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

by Steven Pressfield

  This night is not that bad. This night will end. We will reach the Canal. The war will be over.

  52.

  THE SEVENTH DAY OF THE SIX DAY WAR

  I am only a major, a helicopter squadron commander, but I can tell you this: No other officer, including Dayan himself, has a bird’s-eye view of this war like I do. Why? Because my guys are flying missions in every theater. We are in the West Bank, in Gaza; we are north in the Golan, and west along the Canal.

  Cheetah Cohen commands Helicopter Squadron 124.

  Morning of the third day: My guys are flying medevacs and emergency resupply missions across three-quarters of the Sinai Peninsula. You can spot the highways from beyond the horizon by the smoke rising from burning Egyptian vehicles.

  I feel sorry for the Egyptians. The poor foot soldiers, most of whom are simple fellahin—peasants from the delta—have been abandoned by their officers. They straggle westward in columns of fifty or a hundred, sometimes tens and pairs and even individuals, barefoot and bareheaded. God knows what they are suffering from thirst and heat, grief and shattered pride.

  Our helicopters skim over the northern sector of the Bir Thamada–Bir Gafgafa road. Our armor must have shot up three hundred of Nasser’s tanks, trucks, and transports. The wrecks are strewn over miles. Bodies litter the slopes. The sand is already drifting over them.

  Rafi Sivron is the planner of Operation Moked:

  My job was over once Moked had destroyed the Egyptian Air Force. I stayed in the Pit at Tel Aviv for most of the first and second day, performing command and control duties involving ongoing operations. But finally I went to Motti Hod, my boss, chief of the air force. “I want to fly missions before the war is over.”

  “Good,” he said. “Get out of here.”

  Cheetah Cohen commands Helicopter Squadron 124:

  Rafi Sivron has joined us, coming out from the Pit in Tel Aviv. It’s Wednesday, June 7, the third day of the war. I tease Rafi: “So you finally came up from underground!”

  Though Rafi is a brilliant planner, he is a flier first. He wants to fly missions.

  Rafi has been in helicopters since 1958. He is the bravest copilot and best navigator in the Middle East. He has been awarded the Itur HaMofet and a Chief of Staff Citation for valor, flying covert insertions with me and other teams deep into enemy territory.

  Think about the skill it takes to do this. You must cross the border at night, with no lights, in radio silence, flying at such a low altitude to avoid detection by radar that you cannot navigate by landmarks but must find your way using only time, speed, and heading. Now you must find and pick up a special operations team in the middle of the Syrian highlands or in some godforsaken corner of Sinai, knowing that to be spotted by the enemy can cost not only your own life and those of your crew, but the lives of the special operations team as well. And I’m not even talking about the political or national security consequences.

  The pilot’s job is easy. It’s the navigator who carries the weight. Assigned to such a mission, I do not say, “Give me somebody like Rafi.” I say, “Give me Rafi or forget it!”

  Our squadron is flying north now from Sharm el-Sheikh. We have delivered paratroopers to secure the Straits of Tiran, which had been the trigger point of the whole war when Nasser sent his own paratroopers there in late May. Now, as we fly home along a shoreline of red-gold cliffs and shallows of dazzling aquamarine blue, a transmission comes in from air force headquarters:

  Assemble every helicopter you’ve got; proceed at once to the Golan Heights.

  But my guys haven’t slept in three days. At Eilat I order the squadron to land. We take over the Red Rock Hotel, fifty or sixty pilots and crew, with no permission and no authorization. Air Force Operations is furious. I tell them: “Listen—my pilots are so exhausted they can’t read their gauges, and neither can I.”

  “How much sleep do you need?”

  “I’ll tell you when I wake up.”

  Uzi Eilam, commander of Paratroop Battalion 71, has just completed the liberation of the Old City of Jerusalem:

  Motta Gur calls his battalion commanders together and tells us that the brigade will no longer be operating as a brigade. “You are free to do what you like with your battalions.”

  I know at once I will take Battalion 71 north to the Golan Heights. Why? Where there is fighting, you must be there.

