by Jeremy Bowen
During Shurdom’s second dogfight his aircraft was hit in the tail. He decided to check the trim of his aeroplane. It meant flying at a specified low speed. He told his wingman to “‘Watch my tail. I want to do a slow-speed check.” He asked me, “Aren’t you afraid?” I said, “Of course I’m afraid.”’
During the check he found that the Hunter had been damaged. He decided to land. From the cockpit he could see the base at Mafrak. It was on fire. He radioed in. ‘Is the runway serviceable?’ He spoke in English, which they always used for flying. A voice answered that it was. Shurdom did not recognise it and he suspected something. How could the runway be serviceable after a raid like that? Shurdom asked again for confirmation and when he got it, he asked the man for the name of his dog. Everyone at the Mafrak base knew Shurdom’s dog. There was silence. Shurdom flew on, to Amman. He assumed the Israelis were trying to trick him.
Cairo, 1345; Jordanian Military Headquarters, 1245
Nasser was back at the office he maintained in his villa, where he conducted a lot of his business. He called King Hussein for the first time since the fighting started. He knew by then exactly what had happened to his air force, but he did not tell his new ally. Like Amer, there was no mention of what had really happened. ‘Israel bombed our airbases. We answered by bombing theirs. We are launching a general offensive in the Negev.’ Then he asked the king to seize as much land as quickly as he could, because he had heard the UN Security Council would be stopping the war that evening. King Hussein still had no idea about the damage that the Israeli air force and army was inflicting. After the war he never publicly criticised Nasser for deceiving him. A year later his private secretary confirmed to the Americans that they realised that Nasser had urged the king to commit his forces more deeply when he knew that his own air force had been destroyed – but only when it was too late.
The fighting in Jerusalem was escalating. After Egypt’s appeals for help, the Jordanians dropped their well-established plan for war in Jerusalem. It was called Operation Tariq, a pincer attack to cut off the Jewish side of the city. The Jordanians calculated that their small army, of nine infantry brigades and two independent armoured brigades, the 40th and 60th, was not strong enough to defend the 630-kilometre-long armistice line with Israel. Operation Tariq was designed to give Jordan diplomatic leverage, by effectively holding Jewish West Jerusalem hostage in exchange for a ceasefire and the return of any other land that Israel would have seized. It was a realistic strategy. But Operation Tariq, which had been an integral part of Jordan’s war plans since 1949, was dropped.
The message from Cairo was that an Egyptian division was advancing into the Negev desert to attack Beersheba. General Riad, the Egyptian who had been put in charge of the Jordanian army, did not know that the attack existed only in Amer’s imagination. No one in Jordan had any idea what was really happening in the Sinai. Some Jordanian staff officers at GHQ in Amman argued bitterly with their Egyptian colleagues about ditching Operation Tariq. At one point the director of operations, General Atef Majali, made as if to storm out. But Riad, who had the support of the king, had the last word. The 60th Armoured Brigade was moved south to Hebron, while the 40th moved from the northern part of the West Bank to replace it near Jericho. Cairo asked for a Syrian armoured brigade to move in behind the 40th. Written down on paper in front of Riad and the king, it looked like a good plan. Riad was recognised by the Jordanians, Egyptians and even the Israelis as one of Cairo’s most competent commanders. The only problem for the Jordanians was that Amer’s basic premise was founded on fantasy, and even if one of the ill-trained and barely operational Syrian divisions had been in a sufficient state of readiness to be moved to the West Bank, Damascus had no intention of helping Hussein out.
Amman, 1310
Just as Shurdom and two colleagues were landing at Amman another wave of Israeli warplanes was approaching the airport. The Israelis started rocketing and strafing. Hanan Najar, one of the Jordanian pilots, was hit in the hand. Shurdom grabbed the film from his Hunter’s gun camera and ran for the slit trench to take cover. The raid went on for two and a half hours. By the end of it, the Royal Jordanian Air Force had no serviceable runways and had lost all its strike aircraft. Only two French-built Alouette helicopters were left. The royal palace was also attacked. According to Ziad Rifai, one of Hussein’s closest advisers, the Israelis managed a direct hit on the king’s office. ‘The wall behind the desk and the King’s chair was lacerated by the blast.’
