Six Days (23 page)

Porat had another, more personal reason to be happy. He had spent part of his childhood in a Jewish settlement called Kfar Etzion, about ten miles south of Jerusalem, near Bethlehem. In 1948 it fell to the Jordanians after a bloody siege. Many of its defenders were killed and, for Israelis, it had become a symbol of the sacrifices they had made to establish their state. After Jerusalem, Porat's dream was to return to his childhood home. Surely, if Israel captured the Old City of Jerusalem, Kfar Etzion would not be far behind?

Jerusalem, 1450

The UN's General Bull was about to leave Government House to find a Jordanian who would order the troops to withdraw when an Israeli burst in through the gate of the compound and heavy firing started. General Rabin at GHQ in Tel Aviv had tried to delay it to allow Bull time to negotiate with the Jordanians. But Rabin was told the men were out of contact and could not be pulled back. There was no holding them. The attack was led by Lieutenant-Colonel Asher Drizen, the commander of Battalion 161, one of four reserve units of thirty-five- to forty-year-olds in Israeli Jerusalem. Another battalion of younger men was held in reserve for counter-attacks. That Monday morning, Drizen had been hoping for a lie-in. There had been a party for the soldiers the night before. When he heard that Government House had been taken by the Jordanians, he was about a mile away in the old British Allenby Barracks, firing mortars at Jordanian positions.

The Israelis had a plan to seize Government House that they had been rehearsing for years. Drizen sent two companies there immediately, then set off himself. All day the commanders of the Jerusalem Brigade acted first and explained themselves later. They put the plan to recapture Government House into action, then told Narkiss's HQ what they were doing. Narkiss was a man in a hurry, so he was not bothered by a little free enterprise on the ground. Drizen was a man in a hurry too. When he saw the arrival of the tanks led by Aaron Kamera (just as impatient to get on with a fight that he thought had been postponed for far too long), Drizen ran down under fire to order them into action. A few minutes later, the commander of the reconnaissance unit showed up demanding a diagram of the Israeli positions, to cut down on the risk of friendly fire. Drizen blew his top at the man's shilly-shallying. He told him he would shoot him if he did not move forward immediately. A corporal in the reconnaissance unit stepped forward and threatened to cut Drizen's throat if he did not calm down. In the end he gave them the information they needed and the attack went ahead. While Drizen led his men into the Government House compound, the Jordanians rushed for their Land Rovers which were mounted with heavy machine guns and anti-tank weapons. Drizen grabbed the heavy machine gun on his command half-track and destroyed the Land Rovers, just before a piece of shrapnel gave him a bad wound in the arm. A medic patched him up and he carried on with his right arm strapped to his side. All but three of Kamera's elderly Sherman tanks got stuck on difficult ground and could not continue the attack, but the Jordanians were unable to exploit this Israeli weakness. They tried artillery fire, but it was not accurate. Some of it fell on their own positions, and although the Jordanian infantrymen stuck to their task, they were not able to counter-attack.

An Israeli corporal called Zerach Epstein conducted his own private mopping-up operation. He was the man who had offered to cut Drizen's throat. ‘They shot at me from a dugout and I shot back. I tossed a hand grenade into the trench and raced on … suddenly I found myself all alone among the trees. From beneath one of them a Jordanian sprang out. I shot him and went on running. Somebody called out to me. I stopped and turned back. I saw it was a Jordanian soldier standing about two metres away from me … we pressed the trigger almost at the same moment, but I was just a fraction quicker.' Afterwards they found the bodies of nine Jordanian soldiers lying along the route he had taken.

Just before four in the afternoon the Israelis blew open the heavy wooden doors of Government House. ‘For the second time in two hours,' General Bull complained, ‘we found ourselves overrun. On this occasion Israel chose to cut our link with New York.' Israeli soldiers started clearing the rooms in the approved manner, tossing in a grenade and then spraying them with their Uzis. They were persuaded to stop by UN officers before they harmed any of the women and children who were sheltering there.

