Arik gives me a kiss. “Cheetah, I love you!”
He needs no report from his commanders to know how the battle is going.
35.
BAD NIGHT IN EL ARISH
Eli Rikovitz, Recon platoon commander:
We have reached El Arish. Night has fallen. The tanks of Battalion 82 have seized the crossroads east of town and set up in a circle, cannons facing out. They have been firing for hours.
My driver Uri’s wound is bad. Worse has happened to Zvika. He has been run over by a tank.
Dubi Tevet, Recon jeep driver:
Uri has been shot through the hip. The hole is as big as my fist. Zvika’s extremity is ten times worse. When we captured the crossroads, Zvika positioned his jeep behind one of our tanks to protect it from Egyptian fire. Suddenly the tank began moving in reverse. The driver couldn’t see Zvika’s jeep behind him.
Zvika Kornblit, Recon jeep commander:
I was folded up inside the jeep. The last thing I saw was the tank track passing over my head. I was sure I was going to die.
Moshe Perry, Recon jeep driver:
Dubi and I got Zvika out. We had to peel him out of the mangled steel. He was nothing but a mass of flesh, dismembered.
Zvika Kornblit, Recon jeep commander:
I try to feel my face, to see if I still have a face, if I still exist. My hip is broken, I have five fractures including my spine, not one rib remains unbroken, my right arm is shattered.
Dubi Tevet, Recon jeep driver:
We in Recon have been trained in first aid, but we are not medics. Has Zvika’s spine been crushed? What of his internal organs? How can we help him?
Ori Orr, Recon Company commander:
Eli has informed me over the radio of what has happened to Uri and Zvika. The only good news is in the big picture. The brigade now has most of a battalion of tanks at El Arish.
This is beyond the army’s dreams. In our most optimistic projections we could not have imagined reaching our objective before tomorrow. A pitched battle was anticipated to capture the airfield at El Arish and the big Egyptian base. An entire paratroop brigade, the 55th, is set to jump tonight to help us.
Instead the Egyptians are withdrawing.
The tanks of Kahalani’s company and others have attacked the enemy’s positions at the east end of the Jiradi Pass. Our division’s other tank brigade, the 60th, has gotten behind the foe to the south. As the Egyptians pull back, I myself make the dash through the pass, with Amos and Boaz and others from Amos’s platoon. Our vehicles get through just before midnight.
We’re here.
We have found Eli.
Dubi Tevet, Recon jeep driver:
This night is the longest of my life. I believe it will never end. The main body of Battalion 82 has captured the road junction at the east entrance to El Arish. I am here, within the circle of our tanks, tending to the wounds of Uri Zand and Zvika Kornblit, my friends.
Behind us, the pass remains cut off. We are alone. Ori has gotten through with our fast Recon jeeps, but the rest of the brigade is stuck at the east end.
We wait here at El Arish with our wounded friends. We have no doctors, no medics. We have run out of morphine.
Boaz Amitai, Recon platoon commander:
It’s one in the morning. Gorodish and half the brigade are still back at the entrance to the Jiradi. Over the brigade radio net, we can hear him ordering Infantry Battalion 9 forward to clear the Egyptian trenches that flank the pass. These positions must be taken so that our trucks with fuel and water and ammunition can get through to resupply us and so that Gorodish and the rest of the brigade can come up.
Ori’s brother is in Battalion 9. It’s a good outfit; they will do the job.
Ori Orr, Recon Company commander:
The way you think in war is not the way you think in peace. Your mind must remain on the mission. This is not always possible when you have lost so many friends.
Our company has been leading the brigade for eighteen hours now without a break. We have fought through two enemy infantry brigades and one tank brigade. The ordeal shows on our faces. I do not need retrospect to see this. I see it now.
I am looking across the darkness at Eli, Amos, and Boaz. Amos stands, lighting a cigarette. Eli and Boaz sit in the sand with their backs against the tires of one of our jeeps. Are they thinking of Rafiah? Are they, like me, seeking to tally up the numbers of friends we have lost?
