Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (23 page)
Read Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon Online
Authors: David Landau
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Political, #Historical, #History, #Middle East, #Israel & Palestine, #eBook
By this time, the first Gilowas were lumbering into the yard. With the traffic backed up for miles on the road from
Tasa and only one of the two access roads to the canal open, Sharon had ordered his deputy, Jackie Even, to have these amphibious tugs
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“jump the queue.”
Inside the yard the bulldozers had been unable at first to breach the wall, until I pointed out the red bricks that marked the specially thinned area. Now they were digging fiercely at the ramparts, while the engineers had already started wrestling with the bridging equipment. A unit of antiaircraft machine guns had taken up positions on the walls ready for the air attacks that we knew would come in the morning. Elements of Haim Erez’s tank brigade were also crowding into the enclosure, waiting to join the paratroopers on the other side. Akavish was open; it was along that road that the paratroopers, rafts, and tanks had made their way into the yard. But Tirtur—crisscrossed by the
Chinese Farm—was still shut tight.
Tirtur was extremely important. It was only along this road that the giant rolling bridge could be towed to the canal, while the extension of Tirtur to the canal bank itself had been especially prepared as a launching site for the bridge … But as Amnon’s units hammered all night at the Egyptians in the Chinese Farm, it became clear that we simply did not have the strength to dislodge them from Tirtur itself. For the moment, at least, we would have to rely on Akavish to conduit men and armor toward the crossing site.
The morning of October 16 dawned on the most terrible sight I had ever seen … As the sky brightened, I looked around and saw hundreds and hundreds of burned and twisted vehicles. Fifty Israeli tanks lay shattered on the field. Around them were the hulks of 150 Egyptian tanks plus hundreds of APCs, jeeps, and trucks. Wreckage littered the desert. Here and there Israeli and Egyptian tanks had destroyed each other at a distance of a few meters, barrel to barrel. It was as if a hand-to-hand battle of armor had taken place. And inside
those tanks and next to them lay their dead crews. Coming close, you could see Egyptian and Jewish dead lying side by side, soldiers who had jumped from their burning tanks and died together. No picture could capture the horror of the scene, none could encompass what had happened there. On our side that night we had lost 300 dead and hundreds more wounded. The Egyptian losses were much, much heavier.
…At almost the same moment … the
bulldozers broke through the last of the ramparts, opening
the yard to the canal. And now, directly in front of us across two hundred yards of water was Egypt … On our side everything was barren sand and dust. On theirs the palm trees and orchards grew in lush profusion around the Sweet Water Canal. From where we stood it looked like paradise.
During the night we had managed to get Danny Matt’s entire paratroop brigade to the western side of the canal. Now they were quickly joined by a number of APCs and twenty-eight of Haim Erez’s tanks, which were ferried over on rafts. As soon as they landed, Haim’s armor raced westward, destroying the surprised Egyptian units and positions that had the misfortune to be in their path. By nine o’clock they reported they had eliminated five ground-to-air missile sites, tearing a gaping hole in the Egyptian anti-aircraft umbrella that had effectively closed this area to Israeli jets. Now they were marauding at will, picking off the last Egyptian units in the area. Nothing stood in their way; the region west of the canal was virtually empty. Haim’s voice came over the radio: “We can get to Cairo”…
Inside the yard and in the canal opening, engineers were working like mad, directing traffic, widening the breach, getting tanks, men, and supplies onto the rafts and across to the other side. A race was on. The Egyptians were still not aware of what we had done. They were not trying to interdict the crossing, and as yet there was no pressure on the yard itself.
It was right in the middle of this frenzy of activity that an order came through from Southern Command that was so outrageous I at first refused to believe it. All crossing activity, it said, was to cease immediately. Not a single additional tank or man was to be transferred. According to them, we were cut off, surrounded by Egyptian forces.
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The next battle in the “war of the generals” was shaping up, threatening to dull the heroism and sacrifice of the night’s titanic struggle.
• • •
T
he rolling
bridge, or “the 600-ton monster lying on its belly,” as the 143rd Division’s deputy commander, Jackie Even, dubbed it, was a doubly beached whale that night. Tirtur, the ruler-straight access road forking off from Akavish, remained closed. And the tank battalion detailed to drag it along was neither trained nor qualified to do so. “We were Pattons,” Even explained. “American M60s. The tanks originally trained to drag the bridge were British Centurions from the Seventh Brigade. But they had been sent to the Golan before the war to reinforce positions there.”
