Less than six months after Spring of Youth, the Yom Kippur War exploded on the banks of the Suez Canal and the peaks of the Golan Heights.
EHUD BARAK, SAYERET MATKAL COMMANDER, LATER DEFENSE MINISTER AND PRIME MINISTER
“About four months earlier,Head of Operations General Kuti Adam had told us that several Fatah leaders were living in these buildings in Beirut, and asked if we could act. We said that we might. We passed on questions to the Mossad, received answers, but the issue calmed down. We made other plans—a raid on an officers’ club in Syria and freeing pilots from a prison next to Damascus.
“I was with my wife on a weekend in Eilat when I was summoned to the chief of staff’s office. Dado showed me some photographs and told me, ‘Here, these buildings.’ The chief infantry and paratroopers’ officer Mano Shaked proposed that we attack with a task force from the Thirty-fifth Brigade. To me, this looked like an assault on a fortified target—you arrive with forty guys, set down roadblocks, raid every house. . . . I said, ‘It’s impossible with such a large force. We need the element of surprise. We need to do this with fourteen or fifteen people, to come in civilian attire with American cars and kill them.’ This was approved.
“I told my people, ‘We’ll kill them in bed.’ But two of the team commanders said to me, ‘What do you mean, kill them in bed? We kill people in bed? What have they done that makes killing them justified? Does that square with our principle of “purity of arms”?’
I said, ‘They are bad, dangerous people, working with Arafat.’ They said, ‘That’s nice, but you don’t have authority. We want to know that the chief of staff thinks this is legitimate.’ I said fine, but I brushed it off. They reminded me of what I had said again and again, and eventually I brought in the chief of staff—and he explained it to them.
“They carried out the task very well. Both were killed in the Yom Kippur War.”
AMNON LIPKIN-SHAHAK, COMMANDER OF A PARATROOPER BATTALION, LATER THE CHIEF OF STAFF
“During the battle, we loaded Yigal Pressler, who was wounded, and the body of Avida Shor into one of our cars. But suddenly we saw that the car had disappeared, along with the driver, an older man from the Mossad. We all managed to get into two cars, and we sped off toward the beach. We found the driver there with the third car. I asked what had happened. He told me that, during the War of Independence, he had fought at the Koach fortress, in Galilee, and his commanders had told him, ‘You don’t move from here.’ He didn’t move, and fought, even when his friends retreated, until the Arabs won. He hid under the corpses, and that was how he survived. He later crawled out of there and managed to get away.
“Now, during the battle against the terrorists, he recalled that during the War of Independence, he had nearly been killed because he had stayed until the end. ‘I thought that you wouldn’t get out of there,’ he told me, ‘and I decided to drive to the beach where we landed, hoping that someone would save me.’
“He had simply fled.”
PART FIVE
The Yom Kippur War
Since the 1967 Six Day War, Egypt and Syria have been planning their revenge. On October 6, 1973, Yom Kippur, they attack Israel simultaneously. Israel has its same leaders, and the chief of staff is David Elazar. The Arab leaders have changed: Egypt’s Nasser has died and been replaced by Anwar Sadat. Syria’s Salah el Jadid is in prison, after a coup by his defense minister, Hafez al-Assad. King Hussein is not a member of the Sadat-Assad alliance; on the contrary, he has secretly warned Israel’s leaders of the forthcoming attack. Unfortunately, his warnings have not been taken seriously.
CHAPTER 15
THE BRAVEHEARTS LAND IN AFRICA, 1973
At 4:30 P.M., on October 15, 1973, the paratroopers of the 247th Reserve Brigade climbed into their half-tracks. The last-minute briefing had just ended, and harried staff sergeants ran to the commanders’ half-tracks, carrying the operational maps. A soldier pressed an open tin of cold goulash in his comrade’s hand, one of the authors of this book. “Eat something,” he cracked, “you’ll get your next meal only in Africa.”
Africa. For nine days thousands of IDF soldiers and officers were expecting that mission: the moment when their battered army would break through the Egyptian lines that had been established in Sinai, would cross the Suez Canal and emerge at the enemy’s rear. They knew that this mission would tip the scales of the war. They also believed that they were taking part in a crazy gamble—penetrating through a gap in the Egyptian lines, advancing between two huge Egyptian concentrations and reaching the canal. But exactly because of the mission’s daring and tremendous risk taking it had great chances to be crowned with success. The Egyptians certainly wouldn’t even imagine that the IDF would take such a risky gamble before it had succeeded in crushing their forces entrenched on the eastern bank of the canal.