Abu Agheila, Sinai, 1500

Abu Agheila was on the way into central Sinai. Tanks can fight in most of the desert, but not without fuel and ammunition. Logistics go by road. War in a desert is about controlling the roads and Abu Agheila is one of the most important crossroads in the Sinai, about thirty kilometres from the border with Israel. In 1967 it was protected by four fortified positions that were connected by barbed wire and minefields. In the 1956 war Israel tried and failed repeatedly to take Abu Agheila. It fell only when the Egyptian troops were ordered to abandon it to pull back to the Suez canal. Israel mapped, surveyed and photographed the area before it pulled out after the war. In the next ten years Egypt strengthened its defences and the IDF made an intensive study of the best way to attack them. In yet another example of their thorough planning for the war, they held exercises up to divisional level, usually at night, concentrating on breaching the position.

Abu Agheila's defences hinged on a heavily fortified ridge called Um Katef. Behind a minefield 300 yards deep, Egypt had deployed around 16,000 men from its 2nd Infantry Division in three parallel lines of trenches three miles long, complete with concrete strongpoints. Egypt had reinforced the position in and around Um Katef until it had ninety tanks and self-propelled guns and six regiments of heavy artillery, all well dug in. Sharon, taking advantage of years of planning, had his attack ready. Brigadier-General Gavish at Southern Command tried to persuade him to put it off until the morning, when he would have air support. But Sharon loved fighting at night, when he believed Israeli troops had the edge. By late afternoon Sharon's division was at its start line for the attack above and below Abu Agheila, beginning at ten in the evening with the biggest artillery barrage that Israel had ever mustered.

Ramle, central Israel, 1530

General Narkiss's mobile headquarters was moving slowly, but it was in the right direction as far as he was concerned – towards Jerusalem. He had his wish. Israel was in a shooting war with Jordan. As well as counter-attacking at Government House, Narkiss had sent tanks to attack the mountain ridge that ran north-west of Jerusalem and he had been told that a crack unit of paratroopers was being sent to him to attack in the city itself. He was certain that he would be able to finish the unfinished business of 1948, and capture all of Jerusalem. ‘Joy engulfed me. I knew that soon these three powerful streams would flood together into a tidal wave, to flow over and drown Jerusalem's bonds.'

Washington DC, 0715

In the Pentagon, America's huge, five-sided military headquarters, the phone rang in the office of the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. It was the duty officer in the war room, who was always a general or an admiral. ‘Mr Secretary, Kosygin is on the hotline and wants to talk to the president. What should I tell him?'

One of the innovations brought in after the Cuban missile crisis was the ‘hotline' between Moscow and Washington. It was a secure teletype line, with American and Soviet equipment at either end. It was the first time that the hotline, which had been there since 1963, had been used in a real crisis. McNamara asked why he was calling him. The Soviet prime minister Alexei Kosygin wanted President Johnson, not the Secretary of Defense. ‘Well,' the duty officer replied, ‘the hotline terminates in the Pentagon.'

McNamara was aghast that the line installed by the superpowers to handle crises that could, after all, lead to a thermonuclear exchange did not reach the White House. ‘General, we are spending 60 billion dollars a year on defence. Can't you take a few thousand of those dollars and get these goddam lines patched across the river to the White House? You call the Situation Room and I'll call the president and we'll decide what to do.'

They put the line through to the White House. The first sentence of the first message from the Soviet Prime Minister asked if the American president was standing near the machine. Johnson's reply was addressed to ‘Comrade' Kosygin. The American hotline operators had sent a message to Moscow asking the Russian operators what was the proper way to address Kosygin. When the message went through, addressed to ‘Comrade' Kosygin, the top Russians at the other end looked at it sharply. Was Johnson making fun of them?

At 0730 a presidential aide knocked on Johnson's door. The most powerful man in the world, he noted, was ‘quiet – watching TV. Pres gave no indications of it being anything but a normal day – showered, shaved, dressed and left for SitRm [Situation Room].' He noted Johnson breakfasted on tea, grapefruit and chipped beef, a delicacy which GIs during the Second World War called ‘shit on a shingle' when it came on toast.