Jerusalem, 1330
Since Israel’s defeat at the gates of the Old City in 1948, General Uzi Narkiss had dreamt of another chance to conquer all Jerusalem. Pressing hard for permission to move against the Jordanians, he was ‘in a constant state of excitement, as though knowing that his great moment was drawing near’. Narkiss and an ally tried to persuade General Ezer Weizman, the chief of operations, that ‘this is a great opportunity to do something terrific to the Jordanians. We mustn’t miss it.’ Throughout the morning Narkiss was refused permission to attack. It was not long, though, before the Jordanians offered him the opening that he needed. First, at 1245, Radio Amman declared, inaccurately, that Mount Scopus had been taken by the Jordanians. Then the Jordanians sent two companies into a badly planned attack on Government House, the headquarters of the UN in Jerusalem. For Narkiss, it was ‘a gift from the skies’.
General Odd Bull of the UN saw it happening. It was ‘one of the biggest surprises’ of his life. Jordanian troops were coming into the wooded compound of Government House. It was the only big public building left behind by the British in Palestine, a mansion for its High Commissioners built of Jerusalem stone, on a ridge overlooking the Old City called Jabel Mukkaber, the hill of evil counsel. Under the terms of the armistice it was UN territory, demilitarised and off-limits to both sides. After a heated argument, unarmed UN officers, whose families were inside, persuaded the Jordanians not to occupy the building. But the Jordanians stayed in the woods around it.
The armistice also prohibited both Jordan and Israel from bringing tanks into Jerusalem. Israel kept a battalion of tanks just outside the municipal boundary. Secretly, a few were also kept inside Jerusalem, violating the armistice agreement. In charge was Aaron Kamera, a feisty veteran of 1948 who describes his role in the fight against the British occupation as ‘terrorist.’ When he heard sirens and shooting he made a unilateral decision to move all his tanks into Jerusalem. Kamera was the local driving instructor, so he was well known. As his tanks moved into Israeli Jerusalem, local people threw them cigarettes and cakes and cheered. The neighbourhood insurance man saw him, ran back into his office and wrote him a life insurance policy. Kamera took the tanks to the military headquarters in the centre of the New City, which was at the Russian Compound, a barracks built outside the city walls by the czars for Russian pilgrims. Kamera went looking for orders and was horrified to discover that a ceasefire had been declared. If he had brought his tanks into Jerusalem prematurely, he was in deep trouble. But like several other ceasefires that morning, it did not last long. Word came through of the Jordanian move against Government House. Kamera was told to get his tanks there as soon as possible.
Kibbutz Nachshon, 1400
A group of men sat in the observation post at Kibbutz Nachshon, across the border from the Jordanian garrison at Latrun. It was a hot, still afternoon. They could see explosions where Jordanian mortars were firing over the border. In the distance there was a heavy rumble, like summer thunder. It was the shelling in and around Jerusalem. They kept their transistor radio on for the news. Fighting was being reported on all fronts. Sometimes they moved the dial from Voice of Israel to Cairo Radio’s Hebrew service, which kept up its bragging: ‘Death will come to you in a black dress … at night…’ They laughed nervously and made jokes. But they had no idea how the war was going for Israel. For all their bravado, they were deeply worried.
Damascus, 1415
Uri Gil, one of the handful of Israeli pilots who had missed out on the morni
ng’s raids because they were held back for air defence, finally got his chance. His team were ordered to take off for southern Syria, to intercept a flight of MiGs that had just taken off. When the Mirages were over the black, basalt landscape of the Syrian south, the Israeli flight controllers, who were following the MiGs on radar, fed them the latest information. Twenty miles and closing, then fifteen, then ten, then five. Gil and the other three pilots could not see anything. Then a warning came through their headsets – the MiGs were a mile and a half ahead. Something about what the controller was saying felt wrong to Gil. He broke to the right. Six hundred yards behind him was a Syrian MiG. He never really knew how it got there. He estimated it was two seconds from shooting him.
