No Mission Is Impossible (10 page)

Radio silence was maintained, but to keep the Egyptians from suspecting that something was afoot, several Fouga training jets took off, their pilots speaking by radio while mimicking Mystère and Mirage squadrons carrying out routine practice drills over Israel. If the Egyptians were listening, they could rest assured that this was just another day in the Israeli Air Force.

As the planes neared the skies of Egypt, the IAF electronic combat systems were activated, silencing or disrupting Egypt's transmission networks and radar systems. At the Pit, a nerve-wracking wait began.

At 7:45
A.M
., the planes were over their targets. A hundred and eighty-three aircraft dived toward the Egyptian airfields. The meticulous preparations, planning, calculations and training bore fruit. The radio silence was suddenly broken, and the air force's communications networks filled with excited reports from the skies over Egypt. The Egyptians' surprise was total, and the result was better than expected. One after
another, eleven Egyptian airfields were blown up, pillars of smoke and fire rising above them. A hundred and seventy-three planes attacked the airfields of El Arish, El Sir, Bir Gifgafa, Bir Tamada, Kibrit, Fayed, Abu Suwayr, Inshas, Cairo International, West Cairo and Beni Suef. The ten other planes carried out patrol and photo-reconnaissance missions.

Egyptian bombers destroyed on the ground.
(GPO)

The first anti-runway penetration bombs landed on the Kibrit airfield. The pilots spared the runways at El Arish so that they could serve the IAF when the Armored Corps captured it. At Bir Gifgafa, five MiGs were destroyed, with one managing to get away. At Cairo West, fifteen Tupolev Tu-16 bombers, among others, were destroyed. At Inshas, every MiG was wiped out, even though the morning mist made it hard to see. One of the Israeli formations accidentally arrived at Cairo International Airport, but when it spotted fighter planes among the commercial jets, struck many of them. The Abu Suwayr airfield put up exceptional resistance, and several of its MiGs managed to take off and attack Israel's planes. Twenty-seven passes over the field were carried out, dropping 102 bombs. Captain Ben-Zion Zohar stood out
during the battle, his Vautour engaging with MiGs, returning to bomb the field, and, on its way back to Israel, even attacking a surface-to-air missile battery, landing on its final drops of fuel. He would later be decorated.

Immediately after, the second wave took to the air—164 sorties over sixteen airfields, some of them not attacked during the first wave, like Luxor, where some of the Egyptian planes had escaped. Then came the third, fourth and fifth waves, the last reaching even the remote airfields of Ghardaqa and Ras Banas.

During the third wave, it became clear that Syrian MiGs and Jordanian Hawker Hunters were attempting to attack Israel. Hod ordered a group of planes to change direction and carry out Operation Focus in Jordan and Syria too. The air force destroyed the entire Jordanian Air Force and eliminated most of Syria's planes.

A few errors occurred during the operation, the most bitter being the attack on H-3 airfield in Iraq. MiGs, Hunters and even Tupolev bombers had set out from the field to try attacking targets in Israel. The field wasn't well known, and it hadn't occurred to anyone that it might serve as a departure base against Israel. Air force pilots carried out three attacks on the Iraqi field, achieving success during the first two. But the Iraqis recovered, and when Israeli planes appeared for a third time, they fell into an ambush. Two Vautours and a Mirage crashed after getting hit and one of the pilots who ejected was taken captive; the three remaining planes returned to Israel with their tails between their legs.

But that failure couldn't overshadow Operation Focus's enormous success. Within a few hours, the enemy's air forces were wiped out. The operation would be the decisive component of Israel's victory in the Six Day War. “The pride surrounding this story,” one air force leader wrote, “was simply inexhaustible. There are those who will claim that this was the crowning achievement of all the IDF missions ever.”

During the Six Day War the IDF had destroyed 327 Egyptian planes, 30 Jordanian planes, 65 Syrian planes, 23 Iraqi planes and one Lebanese plane. But the price was heavy: during the war, the air force lost 46 aircraft and mourned 24 of its pilots.

   
MAJOR GENERAL AVIHU BEN-NUN, A FORMER COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF THE AIR FORCE

          
“Before Operation Focus, the IDF chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin visited the squadron base. He met with the pilots and said to us that this mission was ‘life or death.' The existence of Israel depended on it. Rabin and Ezer [Weizman] instilled in us the sense that everything depended on us, that if we didn't succeed at our task, there was no future for this country.

              
“I led a formation of four Mystères to the Fayeed airfield. Every plane carried two bombs, each weighing seven hundred ninety-four pounds. On the way, over the sea, the number four plane disappeared on me, and I felt a stone in my heart. At Bardawil, on Sinai's shore, clouds appeared at an altitude of one thousand feet, and another stone was added. But when we reached Fayeed, I saw a bit of blue sky—and we attacked. I dropped the bombs on the runway and, on the next pass, strafed two MiGs at the edge of the runway, which went up in flames.

