Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (12 page)

Israel strenuously denied any buildup in the north. Eshkol invited the Soviet ambassador to go up there and look for himself. Neither Syria nor Egypt had any evidence of it. Nevertheless, Nasser’s initial move engendered a momentum of its own. On May 16 he ordered more troops into Sinai and demanded that the
UN Emergency Force (UNEF), deployed in the peninsula since the 1956 Sinai War, now withdraw from the border with Israel.

On May 23, Nasser announced the closure of the
Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. This had been the casus belli for Israel in 1956, as he well knew. The Egyptian buildup was now approaching 100,000 men—seven full divisions and additional units. Egypt’s army fielded nearly 1,000 tanks and 900 artillery pieces. Its air force numbered more than 400 warplanes. Syria had some 60,000 men in its armed forces with 200 tanks and more than 100 planes, including dozens of ultramodern
MiG-21s. Jordan, too, could deploy close to 60,000 men, 200 tanks, and 24 British-made planes. On May 30, President Nasser and King Hussein signed a joint defense pact putting Jordan’s Arab Legion under Egyptian command in case of war with Israel. Iraq sent a division into Jordan to join the Arab effort, and several other states sent smaller forces.

The IDF mustered some 1,300 tanks, 750 guns, and 250 warplanes, the best of them French-supplied Mirage fighters. Most of the land army was concentrated on the Sinai border, deployed in three beefed-up divisions commanded respectively by Yisrael Tal, by Sharon’s friend and former commander Avraham Yoffe, and by Sharon himself. The basic strategy they hoped to apply called for attack, for taking the war to the enemy on his territory rather than within Israel’s slender confines. The Egyptians, they assumed, were poised to slice
into the southern Negev, cutting through to Jordan and severing Eilat from the rest of the country.

On May 24, Rabin took sick, purportedly from nicotine poisoning brought on by too much smoking but more likely from frayed nerves in the face of the unremitting tension. His collapse was kept from the public, and in forty-eight hours he recovered. But a halting and hesitant radio broadcast from Eshkol on May 28 heightened public apprehension instead of dispelling it. This was unfortunate and unnecessary, the product of sloppy staff work—the prime minister’s typed text was full of semi-legible handwritten corrections—rather than reflecting any weakness on Eshkol’s part. Indeed, as the industrious and serious-minded minister of defense during the past four years, he, no less than Rabin, deserved a major share of the credit for preparing the army to fight. But Eshkol was determined to exhaust every diplomatic option before giving the army the green light for war.

With each passing day the nation’s fighting spirit seemed to sag. Among the generals of the High Command there was much grumbling, muted for the most part by the proper constitutional constraints and kept firmly out of the press. On May 28, though, after a particularly caustic meeting between senior ministers and the
General Staff, Sharon said something to Rabin about the hypothetical possibility of a military coup in Israel. “Not in the sense of seizing power out of a desire to rule,” Sharon himself explained years later to a high-ranking ex-military researcher. “But in the sense of taking a decision, a fundamental decision. The army could take such a decision, I suggested, without the cabinet. And it would be well received [by the public].”
¹⁹

On the streets of Tel Aviv, meanwhile, a clamor arose to bring back Ben-Gurion. But to no avail. The venom that had poisoned relations in recent years between Eshkol and his erstwhile comrade and mentor made that impossible.
²⁰

The public pressure now shifted to appointing Dayan defense minister. To this, Eshkol reluctantly agreed. On June 2, the morning Dayan’s appointment was announced, the ministers and the generals met again. Rabin warned of “a serious threat to Israel’s very existence … The longer we wait passively, the stronger the Arabs’ confidence grows that Israel is not capable of confronting this challenge.” He urged “a decisive aerial strike” that would destroy the Egyptian air force “in a single day.”

Sharon, the most junior of the generals, was the most outspoken. “Our goal is no less than to destroy the Egyptian forces … But because of hesitation and foot-dragging we have lost the key element
of surprise.” He praised the morale of the people, appearing to contrast it with the faintheartedness of the government. General Matti Peled, head of the logistics branch, also spoke sharply, warning of the effects on the national economy of the prolonged mobilization. “Why do you let this disgrace go on?” he hurled at the ministers.