Gil practised aerial combat constantly. He considered himself an expert. But it was the first time he had done it for real. The two fighters twisted and turned around the sky, trying to get an advantage. Gil felt calm, even a little happy. Finally he was putting his skills to good use. At 10,000 feet the Israeli Mirage cut across the path of the MiG. For a second the two pilots could see each other. They were very close. Gil noticed the Syrian was wearing a brown leather helmet, before he cut his speed to get behind him. He did not feel anger or hatred as he killed its pilot. ‘Calmly, I put the gun sight on him and fired a half second burst. I shot him in the cockpit. There was no parachute. I didn’t feel anything about killing him. He was a target. So was I. If I hadn’t broken to the right, he would have shot me. The hard decision was to break right, from the group. Breaking the formation is a big step.’
During the dogfight Gil had been silent. Now he could hear one of his three colleagues shouting over the radio. Later in the war, Meir Shahar, the pilot who had been shouting, was shot down by antiaircraft fire over a Syrian base. His brother Jonathan was shot down on the same day over Egypt, but he was rescued.
* * *
On the first day of the war, Israel smashed the air forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan and neutralised most of Iraq’s. Nineteen Israeli aircraft were shot down. That was 10 per cent of its strength, a bigger proportion than it lost in the 1973 war. Nine Israeli pilots were killed. Avihu Bin-Nun’s junior colleague, whom he thought had crashed into the sea in the first wave of attacks, survived. He had turned back because he was having problems with the fuel feed to his engine.
Tel Aviv, 1430
Ava Yotvat sat with her two daughters in the shelter under their apartment in Tel Aviv. Deep down, she felt it was going to be all right. She had been badly scared in the weeks before the war, for her daughters and for her husband who was an officer in the army. The Arab propaganda was terrifying. Her parents had emigrated from Holland in 1927. The rest of their family was killed in Auschwitz. Like many Israeli women of her generation and background, from a family of Holocaust survivors who had grown up during a time of food rationing, she always had a full store cupboard upstairs in their flat. She never thought that the Arabs would be able to inflict another genocide on the Jewish people. Israel, she always felt, was the only place in the world that she could be really safe. A shell from one of the Jordanian Long Toms crashed into Frishman Street. Ava Yotvat sat between her two daughters, put her arms round their shoulders and said, right, now we’ll sing. She started a chorus of ‘Jerusalem of Gold’, the hit song of the war for Israelis. All the neighbours joined in.
* * *
Israel’s 55th Paratroop Brigade lay in the sun on the grass next to the runway at Tel Nof airfield. They were in full combat gear, waiting for the Nord-Atlas transport planes that were due to take them to war. They had trained for weeks for what they were going to do – a jump into a hostile landing zone at Al-Arish, the Egyptian town at the northeast corner of the Sinai desert, where it meets the Mediterranean sea. Everything was packed into 20 kg sacks for the jump. Israeli paratroopers had only ever jumped into combat once before, in 1956 when Ariel Sharon’s men had landed at the Mitla Pass in Sinai. Veterans of the Mitla had the right to put a red background behind their parachute wings, to show that they had made a combat jump. The men at Tel Nof airfield were looking forward to getting the same honour. They had seen the jets taking off in the morning, and they had been told that the raids had gone well. The soldiers could hear shells from the Jordanian 155 mm ‘Long Tom’ artillery hitting Tel Aviv and Kfar Saba. The men who came from the two towns were worrying about their families.
They were keyed up. Then the field telephone rang. The advance into Al-Arish was going much faster than anyone had expected. They were not needed. The jump was cancelled. Instead, they were going to Jerusalem. A lot of the men were disappointed. Not only would they lose their chance to get the special combat wings, there wasn’t even a proper war in Jerusalem. They were going to be no better than policemen. Arie Weiner thought it was even worse than that. Their rivals in the 202nd Paratroop Brigade were already in action in Sinai, so this was a double disappointment. Jacov Chaimowitz, a 21-year-old student, was one of the few who were not too bothered. He listened to them complain. ‘I wasn’t disappointed. We had some people who were always walking around with a knife in their mouths. They wanted the badge. But I didn’t see myself as much of a fighter.’