              
“An Antonov An-12 transport plane suddenly appeared in front of me, turned and started fleeing southward. I had a dilemma. It would take ten seconds to bring it down, but perhaps I'd miss the main objective, which was destroying the planes on the ground. Ultimately, I decided to focus on the MiGs. We destroyed sixteen MiGs and also blew up an SA-2 battery across the canal. We even found our number four eventually—he had gone back because of a problem with his fueling system. When I landed, I was told that the squadron commander, Yonatan Shachar, had been hit and had ejected, and I was appointed squadron commander in his place.

              
“Years later, Cairo's daily
Al-Ahram
published an article about the most decorated pilot in the Egyptian Air Force, who, on June fifth, 1967, had managed to escape the planes chasing him in
his Antonov. The entire Egyptian General Staff had been on that Antonov that I hadn't brought down. That didn't bring me much pleasure.

              
“On the third day of the war, we flew over Jerusalem, and the radio played ‘Jerusalem of Gold.' It was the only time I've cried during a flight.”

The conquest of East Jerusalem has not been one of the Six Day War Israeli goals. Its main offensive is in Sinai. But when Jordanian artillery starts firing on Israel, the IDF counterattacks and conquers the West Bank. Two cabinet ministers exert heavy pressure on Prime Minister Eshkol to liberate Jerusalem. At first Eshkol hesitates. So does Moshe Dayan. Finally, on the third day of the war, he gives the IDF its green light.

R
ed Sheet! I repeat, Red Sheet!”

In the early morning of June 5, 1967, shortly after the IAF destroyed most of the Egyptian aircraft on the ground, the order “Red Sheet” echoed in the transceivers of the land forces massed on Egypt's border. Thousands of tanks, troop carriers, self-propelled guns, jeeps and trucks crossed the border and charged the Egyptian positions in Sinai.

The Six Day War had started.

Israel didn't want to be drawn into a war with Jordan as well. Foreign Minister Abba Eban alerted General Odd Bull, chief of staff of the United Nation Truce Supervision Organization in Jerusalem, and asked him to convey an urgent message to King Hussein of Jordan: “Israel will not, repeat, not, attack Jordan if Jordan maintains the quiet. But if Jordan opens hostilities, Israel will respond with all of its might.” The message was delivered to the king, but in vain. On May 30, Hussein had signed a military pact with Nasser and was convinced that this time the Arabs would crush the Jews. The Jordanian Army was ordered to attack Israel.

At 10:45
A.M
., the Jordanian Legion opened fire all along the armistice lines with Israel; Netanya, Kfar Saba, Jerusalem, Ramat David, were shelled. “Long Tom” cannon positioned close to Qalkiliya and Jenin, on the West Bank, fired on Israel's populated centers. Jordanian jets headed for Israeli targets. The legion threw in the battle land forces as well, and occupied Government House, Odd Bull's headquarters in Jerusalem. The IDF Jerusalem brigade, reinforced by tanks, counterattacked and retook the building; it then tried to establish a connection with the Israeli enclave in Mount Scopus, a hill overlooking Jerusalem, where a small unit was guarding a hospital and the old campus of Hebrew University.

Commander of the Central Military District General Uzi Narkiss decided to send the paratroopers to Jerusalem. Their legendary commander, Arik Sharon, was not at their head anymore. Finally promoted to general by Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, he now commanded a division in Sinai. Narkiss dispatched to Jerusalem the newly created 55th Brigade, composed of reserve paratroopers. Its commander was a veteran warrior, Colonel Motta Gur.

Motta was a strange hybrid of an intellectual and a born fighter. He was eighteen during the Independence War, when his training at the Officers Academy had been interrupted and he had been sent with his comrades to conquer Be'er Sheva and fight the Egyptians in the Negev. He liked to describe his baptism by fire to his soldiers. During his first battle, he said, he was just a scared young man, and while the bullets were buzzing around him he suddenly felt an expanding wetness in his pants. He was overwhelmed with shame. Had he peed in his pants? Was he such a coward? As soon as the battle was over he had run to a secluded corner and checked his clothes, then breathed in relief. An Egyptian bullet had pierced his water canteen, and the water had spilled over his pants. . . . He wasn't a coward after all.

After harsh and bloody combats where he had lost some of his best friends, he left the army and enrolled in Hebrew University. There he met Arik Sharon but was not impressed. He heard about the creation of 101, but chose to continue his studies of Middle East history and culture
until the day in 1955 when he met Aharon Davidi, an old comrade in arms from the Negev combats.