“How long,” Eli asks, “since we started this morning?”
Amos says he can’t remember.
“A lifetime,” says Boaz.
Eli Rikovitz:
The nature of warfare is stupidity, and advancing under fire in open vehicles must be near the pinnacle of this. A mortar round that hits a half-track will kill every man in it. An antitank round will burn them all to death. When an artillery shell or a round from a tank’s main gun hits an unarmored vehicle, it leaves nothing but smoking metal and boots with no feet in them.
The farther you advance under fire, I am beginning to learn, the more items you lose. First you lose your equipment and your bedding. It falls off or gets shot up or burned up. You lose your ammo next. You shoot it up or hand it off to others who need it more. You lose your bearings. You lose communication, you lose vision, you lose hearing. You lose parts of your own body. You lose your men. You lose your connection to reality, you lose your composure, you lose your sanity.
The one thing you must never lose is your will to complete the mission.
Boaz Amitai:
No one can sleep. We try, under blankets in the seats of our jeeps. I’m thinking of my father, Eliezer, who commands a reserve infantry brigade defending Jewish Jerusalem. Is he all right? Is he worrying about me? The worst, this night, is sitting up with Eli and Ori. We have acquired now a pretty good idea of how many friends we’ve lost. You can’t think about it. You can’t let yourself.
Ori tries to buck us up by reminding us that not all are necessarily dead; some may only be wounded. But we have all seen Kenigsbuch’s half-track at Rafiah. I myself put blankets over the bodies of Shaul and Benzi and Yoram, cut in half in their jeep at the start of the Jiradi.
No one was brave enough to lift them out.
Ori Orr:
I have been strong all day. Being in command, you have no choice. But now, as I sit in the cold dark with Eli and Amos and Boaz, the part of my mind that I have turned off comes back awake. How many men have we lost? Eight? Ten? More? And others wounded. In one day.
Two more days like this and we will have no one left.
Dubi Tevet:
Boaz Amitai is one of our lieutenants. He comes by to say he has been ordered by Ori to take two jeeps back across the Jiradi to link up with the brigade’s resupply vehicles. It’s 03:30. When Boaz reaches the far side of the pass, he will lead the trucks back to us with fuel and water and rations and ammunition.
Brigade knows we have wounded here. Eli has radioed back four times. The medics are trying to get an ambulance up or even a helicopter when daylight comes.
Uri and Zvika suffer without a word. Will help ever arrive? I have given up searching the darkness for headlights.
Boaz Amitai:
The pass is ten kilometers long. Every meter seems like it’s on fire. The asphalt has melted from tanks burned and crews incinerated.
You try not to think morbid thoughts.
Why am I still above the earth when so many friends, who are better men than I, have been taken beneath it? Why them? Why not me?
I am not religious. I don’t think the way a religious person thinks. But now, driving across these ten kilometers of hell, I feel the presence of the Angel of Death.
“You,” he says to one man. “I shall take you now.”
To another: “You wait. I will come for you later.”
It is a terrible feeling.
Eli
Rikovitz:
At 04:30 Boaz comes back, leading the first vehicles of the supply echelon. At first light a helicopter medevacs Zvika and Uri to Soroka Hospital in Beersheba.
The tanks start to line up for the petrol tankers. At dawn we get into a firefight at the airfield with some retreating Egyptians and Boaz gets shot in the right thigh. He’s okay. The wound is his ticket out.
Gorodish is here now. The whole brigade has reached El Arish. A paratroop force from Brigade 35 is ordered to push west toward Suez along the coast road. We, with the tanks, will drive south into the desert toward Bir Laffan and Jebel Libni. The Egyptian 3rd Division is there.
It’s interesting to observe how the campaign evolves. The army has no official plans to advance beyond El Arish. Yet events dictate that it must.
