Talik speaks. What he says will be repeated thousands of times over the ensuing years. His speech will be quoted and excerpted in military journals and academies of war around the world.
Tal tells us that our battle plans are excellent and that he feels confident that we know them down to the smallest detail. But tomorrow when the war begins, those fine plans will fly out the window. Nothing, Tal says, will happen according to those plans. The lines of assault will change; the direction of the enemy’s movements will change. Everything will change. This is the way things work in war. But, Talik says:
One thing must take place exactly as in the plans: the principle upon which these plans were made. Every man will attack. Every unit will push forward as fast as it can. Pay no attention to your flanks. Give no thought to resupply. If you lose nine tanks out of ten, keep advancing with the tenth. Stop for nothing.
General Israel Tal.
Other nations can afford to lose the first battle, Talik says, and still recover and carry the day. This will not work for Israel. If we fail in the initial clash, our nation will be overrun. The fate of the war on the ground rests with what we in our division do tomorrow. The survival of our country depends upon us.
Now I’m going to tell you something very severe. En brera. No alternative. The battle tomorrow will be life and death. Each man will assault to the end, taking no account of casualties. There will be no retreat. No halt, no hesitation. Only forward assault.
Talik points on the map to El Arish, the main base of the Egyptian 7th Division. Tomorrow, he says, when things go wrong, remember this only:
El Arish.
“Keep moving toward El Arish. Get there at any cost. I will meet you there and shake your hand.”
Dov “Dubi” Tevet is a nineteen-year-old trooper in Eli Rikovitz’s Recon platoon:
In the days preparing ourselves for the war, Eli and I ran many scouting surveys along the border, picking crossing points for the tanks. Under those early plans, the tanks needed us in Recon because the penetration points were on side roads and dirt tracks. The tanks would get lost without our jeeps to lead them.
But now that the real war has started, the tanks are advancing on main roads. They don’t need us for that.
But our Recon jeeps are still driving out front. It’s insane. A jeep is a sitting duck, with the men riding in it exposed to fire from all directions.
Boaz Amitai is a twenty-year-old second lieutenant, second-in-command of the 1st Platoon of the Recon Company under Lieutenant Yossi Elgamis. He commands the platoon’s four jeeps:
The first village we come to after crossing the border is Abasan el-Kabir. My jeep is up front, with our three others following. We haven’t taken any fire yet. In fact, Arab kids on the way have been waving to us.
My driver, Uri Zand, has a transistor radio. We have heard Dayan announcing the onset of hostilities. We’re hearing music. Maybe war is not so bad.
Up ahead: An irrigation ditch blocks the road, a big one—too deep and too wide for the jeeps to cross.
“Boaz!” Yossi Elgamis, our platoon commander, pulls alongside in his half-track. “Find a way around for the jeeps. I’ll take the lead.”
Yossi goes ahead. With its caterpillar treads, a half-track takes such obstacles in stride.
Of all the great guys in our company, Yossi is the best. When we were training at Camp Nathan before the war, he and Eli Rikovitz and I used to go into Beersheba after the day’s drills to a place named Morris’s for steaks and Nesher beer in the big liter bottles. Yossi made us take off our lieutenants’ insignia so we wouldn’t spoil the fun for the sergeants and privates.
Captain Ori Orr is the twenty-eight-year-old commander of the Recon Company. He has three platoons under him—Yossi Elgamis’s, Eli Rikovitz’s, and Amos Ayalon’s:
Your mind starts working feverishly when the order comes, “Go.” You are the commander. You feel everyone’s eyes on the back of your neck.
My vehicle is what they call a command half-track. The command vehicle is the one with multiple radios. We have three. An operator mans these sets, but I can hear all channels, too. I have a microphone and a headset, which I don’t wear because I want to hear what is happening all around as well. One radio links us to the tank battalion we are leading. Another connects us to brigade commander Shmuel Gorodish via his operations officer, Yosi Ben-Hanan. The third, a surplus American GRC, puts me through to my own guys in their jeeps and half-tracks.
