The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War

by Steven Pressfield

  By July ’65 the master plan is ready. It has been printed, proofed, and sent to the squadron commanders, who are still not authorized to show it to anybody. But slowly the deputies, the seconds-in-command, become included; then, under heavy security, the senior pilots.

  By the end of 1965, the squadrons have received individual orders folders for every target. Each squadron has its primary and secondary targets, which its pilots must know in detail. The fliers and their commanders do not need to know what part any other squadron is playing. They just have to know their own roles.

  Giora Romm, twenty-two-year-old Mirage pilot:

  How do you train for attacking enemy air bases? You attack your own. We ran mock operations hundreds of times against Israeli airfields. In the Negev other training targets had been set up, with runways and even dummy planes. Life was very simple for us pilots. We trained, we slept, we trained.

  I had a small room in the bachelors’ barracks at Tel Nof that I shared with another pilot, Avramik Salmon—very plain, just a sink to brush your teeth in and shave. At night we watched movies and played cards. No one had a car. On the rare occasions when someone would lend us transportation, we’d drive to Gedera to a roadside dive called Auntie Leah’s. Have you heard of Pancho’s in the Mojave Desert, where Chuck Yeager and the other U.S. fliers from Edwards Air Force Base used to go? Leah’s was the Israeli version. You sat at tables outside breathing diesel fumes from passing army trucks and tank transporters. But the steaks were good and you could get a beer as long as the place stayed open. Mainly, though, we stayed on base, trained, studied, and played poker.

  We had a pilot in our squadron named Reuven Rozen, a very systematic pilot. One day he and I crossed paths outside the ops room. “Giora, I need five minutes.” He took me into an empty office and handed me his map and operational notes for attacking the Egyptian airfield at Cairo West. He started reciting from memory. “Takeoff at precisely such-and-such, proceed on such-and-such heading at altitude 100 feet to such-and-such a waypoint, to be reached at such-and-such a time precisely, then new heading such-and-such to next waypoint,” and so on for five minutes without stopping.

  Rozen knew by heart everything that had to happen between Tel Nof and Cairo West—the headings, the time, the fuel. I mean everything. You had to. This had to be in your head with no possibility of error. To make the challenge even more interesting, 70 percent of the flight is over the Mediterranean—thus no waypoints for orientation—at an altitude so low that the slightest lapse of concentration will put you nose-first into the drink. Not to mention radio silence. No computers, no satellite guidance, no GPS—they hadn’t been invented. A wristwatch, a heading, and your memory. And that was only for the specific base you were attacking. In your head you had to keep the same encyclopedic knowledge of every other base on the target list—and how to get to it, and get home, from any point over Israel or Egypt.

  Rafi Sivron, planner of Operation Moked:

  In the end, the plan’s most dangerous foes were found not among the fliers who would have to execute it but in the individual department heads of the air force bureaucracy whose authority or fiefdoms were threatened by its existence.

  At that time the Israel Air Force had one extremely rudimentary computer. This instrument was the pride of the Weapons Systems and Planning Department. The department’s chief, an officer named Yoash “Chatto” Tsiddon, ran the plan through this wonder of science.

  The computer said the plan would fail.

  The Weapons and Planning chief called a meeting. I took my seat. Motti Hod headed our contingent. Motti was operations chief of the air force, number two under Ezer. Chatto Tsiddon had commanded Squadron 119 in its early days, as well as the test squadron. He later became a member of the Knesset. He was a person to be taken seriously. Chatto laid out his findings, backed by IBM and the science of binary calculus. Of twelve enemy bases attacked, the computer declared, only two would be knocked out. All others would remain partially, if not fully, operational.

  My heart sank. I defended the program with every argument I could muster. The computer was wrong! The plan would work! The attacks would knock out every enemy base!

  Chatto sat unfazed. Technology had pronounced its verdict. He would pass his assessment up the line. The plan was dead.

