The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War
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“Seven or eight days,” said Dayan.
French eyebrows rose. Can these Jews be joking? Are they mocking us? Dayan’s assessment seemed ridiculously self-confident, not to say arrogant. And yet IDF commanders appeared so certain of themselves and their forces—and proffered such detailed and credible battle plans—that Challe despite his skepticism continued the deliberations. On the final morning, he put this question to the Israeli chief of staff:
“General Dayan, if your forces indeed succeed in reaching the Suez Canal, how long do you estimate they can hold it?”
What answer did General Challe expect? Forty-eight hours? A week? Clearly he was anticipating Israel calling almost at once for French or British reinforcements.
Dayan replied in Hebrew. At once, the Israeli delegation erupted in laughter.
Challe glowered.
Now came the translation:
“Three hundred and fifty years.”
I saw in General Challe’s eyes the same look of fury that Dayan had shown when I passed him the limerick. Then the Frenchman’s expression softened. He began to laugh.
At that moment, Dayan—and the armed forces of Israel—became “possible.” Within days, the Sinai Campaign had begun.
20.
SHOT DOWN IN SINAI
In Turkish there is a word, fergal. It means a man who owns fields. This was my grandfather, Eliezer. I am named for him. My grandfather had vineyards, apple orchards; he employed about 150 people. He was a Jewish leader in Turkey.
Major Eliezer “Cheetah” Cohen was born in Jerusalem in 1934. At the time of the Sinai Campaign in 1956, he was a twenty-two-year-old fighter pilot, flying the U.S.-built P-51 Mustang.
My grandfather was doing a good business selling fresh fruit, but it was impossible to expand because there was no refrigeration in those days and the roads and transportation were too primitive to get the produce beyond local markets. Then my grandfather got the idea to set up a factory to dry the fruit. He started selling raisins and dried apricots and apples. Pretty soon he got rich. That was around 1910, when the Ottoman Empire was still in power. Then along came World War I and the Turks lost. Everything changed. To be in business in Turkey became very difficult. Meanwhile, the British, who had won the war, had taken over Palestine and were running it as a mandate under the League of Nations.
One day my grandfather called the family together and announced: I am packing up and going to Jerusalem! Not to visit, but to live! It has been a dream of my life and now I am going to do it. Who wishes to come with me?
My grandfather built a three-story house, the biggest in all Jerusalem outside the walls. At that time, Jerusalem was only the Old City, one kilometer square. Only a few families had begun to build outside the walls. My grandfather had come to Palestine in 1918 with the whole family (my father was five at the time) and many, many friends in a big convoy.
Our house was in Sanhedria. This was a poor neighborhood then and it is still poor today. An Orthodox neighborhood. My grandfather was not Orthodox himself. He only went to shul on the Sabbath. But he wanted to live among the Orthodox. The neighborhood was called Batei Pagi.
I was born in 1934. During the preceding decades, a new phenomenon had come to the Jewish people in Palestine. This was the Hebrew language. A newspaper editor named Eliezer Ben-Yehuda had started a movement to revitalize the language spoken by Moses and King David. We are Jews! Our history is in Hebrew and we should tell it in Hebrew! In those days, many of our parents’ generation spoke the languages of the Diaspora. My father spoke Turkish. My mother was from Babylonia; she spoke Bablik. I can still speak a little myself.
At six years old, in first grade, I was speaking only Hebrew. We children used to come home from school and scold our parents and grandparents: No more speaking the languages of the old countries! Now we speak only Hebrew!
I remember when I first learned of the Nazi death camps. I was nine or ten. I could not understand how so monstrous a crime could happen. I went to my uncle. “Can this be true? Why are they killing Jews? What did the Jews do wrong?”
My uncle explained to me that the Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe had done nothing wrong; the Nazis were killing them just because they were Jews.
By the time I was thirteen, I had made up my mind to become a soldier.