Mafrak Airbase, Jordan, 1530

Hassan Sabri, a maintenance engineer at Mafrak, looked out on to the smoking wreckage that the Israelis had left behind. The runway was unusable. The stores and most of the technical areas had been destroyed. In the craters on the runway were timed bombs, set to go off at random intervals. Sabri, who spent a year at the RAF training college at Cranwell on an armament engineering course, found out they also had a mercury switch which was set to explode if they were moved. All they could do was explode them where they were.

The atmosphere on the base was transformed. Excitement and expectation had been building up ever since the crisis had started in May. That morning most of them had believed every word of the radio reports of the triumphant progress of the Egyptian armed forces. The humiliation and dishonour of 1948 was about to be avenged. But by early afternoon, the war, for the air force at least, was lost. Officers and airmen whose families lived on the base in married quarters rushed to find them a safer place. Sabri, the engineer, knew what the Israeli raids meant. The radio reports were lies. Something similar must have happened to the air forces of Egypt and Syria. It meant the Jordanian army – and the rest of the Arabs – had been stripped of their air cover. Sabri was filled with despair. What could the army on the ground do, if Israel controlled the skies?

Jerusalem, 1600

After the capture of Government House, Israeli troops cleared the ‘Sausage', a major Jordanian position that controlled access to southeast Jerusalem. Squads of men jumped into the trenches at one end, firing ahead of them and moving along until the defenders were captured. Without taking a single loss, they killed thirty Jordanians. After that they rolled up another elaborate trench system known as the ‘Bell', which they were able to approach from the rear. Once again, the Jordanian infantrymen fought bravely, often to the death, but were not able to reposition themselves effectively enough to beat off an Israeli attack that was coming from an unexpected direction. But just as Lieutenant-Colonel Drizen and his men thought the entire Bell position had been cleared, they were ambushed by four or five Jordanians. Drizen, who was standing on the edge of a trench, was hit in his good hand. Two men who had been on either side of him were killed. A platoon commander was shot through the eye. Corporal Zerach Epstein fired back at the Jordanians, giving other soldiers enough time to throw grenades to kill them.

Jerusalem, 1700; Cairo, 1800; Washington DC, 1000

Teddy Kollek, mayor of Israeli Jerusalem, picked up Ruth Dayan, the wife of the defence minister, from the King David hotel, where she had been sheltering in one of West Jerusalem's more comfortable bunkers, the hotel's La Regence restaurant, two floors down and well sandbagged. They went to the Knesset, a mile-long dash by car down Jerusalem's empty streets. The corridors of the Knesset were packed with ministers, MPs and journalists. The big question was whether Israel should now take East Jerusalem. ‘The mood was momentous and exciting … to advance on the Jordanian-held sector of Jerusalem was, of course, more of a political risk than a military one. Each of us knew in his heart that once we took the Old City we would never give it up.' People were lining up in the Knesset lobby to ask David Ben-Gurion what he thought. He wanted Israel to seize its chance.

On the Arab side of Jerusalem, Palestinians had spent the day listening to predictions of victory on Voice of the Arabs from Cairo. At a forward command post an elderly aristocrat, incapacitated by gout, was carried in dressed in breeches and armed with pistols, dagger and rifle. ‘We will dine in Tel Aviv,' he announced.

Colonel Uri Ben Ari had other ideas. He commanded the mechanised brigade that Narkiss had ordered to swing round to the north of Jerusalem. He planned to have breakfast in one of the villages outside Jerusalem, if there was time. Ben Ari arrived in Israel as a young German Jew called Heinz Banner in 1939, when he was fourteen. His entire family, except an aunt who had married a German officer in the 1920s, was exterminated by the Nazis. Ben Ari had been with Narkiss and Rabin when the Jewish quarter fell in 1948. He too had unfinished business in the holy city, where he had fought with great courage. Ben Ari was one of Israel's most gifted tank commanders. He studied the theories of the German Panzer General Heinz Guderian, the man who formulated the ‘blitzkrieg' – lightning war, based on fast moving armoured divisions backed up by mechanised infantry. He applied Guderian's theories with great success in the Sinai in 1956, before leaving the army prematurely to become a publisher. Narkiss called Ben Ari back in 1967. He shook up his brigade in short order, drilling them until they could move from a standing start in five minutes. On 5 June they started their decisive push to Jerusalem at five in the afternoon.