The war had started on October 6, 1973, Yom Kippur—the Jewish Day of Atonement. At 2:00 P.M., the armies of Syria and Egypt simultaneously attacked Israel on two fronts—in the Golan Heights and along the Suez Canal. In the Golan Heights, the Syrians were stopped only because of the desperate courage and the resolve of a few. In the south, the Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal to Israeli-occupied Sinai, conquered most of the IDF forts along the canal and entrenched themselves strongly in a five-mile-deep strip of land in Sinai, causing painful losses to Israel. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan seemed to waver, as he expressed fear for the possible collapse of “the Third Temple” symbolizing the state of Israel; the pretentious declaration of Chief of Staff Elazar that “we’ll break their bones” turned out to be just a bubble of hot air.
The counteroffensive of Division 162, under the command of General Avraham (“Bren”) Adan, was launched on October 8 and ended in failure. He confronted the Egyptian army and tried to cross the canal, but was repelled. The mission was reluctantly handed over to General Arik Sharon, whose Division 143 also included the famous 247th (former 55th), the reserve Paratroopers Brigade that had conquered Jerusalem in the Six Day War.
At forty-five, Sharon was back in the saddle. After several years in minor positions, he finally had been brought back from the cold by Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, who appreciated his military talent. Ben-Gurion himself had asked Rabin to “take care” of Sharon, whom he loved, in spite of the flaws in his character. Sharon had been promoted to general, and had performed brilliantly in the Six Day War; his combined assault on Abu Ageila fortress in Sinai was being taught in military academies around the world. He had left the army in 1973 after serving as commander of the Southern District and had turned to politics, joining the Likud party, but when the Yom Kippur War broke out he returned as commander of Division 143. In the meantime, Sharon had been hit by two tragedies: his wife, Margalit, had been killed in a car crash, and their eleven-year-old son, Gur, died in an accident, playing with an old rifle. Sharon, though, found solace in the arms of Gali’s younger sister, Lily, who married him, gave him two sons and became a wonderful support for him for the rest of her life.
Sharon’s superiors in the IDF didn’t really want him to cross the canal. Sharon was a maverick, undisciplined, arrogant and a lover of publicity. Besides, he had just become a right-wing political leader, while most of his superiors, including Chief of Staff Elazar, were former members of the left-leaning Palmach. But after Adan’s failure of October 8, and Dayan’s intervention in favor of the 101 founder, they had no choice but to turn to Sharon.
Sharon, determined that it would be him who’d cross the canal, conceived a plan that seemed absolutely insane. On a patrol in enemy territory, the reconnaissance battalion of his division discovered an intriguing fact. The Egyptian forces that had crossed the canal and occupied a five-mile strip along it were divided into two armies—the Second and the Third. The reconnaissance battalion found out that there was no land continuity between the two armies, but a kind of narrow no-man’s-land was separating them. This gave Sharon the idea to send a brigade along the “seam” between the two armies. After reaching and cros
sing the canal, it would establish a bridgehead in the rear of the Egyptians, lay bridges over Suez and bring the war to the Egyptian heartland. The idea was insane indeed—so insane that nobody in a normal state of mind would believe it could be carried out.
Michael Bar-Zohar, one of the authors of this book, accompanied Sharon and Colonel Amnon Reshef, the commander of an armored brigade, on their climb to the top of an arid hill, and Sharon ordered Reshef’s artillery to fire phosphorus shells at five-hundred-meter intervals along the “seam” between the two Egyptian armies. When the firing started, Sharon watched through his binoculars the white smoke mushrooms that sprouted along the “seam” to the very canal; the lack of any movement in the no-man’s-land between the two armies proved that there were no Egyptian units there. Still, no crossing was possible as long as the bulk of the Egyptian armor was deployed on the African side of the canal; it could easily destroy the bridgehead and eradicate any IDF unit that had crossed the waterway. Sharon had to wait for the elite Egyptian armored units to cross the canal and engage the Israeli armor. And the Israeli armor was ready.