  Motti said nothing for what seemed like a full minute. Then he leaned forward and addressed the Weapons and Planning chief.

  “Chatto,” he said, “do you have a better plan? Please feel free to draw up a superior operational scheme. I will be happy to review it. So will Ezer, and so will every squadron commander in the air force. But until you present such a plan, this one stays. This is the plan. No one is changing a word.”

  I have clashed with Motti Hod on numerous occasions. He has held me back from advancement, sought to prevent me from continuing my university studies. I never liked him and he never liked me.

  But Motti saved the plan that day and he fought as its champion on dozens of other occasions. He sold Operation Moked to the squadron commanders and he shepherded it through a high command whose envy of, and competitiveness with, the air force could hardly be overstated.

  It was Motti’s idea to present the plan to the General Staff on a single piece of paper and to press for its inclusion in the overall war plan with as light a touch as possible. In the prewar deliberations, I don’t believe the cabinet even brought it up.

  And, most important of all, when the plan was put into action, Motti orchestrated it like a virtuoso.

  How did the operation come to be named Moked? (A mission order has a number, but an operation has a name.)

  My son Tomer had just been born. I wanted to name the plan after him. Operation Tomer. But I chanced to be having lunch with my friend Benjamin Yossiffon, a helicopter pilot who was in charge of day-to-day operations for the air force.

  “You can’t do that!” Benjamin said at once. “This is a plan of war. You can’t name it after an innocent child.”

  “Well, what should I call it then?”

  He suggested, “Focus.”

  Moked.

  24.

  YOUNG ROMMEL

  My brother Shmulik is commander of the 7th Armored Brigade. He’s a colonel, thirty-seven years old. He has been called “Young Rommel.” He likes that. My friend Yannush Ben-Gal was the brigade’s chief operations officer, but he and my brother got into a fight and my brother fired him.

  I took Yannush’s place. Not because I am a trained operations officer. I’m the only one who can get along with my brother.

  Yoel Gorodish is senior operations officer of the 7th Armored Brigade.

  When the Egyptians first started moving tank divisions into Sinai in mid-May of 1967, our 7th Armored Brigade was scattered in various training and operational roles across Israel. Immediately orders were issued to assemble at Revivim in the Negev. In a big country like America, to move an armored brigade would take months of planning, cost millions of dollars, and require transport by sea, air, and rail. In Israel the whole brigade was on-site in eight hours, and Shmulik was chewing out his officers for taking so long.

  My brother and I had our first blowup not long after this.

  Instructions had come from General Headquarters informing us that the brigade would be issued gas masks. Nasser had used poison gas in his war in Yemen; our forces would have to be prepared in case the enemy tried to use it on us. My brother ordered all beards to be shaved. The masks couldn’t get a tight seal if a man had a beard.

  One of our tank battalions didn’t obey. They thought the order was chickenshit and they let it slide. My brother and I were in a headquarters meeting when this act of disobedience came out. The deputy commander of the offending battalion was sitting right across from Shmulik. My brother said nothing to him.

  Instead he tore into me. “Why didn’t Battalion 82 shave their beards? You were told to implement this order and yo
u did not!”

  When the meeting was over, I went to my brother’s trailer and told him I quit. He said, “Yoel, I know it was not your fault, but this war is going to start in a matter of days and I had to get the message across without yelling at the deputy in front of every other officer.”

  “I don’t care, Shmulik. You humiliated me. I cannot serve under these conditions.”

  I went back to my tent and packed up. Four in the morning, an officer came for me. “Your brother wants to speak with you.” I refused to go. So Shmulik came to me, in a jeep. He ordered me to get in and drove me back to his trailer. Inside he said, “I want you to put your resignation in writing.”

  I told him, “This is between us as brothers. Me telling you is enough! I quit!”

  “Okay,” he said, “but how about if we go to mediation?”

  This was where I made my mistake. I should have turned my brother down flat. Even to consider mediation showed him I was not dead-set.

