern Command, Brig. Gen. Yitschak Rabin, allied with Dayan. Accordingly it is no wonder Laskov got nowhere in his demand that the IDF’s armored brigades be concentrated in a single ugda and, instead of acting as a generalized pool for vehicles, be assigned a critical role in the forthcoming Sinai campaign. Still, until November 1956 Laskov managed to accomplish much. Of the 380 IDF tanks, 310 were organized in three brigades; the remainder were distributed in three battalions among the commands.20 He also tackled the field of maintenance, where he instituted rigid order for the IDF’s lackadaisical methods.
Came the campaign itself and armor—7th Armored Brigade above all—gave a dazzling demonstration of what it could do as even Dayan, who was capable of learning from an error, was later forced to admit.21 From now on no holds were barred; comparing the 1957 budget to that of 1953, no component of the IDF increased its budget allocation nearly as much as the armored corps.22 Some of the IDF’s most promising officers, including in particular one David Elazar and one Yisrael Tal, were transferred to the armored corps. There they started learning their new business from the bottom up, going through every course from driver and mechanic to commander, etc. Later the IDF even overcame its reservations to the point of sending a few of them to study in Germany, though they were warned not to make passes at German girls.23 In 1960 the first armored division was established and put through its paces, being made to cover 90 miles of desert terrain in 32 hours under conditions of simulated combat.24
By that time the IDF’s upgraded, World War II-vintage U.S. Sherman and French AMX tanks—the latter a mere 13 tons, hardly suitable for real-life shin be-shin warfare—had been joined by the much heavier British Centurions, which led the IDF to develop armored doctrine that differed significantly from that of then-contemporary armies.25 During their first appearance in World War I, tanks had been used as siege machines and worked closely with the infantry, acting as mobile shelters and pulling them across enemy trench systems. During the 1930s an attempt was made to turn them into a modern version of heavy and light cavalry, meaning a mobile striking force for independent operations directed deep into the enemy rear. The masters of this kind of thing were, of course, the Germans under Guderian, Manstein, Rommel, and the rest. Starting to develop their Panzerwaffe from 1935 on, in 1939-1942 their series of brilliant campaigns demonstrated what a modern armored force, properly organized and trained, could do; sometimes advancing dozens of miles a day, they caused entire countries to collapse in short order.
The Wehrmacht’s run of deep-ranging victories did not last long. First at El Alamein in November 1942, then in Russia after the Battle of Kursk in July 1943, it increasingly reverted to defensive operations. Combined with a preference for quality over quantity, defense meant an emphasis on much heavier Panthers and Tigers (to say nothing of the monstrous Koenigstiger tanks). This, however, did not apply to the rest of the world, which had set itself the task of reconquering a continent. So much had the Wehrmacht’s early victories captured the world’s imagination that the American, Soviet, and French armed forces committed to mobility during the postwar years. Accordingly the tanks that they built were comparatively fast and lightly armored. The same applied to forces of the Bundeswehr when West German production resumed during the mid-1960s.
The IDF, however, found itself saddled with Centurions. They were fifty-ton machines originally built at the end of World War II with the specific objective of beating a path through the defensive screen of heavy German armor. Although the model acquired by the Israelis came equipped with, or was converted to, an excellent 105mm gun, it was not terribly fast; yet it was very well armored. At the hands of Tal, who commanded the armored corps from 1964 on, this combination of qualities was used to the best advantage. Contrary to the apostles of mobility who held court elsewhere, Tal insisted that the tank’s most important quality was not simply its speed and cross-country capability but its ability to move and operate under fire. The factor that gave it this quality was, of course, its armor, and armor was something possessed by tanks alone and not by other forces such as artillery and motorized (and even, in Tal’s reasoning, mechanized) infantry.
The Germans from the beginning,26 and other armies from about 1943, emphasized the combined arms team in which tanks, antitank troops, self-propelled artillery, and an increasingly mechanized infantry are integrated to work together and protect each other. Not so in the IDF, which did not have modern mechanized infantry (as of the mid-1960s the latter still rode World War II M-3 half-tracks) and which tended to neglect its artillery. Accordingly the armored corps was organized in all-tank battalions: Centurions (at first) or the U.S. M-48 Patton, which was faster, easier to operate, but considerably less well armored (and bought secondhand from West Germany in 1965-1966 after the Bundeswehr itself had switched to the Leopard I). As to defense against short-range antitank weapons, Tal argued that this would not be much of a problem in the Middle East. There, in contrast with battlefields in central Europe, terrain tends to be open, cover scarce, and visibility excellent, thus enabling tanks, which possess advantages in armor
and mobility, to see and hit enemies long before enemies hit them. A dogma (doctrine would be too complimentary) known as helem ha-shiryon (armored shock) coalesced and was even given poetic form and put to music in the armored corps’ anthem of those years: “The track turns, the throat is dry ... here come the tanks!” Confronted with egrofei shiryon (mailed fists) consisting of massed Israeli tanks galloping toward them, the enemy’s troops were supposed to run away.27
Thus, compared to that of other armies, Israeli armored doctrine was backward; indeed when the 1967 war came the onslaught against Egypt in particular resembled nothing so much as a 1940-vintage blitzkrieg. Tal, however, also introduced other reforms, and here his contribution was perhaps more decisive. Training improved, both in individual fields—for example, gunners got so much practice that they accurately hit moving targets at an impressive range of 2.5 miles—and by systematically teaching all four crew members to perform each others’ jobs so that they could form a cohesive team and take each other’s place if someone was injured. Rigid operating and maintenance procedures were devised and enforced by means of strict discipline; not only did Tal expect orders to be obeyed without question but, mirabile dictu, each tank was given a logbook to meticulously record maintenance operations.28 All this represented quite a change in an army that, perhaps because of its PALMACH background, had always boasted of being a balagan meurgan (organized mess). Though contemporary tanks with petrol engines were comparatively delicate affairs, when put to the test there could be no question of their breaking down en masse, as Sharon’s vehicles had in 1956. Tremendous morale—exemplified by commanders who fought “exposed in the turret,” as the title of one popular book had it—did the rest. In 1967, Israel’s tankmen, so determined that they literally looked nowhere but straight ahead, easily carried the day in spite of their comparatively primitive tactics.
The Sword And The Olive Page 22