The mission of the Recon Company is to locate the enemy and to lead the tanks. We are their eyes and ears. But in a fast-moving advance, if we run into resistance, Recon can wind up biting off more than it can chew.
We’re up front. If we run into enemy fire, will we delay the advance by sending back for heavier forces? Sometimes you can’t. You have to attack. But our Recon vehicles have no armor, no heavy weapons. We are not shock troops.
I am thinking this when I hear over the company channel, “Commander down! Commander down!”
Boaz Amitai, second-in-command of 1st Platoon:
Yossi Elgamis has been shot in the head. A burst of machine-gun fire. Just as Yossi’s half-track entered the village of Abasan el-Kabir.
I’m in my jeep. Bullets are striking the sand all around me. It’s like a movie. The sense of unreality is hypnotic. Rifle and machine-gun fire deafens us, but it doesn’t seem real. I can’t assimilate it.
It occurs to me, with lethargic slowness, that I am second-in-command of this platoon. Our leader has been shot. I have to take action.
At once I snap awake.
Yossi’s driver has reversed out of the kill zone. The half-track has found cover behind a building. My jeep speeds up. Fire continues, close and intense. I approach from the rear of the half-track. Yossi lies on his back in the vehicle bed with Itzhak Kissilov and Shmuel Beilis from Yossi’s half-track command team supporting him.
One look is all it takes to know Yossi’s wound is very bad. I am thinking of the ditch at the entrance to the village. Because of that ditch, Yossi went ahead. Otherwise it would be me who was in line for that bullet.
Lieutenant Yossi Elgamis.
I call to Kissilov: “Where is the fire coming from?”
“What?” When Yossi was shot, he fell on top of Kissilov. I can see Yossi’s blood all over the front of Kissilov’s uniform.
“The shooter that got Yossi! Where is he?”
Kissilov points ahead. A mosque. A minaret tower.
We have three tanks with us. We are not supposed to fire on civilian buildings. I get on the radio to the tanks’ commander.
“See that tower?”
He says yes.
“Blow it down.”
He does.
All of a sudden, war has become real.
Yosi Ben-Hanan, 7th Brigade operations officer:
Over the radio, we’re hearing that Yossi Elgamis has been killed. He is a friend and a critical component of the assault—Ori Orr’s deputy, second-in-command of the entire Recon Company.
A terrible thing has happened here, too. A few thousand meters over the border, our column of tanks and trucks has come under mortar fire. Vehicles began hitting their brakes. Joshua, my jeep driver, was run over by the tank behind him.
He has been killed.
I’m at the front of the column with Shmuel Gorodish, the brigade commander, when this happens. My post is on Gorodish’s left in the command half-track. We hear frantic cries over the radio. A jeep has caught fire. Looking back, I can see the smoke.
I realize it is my jeep. It is Joshua.
This, I realize with sudden and searing pain, is how things happen in war. Dear friends are lost not only to hostile fire, as with Yossi Elgamis, but to mishaps, accidents, crazy stuff that has nothing to do with shooting the enemy or being shot by him.
What will I tell Joshua’s mothe
r?
There is no time to feel or to think. A thousand other urgencies press on me. “Where is Kahalani?” Gorodish asks. “Has Battalion 79 reached Khan Younis?”
It’s my job as operations officer to know where every unit is, to feed their reports to Gorodish, and to relay his orders to them.
Lieutenant Avigdor Kahalani is a tank company commander in Battalion 79 of the 7th Armored Brigade:
I’m in the lead tank on a back road approaching Khan Younis, following Yossi Elgamis’s Recon team. Enemy machine-gun fire is making chips of paint dance off my hull and turret. Suddenly the road narrows, hemming our column between massive prickly pear hedges. I order my driver to break out. As he does, I hear a deafening roar and the tank bellies to a stop. A tread chain has come off. We have thrown a track.
A dozen tanks jam up behind me. What a balagan! I am mortified with shame.
I leave my tank and take the tank behind me. Two kilometers later, outside Khan Younis, the same thing happens. The second tank has blown a chain, too! I am beside myself.