If we check our advance here, Egyptian command may rally. Right now they are reeling. Their officers are fleeing, leaving their men to fend for themselves.
We have to keep attacking.
We have to keep advancing west.
Yosi Ben-Hanan, 7th Armored Brigade operations officer:
The operational maps of the 7th Armored Brigade end at El Arish. I know because I drew them. There are no arrows pointing beyond.
But El Arish is only the doorstep of Sinai. It’s nothing. Nowhere. Over half of Nasser’s armor remains untouched in the inner desert—the 3rd and 6th Divisions, the Shazli Force, and the elite 4th Armored Division.
Are there plans to take Jebel Libni? No. Has an attack program been drawn up for Bir Gafgafa? Never. The Suez Canal? In our brigade it hasn’t even been mentioned.
But, plans or no, we must keep attacking. The logic of events demands it.
This is my first experience of war, as opposed to exchanges of fire, such as the brigade has participated in on the Golan Heights over the past couple of years.
Lieutenant Yosi Ben-Hanan, 7th Armored Brigade operations officer.
Collection of Yosi Ben-Hanan.
The real thing is beyond anything I could have imagined. Not only the “little picture” of events on the ground—who lives and who dies, for what reasons of chance or necessity—but the way the process plays out on the level of armies and nations.
Certain principles have become clear.
Blitzkrieg works.
War of movement works.
In little more than twenty-four hours of fighting, the Egyptian 7th and 20th Divisions have essentially ceased to exist. Thousands of enemy vehicles have been destroyed, hundreds more captured intact. Fifteen hundred Egyptian soldiers have been killed, while thousands more flee on foot into the desert.
El Arish, where we are now, is a big, powerful base with a town and an airfield. Yet it has fallen without a siege and with only a short, fierce firefight.
This is amazing to me.
When historians write of this war, they will draw maps with assault arrows and lines of advance; they will speak of how the commanders planned this, the generals schemed that. And this will be true, as far as it goes.
The missing element is the momentum of events.
Gorodish understands this. He could see, back at the entrance to the Jiradi—even while one indispensable battalion commander, Ehud Elad, had been killed, and an equally brilliant company commander, Avigdor Kahalani, had been nearly incinerated—Gorodish could see, and declare aloud, that we could not stop here or at El Arish. Our force could not cease from advancing. And that nothing could or would stop us short of the Suez Canal.
Yoel Gorodish, senior operations officer of the 7th Armored Brigade:
Gorodish is a shochet—a kosher butcher. My brother learned the trade when he was fifteen. The shochet is a respected position in any Jewish community. In some smaller congregations, the rabbi and the shochet are the same man.
Now this shochet, Shmuel Gorodish, has become “Young Rommel.” The carcass he is carving is that of the Egyptian Army.
BOOK SIX
JERUSALEM
36.
A THOUSANDTH OF A POUND
When I was five years old, I visited Jerusalem for the first time. I cannot express the magnitude of this occasion. The journey was for me the first time out of the little kibbutz, the first time to ride in a car or a bus, the first time I ever sat down to a meal at a real table in a real dining room.
Captain Yoram Zamosh commands “A” Company in Major Uzi Eilam’s Battalion 71 of Paratroop Brigade 55.
For half a year my sisters and I had prepared for this monumental event. An untutored boy—myself—must be taught the proper way to shine his shoes and tame his cowlick, to hold a spoon and fork. We were going to the great city! I had to know how to behave like a gentleman.
We traveled—my parents, my two sisters, and I—by a very old bus to Tel Aviv, to the central station, then by a slightly newer bus to Ramla, and from there up to Jerusalem. We were going for Passover to my uncle’s house in Jaffa Street. The total distance of the trip was not even a hundred kilometers, but it felt to me like girdling the globe.
We had a wonderful seder, and I received the gift of a coin worth two mills. A mill equaled one-thousandth of a Palestinian pound. This was to me a treasure beyond imagining.
