Six Days (25 page)

Fedorenko had stonewalled Goldberg. But in a private meeting shortly afterwards he told the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian ambassadors that it was the best deal they were going to get. Goldberg and Fedorenko met again at 9 p.m. New York time. By then the US had gone even further towards the Soviet position. The new American draft accepted the Soviet language that both sides should withdraw back to the armistice lines. Fedorenko stonewalled again. He could not give an answer before the morning.

In one day the United States had gone from supporting a ceasefire resolution calling simply for both sides to stop fighting, to drafting a call for a return to the positions that had been held on 4 June. Had the Soviet Union accepted it, they would have scored a diplomatic victory on behalf of their Arab allies. It would have had the added bonus for them of sowing dissension between Israel and the US. Instead, they played into Israel's hands.

White House Cabinet Room, 1130

President Johnson summoned his Special Committee of wise men that had been assembled to handle the crisis. They knew that Israel, whatever it was saying in public, had fired first. But they did not know who was winning. McGeorge Bundy, the committee's secretary, fretted about the ‘awful shape we would be in if the Israelis were losing. We didn't really know anything about the situation on the ground.' The committee realised that if they were losing, the US would either have to intervene or watch Israel being ‘thrown into the sea or defeated. That would have been a most painful moment and, of course, with the Soviet presence in the Middle East, a moment of great general danger.'

When, in late afternoon, they found out exactly what the Israeli air force had done, the whole atmosphere changed. Bundy was relieved that ‘the fighting was the Israelis' idea and … the idea was working. That was a lot better than if it had been the other way around.' The Americans protected the Israelis. They knew a pre-emptive attack would be controversial, especially after Washington's loud warnings that more time should be given to diplomacy. The State Department's own legal advice was that Israel's action could be a violation of the United Nations charter. Walt Rostow thought it was best not to put on the record ‘that Israel had kicked this off from a standing start'. He changed the draft of a letter from President Johnson to Britain's Prime Minister Wilson, to edit out the suggestion that Israel had moved first. The Americans were pleased that the people to whom they were drawn instinctively were on top, and that their pre-war intelligence pointing to a rapid Israeli victory had been right. But more than anything else, they were delighted that, thanks to Israel, they were off the hook. Johnson believed he had to find a way to honour the promises that Eisenhower had made in 1957 about keeping the Gulf of Aqaba open. But he did not like their only plan, for a naval operation with such limited international support that it could not have been passed off as anything other than gunboat diplomacy on Israel's behalf. Now it may be war, but at least someone else was doing the shooting.

Imwas, West Bank, 1830

Two detachments of Egyptian commandos prepared to cross the border into Israel from Imwas, a border village close to the main road from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. Their mission was to raid the main international airport at Lod and an airforce base at Hartsour. They had Jordanian guides to get them over the border. After that all they had to rely on was a palm-sized aerial photograph and their enthusiasm. As the last of the evening light faded away, they moved quietly through fields and past farms and villages. Ali Abdul Mursi, one of the officers, realised that the whole country was at war. Most of the men were away fighting. If Egypt had been better organised, large-scale guerrilla operations inside Israel could have done a lot of damage. They trudged on through the fields.

Abu Deeb, the
moukhtar
or headman of Imwas, spent the evening sitting and talking with his brother Hikmat Deeb Ali outside their family house. Crisis or no crisis, on Monday morning Hikmat had travelled twenty miles or so by bus from his home village to get to his job on a building site in Jerusalem. He needed the money. But soon the news came through on the radio that the war had started. When they heard gunfire and shelling start in Jerusalem itself, Hikmat, like all his workmates, went back home. When he arrived, his neighbours were ‘looking at each other … waiting. There was no sense of what was next.'

Sinai, 1830

By six, Brig. Gen. Avraham Yoffe's tanks had spent nine hours moving slowly through sand dunes that Egypt, assuming that they were impassable, had left virtually undefended. In places engineers had to dismount to clear minefields, inching their way forward with steel prods. By nightfall they were at B'ir Lahfan, where they came under fire and stopped. Yoffe's tanks blocked the road to Al-Arish from Jebel Libni and Abu Agheila. Fighting went on for most of the night, as Yoffe's men stopped reinforcements getting to Al-Arish. The confused fighting at Rafah was over by midnight. Ori Orr looked round his men who had fought there, ‘trying to work out who was wounded and who was killed'. The survivors looked like ‘children who have been forced to grow up in just one day'.