I’m going to be a warrior and I’m going to kill anyone who comes to harm my people, no hesitation, no conscience; they have butchered us and I am going to do the same to them. I don’t give a damn about other nations; I am going to protect my own. I still talk like this. My wife nearly faints each time I do.
When I was eighteen I took the army tests and they said I qualified for flight school. Even better. I will kill more enemies from the air.
In ’56 I was a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant flying P-51 Mustangs. My brother Nechemiah was fourteen. He was still at home in Jerusalem.
The Mustang was a great American plane that the Americans wouldn’t sell to Israel. We got a few as war surplus and others through smuggling and illegal purchases. Later, more were acquired legitimately through Sweden.
The Mustang had all the American virtues. It was roomy, fast and powerful, and an incredible weapons platform. You felt like you were driving a Cadillac. The Mustang carried napalm, bombs, and rockets and had six .50-caliber machine guns, three on each wing.
In ’56 the 202nd Paratroop Brigade under Arik Sharon captured the Mitla Pass deep in Sinai. The Egyptians began advancing armored columns to attack them. It was the air force’s job to stop these forces. At the same time our own tank columns were trying to break through the Egyptian defenses at Abu Agheila and Um Katef in eastern Sinai. We had to support them too.
That was where I got shot down.
I must confess that in 1956 the Israel Air Force had not yet come into its own. Though the nation had won a monumental victory due in no small part to our efforts, still, despite many instances of skill and courage by individual pilots—well, we could have done a lot better and we knew it.
We were outnumbered and outgunned at every level. The Egyptian Air Force was all jets. We were flying propeller planes. Those jets we did have, ancient Gloster Meteors and the French-built Ouragans, were restricted primarily to close air support because they were no match for the Egyptian MiGs. The only fighters we had that were equal to these planes were one squadron of French Mystères, which were so new that we didn’t have enough pilots to fly them. French and British squadrons secretly deployed to Israeli air bases. In fact, the entire air defense of the cities of Israel was given over to French squadrons.
To attack a column of tanks in a Mustang, you have to fly so low that the bottom arc made by your propeller blades passes only meters above the enemy vehicles. At that height, a guy with a pistol can knock you out of the sky. Each pass is a gunfight. You’re coming in so fast and so low that the enemy vehicles go from tiny to huge in a fraction of a second. You can see the truck drivers diving out of their cabs and even the tank crews scrambling out of their hatches and running like hell for the nearest ditch. And you can see the figures of the brave men who turn toward you and make their last stand using machine guns and antiaircraft cannons and even their own rifles.
It is a terrible thing to shoot a man and see him die. A pilot does most of his killing at altitude; he can report later in the briefing room that he destroyed this many tanks or that many trucks. But down at eye level it’s another story. I did not feel so sure, anymore, about my resolve to slay the enemy without conscience. No one who has killed face-to-face will ever sleep the same again.
The pass when I got shot down was against an Egyptian antiaircraft gun. I could see the muzzle flash and feel the impact of the cannon shells hitting my engine. The coolant in the power plant of a P-51 is oil. Suddenly dark goo exploded everywhere. My windshield went black. I pulled left and up. I could hear the engine sputtering. My pressure gauges plummeted to zer
o. I turned east and tried to gain altitude. The issue was not whether I was going to go down but how soon and where.
Later, in the sixties, when I began to fly helicopters and my brother Nechemiah had become a leader in the Sayeret Matkal, he and I did many covert operations in this same part of Sinai. He led the teams and I flew them in and out.
To this day, the content of those missions remains classified. I am not allowed to speak about them except in the most general terms.
By the mid-1960s Nechemiah along with Ehud Barak (who would later become prime minister and minister of defense) had become the commanders of the future in the Sayeret Matkal. One or the other led most of the covert insertions.
On one mission both Nechemiah and I were awarded Chief of Staff Citations for valor. That was the first time such an honor had been given to two brothers. General Rabin pinned the decorations on us himself, in his office. Not long after that, we did another night insertion that the chief of staff directed in person from a forward command post. He issued special instructions that two brothers may not fly in on the same aircraft. If something happened to us, he did not want to face our mother.
My helicopters took Nechemiah’s team into Sinai at night, flying so low that the landing gear would skim the dunes from time to time. Coming back out, racing the dawn, I was plugged into the aircraft intercom when I heard my brother’s voice. I got very upset. “What are you doing on this helicopter, ahuyah? You know the chief of staff expressly forbade it!”
“He said we couldn’t fly in together. He didn’t say anything about flying out.”
Rabin debriefed the mission himself. All the pilots and Sayeret Matkal guys took part; the session went on for hours. It is an inviolable principle in the Israel Air Force that one must speak the truth in a debriefing session, even if—particularly if—it reflects negatively on himself.
I spoke up.
“General Rabin, I must report that, contrary to your instructions, my brother and I flew out of Sinai on the same aircraft.”
The whole room went silent.
“Did you fly in together or out?”
“Out only.”
A moment passed. “Well, I guess that’s okay then. I only said you couldn’t fly together going in.”
Nechemiah and I burst out laughing. We couldn’t stop.
Rabin glowered. “What do you find so funny, Cheetah?”
“I’m sorry, sir. What you said now is exactly what Nechemiah said on the helicopter flying out.”
Our family are Sephardim. Dark skinned. This is one reason why my brother was so good on special operations. He could pass for an Arab. He knew most of the dialects, and the ones he didn’t know, he picked up fast from his instructors. Most Sayeret Matkal operations are not helicopter insertions. The teams would cross the border on foot. Sometimes they went hundreds of miles deep into enemy territory, into Egypt, Jordan, Syria, even Iraq. They stole cars or rode buses. They ate in Arab restaurants, prayed in mosques. It scared me just flying in to pick them up. I can’t imagine how those young guys did it, on the ground on their own, day after day, knowing that capture meant death or worse.
Nechemiah Cohen beside his brother Cheetah’s helicopter, preparatory to a cross-border special forces operation. December 2, 1965.
Photo courtesy of Cheetah Cohen.
Nechemiah is eight years younger than I. When he was a child, it was my hope that he would not have to grow up to be a fighter. But of course he wanted to be like his father and uncles and older brothers. Nechemiah is not a big man. He is light and fast. Quiet and thoughtful, he would never boast. But in the Unit, as the Sayeret Matkal calls itself (as Unit 101 did before them), when they ran competitions for endurance, strength, and speed, Nechemiah always came in ahead of everybody else.
I crash-landed my Mustang, dead-stick, with my eyes peeking around the oil-blackened windscreen. But now on the ground I had a problem. I had broken my leg a couple of weeks earlier. When the fighting in Sinai broke out, my squadron commander at first refused to let me fly. I insisted that my leg would not be a problem. Finally he said, “Okay, Cheetah, take a Stearman up over the airfield and do two slow rolls. I’ll watch you.”
A slow roll is harder than a barrel roll. You need to push the rudder pedal all the way down and hold it. It takes a lot of strength. You can’t do it on a bum leg.
I did it, so my squadron commander let me fly.
Now I was in the desert with a broken leg. How am I going to walk out of here when every Egyptian soldier who has seen my plane going down is racing like hell, right now, to capture me and do what they do when they get their hands on an Israeli pilot?
I hopped on one leg for about two hours, keeping within sight of a road in case I should see Israeli trucks or tanks. But everything that passed was Egyptian. I spotted an abandoned pipeline and crawled inside to hide and to get out of the sun. Late in the afternoon a couple of Egyptian trucks stopped just down the slope. I could hear the men calling to each other.
“Moshe, where’s the Pepsi?” In Hebrew!
Our guys, it turned out, had captured these trucks from the Egyptians. Among the loads were cases of Pepsi-Cola, which we didn’t have in Israel at the time. These soldiers apparently got a taste and liked it. But by the time I realized they were my own countrymen, they had started up the trucks and driven off.