Dayan broadly agreed. He said the IDF could achieve its war aims in six days. In the discussion that followed, Eshkol upbraided Sharon and Peled. He accused them of “rearing up against the government.” He explained once again why it was important to give international diplomacy every opportunity to play out. The meeting broke up, still without a decision.

Once again, Sharon—as he himself testified—stayed behind chatting furtively with Rabin. “I said that if we had got up at a certain point and said, ‘Listen, you lot, your decisions are endangering the State of Israel. And since the situation is extremely serious, you are hereby requested to go into the adjoining room and stay there while the chief of staff goes to the national radio station and broadcasts an announcement. In my judgment, if we did that they would have accepted it with a sense of relief and liberation.”

Sharon first recounted these dramatic moments to the
Haaretz
military commentator
Ze’ev Schiff, soon after the war. Sharon shared with the reporter his hypothetical fantasy of locking the ministers in a room while the chief of staff went on the air. But he did not mention that he had shared the idea with Rabin, as he claimed in his testimony to the military historian more than thirty years later. Schiff suggested that the later embellishment may well have been apocryphal.
²¹

A decision to go to war on June 5, barring unforeseen developments, was made secretly by Eshkol and a small group of top ministers soon after the larger meeting with the generals on June 2. It was approved by the full cabinet on June 4.

Sharon admits that “with Dayan present, it was like a fresh wind.” He had been railing for days against the High Command’s original plan for a phased attack in Sinai, “one division first, then the other two twelve hours later. I argued vehemently against that … It would be a waste not to attack simultaneously everywhere, to devastate the entire Egyptian army at once.”
²²
This was Dayan’s thinking, too. Sharon, moreover, had shared with Dayan, then still a backbencher, his complex scheme for a divisional assault on the formidable Egyptian defenses at Abu Agheila—
Umm Katef, the “gateway to Sinai.” This was his own division’s main assignment in the war. In 1956, it had taken the IDF, commanded by Dayan, three full days of stubborn
fighting before Abu Agheila fell. This time, Sharon proposed to overrun it in one night.

With great prescience—but without, as it turned out, the determination to impose his orders—Dayan ordered the army not to occupy the Gaza Strip and not to advance right up to the Suez Canal.
²³
In the event, both of these Pyrrhic successes occurred in the hectic, historic week ahead.

Even Sharon’s more consistent and implacable critics make an exception for his performance in the Six-Day War.
²⁴
It was classic: a battlefield commander in his métier, unsullied by outbursts of argument or disobedience. The conquest of Abu Agheila was accomplished in near perfection on the night of June 5–6, 1967. Once Sharon’s division had taken this strategic junction, Yoffe’s troops poured through it to the west, while Sharon’s own armor continued south to overrun another key Egyptian fortified complex at
Nakhl.

At dawn on the fifth, Sharon drove in his staff car for a final meeting with his three armored brigade commanders. They talked through the next day’s plans one last time, shook hands, and embraced. Sharon took a small rucksack and blankets from the Studebaker sedan and stowed them in his jeep, amid the communication sets already hissing and chattering. Each of the brigades, and the headquarters team of jeeps and half-tracks, now trundled toward its assigned jumping-off point on the border.

Soon, the signal came through. Sharon took his microphone and, listing each of his brigades in a steady voice, he gave the order: “Nua, nua [move].” He watched through his binoculars as the columns of tanks lurched forward, churning the dust. Very soon they were shooting, engaging small Egyptian units deployed in forward defensive outposts close to the border.

