No Mission Is Impossible (6 page)

              
“And then they broke through on the Burma Road!

              
“One day, I went down to Tel Aviv on the Burma Road for an interrogation of prisoners. And, to my surprise, I was able to buy candles and matches and sardines—as much as I wanted. Sardines: what a feast!”

The Independence War is crowned with an Israeli victory. At the end of 1953, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, sixty-seven, has resigned and settled in kibbutz Sde Boker in the Negev, but in February 1955 he is convinced to return as defense minister under Prime Minister Moshe Sharett. Ben-Gurion accuses moderate Sharett of weakness and irresolution. This is also the opinion of the chief of staff, forty-year-old Moshe Dayan, who is a close ally of the director general of the defense ministry, thirty-two-year-old Shimon Peres. The incursions of terrorists into Israel and the growing threats of a new war publicly made by Egypt's president Gamal Abdel Nasser lead Ben-Gurion to adopt a tough policy toward Israel's neighbors. After each terrorist act Israel will now hold responsible the state from whose soil the terrorists have come—and launch retaliatory raids against its military bases.

O
n February 28, 1955, after nightfall, six IDF paratroopers under the command of Captain Saadia (“Suppapo”) Elkayam crossed the border into the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip. The border was not fenced—just a deep ditch dug by tractors. Suppapo's small advance team quietly moved between two Egyptian army positions, but a couple of Egyptian soldiers in a concealed ambush farther up the road opened fire on the Israelis. Suppapo and his men killed the Egyptians with hand grenades and submachine-gun fire and continued to advance. Very soon they were joined by a column of paratroopers of the 890th Paratroop Battalion. At their head was an already famous officer: Ariel (“Arik”) Sharon.

Sharon was escorted by two staff observers and his deputy, the calm, bearded Aharon Davidi. Born in Tel Aviv, a volunteer in the Palmach (storm units of the IDF during the Independence War) since the age of fourteen, Davidi had been nicknamed “the coolest soldier in the army.” His tranquillity under fire was legendary. Even in the heat of battle this former Palmach officer would perform his duties
unruffled, as if the bullets and the grenades and the bombs were not of his concern. Nobody knew that Davidi worked out in secret before every battle, doing physical exercises that helped him hide his fear from his soldiers. His pockets were full of bread and he would munch crusts during the battle, drawing calm and composure from the food. His soldiers admired his serenity and tried to emulate him.

While Sharon and Davidi led their column into Gaza, another paratrooper unit, led by the battle-scarred Danny Matt, crossed the border close to kibbutz Be'eri, farther to the south. They bypassed some villages and set an ambush on the Gaza–Rafah highway to prevent any reinforcements from reaching Gaza.

After two hours of strenuous marching, the paratroopers stopped in an orchard that offered a view of the railroad station and a large Egyptian military base.

On Sharon's order, the paratroopers charged.

Operation Black Arrow, also called the Gaza raid, was under way.

T
he Israeli government made the decision to launch Black Arrow after several incidents on the Gaza border. The most recent had been an incursion into Israel of an Egyptian intelligence-gathering detail that had collected information, carried out several sabotage operations and murdered a civilian close to Rehovot. When the identity of the perpetrators was exposed, the IDF decided to deal a severe blow to the Egyptian Army.

In the last few years scores of incidents had erupted on Israel's borders, and many infiltrators had entered the country, stealing and murdering civilians. The IDF had tried to retaliate with raids in enemy territory—and failed. The names of these Arab villages and military positions had aggregated into a long list of shame that the IDF tried to repress. Out of all those failed operations, the fiasco that stunned IDF Head of Operations General Moshe Dayan was the miserable failure of the Givati Brigade at the Jordanian village Falame. On January 28, 1953, 120 soldiers attacked the village, which was defended only by locals, shelled it with mortars and after four and a half hours retreated without
accomplishing their mission. Dayan, furious, published a new order: “In the future, if any unit commander failed to carry out his mission claiming that he could not overcome the enemy force, his explanation would not be accepted unless he had suffered 50 percent casualties.”

This was a very tough order. But things did not change until Arik Sharon entered the scene.