Old municipal buses turned up to take the paratroopers to Jerusalem. They climbed aboard with what they could carry and their personal weapons. Their heavier gear was packed into the jump sacks and would have to follow on later. They had no maps of where they were going. Many of them had never even been to Jerusalem. They squashed into the cramped seats, grumbling. But the mind of Hanan Porat, a deeply religious young paratrooper in his early twenties, was racing about what they were about to do. He was convinced that his unit was, finally, doing God’s work. They were going to complete the conquest of Jerusalem that had been left unfinished in 1948. Porat studied at the religious school in Jerusalem that followed the teachings of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, one of the most influential Jewish figures of the twentieth century. He was the first rabbi to link orthodox Judaism with Zionism. It had not been easy. Most of the early Zionist pioneers were either atheists or indifferent about religion. Most orthodox Jews in the Holy Land were just as indifferent, or hostile, to Zionism. They believed that God, not East European immigrants, would establish a Jewish state. Rabbi Kook taught that working for the return of the Jewish people to Zion was God’s will. That, Hanan Porat was convinced, was exactly what his unit of paratroopers, Battalion 66, was about to do in Jerusalem. On Independence Day, when the first warnings of Egypt’s move into the Sinai were coming through, Porat’s mentor Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook, the son of the school’s founder, spoke passionately about how he had wept when the UN partitioned Palestine. He shouted, ‘Where is our Schechem [Nablus]? Where is our Jericho? Where is our [river] Jordan?’ Now Porat and his fellow students were in the army, about to fight to regain all the places that had been lost.
Porat had another, more personal reason to be happy. He had spent part of his childhood in a Jewish settlement called Kfar Etzion, about ten miles south of Jerusalem, near Bethlehem. In 1948 it fell to the Jordanians after a bloody siege. Many of its defenders were killed and, for Israelis, it had become a symbol of the sacrifices they had made to establish their state. After Jerusalem, Porat’s dream was to return to his childhood home. Surely, if Israel captured the Old City of Jerusalem, Kfar Etzion would not be far behind?
Jerusalem, 1450
The UN’s General Bull was about to leave Government House to find a Jordanian who would order the troops to withdraw when an Israeli burst in through the gate of the compound and heavy firing started. General Rabin at GHQ in Tel Aviv had tried to delay it to allow Bull time to negotiate with the Jordanians. But Rabin was told the men were out of contact and could not be pulled back. There was no holding them. The attack was led by Lieutenant-Colonel Asher Drizen, the commander of Battalion 161, one of four reserve units of thirty-five- to forty-year-olds in Israeli Jerusalem. Another battalion of younger men was held in reserve for counter-attacks. That Monday morning, Drizen had been hoping for a lie-in.
There had been a party for the soldiers the night before. When he heard that Government House had been taken by the Jordanians, he was about a mile away in the old British Allenby Barracks, firing mortars at Jordanian positions.
The Israelis had a plan to seize Government House that they had been rehearsing for years. Drizen sent two companies there immediately, then set off himself. All day the commanders of the Jerusalem Brigade acted first and explained themselves later. They put the plan to recapture Government House into action, then told Narkiss’s HQ what they were doing. Narkiss was a man in a hurry, so he was not bothered by a little free enterprise on the ground. Drizen was a man in a hurry too. When he saw the arrival of the tanks led by Aaron Kamera (just as impatient to get on with a fight that he thought had been postponed for far too long), Drizen ran down under fire to order them into action. A few minutes later, the commander of the reconnaissance unit showed up demanding a diagram of the Israeli positions, to cut down on the risk of friendly fire. Drizen blew his top at the man’s shilly-shallying. He told him he would shoot him if he did not move forward immediately. A corporal in the reconnaissance unit stepped forward and threatened to cut Drizen’s throat if he did not calm down. In the end he gave them the information they needed and the attack went ahead. While Drizen led his men into the Government House compound, the Jordanians rushed for their Land Rovers which were mounted with heavy machine guns and anti-tank weapons. Drizen grabbed the heavy machine gun on his command half-track and destroyed the Land Rovers, just before a piece of shrapnel gave him a bad wound in the arm. A medic patched him up and he carried on with his right arm strapped to his side. All but three of Kamera’s elderly Sherman tanks got stuck on difficult ground and could not continue the attack, but the Jordanians were unable to exploit this Israeli weakness. They tried artillery fire, but it was not accurate. Some of it fell on their own positions, and although the Jordanian infantrymen stuck to their task, they were not able to counter-attack.