  “Who,” I asked, “do you propose as mediator?”

  “Our mother.”

  We both burst out laughing. Our mother is old-fashioned, very Orthodox. She would die before she would stand to see two of her children fighting.

  So my brother got me to stay.

  Here is how he ran the brigade:

  The division speed limit was 60 kilometers per hour. Shmulik issued an order: “The 7th Brigade will go no faster than fifty-nine.” So if you got caught driving sixty-one, you were in trouble two times—once with Division for exceeding sixty and once with my brother for exceeding fifty-nine.

  But accidents in the brigade dropped to zero.

  Whatever hour a meeting was scheduled to start, “Shmulik Time” was five minutes earlier. God help you if you didn’t show up on Shmulik Time.

  My brother was the best tank gunner in the division. In drills, he would kick gunners out of their seats and take over himself, then put round after round on target. He made men cry; then he would stay late and work with them personally on bore sighting and range finding. I have seen him hurl steel helmets and telephones across tables at his own officers. But against the enemy in the field he would put himself so far forward that these same officers would beg him to take greater care for his own life.

  In Brigade 7, maintenance lapses were unforgivable. Uniforms had to be perfect. Even the laces of our boots had to be tied in a prescribed way, with the loose ends tucked into the boot top. Why? So that a crewman’s laces will not catch on a corner when he scrambles aboard his tank. Army-issue belts could be worn with the buckle facing either way. Not in my brother’s brigade. Belts must be buckled left to right only, so that if a man was wounded and you had to open his belt to apply medical aid, you knew which way to pull without thinking. Every soldier in the army was required to carry a tourniquet-type bandage. In other outfits, the man could pack this anywhere among his kit. In our brigade, the bandage was always in the left front pocket. Troops were drilled until finding and applying this bandage became second nature.

  Colonel Shmuel Gorodish, commander of the 7th Armored Brigade.

  Under Shmulik, the interior of every tank had to be organized identically. Signal flags would be in the same rack, in the same order. Tanks carry different kinds of shells for different fire missions; these must be stowed in the same place, in the same order, inside every tank. Why? Because tanks break down or get knocked out by enemy action. When a commander switched to a new tank, he had to be able to find every item he needed blindfolded. Fire orders and internal commands were likewise standardized, so that every gunner, loader, and driver could be replaced by every other if he should be wounded or killed and so that orders from any commander could be understood and obeyed without hesitation.

  Under Shmulik, brigade exercises were more rigorous than combat. The men will look forward to wartime, my brother declared, because it will be easier than training.

  We will operate at night and in all weathers. We will make every mistake it is possible to make until we stop making mistakes. When our tank crews drive their vehicles into blind wadis and can’t find their way out, when they get lost in the dark and their fuel tanks run dry, when they collide with each other and can’t complete their missions and wind up at daylight calling for help like wayward sheep, they will learn then that filters must be changed on schedule and tracks must be tightened and maps must be read and navigation must be taught and men must act as teams and “I don’t know” is not an answer to anything.

  One day at the end of May, Moshe Dayan came to inspect the brigade. Dayan had no official status at that time; he had no rank and no command. A few years later, Shmulik and he had such a terrible falling-out that my brother was literally plotting to murder Dayan. But this day and this war they loved each other. My brother was Dayan’s kind of soldier.

  On the map Shmulik showed Dayan how the brigade would advance past Khan Younis, seize the road junction at Rafiah, and speed through the Jiradi Pass to capture the Egyptian headquarters at El Arish.

  “Where do you expect resistance to be heaviest?” Dayan asked.

  “I don’t care,” said Shmulik. “When Hativa Sheva [Brigade 7] gets through with these Egyptians, the only way you’ll recognize them will be by the tracks of our tank treads imprinted on their backsides.”