“I am with the paratroopers now,” Davidi said.

“What do you do there?”

Davidi told him about the unit missions; in his soft, matter-of-fact manner, he described the reprisal raids, the incursions deep into enemy territory and the new spirit motivating “the guys with the red boots.” Motta was excited. “I am coming!” he said and joined the paratroopers.

As commander of Company D he fought at most of the reprisal raids. He was wounded at a battle in the Gaza Strip and was decorated for bravery by Dayan. Yet, he became the most outspoken critic of Sharon, delivered scathing accusations of his commander after the Mitla Pass battle, and used to say that “I never saw Sharon's back when we were charging the enemy,” meaning that the paratroopers' legendary chief was not a hero at all. Nevertheless, he stayed in the paratrooper corps and performed brilliantly. After the Sinai campaign, where he fought at Mitla, he was sent to high-level studies at the Ecole Militaire in Paris. There, beside his martial studies, he and his wife, Rita, discovered French culture: the theaters, the museums, the books of Camus, Sartre, Giraudoux. After his return, he filled several positions in the army. In the evenings he had to tell stories to his four children, and he preferred to write them. His children's books, about “Azit, the paratrooper dog,” were best-sellers in Israel and even became a kids' movie.

And on June 5 he was to lead the brigade of war-hardened veterans at the battle for Jerusalem.

I
n the afternoon of that day, Cabinet Ministers Yigal Allon and Menachem Begin entered the office of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. Allon, the legendary former commander of the Palmach, was a leader of the left-wing Ahdut HaAvoda party; Begin was the charismatic head of the right-wing Herut. But both of them were political hawks and they urged Eshkol to liberate the Old City. Yet a formidable obstacle stood in their way: Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, who worried about possible damage to the world's holiest places and the international reaction to
the conquest of the Old City. He feared that any fighting inside Jerusalem might result in foreign pressure on Israel that would also influence the campaign against Egypt and prevent Israel from completing its war goals. Dayan knew, however, that the fall of Mount Scopus into the hands of the Jordanians would be considered a severe blow to Israel's prestige. He therefore authorized the IDF only to conquer the road to Scopus, in northeast Jerusalem.

Following Dayan's order, Motta assigned the missions of his three battalions that would attack East Jerusalem: Yossi Yaffe's Battalion 66 would storm the Jordanian Police Academy, conquer it and the nearby Ammunition Hill and Hotel Ambassador. The two other battalions would take the Rockefeller Museum in a pincer attack. Uzi Eilam, the hero of Black Arrow, would lead his Battalion 71 through several Arab neighborhoods and the American Colony and approach the Rockefeller Museum; Yossi Fradkin's Battalion 28 would advance farther up along Salah a-Din Street, a major artery in Arab Jerusalem, conquer the museum and the area adjacent to the Old City Wall. The paratroopers would be supported by tanks and artillery. At the outcome of these attacks the paratroopers would control the road to Mount Scopus. All the objectives of the paratrooper assault were in Arab Jerusalem, but none was inside the Old City.

The last briefing of the company commanders was held in the Cohen Family shelter, in the Beit HaKerem neighborhood. During the briefing the house owner's elderly mother entered the shelter. She handed an old, threadbare Israeli flag to Captain Yoram Zamosh. Her voice was breaking when she told the paratroopers that the flag had been floating over her house in the Old City during the War of Independence. She had taken it when she had been forced to abandon her home. She now asked the officers to raise the flag over the Western Wall. Her plea electrified the soldiers; unwittingly, the elderly lady had determined the goal of their mission, even though it hadn't been formulated in any official document.

At 2:30
A.M
., Uzi Eilam led his battalion to Arab Jerusalem, crossed the border fences and after bitter fighting, conquered the American Colony and approached the Rockefeller Museum. But the other operations
didn't turn out the way they were planned. The paratroopers were not familiar with Jerusalem, and the intelligence reports about the legion's positions and firepower were far from adequate. Battalion 28, which was to perform the second part of the pincer movement, crossed the no-man's-land, followed by several tanks, and headed for the Rockefeller Museum. But at the crossroads by the wall it missed the turn, and instead of advancing through Salah a-Din Street, the battalion entered the Nablus Road. This turned into a death trap.

The dark Nablus Road and the Old City Wall were fortified with elite Jordanian troops manning heavy-machine-gun nests and riflemen positions, equipped with mortars, bazookas and recoilless guns. The Jordanians opened a murderous crossfire on the approaching paratroopers, inflicting heavy casualties upon them. The medic Shlomo Epstein, who was dressing the wounds of Yossef Hagoel, heard the hiss of an approaching shell and threw himself on Hagoel to protect him. The shell crushed his body. Hagoel survived. Lieutenant Mordechai Friedman raised his hand to throw a hand grenade on a spitting-fire position in a dark alley and was mown down by a machine-gun burst. He collapsed and the grenade exploded in his hand.

