Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (24 page)
Read Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon Online
Authors: David Landau
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Political, #Historical, #History, #Middle East, #Israel & Palestine, #eBook
Perhaps it was the sight of his head that momentarily dehumanized the others. Perhaps they realized that the bloodstained bandage, with Arik’s telltale gray locks peeking out from on top of it, was about to become one of the iconic images of this war—in Israel and throughout the world. With one superficial head wound, Sharon had dealt his rivals a mortal blow in the public-relations race for glory.
The “war council on the dunes” should have been the moment of greatest gratification, when the principal commanders paused to rejoice together as they finally set about turning the tables on the enemy. Instead, they could barely speak a civil word to one another. In the days that followed, as the military situation improved, their relations continued to deteriorate. The cease-fire with Egypt and Syria, on October 22, ushered in an even more public and acrimonious round in the “war of the generals.”
Dayan, at any rate, remained with Sharon for a couple of hours and visited with him in “Africa.” He could scarcely have failed to sense the outpouring of love and adulation for the divisional commander wherever
they went. The simplistic but evocative sobriquet “Arik, king of Israel,”
m
was already making the rounds of the division. Within days it would be on all the soldiers’ lips and on makeshift banners hung from their tanks.
Dayan, describing the “war council on the dunes” in his own memoirs, supplies the recognition and appreciation that the other generals could not bring themselves to utter. “Sharon’s division had fought with total self-sacrifice,” he writes.
It had suffered very heavy casualties, but it had not wavered from its assignments. Its soldiers had conquered the bridgehead on the eastern bank in devastating armored battles. All of the men—from Arik and his staff to the last field unit—were under constant bombardment. In the battles for the eastern bridgehead the division had lost some two hundred men. In Amnon Reshef’s brigade all the senior commanders were killed and replaced twice over. The company commanders were now the “third generation.” Dozens of the brigade’s tanks had been hit and left burned out and destroyed at
Lakekan, at
Matzmed, and at the
Chinese Farm.
Within hours of the “council on the dunes,” tensions were running high again, this time over what Sharon and his staff regarded as Bren’s sluggishness—unpardonable in the circumstances, they maintained—in crossing the canal
even once the bridge of rafts was up.
“At 1600 the bridge was ready,” Jackie Even recalled, “and nothing happened! Total silence. I’m screaming at Bren on the radio that we’re open for business, and no one comes. For seven hours no one came.”
Bren’s division had been fighting all day against a determined Egyptian effort to break out of Missouri and cut off the Israeli eastern bridgehead by severing both Akavish and Tirtur. In the afternoon, a separate Egyptian attack, by the Third Army’s Twenty-Fifth Armored Brigade, was mounted from the south. Reshef lay in wait for the Egyptian column, and he was supported by two of Bren’s brigades, the 217th under
Natke Nir and the 500th under
Arieh Keren. It was an important battle and ended in a huge success for Israel with more than eighty Egyptian tanks knocked out.
Regrouping, refueling, and reorganizing after these battles naturally took Bren’s brigades hours, and it was nearly midnight by the time the 162nd Division began its crossing.
Even recalled:
At last, Bren arrives with his command unit and another brigade. And
Natke Nir also begins arriving. The Egyptians must have twigged what was going on, and a bombardment from hell opens up on us. The whole area seems to be burning. It’s midnight, but it’s light like day. I say to myself, “Whether you die or not, if this operation doesn’t succeed, everything is lost.” After Bren and the first brigade are across, the bridge is hit and breaks apart. A tank on a raft is hit and sinks with its crew inside. Gilowas—now ferrying Bren’s tanks across—are hit and several sink. I’m in the middle of the bridge, on my own with no engineer officers. Our people are being killed and wounded all around me. I maneuver a bridging tank into position to span the break in the bridge—and the division continues to cross … The cries of the wounded mingle with the crashing of shells, but I say to myself, “We’ve won the war.” Getting the 162nd over to the other side, to join the force already over there, was the event that won the war. I had this feeling of sudden, total relief. We’d won.
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The next day, in hard battles against Egyptian reinforcements rushed in from around Cairo, the 162nd Division broke out of the west bank bridgehead and surged west, intent on swinging down the coast of the
Great Bitter Lake to the south and cutting off the Third Army from the rear. It was joined later by elements of Magen’s division, striking out farther to the west and then sweeping south. Together in the days ahead they would advance down the coast and cut the Cairo–
Suez road that was the Third Army’s vital supply route. An attempt to take the city of Suez itself ended in costly failure.