Arik, the son of Russian-born farmers in moshav (“cooperative village”) Kfar Malal, was different. A born rebel, bold and tempestuous, the handsome officer was twenty years old when he was badly wounded in the battle of Latrun. He lay bleeding in a wheat field, watching the Arabs who descended from the hills rushing to murder the wounded Israelis with guns and knives. Another soldier, also wounded, grabbed Arik's arms and dragged him toward the Israeli lines. The other soldier had been wounded in the jaw and couldn't speak. The two men silently crawled across the battlefield, while the desperate cries of their wounded comrades, left behind, resounded in their ears. That experience had a long-lasting effect on Sharon—in the future he would not leave a wounded soldier in the battlefield.

After he recovered, he went back to fighting, then spent four years in the army before becoming a student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. But his heart was not in it. One evening he lay in wait by the prime minister's office in Jerusalem, and when Moshe Dayan came out of the building he handed him a short note:
I am a student now, but I exist. If you have operations in mind—I am ready.

Dayan remembered him from the days when he was commander of the Northern District and Sharon his intelligence officer. One day the Jordanian Legion had captured two IDF soldiers and refused to release them. Dayan, back from a general staff meeting, casually asked Sharon, “Tell me, is it possible to capture two legionnaires around here as hostages?”

“I'll check that out, sir,” Arik had replied.

He got into a pickup truck with another officer and drove to the Sheikh Hussein Bridge, on Jordan's border, drew his handgun and came back with two legionnaires. Dayan was very impressed: “I only asked
if it were possible,” he said, “and he went out and came back with two legionnaires as if he had just gone to pick fruits in the garden.”

One evening in Jerusalem, while Arik was reading about Duke Godfrey de Bouillon, who had led the Crusaders into Palestine in the eleventh century, he was summoned to the office of Colonel Mishael Shaham, commander of the Jerusalem District. Shaham asked him to assemble a small team of irregulars, cross the border and blow up the home of the Palestinian gang leader Mustafa Samueli in the village of Nebi Samuel. Arik recruited a small group of comrades from the war—Shlomo Baum from Kfar Yehezkel, Yitzhak (“Gulliver”) Ben-Menahem and Yehuda Dayan from the university, Uzi and Yehuda Piamenta from Jerusalem, Yoram Lavi from Kfar Malal, and Saadia, the Palmach sapper. The group crossed the border and reached Nebi Samuel undetected. The mission was not exactly a success—they blew up the wrong house and Samueli survived. The Jordanians opened a murderous fire on Arik's men, but they retreated in an orderly way and returned home unscathed. In spite of the failure the conclusion was clear: the men had done their best to execute their mission. If they had been better trained, they certainly would have succeeded.

Arik suggested to Colonel Shaham that they establish a secret unit for special missions across the border. Moshe Dayan embraced the idea in spite of the angry objection of his colleagues. And so, in August 1953, Unit 101 was born.

Unit 101 was to become a legend, even though it was a tiny unit that existed barely five months. There was no mission its irregulars refused: deep reconnaissance incursions into enemy territory, raids on terrorists in their lairs, risky operations amid hostile crowds. One-oh-one produced a group of warriors that inspired the entire army with a new spirit. “Three men revolutionized the IDF,” a 101 veteran told us. “The commander who pushed the change from above and believed in it—Moshe Dayan; the officer who initiated operations, conceived and proposed, and relentlessly sought combat with the enemy—Arik Sharon; and the fighter who invented new methods and was a teacher to all of us in his tactical planning—Meir Har-Zion.”

Meir (“Har”) Har-Zion was a young, fearless kibbutz member with extraordinary scouting instincts, a creative mind and an apparently limitless knowledge of the geography of Israel and Palestine. At the age of seventeen he had been captured by the Syrian Army while hiking with his sister Shoshana north of the Lake of Tiberias; after his release, he had crossed the Jordanian border with a female friend and visited the magnificent ancient city of Petra, in spite of the Jordanian patrols that shot fourteen other Israeli adventurers in the 1950s.

Meir joined the army and was recruited by Sharon. With his friend Shimon (“Katcha”) Kahaner and a few other comrades he carried out several daring incursions into neighboring countries. One of their night missions was to reach Hebron by foot, twenty-one kilometers from the Israeli border, kill three terrorists, blow up their house and retreat—another twenty-one kilometers. The mission was a success, but on their way back the 101 fighters clashed with a large unit of the Jordanian National Guard. Meir attacked the Jordanians, killed their commander and led his friends back to Israel, carrying the slain Jordanian officer's handgun.