  Cheetah Cohen commands Helicopter Squadron 124:

  We fly in to a place called Poriya. Rafi Sivron is with me. He’s my copilot.

  Poriya is a high point overlooking the Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee, from the west. Over our left shoulders as we fly in, we can see Nazareth, where Jesus grew to manhood. Tiberias, an ancient center of Hebrew learning, passes beneath. Mount Tabor, where Deborah’s general Barak defeated the Canaanites, rises to the west. Ahead are the Horns of Hattin, where Saladin routed the Crusaders in 1187. Beyond this lies Capernaum, where a certain person walked on water.

  We land in a big field. It’s all big fields up there. We have two squadrons—mine, the 124, with seventeen Sikorsky S-58 helicopters, and the 114, commanded by my friend Haim Naveh, flying big French Super Frelons.

  Here is Haim’s story in four sentences:

  Eleven years old, Budapest, 1942, Haim and his parents are herded with hundreds of Jewish families to a bridge in the city center. Father, mother, everyone is packed off to the death camps. Haim escapes. He survives two winters, alone on the streets, before rescue brings him to Mandate Palestine.

  Now here he is, twenty-three years later, commanding a helicopter squadron in a fight against other enemies whose aim is to destroy our people.

  Across the Sea of Galilee rises the Golan Heights. Looking east from Poriya, we can see the plateau, big and square and high. Volcanic. Tanks need steel tracks there, not rubber like in Sinai.

  On the ground, the first person I run into is Danny Matt. His paratroopers are arriving by bus and truck.

  “Danny! I thought you were still in Sinai.”

  “It’s over. They pulled us out. We were in Bethlehem and Hebron yesterday, but that’s finishing up, too.”

  I want to hug Danny, but he is a colonel and I am only a major. Instead he hugs me.

  “What orders do you have, Cheetah?”

  “Me? What orders do you have?”

  Rafi Sivron:

  My orders from Air Force Operations are to set up a forward air command post. I will not be in command of Squadrons 124 and 114, but I will be directing their efforts in coordination with the ground forces.

  Together with the commanders of the paratroopers and the infantry, we will figure out what we want to do, what we can do, and what high command will let us do.

  Cheetah Cohen:

  Rafi and his guys set up their forward CP in the middle of the field. All around them helicopters are landing. The Golan Heights is only sixty-five kilometers long from north to south and between twelve and twenty-five kilometers across. Our birds can ferry Danny’s paratroopers anywhere onto the Heights as soon as we get the order.

  But will we get the order?

  Rafi’s improvised command post consists of two tables with radios and other communications gear. We are operating out of our hip pockets, with conflicting reports coming in from all over.

  From army headquarters Rafi has learned that ground forces of the Northern Command under General David “Dado” Elazar, joined by others arriving from Sinai and elsewhere, have broken through in the northern sector of the Heights. The Golani Brigade’s Battalion 51 has captured Tel Fakhr, Tel Azzaziat, and Darbashiya, and other units are advancing as well. The fighting has been furious and bitter, hand to hand in many places, as our troops assault uphill against formidable entrenched positions. Losses have been heavy in men and vehicles. I hear one report of an IDF battalion that started an assault with twenty-six tanks and finished with two.

  Rafi Sivron:r />
  Kuneitra is the principal city of the Golan Heights. It’s in the north, less than eighty kilometers from Damascus, the Syrian capital. By 10:00 we’re hearing reports that Israeli forces, supported by sortie after sortie of Vautours, Mystères, Super Mystères, and Mirages, have cut off the town.

  If our ground forces can take Kuneitra, the highway to Damascus will lie wide open.

  Cheetah Cohen:

  Syrian radio is reporting that Kuneitra has fallen. This report will turn out to be premature. But our radio intelligence guys in Tel Aviv jump on the opportunity and rebroadcast the piece over and over.

  Who knows? Maybe it will scare more of the enemy into packing up.

  Rafi Sivron:

  Syrian forces are withdrawing. Every report confirms this. But we don’t know how fast, how many, or from where.

  We still have no orders.

  At noon Kuneitra falls. Where are our generals? Heading there, apparently. We can’t reach them.

