Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (19 page)

A
rik Sharon, busy all week running the Likud election staff from an office in Tel Aviv barely half a mile from IDF headquarters, knew nothing of the secret deliberations in the government and the army. On Friday morning, he took a call from Southern Command suggesting that he come down to look at some intelligence data that had been coming in. “One look was enough,” he writes in
Warrior
. “Near the canal the Egyptians had concentrated all their crossing equipment, a massive deployment that was quantitatively different from the exercises we had gotten used to watching.” “There’s no question,” he told his divisional intelligence officer,
Yehoshua Saguy. “This time it’s war.”
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The next morning at 7:30 they both received their mobilization calls
and headed for the division’s base camp outside
Beersheba. “During the three months since my retirement I had visited the division regularly,” Sharon writes, “and only a short while before, I had conducted a training exercise with them. Knowing how competent the headquarters staff was, it was no surprise to find everything in order when I arrived at the base and the mobilization proceeding calmly.”

This was one of Sharon’s taller war stories. A less tendentious depiction of the scene at the divisional base was “near chaos.” There had indeed been an exercise a short while before, and much of the equipment had not been re-stored or, where needed, repaired. “[A young officer] shot the lock off a storeroom with his pistol, and the crew of the command vehicles and the divisional war room charged in and grabbed whatever equipment was lying around … Technicians repaired communications gear as best they could.”
⁴

The tank and armored personnel carrier (APC) crews climbed aboard “and set out on the long drive to Refidim
^c
—on their tracks.” There were no flatbed tank transporters at this base and no time to wait for any available ones to be sent. The crews also lacked “goggles, personal weapons, fireproof overalls, torches, blankets.”
⁵
In other reserve bases around the country, the picture was no different. This was not an army primed and poised for war, but rather one that had grown lax and decadent, basking in its overconfidence. The state of the IDF’s emergency stores on that fateful Yom Kippur was to be one of the grave episodes of negligence investigated by a commission of inquiry, under the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Shimon Agranat, once the war was over.

“T
he strongpoints were strongpoints as long as the east bank of the canal was in our hands,” Moshe Dayan writes in his memoirs. “Now they became traps for the units caught inside them and surrounded by Egyptian forces.” All the passionate struggles over the
Bar-Lev Line for years before the war and during the first, terrible days of the fighting are encapsulated in the defense minister’s morose observation. The strongholds were still in with a chance, Dayan continues, “if we could succeed within a very short time either in evacuating them or in pushing the Egyptians back out of the east bank. The chief of staff and the CO of Southern Command seemed to think we could. I, sadly, did not share their optimism.”

This unshared optimism apparently prompted both Gonen and
Mandler to decide against ordering any of the strongpoints to be evacuated during the first twenty-four hours. “The soldiers were begging to be brought out,” Sharon wrote, “but the tanks could not do it.”

As soon as he arrived at the front, Sharon began pressing to reverse the no-evacuation order and get the beleaguered men out. This quickly became an early flash point of tension between the 143rd Division and Southern Command. Making matters worse—and unforgettably poignant for everyone who heard those radio exchanges and lived through the war—the men in the strongpoints began addressing their increasingly desperate appeals to Sharon personally. “We recognize your voice, ‘40’ ”—this was Sharon’s designation on the divisional network—“we know who you are. We know you will get us out of here. Please come to us. Please send us help.” One soldier in
Purkan, the strongpoint opposite Ismailia, recalled “a moment of exultation when we heard Sharon had arrived. If we’d had champagne we’d have opened it. Just his voice on the radio was like salvation.” Sharon for his part promised them, for all to hear, that he would help them get out.

“It took years,” Sharon reminded the commission of inquiry in his testimony months later, “until the IDF established the norm that we don’t leave the wounded on the battlefield and we don’t leave men to fall into the enemy’s hands. To me, this matter is of cardinal importance.” He said that he had submitted a detailed rescue plan on the afternoon of October 7, “based on the experience of the night before. We would break through on a very narrow front, creating a virtual
moving box of fire with tanks and artillery. When we approach the strongpoints, we send a small force in, they get the men out, and we disengage.”
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“Not only would they [the Command] not approve any attempt at evacuation that afternoon,” Sharon recalled bitterly after the war to another of the men trapped in Purkan. “They told me to come and talk about it in the evening, and then they didn’t send a helicopter for me. I waited for hours on some sand dune at
Tasa until they deigned to send one to take me to
Um Hashiba. They deliberately delayed so that I should not be able to raise the subject of the strongpoints at the meeting. I had called the minister of defense and told him that in my view it was possible to rescue the men from the strongpoints.”
⁸

This delayed helicopter—the Command’s explanation was technical problems—became the next point of friction in the already-worsening relationship between Sharon and his erstwhile-subordinate-now-superior, Shmuel Gonen. Sharon repeatedly urged the CO of Southern Command to come up to the front and see the situation for himself. But Gonen preferred to run things from Um Hashiba. Now, on the night of the seventh, with the reserve divisions more or less deployed, they were to have a first war council there in the underground war room and decide on how to parry the Egyptian thrust. Thus far, as Dayan records in his stark, unvarnished tone, “We had not only failed to prevent the Egyptians from crossing; we had hardly hurt them at all. Their casualties … were negligible. Hardly any of their equipment had been destroyed. We had barely disrupted their crossing operation.”