During the morning, Sharon kept hurling the remnants of Reshef’s brigade at Tirtur, bolstered by battalions from the 600th and the 421st. But to no avail. Even when Reshef finally took the crossroads at Lexicon, the road east remained impassable, at the mercy of the Egyptian artillery and armor deployed in Missouri to the north. He suffered still more casualties. Sharon asked for reinforcements from Bren’s division.
By now, the High Command had decided on a radical change to Noble Hearts: Sharon’s division would not be crossing the canal; Bren’s would instead. Sharon’s division would be tasked with widening the eastern bridgehead and defending it. For the moment, Bren’s division would help with this while preparing to cross.
In the late afternoon, Reshef and Sharon, both bone tired and both at once exultant over the initial crossing and devastated over the casualties, met on the battlefield, overlooking the crossroads. It was a moment of profound emotion and of intense comradeship. It remained engraved on Reshef’s memory, despite the subsequent vicissitudes in their relationship—and despite the incongruity of the gourmet feast they consumed amid all the carnage and destruction:
We’re sitting on the tank engine. His guys bring us food. Arik had two four-by-four Wagoneers. One for milk and one for meat! Because you mustn’t mix swiss cheeses with Hungarian horse-meat sausages! It’s not kosher!! Anyway, he had two separate vehicles full of food. It was Lily’s doing really.
They hand up the food … all sorts of delicatessen, and the two of us are talking and eating. He talks, and I fall asleep. I talk, and his head lolls. Somebody comes and tells us that they’re sending in the 890th Paratroop Battalion—attached to the 162nd Division—into the Chinese Farm, attacking on the east side of it. He was pretty astonished, I think. He couldn’t understand it. But both of us were too tired to analyze it anymore. We didn’t have the facts.
Reshef said he wanted to cross, too, and Sharon said he wanted him to as soon as possible, as soon as his brigade was relieved. “In the end, it took several days—because they didn’t let our division cross,” Reshef recalled, dredging up the old recriminations decades later.
They transferred the other division first. Arik wanted us to cross first. He believed in us. He wasn’t going to send me across in defiance of his orders, but he wanted me to be relieved so I could cross. And so did I. I’d taken a sort of oath: I was the one who tried to stop the original Egyptian onslaught on Yom Kippur, and now I wanted to cross over first into Egypt. Yes, Erez had crossed already. But Erez was our comrade, from our division. I wasn’t jealous of him. But I wanted to be next in line after him. Yes, someone’s got to fight against Missouri. But I’d been doing that since the first day of the war.
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T
he paratroop attack on the
Chinese Farm that night, which Sharon and Reshef spoke of but failed to take action to prevent—it was under Bren’s command—became, for Israelis, one of the most famous and tragic battles of the war. The heroism of the men of the 890th Battalion under
Yitzhak Mordechai
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furnished books, songs, and legends for a generation and more. The battalion was cut to pieces. Forty of its men died in fourteen hours of incredible tenacity against hopeless odds. A hundred more were injured. Historians and old soldiers still pick over the records, trying to understand what went wrong. The core mystery centers on the informational lacunae. How was it possible that word of the 143rd Division’s desperate battles there the night and day before, involving both armor and infantry—including paratroopers—apparently failed to reach the 162nd Division, deployed nearby?
It was a near-suicidal assignment, probably superfluous, and plainly conceived in profound error. But it could justly be crowned a success, indeed a historic victory. While the paratroopers fought and died to try to free up Tirtur, just behind them on Akavish a convoy of uni-float rafts
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was being tenaciously dragged and pushed toward the canal. Together they would form the bridge on which, the next day, the 162nd Division crossed into Egypt, thus finally clinching the turnabout in the war. The blood of the paratroopers had not flowed in vain.
It was a disaster nevertheless, and Sharon’s officers had no hesitation
in bad-mouthing Bren for it. After all, he had assumed overall responsibility for securing the roads to the canal. The episode brought the underlying tensions and recriminations among the generals into even sharper relief. The order that morning, so hateful and misguided in Sharon’s eyes, to stop the crossing had come from both Gonen and Bar-Lev. “As long as there’s no bridge, there’s no crossing” is how Jackie Even remembered Bar-Lev’s fiat. “I’m not transferring the IDF aboard those Gilowas!” Chief of Staff Elazar reacted in the same way—increasingly so during the day as the strength of the Egyptian resistance at Missouri/
Chinese Farm became clearer. “As long as we do not have a safe and stable bridge, we will hold on to the west bank with limited forces only,” he ruled.