The year was 1946. The British had instituted a curfew because of violence threatened by the Irgun and other dissident Jewish groups. Directly beneath the windows of my uncle’s house was a post manned by British paratroopers with their red berets and pompoms. I sat for hours on a little balcony behind this position, watching the soldiers, fascinated.
Suddenly my coin slipped out of my hand!
It fell down among the British sandbags!
Though such an act was absolutely forbidden, I ran down the stairs to the military position. A big Scottish officer with a red mustache and blue eyes helped me find my coin. The paratroopers gave me chocolates and sat me behind a machine gun with a beret on my head. Half an hour later I was returned to my uncle, who immediately put all my identification details in a pouch around my neck so I would not get lost again.
The next day we went to the Kotel. The Western Wall. Over sixty-five years later, I have forgotten nothing. The political state of affairs was vividly clear to me, even as a child—how poor we Jews were, and how small and powerless compared to the mighty British.
The Arabs were not the enemy then. They were under the imperial thumb, just as we were. But Jerusalem was a Jewish city—the Jewish city. I felt keenly that this Wall, these stones, belonged to us by right and justice, but we had yet no power to possess them.
To be in this place with my parents was an overwhelming emotional experience, for them as well as for me, because as a child on the kibbutz you were raised not with your mother and father but with the other children. You lived in the children’s house. You saw your parents perhaps on the Sabbath or for holidays, but the rest of the time you were apart. So this trip was indelible to me for that reason as well.
I remember several years later traveling to Jerusalem on my own. I was sixteen years old the first time, setting out from the kibbutz on foot, trekking from early in the morning, seventy kilometers, carrying only a wrinkled old 1:100,000 gas station map and a few sandwiches, arriving at Ein Kerem just as the setting sun turned the white stones of the city to gold.
The Jordanians held the Old City then. The year was 1958. A Jew could no longer visit the Kotel or get anywhere near it. I made this trip many times. The pilgrims would go to Har Zion—Mount Zion—near to the Old City but outside the walls. There was a flight of stairs that mounted to a lookout platform from which, on tiptoe, you could peer in the direction of the Western Wall, which was hundreds of meters away. You were warned not to point your finger because Jordanian snipers might mistake it for a rifle and shoot at you. I went to Mount Zion at every visit, as well as up to the roof of Notre Dame Hospice, another vantage point from which one could look out over the rooftops of the Old City.<
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You could not see the wall from either position. Only a grove of poplars was visible, which stood somewhere nearby, on the Temple Mount, above the wall. Only the tops of these trees could be glimpsed. At that time I was outwardly observant, as you had to be on a religious kibbutz such as mine, but I wasn’t a particularly strong believer. Still, to see those poplars, only a glimpse of their crowns, was worth walking all day or all my life.
I served as a paratrooper in the regular army from 1960 to 1966, first as a corporal, then a lieutenant, finally as a company commander, before being released into the reserves. The army was forming a new reserve paratroop brigade, the 55th. My good friend Moshe Stempel had been appointed second-in-command; he brought me into the unit as a company commander. It was Moshe Stempel who formed the brigade, not Motta Gur, though Motta came to command it.
We had our first brigade exercise at Arad near the Dead Sea in April of ’67, just two months before the war. Rain fell in torrents day after day, but we were young paratroopers; nothing could faze us. Practically everyone in the paratroops was a kibbutznik, most from the north, very secular, guys who had never said a prayer or even wanted to. My kibbutz was in the south, not far from Arad. I took all my friends from the brigade there, to meet my mom and to show them we weren’t all crazy on a religious kibbutz. My mother made home-cooked meals for everyone. To her, they were her sons. She could not do enough for them.
37.
A PARATROOPER’S WET DREAM
Every paratrooper’s fantasy is to make a combat jump. You get a red border for your jump wings. But I will tell you the truth and you can believe it: There never was a paratrooper who wasn’t secretly relieved—even Arik Sharon himself—when he learned that a jump under fire had been postponed or canceled.
The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War Page 25