By the time Sharon arrived, close to 10:00 p.m. for the meeting scheduled for 7:00, the key decisions had been made. Dayan, who did not attend, had been lugubrious all afternoon, trying to persuade the army and the cabinet to abandon the canal altogether and withdraw to a new defensive line based on the Mitle and
Gidi passes.

On the Syrian front, where Israel’s lines had been breached, too, the defense minister believed there must be no withdrawal.

Chief of Staff Elazar was far from such despondent thinking. He believed the IDF, despite its early and heavy losses, would be able to beat back the Egyptians and eventually take the battle to them across the canal. He did, however, agree with Dayan that the talk—from Gonen and also from Sharon—of Israel crossing the canal in an immediate, large-scale counterattack was premature, unrealistic, and dangerous. If the IDF were to commit the bulk of its depleted southern forces to a cross-canal operation and get bogged down there, there would be precious little preventing the Egyptian forces already in Sinai from marching on toward Tel Aviv.

It was this strategic thinking that lay beneath Elazar’s plan for the next day’s fighting on the canal front, which he envisaged as an initial, limited counterattack on the Sinai side. He unfurled it before Gonen and his generals (minus Sharon) in the command bunker at
Um Hashiba. Bren’s division was to attack the
Egyptian Second Army along the east bank of the canal, pressing its assault from north to south, starting in the area of
Kantara. Sharon’s division, deployed around
Tasa, would serve as a reserve, supporting Bren if needed. Assuming Bren’s attack went well, Sharon’s division would then swing into action, attacking the
Egyptian Third Army, also from north to south, along the shore of the
Great Bitter Lake. Mandler’s division would continue blocking attempted breakouts in the south and would support Sharon’s attack if needed. “Two feet on the ground,” Elazar said repeatedly, “and the third up and attacking.”
¹⁰

According to his biographer, Elazar also sketched out his longer-term strategy for the Egyptian front. “I want to attack [across the canal],” he said, “but first we will need to defend when they attack us.” He anticipated the Egyptians hurling their heavy armored divisions across the canal, which they were scheduled to do, under their Soviet offense doctrine, once their infantry divisions had fully deployed. “We’ll break that attacking force,” said Elazar, “and when it has been seriously weakened—then we’ll attack.”
¹¹

Sharon met Elazar leaving the command bunker, accompanied by Yitzhak Rabin, the 1967 chief of staff. He immediately began expounding his own basic belief: that it would need a mighty armored fist comprising two whole divisions attacking together to smash through the Second Army and then move down to the Third. One division with the others held in reserve would not be enough. But Elazar rehearsed his view that one division needed to be ready at any time to block an
Egyptian advance toward the heart of the country. Sharon countered that the Egyptians were not aiming for Tel Aviv, but rather to consolidate their gains in Sinai to a depth of five to seven miles. They would not want to step beyond their surface-to-air missile coverage deployed on the west bank.

But Elazar’s mind was made up. “Rabin put his hand on my shoulder,” Sharon writes. “ ‘Arik,’ he said, ‘we’re counting on you to change the situation.’ With that they shook hands with me and disappeared into the darkness.”
¹²
Sharon went down into the bunker and argued his case for trying again during the night to relieve the strongpoints. Gonen, despite himself, seems to have been affected by Sharon’s remonstrations. “He did not turn him down flat,” Bren writes, disapprovingly, in his own book on the war. “He said only that at this stage we were not going to approach the strongpoints, though developments during the night might lead to a change in plan.” This nuance was to grow to critical importance in understanding what went so terribly wrong the following day.

Gonen was accused by his many critics of arbitrarily changing Elazar’s plan when he issued his final orders to his divisions. In his first order, issued during the night, he approved plans submitted by the 143rd Division to rescue the strongpoint crews in its sector—
Hizayon,
Purkan, and Matzmed
^d
—before Bren began his attack. At dawn, however, he reverted to the original order for the 143rd to stand in reserve while the 162nd attacked. But he left in place, in his orders to the 162nd, the goal of rescuing strongpoints and even attempting a limited crossing. This implied, as Elazar’s biographer points out, approaching the canal bank, which Elazar had explicitly forbidden; it implied attacking from east to west, whereas Elazar explicitly and repeatedly ordered a north-to-south attack across a narrow front; and it implied trying to cross the canal, which Elazar had expressly discouraged and hedged with conditions.
¹³

Bren’s brigades began to move south at 8:00 a.m. But it was far from a divisional armored fist scything through the Egyptian deployments.
While one brigade did encounter enemy infantry and armor, and engaged them successfully, the two others drove along in uneventful silence. Chaim Herzog writes sourly:

The result was a veritable rout. Sharon, deployed in reserve to the west of
Tasa, writes that he saw the disaster shaping up: