Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (20 page)
Read Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon Online
Authors: David Landau
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Political, #Historical, #History, #Middle East, #Israel & Palestine, #eBook
At about 9:45 I saw them [the 162nd Division]. But they were not moving along the front a couple of miles east of the canal as I had expected. Instead, the dust columns were rising in back of us, seven or eight miles from the front. I watched as Adan’s tanks pressed southward, passed to our rear, and then turned westward toward the Egyptians … I was dismayed by what was happening. Only a relatively small number of tanks were involved, perhaps two battalions charging valiantly into the Egyptian artillery fire. It was not a divisional attack; it was not even a concentrated effort. There was no way it could succeed.
“But,” Sharon continues, “I did not have much time to worry about it.” In a decision that remains essentially inexplicable to the present day, Gonen now ordered Sharon’s division to pull back eastward to Tasa and drive south down the
Lateral Road for some fifty miles with a view to seizing Egyptian bridges opposite the city of
Suez and crossing on them.
This idea seemed to be that since Adan had now rolled up the
Egyptian Second Army, I could smash through the unsuspecting Third Army. It was unreal. First of all Adan had not rolled up anything … Second, my division was occupying critical high ground that would cost us dearly to get back if we gave it up. And if we did not get it back
we could forget about any future assault on the canal in this sector. Third, the idea that we might fight our way through to the canal in the south and find intact Egyptian
bridges there was based on the merest wishful thinking. And even if we did, we knew the Egyptian bridges were constructed for the lighter Soviet-made tanks and would not support ours…
When I got the order to move south, I called Gonen immediately. In the strongest terms I told him that what he was asking would be a disastrous mistake … The answer was shouted back. If I didn’t obey the order I would be dismissed immediately. Immediately! “Then come down here and look yourself,” I repeated. “No!” Gonen shouted. “You will be dismissed. I will dismiss you right now!”
I thought about it for a moment, then decided I had no choice except to obey. So I gave my own order for the division to pull back to
Tasa and head south … If I had to strike in the south I was going to do it as fast and as hard as I could. But even as I did, I deviated slightly from Gonen’s order. Instead of disengaging completely, I left my divisional reconnaissance unit holding two absolutely critical ridges, one code-named
Hamadia, the other
Kishuf. These positions were on either side of the Akavish Road, which led to the canal in the region of
Deversoir. This was where I had prepared the crossing site five months earlier, with its walled “yard” and its thinned-out ramparts. I was simply not going to hand control of these ridges over to the Egyptians.
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Three and a half hours later, and fifty uneventful miles farther south,
a helicopter overflew the column and landed near my APC. A liaison officer from Southern Command climbed out and told me briefly that Adan’s attack had failed. There had been no Israeli crossing as had been mistakenly reported to Southern Command … We were ordered to get back as fast as possible to support Adan and recover as much of the ridgeline as we could.
My inner feelings at that point were simply not describable. If on
the surface I appeared normal, it was because I was numbed with rage. It was now October 8. Two days earlier the entire division had been called out of their homes and synagogues. In less than twenty-four hours they had fully mobilized and had driven two hundred miles to the battlefield … And now, on this absolutely crucial day of battle, they had spent their time driving around the desert like idiots.
As the 143rd Division made its frustrating way back during the afternoon, Bren Adan’s battered division was able to regroup and strongly resist Egyptian advances eastward opposite Firdan, taking a significant toll of Egyptian armor and infantry in some of the bitterest fighting of the war. Farther to the south, however, Bren’s forces failed to hold the key area of
Hamutal, which commands a section of the Talisman road from
Tasa to Ismailia. Here, a tragedy of “friendly fire” was only narrowly averted when Bren’s retreating forces encountered a brigade from Sharon’s division, under Haim Erez, also intent on recapturing Hamutal. Neither brigade was aware of the other. “The confusion on and around Hamutal was tremendous,” Bren writes.
Bren was sharply critical of Sharon’s behavior once the 143rd Division had returned to within striking distance of the battlefield. He accused Sharon of evading appeals from Gonen that he deploy his unblooded brigades to assist the hard-pressed sister division.
But Bren directed the full brunt of his resentment, recrimination, and disdain at Gonen, accusing him of transmitting overoptimistic, inaccurate, and sometimes wholly fictitious reports to the High Command in Tel Aviv. These were based not on the 162nd Division’s reporting to Southern Command, Bren insisted, but on Gonen’s strange misunderstanding of the true situation on the battlefield. “Gonen behaved as if we were conducting some kind of war game, an exercise involving no troops—neither ours nor the enemy’s—and in which there was no battlefield reality. For him the battle ended the moment he had had his say. The moment he made a decision, he could move ahead to the next stage.”
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Elazar’s approval of Gonen’s wildly optimistic plans came after he had himself presented a wildly optimistic picture of Bren’s unfolding attack to the cabinet. This fantasy world in Tel Aviv was not to be shattered until late in the evening of October 8. “I want to know,” Golda Meir asked her top ministers and generals that night, “has the situation on the canal got better or worse since the morning?” The first, faint reply came from General (res.)
Zvi Zamir, head of the Mossad. “My impression is that it hasn’t got better … Our tanks are
being consumed.” “And only in the morning they had to ‘hold Arik back,’ ” the prime minister retorted sardonically. The bitter irony in her comment echoes down the decades.
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In Gonen’s view, the blame for the misreporting up the chain of command lay wholly with Bren, who “never reported to Southern Command on the setbacks he encountered. While he was reporting that everything was all right, key areas of high ground were falling into the Egyptians’ hands … There was confusion, too, within his division. At one point, a brigade commander
Natke Nir told Adan that [a battalion commander Assaf] Yaguri might have crossed the canal, when in fact he had already been taken prisoner and his battalion smashed. My sending Sharon’s division south came in the wake of Adan’s optimistic reporting.”
Gonen denied, moreover, that he had changed the original plan. The main assignment remained destroying the Egyptian forces in Sinai. Bren was ordered, as concomitant assignments, to rescue
Hizayon and
Purkan and to cross to the other side there. “But the final decision on these was left in his hands, depending on the battlefield conditions, and he acknowledged as much in his response. The failure of his division was not in the assignment but in the execution. He never actually mounted a divisional attack.”
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• • •
C
hurning beneath all the arguments and analysis of the events of October 8 was an ugly subtext, replete with political rivalries and personal animosities. It ran through the minds of all the major players at the time and continued to fuel passions and suspicions long after. “They’re turning us away [from the canal] deliberately,” Sharon said to the officers in his APC when the order came through to head off to the south.
“I know what he thought,” the division’s chief intelligence officer,
Yehoshua Saguy, recalled decades later.
He thought—and in fact he
said
—that they want to head him off because they envisage a great and glorious victory for Bren’s forces. And the plain fact is that they did head us off southward. There was no way we were going to reach our ostensible destination in the south before nine or ten o’clock at night. This is a whole division traveling … hundreds of tanks and APCs and trucks. To launch an attack there at night would have been suicide.
Don’t forget, Arik’s not just a general. He’s a political figure. He’s just set up the Likud … After the cease-fire, we were called “the Likud division,” and they [the 162nd] were called “the Labor division.” Those were the names people used, even on the radio network.
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In addition, the tank men were a junta—Dado [Elazar], Gorodish [Gonen], Bren. They stuck together and supported each other automatically.
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General
Abrasha Tamir, another of Sharon’s staff officers, put it even less subtly:
Arik thought Bren was an idiot before the war. He thought Gorodish was crazy before the war. And they thought the same about him. But Bren and Gorodish basked in Dado’s favor. He always gave them his backing … There’s a picture of me standing with Arik on the top of a hill on the first day of the war when we reached the front, with him looking ahead through his binoculars and me with my head turned around looking back. I remember he said to me, “What are you looking
at? The enemy’s over there” [pointing forward]. And I said, “No, sir. The enemy’s not there. The enemy’s back here, behind us.”
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One high-ranking officer who rejected this political subtext, at least as regards the events of October 8, was Sharon’s old commander from 1948,
Asher Levy. Levy, by now a brigadier general, served as operations officer (the No. 3 man) in the 162nd Division during the first week of the war, after which he was transferred to a senior post at Southern Command headquarters. His appraisal of Bren’s performance on the eighth was devastating. He insisted, though, that Elazar’s decision to split the two divisions rather than launching a combined two-divisional attack was made “because he genuinely believed we needed to sweep up the Egyptians all the way down the canal. The purpose was not to prevent Arik from crossing on Egyptian
bridges … The ‘war of the generals’ started later.”
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In Tel Aviv the day’s disaster gave new impetus to Moshe Dayan’s suggestion that Israel abandon the canal and pull back to a new line of defense deep inside Sinai. Other ministers and advisers now seemed prepared to consider it. But Golda Meir was rocklike in her resistance. “I warn us all against planning new defense lines. They won’t hold. If we move to some new line inside Sinai, it will not hold.” If there was no choice, she said, then of course they would have to dig in farther back. But that was not the situation at the present time, and she would not hear of withdrawal.
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The news from the Syrian front was better—though still far from good—and a consensus evolved that Israel must press home its counterattacks on the Golan while containing the Egyptian bridgeheads without initiating further risky and costly operations against them at this stage. This meant the air force would continue to devote most of its efforts to support the forces in the north and to bomb strategic targets inside Syria. Deputy Prime Minister
Yigal Allon said it was important to defeat the Syrians quickly so as to deter Jordan and Iraq from entering the fray.
The next morning, back from visiting the headquarters in Sinai, Dayan was still grim. “In my best judgment,” he reported, “there is no chance of crossing the Canal. In the immediate future we should not try to cross, nor even to approach the Canal and drive back the
Egyptians. We’d pour out our life’s blood and it wouldn’t make any difference … Even Arik agrees that crossing the Canal now will not radically change things.”
Elazar, once again, refused to be drawn into despondency. The day before had been a failure, he admitted. Now the divisions in Sinai would be on the defensive. But he hoped the Egyptians would attack—and be broken. Eventually, he insisted, the IDF would cross the canal.
GOLDA:
But when Arik’s on the other side, won’t he be in a trap?
ELAZAR:
In certain circumstances—yes. Right now, it’s not possible. But it might become possible by Wednesday night or Thursday … or Friday…
GOLDA:
Tell it to me in plastic terms. He crosses; they’ve got tanks, etc., there; what happens?
ELAZAR:
They’ll attack him. He’ll go in with two hundred tanks. They won’t have aerial superiority…
GENERAL AHARON YARIV:
He will neutralize the missiles; he’ll destroy a lot of them. The Egyptians will direct part of their force to confront him. If it works, it will be very good.
GOLDA:
What I’m afraid of is if it doesn’t work. It’ll be a catastrophe. He’ll be stuck over there, in their hands.
ELAZAR:
Anyway, it’s not doable in the present situation. Only if things improve.
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One area where Dayan and Elazar did see eye to eye was the creaking command structure in Sinai. “I don’t think Gonen can handle it,” the defense minister told the other ministers bluntly, “especially with Arik under him.” At a predawn meeting with Elazar, he proposed that either Sharon or Bar-Lev be appointed to head Southern Command.
Elazar, unsurprisingly given their various past histories, plumped for Bar-Lev. The eventual decision was not to depose Gonen but to appoint Bar-Lev over him as “personal representative of the chief of staff”—in effect, commander of the front. For Sharon this was “the last thing I needed to hear … I felt I was in a hornets’ nest.”
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But for Golda and the ministers, the slow-talking, unflappable Bar-Lev inspired confidence.
Bar-Lev took up his new posting in Sinai on the morning of the tenth.
Uri Ben-Ari, Gonen’s deputy, later described to army historians the sense of calm he felt almost palpably descending on Southern Command from the moment Bar-Lev took over. “It began at HQ and spread instantly over the radio. Before he came, staff meetings were one long
shout from Gonen. Bar-Lev put in place proper work methods. No one questioned his authority. The country owes him a great deal.”
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