  Dayan was not supposed to stay the night, but he did. The next morning a message came for him from Tel Aviv. As soon as Dayan read it, he went into the trailer alone with Shmulik and locked the door. The two men did not emerge for several minutes. When Dayan finally came out, he and his driver climbed straight into their jeep and drove away.

  My junior operations officer was Lieutenant Yosi Ben-Hanan. Six years later as a tank battalion commander in the Yom Kippur War, he would win the Itur HaOz, the Medal of Courage, for his heroism fighting the Syrians on the Golan Heights.

  Yosi, now, watched Dayan and his jeep speed away.

  “Is this it?” he asked me. “Has the cabinet given Dayan supreme command?”

  25.

  “BECAUSE I WAS NOT AT NEBI YUSHA”

  I grew up in Jerusalem, next door to the home of a young man who had been a hero of the War of Independence in 1948. His name was Yizhar Armoni. Armoni had fought in one of the war’s first critical operations, an attempt to capture the British police fort of Nebi Yusha in the Upper Galilee. This fort had been given to the Arabs by the British; it dominated all access by road to the besieged kibbutzim along the Lebanese border.

  Lieutenant Yosi Ben-Hanan is the twenty-two-year-old operations officer of the 7th Armored Brigade.

  The Arabs holding the fort put up a furious resistance. Many of the attacking Palmach fighters were killed. The retreat of the survivors was carried out under heavy fire; Yizhar Armoni was wounded in both legs but refused to be evacuated. He stayed behind alone, for hours, with only a Bren machine gun, covering the withdrawal of his comrades. The Arabs killed him.

  I was an infant then. Though the fight at Nebi Yusha had been a grim defeat for the Israeli forces, Yizhar Armoni was named one of the twelve Heroes of Israel, the highest military award for valor during the War of Independence.

  If you ask me why I became a soldier, I will tell you, “Because I was not at Nebi Yusha.”

  I had a second hero growing up. This was Joseph Trumpeldor, who was killed by Arab forces at Tel Chai in 1920 on the eleventh day of the Hebrew month of Adar. It was Trumpeldor, mortally wounded, who declared, “It is a fine thing to die for one’s country.” This, almost three decades before we Jews had a country.

  I was born on the eleventh of Adar, 1945. My parents named me Yosef after Yosef Trumpeldor.

  Ask me why I have chosen to dedicate my life to the defense of Israel. “Because I was not at Tel Chai.”

  The mother of Yizhar Armoni was left bereft by her son’s death, so my own mother used to let her look after me in the afternoons. I was four or five at the
time. It helped Mrs. Armoni to have a young boy she could talk to and take care of.

  Mrs. Armoni used to walk me down the flight of steps to the unpaved alley that had been named after her son, Yizhar Armoni Climb. She would say to me, “Do you see that big boulevard at the top of the hill, Yosi? It is named after a pioneer Zionist, Ussishkin Street. This little lane is all they gave to my son.” She held my hand as we walked. “When you grow up, Yosi, you will be a fighter like my son.”

  My immediate superior now in June 1967 is Yoel Gorodish. He’s a major, the senior operations officer of the 7th Armored Brigade. Yoel’s brother Colonel Shmuel Gorodish commands the brigade.

  It is a quirk of brigade command organization that the junior operations officer—i.e., me—is the one who rides up front alongside the brigade commander. The responsibilities of the senior operations officer are much weightier—among other duties, coordinating logistics and resupply for the entire brigade—so he operates primarily in the rear.

  The result is that I will play a pivotal role in, and have a front-row seat for, not only the armored clashes of the brigade throughout the war but the drama of command and decision as well. Through my headset will pass most if not all orders from Gorodish to his battalion commanders and their responses to him. I will hear as well all instructions to Gorodish from higher command.

  General Israel Tal commands our division. The 7th Armored Brigade is one of three under his command. The other two are the 35th Paratroop Brigade, under Colonel Raful Eitan, and the 60th Armored Brigade, commanded by Colonel Menachem “Men” Aviram, a reserve formation recently called up.