“Of course,” Sharon writes bitterly, “by the time Adan broke out of the bridgehead the Egyptians had managed to concentrate forces opposite him. And what could have been done so easily on the sixteenth and even on the seventeenth became a hard and costly job on the eighteenth.”
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Back in Tel Aviv, Dayan batted away renewed efforts by Gonen and Bar-Lev, working through Elazar, to engineer Sharon’s removal. With the end of the war in sight, the defense minister told the chief of staff, it simply wasn’t going to happen.
Sharon, meanwhile, was preparing to send Reshef’s brigade across the canal at last, to join Erez. Crossing was no longer a problem: the huge roller bridge was finally dragged to the canal, and on the morning of the nineteenth it spanned the two banks about half a mile north of the pontoon bridge made from the self-propelled rafts. Reshef and
Erez, together with
Danny Matt’s paratroopers, were to press north toward Ismailia. But Gonen still wanted the bulk of the 143rd Division to stay on the east bank and keep attacking Missouri in order to widen the bridgehead and push the Egyptian artillery out of range.
Sharon argued, more and more vehemently, that attacking Missouri would be costly, misguided, and unnecessary. “On the contrary, the most effective thing to do would be to move northward along the west bank of the canal, behind the Egyptian positions. As we moved up behind them toward Ismailia, the Egyptians would be so menaced themselves, they would not even begin to think about threatening our lines of communications.” But he was ordered to bring back forces from the west bank to beef up the projected assault. Sharon kept dragging his feet. On the afternoon of the nineteenth, Gonen once again asked Elazar to fire Sharon on the grounds that he was defying Southern Command’s orders.
These were not without logic. The area of the bridgehead was still under constant, heavy shelling, and the toll on IDF lives was unbearable. October 19, Dayan writes, was the worst day of the war in terms of casualties, with one hundred dead and more than four hundred injured, most of them in the bridgehead area.
But Dayan himself was becoming increasingly disenchanted with Southern Command’s adamant insistence on attacking Missouri. The Egyptians, now seriously alarmed at their situation, had begun urgently lobbying their Soviet patrons to procure a cease-fire.
Henry Kissinger, the American secretary of state, seemed inclined to go along with it. Prime Minister Meir believed they had three days left before the two superpowers, working through the UN, issued a joint ukase bringing the war to an end. The priority now, Dayan advised her, must be on shaping the cease-fire lines.
“We need to focus on our offensives west of the Canal,” Dayan told the prime minister. “We need to push northwards and southwards, and try to reach Ismailiya and
Suez.”
Nevertheless, Dayan was still not prepared to intervene directly on Sharon’s behalf in his struggle against the order to attack Missouri. “I fought it,” Sharon writes.
I railed against it. I tried every way I knew to get the order rescinded. It would be a useless gesture, an absolutely needless waste of lives. But at the end I was not able to change it. On the twenty-first I obeyed the order.
The morning of the attack I stood on a rampart on the western bank and watched Tuvia’s tanks and APCs rush the Egyptian positions.
I saw them penetrate deep into the defenses, and as they did I saw them hit by a torrent of RPGs, Saggers, and tank fire. One after another Tuvia’s vehicles stopped and burst into flame. It was a sight that sickened all of us who were watching…
That evening Southern Command ordered me to attack again … to take forces from the western side of the canal … and transfer them back to the east to take part in a battle that should never have been fought in the first place … It was generalship of the worst kind. But I am afraid that it was more than just bad generalship … To this day [sixteen years later] I cannot free myself from the feeling that one of the reasons they were pressing me to attack the Sixteenth and Twenty-first divisions on the east side of the canal was not because they considered the corridor too narrow, but because they wanted to keep my troops on the eastern side. They would allow me to proceed north, but they did not want me to have sufficient forces to do it effectively. These are hard things to say. But my strong impression then was that the antagonisms of years between myself and those in command (Bar-Lev and Elazar), augmented now by political considerations, played a considerable role in the military decisions.
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“Do you intend to reinforce Tuvia?” Gonen yelled at Sharon on the radio that night.
“No way,” came the laconic reply.
“So I say reinforce!”
“No way!”
“You should know—this is insubordination.”
“Oh come on, leave me alone with that kind of talk.”