I take a third tank—my deputy Daniel Tzefoni’s.
I’m so furious I could chew through a steel tread. I want to be first into Khan Younis. My company must break through before all others! I am cursing in Arabic (Hebrew is notoriously deficient in profanity), using words even I didn’t know I knew.
Lieutenant Eli Rikovitz commands the Recon Company’s 3rd Platoon:
The idea of attacking Khan Younis is not to capture the place. All we want is to run a right hook and loop back south to attack Rafiah Junction from the rear. From Rafiah, the main road leads to El Arish.
El Arish is our target.
Khan Younis is only a bump on the way.
Lieutenant Avigdor Kahalani, tank company commander:
We have entered Khan Younis. Machine-gun and antitank fire is coming from everywhere.
Tanks are not meant to fight in an urban setting without armored infantry to spot the enemy and make them keep their heads down. To protect ourselves we are firing our machine guns over each other’s flanks.
Suddenly in the center of town an Israeli tank materializes on my right, with other tanks of our “C” Company right behind. The platoon commander tells me his company commander, Benzi Carmeli, has been shot. Benzi is in the tank now, gravely wounded.
I must take the lead with my “B” Company.
Eli Rikovitz, Recon platoon commander:
From the outskirts I can see the Patton tanks of Battalion 79 entering Khan Younis and vanishing amid clouds of smoke and dust. I don’t know why they’re going in. The town means nothing.
I turn left, bypassing Khan Younis. My platoon is leading the tanks—British-built Centurions—of Battalion 82. The commander of Battalion 82 is Gabi Amir. With him is the deputy brigade commander, Lieutenant Colonel Barouch Harel, nicknamed “Pinko.” Pinko is in the lead, right behind me. Over the radio I’m telling him to follow my platoon’s dust.
Looking back, I must say it is a hell of a sight.
Behind me in the clear morning air are at least thirty Centurion tanks. The column stretches back half a kilometer. It is one giant cloud of alkali. Every time the dust parts, another two tanks emerge. In between are various command cars, jeeps and half-tracks, and intelligence and air liaison vehicles, all bristling with antennas. In the lead, my platoon has four jeeps, two half-tracks, and three tanks. As we pull away from Khan Younis, another half dozen Pattons from Battalion 79 rumble into view and roll into the town.
A big part of war is spectacle. What are these Egyptians thinking when they see all this armor steaming directly at them? Even I am impressed.
Gabi Gazit is a twenty-year-old trooper in the Recon platoon of Lieutenant Amos Ayalon:
My half-track is rolling beside the CJ-5 jeep driven by my friend Benzi Nissenbaum. We’re two thousand meters across the border now and starting to hear mortars and small-arms fire. Benzi’s jeep looks a lot safer to me than this big, rumbling half-track.
“Benzi, let’s trade vehicles!”
He grins and shows me his middle finger.
A column of half-tracks in the desert.
There are eleven of us in this half-track. The first thing that soldiers do, boarding such a vehicle, is to tie their haversacks, bedding, and web gear over the kit rails that run along both flanks. They do this to add a layer of protection against enemy fire. There’s a joke about a half-track’s armor. It doesn’t stop bullets coming in; it just lets them rattle around inside for a while. With the packs and the gear, the men hope, they will be shielded at least from flame or shrapnel. Every little bit helps.
Our half-tracks are U.S. Army M-3s from World War II. Good vehicles, tough and reliable. A half-track has tires up front and a lightweight caterpillar track in back. It will cross sand and gravel and, with a skilled driver, can zip along wadis—dry riverbeds in the desert—as if they were paved roads. On asphalt, a half-track will do 50 kilometers per hour. In the desert, that is supersonic. Troops on foot in the desert are dead troops. They can do nothing except wait to die.
Half-tracks unfortunately are targets. That’s why I want to trade with Benzi.
His speedy little jeep looks awfully good to me.
Avigdor Kahalani, tank company commander:
In the center of Khan Younis, the road forks. Where’s the road to Rafiah? I’m navigating on instinct. I have no map. I forgot it in the first tank.
Then I remember the railroad—the old Ottoman line that runs from Alexandria to Damascus. The railroad runs through El Arish. If we can find the tracks, we can follow them out of this hellish town.
A tank turret is high up. You can see. I spot date palms and a line of dunes indicating the Mediterranean coast. Telegraph poles! Train tracks!
I order my driver forward.
We’re back in business.
Eli Rikovitz, Recon platoon commander:
Our objective now is Rafiah Junction. We have run a right hook via Khan Younis, avoiding the Egyptian Stalin tanks to the south. We are coming at Rafiah from the north. My headset crackles:
“Five, this is Twenty. Where are you?”
“Twenty” is Shmuel Gorodish, the brigade commander. “Five” means our Recon Company commander. That’s Ori.
Gorodish gives the map code for the UN camp north of Rafiah Junction. He is almost there, he says. Ori answers that he is coming fast.
Ori Orr, Recon Company commander:
Rafiah Junction is a crossroads built up into what the manuals call a “fortified encampment.” How fortified, we don’t know. There’s a ridge that commands the main road west to El Arish. If I were the Egyptians, I would defend this with everything I’ve got.
We know the Egyptian 7th Division is present, but Intelligence can’t tell us where because the enemy shifts positions every night after dark. We know the foe has two infantry brigades. He has tanks. He has artillery. He has antitank guns.
The antitank guns are more dangerous to us in Recon than the tanks because they won’t be saving their ammunition to take on heavier targets. They would love to nail our jeeps and half-tracks. The antitank guns will be dug in low, only a foot or two off the ground, in hedges of castor bushes and prickly pear. We have trained to spot them. It’s impossible. Not even their muzzles will be visible.
Boaz Amitai now leads the Recon Company’s 1st Platoon:
I can hear Ori and Eli over the company channel. They have reached the UN camp on the way to Rafiah Junction. Gorodish, the brigade commander, is already there. This is why they call him “Young Rommel.” If he were any farther forward, he would be shaking hands with the Egyptians.
The camp is where a detachment of UN peacekeepers stayed before Nasser kicked them out on May 17. The site is directly north of Rafiah Junction. Gorodish has pulled up at this vantage to scope the place before he advances into the open.
Ori Orr,
Recon Company commander:
We are peering through binoculars at Rafiah Junction—me, Gorodish, Ben-Hanan, others. I’ve got Eli on the company channel. He’s not far, coming from Khan Younis, leading Pinko and tanks of Battalion 82.
Gorodish’s vehicles have pulled up beneath the water tower of the abandoned UN camp. On the radio Eli confirms the report that Yossi Elgamis has been shot in the head entering Abasan el-Kabir. Eli has this as fact from Boaz Amitai, who has taken over Yossi’s platoon. Eli doesn’t know if Yossi is dead or wounded.
I have no time to think about it.
The situation before us is this:
Our tanks are behind us, some close, others strung out over kilometers. It will take half an hour to bring them up into an attack formation, issue orders, assault the junction.
Most of my Recon Company is here.
We are ready now.
Do we wait for the big guns or go forward now with our peashooters?
I know Gorodish well. I served under him as a tank company commander before I took over the Recon Company. Gorodish is thirty-seven, impatient, aggressive, without fear. He is from a religious family, where all that zeal has gone into ambition. He would attack hell itself if he could get clearance.
“What do you think, Ori?”
Through the binoculars I can make out castor bushes and low scrub-covered dunes. Dark lines could be trenches, but we’re too far away to tell. I can see the ridge that commands the main road to El Arish. A division could be hidden on it or behind it. Beside Gorodish, Yosi Ben-Hanan is on the radio to tank Battalion 79. The lead company is Avigdor Kahalani’s. I know him well, too. He is young and even more aggressive than Gorodish. But his tanks are still a good distance away.
With another brigade commander, you might say wait. Not with Gorodish. Momentum is everything. We must break through.
The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War Page 20