  We have two squadrons of helicopters and most of a brigade of paratroopers, and we can’t get orders from anybody.

  Danny Matt:

  I’m standing with Cheetah, peering across the Sea of Galilee at the Golan Heights. Both of us are thinking the same thought:

  If the Syrians are pulling out of Kuneitra, racing home to defend Damascus, a cease-fire could be imminent. At the UN in New York, Syria’s ambassador is no doubt demanding a resolution right now. If such a measure is passed and our government accedes (which it must), cease-fire lines will be established based upon the present positions of the two armies.

  Though the Syrians are withdrawing in the north of the Heights, they have not pulled out in the center and the south.

  “Danny,” Cheetah says, “we can’t let this war end with the Syrians still controlling two-thirds of the Heights.”

  Rafi Sivron:

  For three years, between ’62 and ’65, I was operations deputy in air force headquarters. Two days a week my duties brought me up here to the Galilee. I fell in love with the Golan. No place on earth is more beautiful than the Heights in the spring, when the hills are carpeted with wildflowers. But the fighting up here never stopped.

  The Golan Heights is a volcanic plateau, elevation about 3,000 feet, overlooking in its southwest corner the Sea of Galilee, which is 660 feet below sea level. For decades Syrian gunners on the high ground have tormented Israeli farmers in the flatlands below, in violation of the 1948 armistice, firing their Russian artillery down onto the kibbutz fields. This game is not sporting. Our farms are so close the Syrians can throw rocks and hit them. They fire at tractors in the fields and shell the barns and livestock pens and homes and school buildings. The kibbutz children spend half their lives underground.

  Since Wednesday, the third day of the war, delegations from these settlements have been besieging Eshkol and Rabin and Dayan, who was born on one of these kibbutzim, Deganiah Alef, and who grew up on moshav Nahalal, only fifty kilometers west.

  “Take the Heights!” the farmers plead. “Protect us from the Syrians!”

  “Their provocations started this war. We can’t let them off scot-free!”

  Danny Matt:

  Before my paratroop brigade was sent north to the Golan, we were ordered into the West Bank to seize Hebron and Bethlehem. As a young squad leader in the Haganah during the War of Independence, I had fought in this exact place against the Jordanian Arab Legion, defending a cluster of villages called Gush Etzion, the Etzion Bloc.

  The campaign lasted from November 1947 till May 1948, when the four primary settlements—Kfar Etzion, Ein Tzurim, Massu’ot Yitzhak, and Revadim—finally surrendered. The Arab Legion massacred every Jew, 127 souls, and looted and burned everything left behind.

  This is a score I have very much wished to settle. But when my paratroopers and I get to Bethlehem and Hebron, the enemy has cleared out.

  Now here we are in the Golan, presented with another opportunity.

  We cannot let this one go to waste.

  Pilot Giora Romm has three MiG kills from the first day of the war:

  The Golan has put me in the hospital. It’s my own fault. Day two, I’m assigned as flight leader with a mission to the Heights. I have no business leading a formation. I’m twenty-two years old; I have just seen my first combat twenty-four hours ago. But because I have shot down three MiGs, I have achieved a certain level of celebrity.

  Here is how unconscious I am. I forget that the Syrians know there is a war going on. I’m thinking it’s still day one, that I have to fly below the radar.

  If I had been using half my brain, I would have approached the Golan Heights at 20,000 feet, well above Syrian triple-A, picked my targets, and led my planes in high and safe. Instead, I’m hugging the deck, point-blank above the barrels of the enemy’s antiaircraft artillery.

  Now I’m in the hospital at Afula, lucky to be alive after taking a hit directly beneath my seat and barely getting my Mirage safely back onto the ground at Ramat David. My right leg is full of shrapnel. The nurses have shot me up with painkillers. I’m wearing one of those ridiculous hospital gowns. I look around my hospital room and say to myself, “Giora, you can sit out the war reading magazines in this bed or you can show some initiative and get back into action.”