Bar-Lev got on the radio and gave Sharon a specific order to transfer forces back to the east bank and to attack Missouri again in the morning. Sharon transferred five tanks. But now, at last, Dayan stepped in. Sharon called him to appeal Bar-Lev’s order. Dayan called
Yisrael Tal, the deputy chief of staff. “An appeal like that from Arik can’t just be ignored,” he said. He asked Tal to review the arguments and “issue appropriate orders.” “Fifteen minutes later,” according to Chaim Herzog, “Tal phoned Gonen to transmit an order from the minister of defense not to attack Missouri.”
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Dayan, having exercised his waning authority at last, did not make do with that. At dawn he flew down to Sharon’s division, heard his side of the story, flew on to the Southern Command headquarters, and poured out his wrath on Gonen (Bar-Lev was not in the war room). “You told him to take Missouri. That is scandalous. Attacking Missouri is suicidal. There is a conditioned reflex in this Command against every suggestion from Sharon.”
GONEN:
Arik is conducting his own private war.
DAYAN:
There are those who say that it’s this war room that has been infiltrated by political considerations.
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By now, the cease-fire was imminent. Sharon’s division had the Ismailia–Cairo road within its gun sights, but Sharon wanted the town itself, and he pushed his armor forward. The column was stopped by two battalions of Egyptian commandos dug in around a sewage plant on the southern outskirts. A desperate battle developed. The cease-fire hour agreed to by Israel, Egypt, and Syria, 18:52 on the twenty-second, came and went, but the fighting outside Ismailia raged on until close to midnight as the Israelis sought to evacuate all their dead and wounded.
“It wasn’t till the last night that the Command allowed us to attack Ismailia,”
Abrasha Tamir recalled.
What can you achieve in an attack that you mount helter-skelter at the last minute? I’m not saying Arik’s behavior all through the war was right, his tantrums, his not answering on the radio, and so forth. But the fact is that Southern Command forbade us to transfer more of our forces to the west bank and forbade us to go onto the attack against Ismailia until the twenty-second. It wasn’t because Bar-Lev and Gorodish really thought the eastern bridgehead needed widening. They simply didn’t want
us
to attack! They wanted the only attack to be accomplished by Bren and Kalman, while we stayed with the bridgehead … All in order that Arik shouldn’t strut around as though he were the victor.
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Tamir’s judgment was shared, to a greater or lesser extent, by other key figures on Sharon’s staff. “If you’ve decided to cross, then cross!” said
Yehoshua Saguy, the divisional intelligence officer.
Arik was there on the canal bank with the Gilowas [on the morning of the sixteenth]. They should have tasked Bren’s division with clearing the area of the approach roads. And let Arik cross.
They stopped Haim Erez and turned him around. And soon enough, of course, the Egyptians recovered and built a new defensive line with vast minefields and reinforcements. Instead, we should have continued advancing westward toward Cairo with two divisions. I’m not saying we should have entered Cairo. I’m not saying the Great Powers would have allowed us to approach Cairo. But that would have meant decisive victory. If the powers had intervened to stop us, that means we have achieved a decision in this war. As it was, the war ended indecisively.
The contrary viewpoint is perhaps best expressed by
Asher Levy, the brigadier-general who fought the war first in Bren’s division and then in Southern Command headquarters. Best expressed—because Levy, at the end of the day, is among those who believes passionately that without Sharon there would have been no crossing of the canal. But as regards what came later, he says,
It was because of his character, the bad traits in Arik’s character. He saw that he was left behind while Bren began to sweep ahead, down the coast of the lake toward Suez. Not because [Bren] was such a great general, but because things went well for him. The IDF was back to its old self. The plans for racing down southward were good, and all went fantastically—until Suez. All the glory was over there. And Arik’s sitting over here…
He was wrong about Missouri. It was vital to ensure at all costs that the eastern
bridgehead stay open. That was Southern Command’s most crucial task, and they assigned it to Arik. But he didn’t like it, because the glory wasn’t there. The plan was that he takes care of the bridgehead and Bren crosses. But he wanted to cross. And Haim Bar-Lev wouldn’t let him. He said, Bren crosses and you broaden the bridgehead. And Bar-Lev was 100 percent right.
And so he decided that we’ve got to conquer Ismailia. The Command were against it. They said it would be too great an effort, and they were opposed to making another such effort at that stage of the war. But Arik dragged them into it, and many men were killed there.