The commander of Israel's southern front, Brigadier General Yeshayahu Gavish, tired, with eyes bloodshot from the desert sand, flew south in a helicopter to the advanced headquarters of Brigadier General Yoffe. Amos Elon who was travelling with him, thought the camouflaged military vehicles beneath them looked like a Bedouin camp. When they landed Gavish dusted himself down and went to the war room with Yoffe. It was made of nets strung between two trucks. As the sun set, ‘from the south, rolling over the darkened hills, came the thunder of cannon fire'. Rabin called Gavish, suggesting that they bomb Abu Agheila all night so they could march in when morning came. Doing that, he said, would minimise Israel's casualties. Gavish – and Sharon – disagreed. Gavish wanted to get his tanks into the position. Sharon protested that he was halfway through the attack. This was no time to break off. And he believed, correctly, that he was playing to Israel's strengths. ‘The Egyptians do not like fighting at night nor do they enjoy hand-to-hand combat – we specialise in both.'

*   *   *

At 2200 guns from two Israeli brigades opened up on the Egyptian fortifications at Um Katef and Abu Agheila. Ariel Sharon rubbed his hands. ‘Such a barrage I've never seen.' In twenty minutes 6000 shells landed on Um Katef. To the west, Israeli paratroopers, carried the first part of the way by helicopter, foot-slogged through soft sand to get behind the Egyptians, to attack their artillery. They blew up guns and shells and forced the crews to retreat. To the north, Sharon's infantry and armoured brigades, led by mine-clearing equipment, moved forward behind the barrage. Much of his infantry was transported to the battle in civilian buses, which they smeared with mud, ‘not so much to camouflage them,' Sharon explained, ‘but to make them appear a little more military'. They advanced the last few miles on foot, carrying coloured lights so they would not end up attacking each other.

Israeli foot soldiers worked their way through the Egyptian trenches, some men inside them, others above the parapet, shooting down into them. During the fighting at Abu Agheila, Egypt tried to send reinforcements from Jebel Libni, in the south-west. Brig. Gen. Yoffe's division was already at B'ir Lahfan to stop them getting through. The tanks fought all night. The Egyptians were overwhelmed after Israeli mechanised infantry came racing from Al-Arish to take their western flank.

Israeli wounded from the paratroop unit that was assaulting the defence lines on the road to Abu Agheila started coming in. One of their doctors ‘was scared until I had to treat the first wounded … Soldiers lay legless, their hands crushed, a bullet in the neck, fragments in the stomach. We had only ten stretchers and some of the wounded insisted they could walk or limp along without help. The difficulty was to make sure that the infusion needles stayed in place while we advanced under fire.'

As usual, the Egyptians fought bravely in their fixed positions. But, as usual, their officers were not flexible enough to turn them around to deal with Israeli attacks from the rear. Junior officers and NCOs were also unable to organise effective counter-attacks against the Israelis who invaded their positions. But, in the end, the biggest reason for Israel's victory at Abu Agheila was Egypt's failure to commit its reserves until it was too late. They were close enough to hear the battle going on but were spectators for most of the night until Israel got round to surrounding and attacking them. Egypt had an armoured brigade in a good position to attack a task force of Israeli Centurion tanks that managed to chug its way through the supposedly impassable sand dunes north of Um Katef. But it did nothing, presumably because they did not have any orders. The Centurions' commander, Lt. Col. Natke Nir, was badly wounded in both legs, but his tanks turned the northern end of the Egyptian defences and managed to get in behind them. By eight in the morning, with smoke from burning vehicles and exploding Egyptian ammunition drifting across the sand, the battle was won. One of Yoffe's brigades was waiting to continue the advance. The road was blocked with the hundreds of civilian vehicles that had transported Sharon's infantry to the battle. They were pushed off the road and on to the sand, so Yoffe's men could continue to their next target, Jebel Libni.