I began walking. At least now I knew I was near my own people. Around sunset a column of IDF tanks appeared. I hopped out onto the road, waving my arms and shouting. The first tank braked at fifty meters, keeping its hatches buttoned up. I could see its coaxial machine gun traversing, stopping with its barrel zeroed right between my eyes. To my horror, I realized that I was wearing a light-colored flight suit like Egyptian pilots wore. On top of that, I am dark skinned like they are.
I began shouting in Hebrew. No one in the tank could hear me because of the distance, the noise of the engine, and the fact that their hatches were shut. Suddenly a second tank came forward. The first tank must have radioed for a superior officer. Tank number two stopped about twenty-five meters away, its gun pointed at me too.
Suddenly the commander’s hatch opened. My cousin Yoav stuck his head out.
“Cheetah! What are you doing here?”
21.
THE MITLA PASS
Every paratrooper lives to make a combat jump. You get a red background patch for your uniform that you mount your jump wings on. It goes above your left breast pocket. In Israel in ’67, no paratrooper had made a combat jump since the men of Battalion 890 at Mitla in 1956.
Dan Ziv is the thirty-one-year-old deputy commander of Paratroop Battalion 71. Eleven years earlier, in 1956, he was awarded the Itur HaGvura, Israel’s highest decoration for valor, for his actions at the Mitla Pass in Sinai.
Let me tell you about ’56. You cannot understand ’67 if you don’t know about ’56.
This was a war, the Sinai Campaign, that lasted only one hundred hours but that put Israel on the map as a force to be reckoned with—and by the way made a worldwide hero of Moshe Dayan, who had been chief of staff and was considered the genius behind the whole show. It also was the war that humiliated Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser in front of all the Arab world and by the logic of national pride and payback made the Six Day War, eleven years later, inevitable.
When you are a twenty-year-old lieutenant, you know nothing about the “big picture.” The politics of whatever war you’re fighting are explained to you for a few minutes in battalion and brigade briefings, and maybe you read about the international situation in the newspapers and chew it over with your friends and the other young lieutenants. But basically it’s so far over your head you can’t waste time worrying about it. What you are concerned with is your own piece of the puzzle.
Can I lead my men?
Can I accomplish my mission?
Can I keep my soldiers safe?
The Mitla Pass is one of these.
Mitla is deep into Sinai, only fifty kilometers east of the Suez Canal. The plan—Dayan’s plan—was to start the war not with conventional assaults along the Israel-Egypt border but to strike deep from the very start. Our paratroop battalion, 890, would jump at Mitla and seize the pass before the enemy even realized that the fight had started.
This stunt at Mitla served no real military purpose. Its aim was political. The point of having an Israeli force seize territory so close to Suez was to establish a pretext for the British and the French to invade Egypt and take back the Canal. Nasser had nationalized this previously international waterway just a few months earlier, in July 1956.
The British and French plan was to wait till we Israelis had taken Mitla, then announce to the world, “These crazy Jews and Arabs are fighting again; it’s up to us powers to keep them apart, so we will invade Egypt as peacekeepers and by the way we’ll kick Nasser out of the Canal.”
I am only a twenty-year-old lieutenant and of course no one is telling me this plan, but if I had known, I would have said, “Wow, that is some crazy scheme!”
At that time Israel had its own reasons for going to war with Egypt, namely that Nasser had acquired huge shipments of Soviet arms via Czechoslovakia in 1955. The General Staff figured it would take Nasser three or four years to train his army up on the new tanks and planes. Then he would attack us. No nation would supply us with equivalent arms. The Americans wouldn’t, the British wouldn’t, the French wouldn’t. Dayan believed that Israel must preempt the enemy. We had no choice but to destroy those Soviet arms before Nasser could use them against us. At the same time Ben-Gurion, who was prime minister and minister of defense, was thinking: It’s good for Israel to fight alongside England and France. We can gain their respect and possibly their aid and arms in the future.