By midday, when Sharon drove through the first Egyptian outposts overrun by his tanks, he knew that the war was essentially won. The air force had delivered what Rabin and the air force commander
Motti Hod had promised the anxious ministers: the near-total destruction of the
Egyptian air force. The first wave of Israeli jets came in from the sea and attacked Egyptian planes on the ground at 7:45. Many of the Egyptian pilots had been out on early morning patrols and were back at base, having breakfast. Israel hurled virtually its entire complement
of frontline jets
^c
into this operation, and it proved decisive. Time after time throughout the morning, the Israeli planes returned to hit planes, hangars, radar installations, and runways all over Sinai and Lower Egypt. By 11:00, Hod was able to report that at least 180 Egyptian planes had been destroyed and that all the air bases had been rendered inoperative at least for the next few hours. The air force next turned its attention to Syria and to Jordan, too, after King Hussein rejected Eshkol’s appeals through the UN and the United States to hold his fire and stay out of the war. “Within two hours,” Rabin records, “the Jordanian and Syrian air forces had been destroyed, as had the Iraqi air base, H3, near the Iraq-Jordan border. Four hundred planes of various types were destroyed by the IAF [Israeli Air Force] on the first day of the war. These incredible results of the air force operation determined to a large extent the fate of the whole war.”
²⁵

As Sharon and his headquarters team advanced toward Abu Agheila in the afternoon, they saw IAF French-made Fouga Magister training jets swooping down on Egyptian forces giving battle to one of Sharon’s brigades farther to the north. The Fougas had been fitted with machine guns and underwing rocket pods. They were the best the air force could spare for ground support on that first day of the war. Later, with the Sinai skies almost totally clear of enemy planes, the full power of the IAF’s Mirages and Mystères would be brought to bear on the Egyptian divisions.

The northern brigade, equipped with British-made
Centurion tanks, had run into trouble earlier in the morning from Egyptian artillery and antitank fire. A battalion commander and two other officers were killed and several tanks disabled. The brigadier,
Natke Nir, pulled back, regrouped, and attacked again in the afternoon, this time succeeding in overrunning the defensive position north of Abu Agheila itself. Still, the firefight showed how strongly dug in the Egyptians were around and inside the Abu Agheila–Umm Katef complex. Their artillery in particular, some eighty 130- and 122-millimeter Russian guns, would take a heavy toll on the Israeli attackers unless they could be silenced.

This task was assigned to a brigade of paratroopers under
Danny Matt, ferried into position by relays of helicopters after nightfall. Their job was to storm the Egyptian guns from the rear, where they were least expected. The Centurions were to attack from the north, engaging the hundred-odd tanks deployed within the complex. Nir’s
brigade was also to cut off the desert road from the northwest and the southwest, thus blocking reinforcements that might be sent in from deeper in Sinai.

At the same time—timing was the critical factor in Sharon’s intricate planning—an infantry brigade under
Kuti Adam would storm the three rows of Egyptian trenches and concrete bunkers facing east, which were the main bulwark of the fortified position. The triple trenches were a textbook Soviet-style defensive deployment with the added advantage of difficult terrain at both ends: “high soft dunes in the north,” Sharon writes, “and in the south jagged ridges and broken foothills.” The infantry would go in from the north. Sharon knew the terrain from surveys he himself conducted after the Sinai War. He knew they could get through. Next, another brigade of tanks under
Mordechai Zippori would charge forward parallel with the road, clearing a path through the minefields to confront the trenches in a narrow frontal assault.

As evening fell, the infantry arrived, carried to battle aboard a motley fleet of civilian buses that had been mobilized for war along with the reservists. They drove as far as they could on the old, rutted road, then let off their passengers. “Bus after bus was lined up as far back as I could see,” Sharon writes. “I went down to the road to watch the procession up close. Zippori’s Super Shermans moved up to take positions for their frontal assault. Then Kuti’s infantry, two endless lines along the side of the road, marching into the gritty wind from the dunes. Soon they would leave the road in a wide hook from the north … They saw me in the middle of the road, and it was impossible to miss their expressions of confidence and determination.”

The division’s third tank brigade, equipped with light French-made
AMXs, was deployed farther to the south, blocking the road from the Egyptian divisional headquarters at
Kseima, twenty miles to the southeast. There were also units engaged in an elaborate feint that Sharon mounted during the day in the direction of Kseima, in the hope of confusing the enemy as to his intentions. “Abu Agheila was the more formidable position,” he explains in
Warrior
. “The Ismailia road led right through the Abu Agheila defenses. Were I to take Kseima first, I would still have to deal with Abu Agheila. But if Abu Agheila fell, we would be in control of the roads behind Kseima, and the Egyptians would find the position untenable.”