He didn’t have to wait long. On October 14, hundreds of Egyptian tanks, including a large part of the crack 4th Armored Division, crossed the canal. A formidable battle ensued, and after a few hours the burning carcasses of 250 Egyptian tanks were strewn in the sands of Sinai. The IDF lost only twenty-five tanks. The time had come to launch Sharon’s plan, code name Bravehearts.
And bravehearts they were indeed, all those reserve paratroopers who had fought in most of Israel battles, their feats crowned with the conquest of Jerusalem. Motta Gur wasn’t their commander anymore—he had been appointed IDF attaché to the Israeli embassy in Washington. The leader of Brigade 247 was another legendary commander—Danny Matt.
Born in Cologne, Germany, raised in a religious moshav on the coastal plain, Danny—barely sixteen—had joined the British Coast Guard, then enlisted in the British Army and participated in the last stages of World War II. Back in Israel he joined the Palmach and settled in kibbutz Ein Zurim, in a cluster of agricultural villages south of Jerusalem, called Bloc Etzion. On May 12, 1948, two days before Israel was created, a huge mass of Arab irregulars attacked the bloc, massacring scores of its inhabitants. Danny, manning a position close to Ein Zurim, found himself facing thousands of Arabs, who were yelling; waving rifles, axes, and knives; and submerging the area. Feverishly, he attached thirteen grenades to his belt, grabbed a machine gun and started firing at the advancing crowd. The first wave of attackers collapsed, but they were replaced by hundreds of others, all of them screaming and charging his isolated position. He knew that if they reached him they’d tear him to pieces, and so he kept firing, mowing down line after line of attackers. He started pulling hand grenades with his right hand, removing the triggering pin with his teeth, while firing the machine gun with his left. Scores of dead attackers piled in front of him. As he ran out of ammunition he threw away the machine gun, removed the pin of his last grenade, raised the grenade above his head and ran toward kibbutz Revadim. The mass of Arabs parted before that crazy bearded man waving an armed hand grenade. He reached the kibbutz, followed by a fierce crowd of enemies; somebody dragged him into a house, another guy sheared his beard with a pair of scissors, a third shaved his stubble with an old razor, without water or shaving cream, tearing pieces of skin from his face, while outside the Arab crowd kept yelling, “Where is the bearded one? Where is the murderer? Give us the murderer!”
Fortunately, at that moment the Jordanian Legion arrived and took all the kibbutz men prisoner. Danny put on large sunglasses and joined his comrades. He was not recognized. He spent a year as a prisoner of war in Jordan. Upon returning he grew his beard again, joined the paratroopers, commanded an elite company, participated in all the reprisal raids and was severely wounded in the Mitla battle. He spent two years at the War College in Paris, later distinguished himself in the Six Day War—and finally assumed command over the famous 247th Brigade.
On October 15, at sunset, several units carried a diversionary attack on the Egyptian forces, while Danny’s brigade, riding on half-tracks, moved toward the Suez Canal on a narrow asphalt road, code-named Spider. One battalion of the 247th was late arriving to the assembly area, but Danny refused to delay the mission and moved forward with the two remaining battalions. The plan was that at 8:00 P.M., the paratroopers would reach the canal, board rubber boats and cross the waterway in proximity to Deversoir, where the canal flows into the Great Bitter Lake. Sharon, on the commanding half-track, was not far behind them.
The crossing, however, almost failed because of a traffic jam. The paratroopers’ half-tracks got stuck in the middle of a nightmarish tangle of hundreds of vehicles. Heavy trucks, jeeps, pickups, and even private cars surrounded by crowds of reserve soldiers were massed along several miles on the narrow road, blocking Danny Matt’s convoy. Once in a while, the paratroopers’ vehicles would break through and advance a couple of hundred yards, then become immobilized again. The troubled voices of Sharon and his deputy echoed in the brigade commander’s radio over and over again. The most crucial mission of the war could end in failure because the IDF could not overcome traffic congestion.
The Israeli tanks cross the Suez Canal on the pontoon bridge.
(Bamachane, IDF Archive)
The road cleared only after midnight. Headlights off, the convoy sped on the Spider route toward the red flashes and the smoke mushrooms hovering over the nearby hills and across the canal. At a road crossing a naval unit loaded a score of rubber boats on the half-tracks. The IDF artillery shelled the crossing areas in order to drive away the Egyptian soldiers that might be positioned there. A tank battalion and a commando on half-tracks from another brigade emerged at the head of the convoy to protect it on its way to the canal.