Elazar was angry that the situation at Missouri was not made clear to him in real time. He was bitter and furious at what he felt was glib and inadequate reporting by Sharon’s division—both about the true state of the roads and about the true intensity of the resistance they had encountered. He was even angrier to hear that Sharon was vociferously criticizing the order to stop the crossing until a bridge was up. Sharon’s officers were saying that a whole division could have crossed on the Gilowas—had the High Command not wasted this crucial day with its overcautious hesitations.
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To Sharon, Elazar and Bar-Lev were indeed squandering the military opportunity that his division had paid much blood to create. The whole strategy of crossing, he argued, was designed to throw the enemy off balance and recapture the initiative. He had successfully plunged through the gap between the two Egyptian armies. Surprise had been total—and was still in effect. Despite Haim Erez’s vigorous rampage on the western shore, the bridgehead on both banks was still amazingly quiet and peaceful. This was the time to exploit the breakthrough by pouring more and more armor and supplies over to the other side. Granted, there was no bridge yet, and no real prospect of getting one up soon. But the Gilowas were doing the job.
“October 16 could have been the day of our real triumph,” Sharon writes.
But it was not. Instead, after the previous night’s immense efforts, the advance was halted. That day and more than that day were
wasted … That night, exhausted and morose, I went to sleep on the warm engine cover of a tank. Early on the morning of the seventeenth I was awakened by the sound of self-propelled rafts being towed into
the yard. They were a welcome sight. With enough of these rafts on hand we would now be able to assemble the bridge. Once that was done, we
might finally be able to change some minds about getting our forces across fast, even though by this time surprise was no longer with us.
That last assessment was now violently confirmed with a sudden and intense artillery bombardment of the yard.
Almost simultaneously MiG fighters swarmed over the yard in an attack that turned the compound into an inferno … Suddenly I felt a smashing pain on my forehead. But an instant later my eyes opened and I realized that whatever had hit me was just a glancing blow. Though my head was bleeding heavily, nothing else seemed wrong…
I felt I had to get the command vehicles out of there. The fire was so heavy that our aerials were taking hits and we were in danger of losing radio control. So I ordered them to the gate area … As I looked I realized that while inside the yard we were under artillery fire, outside the vehicles were being hit by direct flat-trajectory tank fire … Through my binoculars I looked toward the road junction several hundred yards away and was shocked to see an Egyptian counterattack of tanks and supporting infantry coming directly toward us. It was an absolutely critical moment. These Egyptians were about to close the yard behind us. The only force I had under my hands at that instant was the command APCs, those five M113s.
Sharon described how they charged the junction, all their machine guns blazing, and somehow held off the advancing Egyptians for a few precious minutes until a rescuing force of Israeli armor swung into view and drove them off.
His forehead swathed in bandages and his heart racing from this narrow escape, Sharon was now summoned to a consultation at a point several miles back from the canal.
When we got to the co-ordinates on the dunes, I saw waiting for me Moshe Dayan, Haim Bar-Lev, David Elazar, and Avraham Adan. As I approached, nobody said a word—except Dayan, who greeted me with a normal, friendly “Shalom, Arik.” I hadn’t seen any of them
since the fourteenth. Since that day virtually the entire crossing battle had been carried out by my division alone. But now there was not a single word or an outstretched hand. Just silence.
Then Bar-Lev said, very quietly and deliberately, “The distance between what you promised to do and what you have done is very great.” At that moment I felt tired to death … I knew there was only one thing to do. I had to smack Bar-Lev in the face. I felt I just had to do it.
To this day I do not know how I kept myself from hitting him. Instead, I simply clamped my mouth shut. After a moment more of silence, a short discussion took place and they decided to do what they should have done two days earlier. Very soon the pontoon bridge would be completed. Now we could proceed across the canal. My division would hold the yard, secure the corridor, and proceed north on the west bank of the canal toward Ismailia, and westward twenty-five to thirty kilometers in the direction of Cairo. Adan and
Kalman Magen would cross the bridge and would proceed southward around the shores of the
Great Bitter Lake to the rear of the
Egyptian Third Army. It was a brief exchange. When it was over, Gonen, Bar-Lev, and Elazar got into their helicopter and flew off. Adan mounted his APC to go back to his division. I was there alone with Moshe Dayan … He asked me about my head. It was, at least, a human interaction.
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