The battalion commander called for help and several tanks joined the fighting. Some of them were hit, others got stuck. Only after seven hours of fighting did the paratroopers succeed in clearing the entire road, which was less than a mile long. They reached the hotels Columbia, facing the Nablus Gate, and Rivoli, by Herod's Gate. The legionnaires, barricaded on top of the wall, focused their heavy fire on Rivoli. Haim Russak tried to rescue a wounded comrade and succumbed to the fire of a Jordanian machine gun. The medic Nathan Shechter tried to save him, in vain. Shechter, himself, would soon be killed at Rockefeller Museum.

W
hile the battle was raging on Nablus Road, Battalion 66 was engaged in terrible combat. The paratroopers broke into the Arab city and stormed the Police Academy. At their head was Giora Ashkenazi's company, which advanced using bangalores—long pipe-shaped explosive charges that blew up both the barbwire fences and blazed
paths across the minefields. Giora was followed by the company of Dodik Rotenberg, which invaded the fortified trenches and the academy building. The companies of Gabi Magal and Dedi Yaakobi mopped the building, and paused, seeing the sinister outline of Ammunition Hill.

The hill was a formidable bastion, a fortified compound that used to be the armory of the Police Academy during the British mandate. The Jordanians had transformed it into an impregnable fortress. The hill was surrounded by fences, scarred by narrow, winding, stone-plated trenches that some writers later described as a bundle of tangled bowels. Most positions were covered, and between them rose concrete bunkers, cunningly positioned. Every inch of the hill was covered by crisscross fire from several sources. The hill was defended by crack troops, the best of the legionnaires. They were excellent, indomitable warriors who knew they had no way out of the hill and had to fight to their death.

Dedi Yaakobi led his paratroopers to conquer the hill, but his men soon realized that they were trapped in a deadly inferno, exposed to heavy and murderous fire from all over. The night thundered with machine-gun bursts, bomb and grenade explosions, shouts of the wounded and death rattles. The paratroopers advanced in the narrow trenches but were easy prey for the heavy fire of the bunker positions. The company broke into several units that all encountered a grim fate. Corporal Meir Malmudi's squad was decimated in a crossfire trap in an open stretch. Yoram Eliashiv, quiet and calm, was slain at the head of his platoon. A bullet pierced the forehead of Yirmi Eshkol, Dedi's deputy. Soon after the battle began, most of Dedi's men were killed or wounded. He called Dodik for help but even before reinforcements arrived, his remaining soldiers, some of them severely wounded, kept running forward in the treacherous trenches, often bumping against the bodies of fallen legionnaires.

A similar fate awaited Dodik's soldiers. Platoon commander Yoav Tzuri led his men through the exposed stretch where Malmudi's soldiers had been killed. He was hit on his turn and fell, dead. Dodik's deputy, Nir Nitzan, led another platoon to the western part of the peripheral trench. He called Eitan Nava, a tough moshav boy, to get
out of the trench and run ahead of the paratroopers, shooting at the enemy with his mini–machine gun. Nava knew that this was a suicide mission but didn't hesitate. He jumped out of the trench and ran forward, spraying the Jordanians with continuous fire while also attracting fire from all over. His comrades shouted at him, “Jump in the trench, you'll be killed!” but he kept running, hitting thirty legionnaires before he was slain.

Another fighter, Israel Zuriel, immediately leapt out of the trench and took Nava's place. He survived against all odds.

Most of the medics running in the trenches between scores of wounded were injured or killed. Didier Guttal crouched in one of the trenches, his arm torn from his body. Another medic, Yigal Arad, ran like mad between the wounded of the two companies, dressed wounds, tied tourniquets and firmly fixed broken limbs.

From different directions, the surviving soldiers approached the main bunker. Zvi Magen, a platoon deputy commander, charged ahead of his soldiers and tried to throw a hand grenade on the position; he was killed by a burst of machine-gun fire. In the meantime the sun rose in the east and exposed the paratroopers to the accurate fire of snipers and machine gunners. Yet they kept fighting, advancing inch after inch to the monstrous bunker. It was a double bunker, protected with eighteen-inch-thick concrete plates. Three paratroopers approached the bunker from both sides—Yaki Hetz, David Shalom and Yehuda Kendel. All their efforts to destroy it by automatic fire, bazooka shells and hand grenades failed. Their commander ordered them to bring over bags of explosives, which they piled up by the bunker's walls. A formidable explosion blew up the bunker, yet the soldiers had to confront and kill five legionnaires who had miraculously survived.