  I decide to run away from the hospital. I phone Tel Nof; the air base sends a truck for me. My flight suit from this morning has burned up. I ride home in a bathrobe. Back at the base, my squadron commander, Ran Ronen, won’t let me fly because of my shot-up leg. He sends me to the base doctor. “Giora,” says the air force physician, “show me you can move your leg.”

  So I flex my good leg.

  Three hours later I’m back in a Mirage at 20,000 feet over Sinai.

  My number one is Motti Yeshurun; number two is Avramik Salmon. Their planes are leading mine. Suddenly I spot a glint far below. “Visual contact! Follow me!” This is outrageous for a young pilot to say. I drop my nose and dive, full afterburner.

  You are either a MiG-killer or you are not.

  I plunge into an ongoing dogfight, in which my best friend Yigal Shochat in a Super Mystère makes an excellent kill on one MiG-17 and two others take off to the west. My own partners are far behind. I tell them over the radio that I’m chasing two MiG-17s. They ask which direction I’m going. I know if I bring my formation-mates with me, I will never shoot down the two MiGs. At best I’ll get one. So I say I’m going east.

  I’m going west.

  My partners go east and I shoot down the two MiGs, one right away and the other later by the Canal.

  No one ever challenges me. No one complains. Why? Because the war is a thousand times bigger than such petty controversies.

  And I know I have a fallback position that no one can contest. I can say I made a mistake. I spoke in Japanese, so sue me.

  Menahem Shmul is Giora Romm’s squadron-mate in Mirage Squadron 119:

  Thursday, June 8, I’m with Avramik Salmon over the Canal when the GCI—ground control—tells us we have air targets: four MiG-19s are attacking our infantry and armor. Amazingly, the Egyptians still have planes in the air.

  We drop our fuel tanks, dump our bombs. I pick out one MiG-19, miss him first at low level when my primary gunsight fails. I go closer, high speed, put the fixed crosshairs in front of his nose at eighty meters, the MiG looming broad as a barn in my windscreen, pull the trigger, bullets right into his engine, he’s gone.

  Salmon gets two; I get one.

  Next sortie, Jacob Agassi is my leader, a lieutenant colonel, about to be promoted to base commander of Ramat David, flying in our squadron, a great pilot.

  Agassi and I are over the same area by the Canal when ground troops call for help over the radio. Egyptian planes are attacking them. It’s a great feeling to be the cavalry and be able to rush to the aid of our warriors under fire. I catch an Ilyushin-28, a light bomber, above Bardaw
ill Lagoon, don’t even drop the tanks, do a hindquarter attack. He has a 23-millimeter gun aft so I can’t come from directly behind. I get him from six hundred meters; he blows right on top of our troops.

  The day isn’t over. The GCI says, “You have four MiG-21s in your area.” We turn back west, half a minute—there they are. I’m younger and quicker than Agassi, so I take one and chase him, down on the deck, pipper on the cockpit, three bullets, the MiG is gone.

  So I got three kills in that same day.

  Am I thinking of my father? Yes. And of his younger brother Yaakov, my uncle, who at age eighteen in the War of Independence was one of “the Thirty Five” who rushed to the aid of the settlers at Gush Etzion and was tortured and killed by Arab Phalangists in that horrible massacre.

  I have had my own war now, the first of five. I have destroyed enemy planes and ground targets, even a ship in Sharm el-Sheikh Bay. I have been shot up by triple-A and brought my Mirage home safely. I have fulfilled my pledge to Ran, my squadron commander, who kept my name on the mission board when he had every right to ground me.

  I have maintained unbroken the chain of warriors of my family.

  Rafi Sivron:

  Cheetah and Haim’s helicopters have begun ferrying paratroopers up onto the southern section of the Golan Heights. It has taken all morning to get permission.

  I’ve been waiting beside the ground commander, Elad Peled. High command has hung back, fearing that if we attack and succeed, the Russians will enter the war to protect their Syrian allies.

  Finally, early afternoon, Intelligence confirms that the enemy is withdrawing across the length and breadth of the Golan.

  I’m on the radio to Rafi Har-Lev at Air Force Operations. “Go,” he says. “I’m giving you the green light.”