Cairo, evening

Crowds poured into Cairo from the provinces to celebrate a great victory in buses and trucks provided by the Arab Socialist Union, the ruling party. Many of them had transistor radios. By 8:17 p.m. Cairo Radio was claiming that eighty-six enemy aircraft had been destroyed and that Egyptian tanks had broken into Israel. At the headquarters of the Sinai front, General Gamasy listened ‘with growing horror' to what he knew was a pack of lies. At Central Command, General Hadidi slumped into his chair, convinced that the war was at least half-lost. The US Embassy did not trust the ‘repetition of vague and universally victorious communiqués' on the radio. They recommended that Washington apply the ‘usual coefficient of mendacity of 10, giving the total number downed as something like 9'.

Anwar El Sadat could have told them they were not being suspicious enough. Like Nasser, he had retreated to his villa, where he had spent the day ringing Nasser and Amer and trying to follow what was happening in the air and at the front. Late in the evening he rang Amer again, who told him ‘drily and irritably' that the Israelis had captured Al-Arish. Sadat, at a loss, went for a long walk through the streets of Cairo. He watched Nasser's loyalists marching up and down Pyramids Road. Sadat was ‘dazed and broken-hearted', as they chanted and danced to the fake reports of an imaginary victory.

Jerusalem, evening

The BBC had refused to run the world exclusive of its own correspondent, Michael Elkins. He had only just started work with the Corporation, and he was an Israeli. The editors in the newsroom in London thought that he might, as they delicately put it, have ‘spoken with the tongue of the prophets'. By the evening they relented, and put out Elkins's story, which had already been broadcast coast-to-coast in the US on CBS. He beat the military censorship with careful words: ‘… less than fifteen hours after the fighting began at dawn this morning, there was every evidence that though fighting will continue, Israel has already won the war … I may not now report where the Israeli armed forces stand, but the place names will be familiar to anyone who has read a good account of the first five days of the 1956 Sinai campaign. This time Israel has created the nearest thing to instant victory the modern world has seen.'

The Jordanian command post on the eastern side of the city was under heavy artillery fire. The air seemed to be vibrating. Brigadier Atta Ali, the Jordanian commander, and Hazim Khalidi, a member of one of Jerusalem's aristocratic families who had been an officer in the British army, were discussing the chances of reinforcement. Messages from Amman were telling them that four brigades were coming, but they could not raise the Jordanian army's West Bank headquarters on the radio. They did not know that it was already pulling back across the river Jordan. Reinforcements that were trying to make it up the Jericho road were attacked and destroyed by the Israelis. The bunker was overcrowded. Several dozen policemen kept pushing into it to escape the shelling. No one had taught them about digging trenches to protect themselves.

Tel Aviv disappeared into a deep blackout. The British journalist James Cameron reported that it ‘might seem a bit excessive in view of this claim to have rubbed out the entire Arab air threat, but the Israelis have lived so long on a razor edge that they take no chances'. The tension of not knowing what was happening at the front was still there, Cameron went on. ‘It has been a day of immense sorrow and apprehension here, where virtually no one exists but has a son or a father in very serious danger.'

Washington DC, evening

Since mid-afternoon Walt Rostow, the National Security Advisor, had been talking to President Johnson about the shape of the post-war Middle East. After a long day, Rostow sat back in his chair in his office in the White House basement, dictating a message to Johnson. He beamed with pleasure and relief. The first day had been a ‘turkey shoot'. He noted: ‘The key to ending the war is how well the Israelis do – or don't do – on the ground.'

DAY TWO

6 June 1967

Jerusalem, 0100

The Israeli paratroops were being rushed into action. It was urban warfare, fighting house to house, close to the enemy. It was very different from their original mission to destroy the guns at Al-Arish that they had rehearsed until they had it off by heart. They had no maps of Jerusalem, nor the right equipment for street fighting. But General Narkiss wanted to get them into battle fast, in case the Jordanians counter-attacked in the morning or the Security Council passed a ceasefire resolution before they had seized East Jerusalem. Colonel Mordechai Gur, the commander of the 55th paratroop brigade, set up his headquarters in a requisitioned school. General Narkiss struggled down a dimly lit corridor, ‘lined wall to wall with paratroop officers in battle dress', into the biology lab where Gur and his officers were planning their assault, next to ‘jars and bottles of lizards, grasshoppers, birds, chicken eggs, a goat foetus and maybe a lamb, all swimming in formalin'.