But the escort was the first to be hit. Darting forward before the paratroopers, the tank battalion fell into an Egyptian ambush. Most of the tanks and the commando half-tracks were hit and burst into flames. The losses were heavy, but Danny Matt’s convoy bypassed the burning armor and continued its advance toward the canal. Miraculously, the Egyptians did not notice the advance unit and it easily reached the canal bank. But when the bulk of the convoy approached, with the brigade commander’s half-track at its head, it was met with heavy, sustained fire. Egyptian soldiers of the Second and Third armies, stationed in the sandy flatlands by the canal, sighted Matt’s half-track, which signaled with its headlights to Sharon, who watched the convoy from a nearby hill. The sheaf of antennae, protruding from the canvas top of the vehicle, was another sign that this was the commander’s half-track. The Egyptians attacked the convoy with bazookas, machine guns and other weapons. Missiles whooshed beside the vehicles and the paratroopers returned fire. Yet, the Egyptians were too far away, as Sharon had surmised, and most of their fire was ineffective.
After several turns of the road the enemy fire weakened. The convoy stopped in a kind of courtyard, surrounded by steep sand ramparts. The soldiers climbed up the western rampart and descended on its other side. At their feet glistened a calm, silvery stripe—the Suez Canal. The rubber boats were unloaded and swiftly brought to the water. The paratroopers jumped into them, and one after the other the boats ploughed the Suez waters, heading for the African bank. At 1:25 Danny Matt radioed the word “Aquarium,” meaning the boats were in the water. He then boarded one of the first boats. Bar-Zohar crouched beside him. A few shells exploded by the fast moving boats. Most of the fighters were excited, feeling they were experiencing a dramatic moment, a game-changing event that could seal the outcome of the war.
Danny Matt’s outward calm concealed tremendous tension. Never in his life had he felt such crushing responsibility. “We were carrying out a mission that could change the war’s outcome. I felt that the entire nation of Israel was raising its eyes toward us,” he later said.
The boats coasted by a low stone jetty. The paratroopers crossed a sandy strip, covered with low shrubs. Danny, never d
eparting from his cool, radioed the code word for the landing on the African bank of the canal: “Acapulco; repeat, Acapulco!”
While excited senior officers radioed congratulations to Matt, the paratroopers scouted the area. They had landed in the very middle of a fortified Egyptian compound: sand ramparts, stone and concrete walls, reinforced positions, underground bunkers. A terrible fight could have taken place here if the Egyptians had stayed and confronted the paratroopers, but they had escaped from the heavy artillery shelling. In later years historians and writers would express their amazement that the paratrooper force that had established the bridgehead was so small and vulnerable—barely 760 men.
A grove of firs, eucalyptuses and young palms stretched out behind the compound. Small units of paratroopers took position on top of the ramparts.
Arik Achmon, one of Matt’s two deputies, stopped by to see a friend. “To be in the first half-track that entered the Old City of Jerusalem,” he cracked, smiling, “and in one of the first boats to cross into Africa—that’s quite something in a man’s life, isn’t it?”
Thundering explosions were heard from the eastern bank of the canal. The paratroopers didn’t know that a formidable battle was raging between Reshef’s armored brigade and large Egyptian forces. The fighting took place around the Tirtur (“Rattle”) route that ran parallel to the Spider road that Matt’s men had used to reach the canal. The fierce combat spread to the “Chinese Farm.” It also delayed the crossing of the canal by large Israeli forces, because the Cylinder Bridge, a prefabricated Israeli invention, dragged by eighteen tanks, wouldn’t reach the Canal before October 17.
But Sharon wouldn’t give up. Two huge bulldozers arrived at the canal and breached a passage for heavy vehicles. The breaching site (the “Yard”) had been prepared by Sharon long before, when he still was commander of the Southern District. He had used red bricks to mark the thinner ramparts, which could be easily breached. Now he dispatched to the breach several pontoons that should together form a floating bridge. But as some of the pontoons lagged behind, the engineers brought over the “Crocodiles,” monstrous amphibious tank carriers that had been invented by a French officer and named Gillois after him; a while before, the Israeli defense ministry had bought the old Gillois from the NATO surplus stocks and refurbished them—and as dawn broke on October 16, the Crocodiles started carrying the first tanks of Hayim Erez’s armored brigade across the canal.
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