Sharon and Har-Zion were considered heroes but they also had their questionable sides. Ben-Gurion considered Sharon one of the greatest warriors of Israel but repeatedly noted in his diary that Sharon “is not telling the truth,” an accusation that was shared by many senior officers.

Meir Har-Zion, too, had attracted scathing accusations by civilian and military leaders for an act of personal vengeance carried out in enemy territory. His beloved sister Shoshana was captured and murdered with her boyfriend by Bedouins while trekking across the Jordanian border. Meir and three of his comrades crossed the border, caught the five murderers and killed four of them, sending the fifth to tell his tribe about the vendetta. Ben-Gurion had Meir Har-Zion arrested on his return, and he was expelled from the army for six months.

At the end of 1953, Moshe Dayan was appointed chief of staff of the IDF. Soon after, 101 merged with the paratroopers, and Sharon became their commander.

And that February night in 1955, he led his paratroopers into Gaza.

S
haron distributed the missions to his officers. Force B would secure the route of entry and exit of the soldiers to and from the Gaza Strip. Force C, the 101 veterans commanded by Danny Matt, would ambush any reinforcements coming from Rafah. Force D, led by a young officer named Motta Gur, would attack the railway station. Another unit of twenty paratroopers would serve as Arik's reserve.

Force A, charged with the major task—attack and destroy the Egyptian base—was under Suppapo's command. Suppapo was a brave officer, a younger version of Sharon. He was a warhorse, always volunteering for the most dangerous missions. Battle scars were scattered all over his body, but he kept joking, “The bullet that would kill me has not been made yet.” His A company was always charged with the most dangerous missions. A few weeks before, when Arik had decided to send Motta Gur's D Company on a raid to Beth Zurif, in the Hebron hills, instead of A Company, Suppapo burst into tears and didn't speak to Motta for several days.

But that night Suppapo was delighted. Arik had instructed him to capture the Egyptian base and blow up its main structures. That very morning Danny Matt had met Suppapo and his young bride in Tel Aviv. They were on their way to receive the keys to their new apartment, Suppapo revealed proudly.

He now led the charge of his men but made a fatal mistake. He mistook a water-pumping facility, surrounded by army tents and positions, for the enemy base. The Egyptians at the facility opened automatic fire on the attackers. After a short firefight, the paratroopers captured the camp.

Suddenly, shots were heard and bullets rained on the paratroopers from the dark compound across the road. The soldiers heard Davidi's voice: “Suppapo, that's a mistake! The camp is on your right!”

Suppapo realized his mistake and darted toward the gate of the compound, followed by two of his men. The enemy's fire increased.

A bullet hit Suppapo's eye and exited through his forehead. A platoon commander, Lieutenant Uzi Eilam, dragged Suppapo's body to a ditch beside the road, where some of the wounded lay. Uzi himself had been wounded; a bullet had shattered his hand, but he kept fighting.

The heavy machine guns kept firing. Company A was dispersed and confused. A feeling of defeat started spreading among the men.

Suddenly Davidi appeared beside them, calmly walking on the road as if the Egyptian bullets were not flying around him. He stood by a eucalyptus tree, exposed to the enemy's fire. Uzi jumped up and stood by him.

“What's going on, Uzi?” Davidi asked evenly.

“Suppapo was killed and we have quite a few wounded.”

“Where are they firing from?” Davidi asked.

Uzi pointed: “From here and from there.”

Davidi and Uzi threw hand grenades on the Egyptian positions, and one of the soldiers blew up the closest machine-gun nest. Davidi assembled the company and Uzi shouted loudly,“Those of my men who are unhurt—follow me!” He and four of his men found a hole in the camp fence and entered. A paratrooper was killed, but Uzi surprised the Egyptians from the back, blasting their positions one after the other. Several Egyptians were killed while others escaped. In a matter of minutes the paratroopers conquered the entire compound. The battalion sapper led the “porters,” laden with explosives, into the camp, and soon all the buildings were blown up. Davidi had Suppapo's men prepare stretchers for the wounded and the dead. Breaching his legendary calm Davidi called out to the men, “Company A lions! Carry on as you did so far. Go on like tigers!”