No Mission Is Impossible (9 page)

Arik immediately assembled a “patrol team” under the command of Motta Gur. At the head of the column Arik placed six half-tracks;
behind them the half-track of the tanks force commander Zvi Dahab and Danny Matt; then three tanks; then the brigade deputy commander, Haka Hofi's, half-track; six more half-tracks full of paratroopers; a battery of heavy 120-millimeter mortars; and several equipment-carrying trucks. The paratrooper commando joined the column not as fighters but as tourists who came to enjoy the trip to the canal. Davidi made a funny hat out of a newspaper, to protect himself from the sun.

And Arik called all this battalion-sized convoy a “patrol.”

At 12:30
P.M
. the convoy entered the pass. They quickly advanced in the narrow canyon, between two towering mounts.

And there the Egyptians were waiting.

H
undreds of Egyptian soldiers were entrenched in dugouts, natural caves in the rock and behind low stone fences. On the roadside, camouflaged by bushes and bales of thorns, stood armored cars carrying Bren machine guns. Companies of soldiers were positioned above them, armed with bazookas, recoilless guns, anti-tank guns and midsized machine guns. And on a third line above, in positions and cubbyholes in the rock, lay soldiers armed with rifles and automatic weapons.

At twelve-fifty, the half-tracks advancing in the pass were hit by a lethal volley of bullets and shells. A hail of bullets drummed on the half-tracks' armored plates. The first half-track swayed to and fro and stopped, its commander and driver dead; the other soldiers, some of them wounded, jumped off the vehicle and tried to find cover.

Motta Gur's half-track was about 150 yards behind. He ordered his men to advance toward the damaged vehicle. Three half-tracks reached the immobile vehicle and were hit too. Motta got around them and tried to escape the ambush, but he was hit as well. He and his men sought refuge in a shallow ditch beside the road.

Haka, who was in the middle of the column, realized that his men had blundered into a deadly ambush. He ordered Davidi to get back and stop the vehicles that had not entered the pass yet. Davidi unloaded the mortars and opened fire on the hills. Haka himself broke through the enemy lines with a company and two tanks. The armored vehicles bypassed
the stuck half-tracks and emerged on the other side of the pass, two kilometers down the road.

Mitla, full of burned, smoldering vehicles from the Egyptian convoy from the day before, now became a killing field for the paratroopers. Four Egyptian Meteor jets dived toward the column, blew up eight trucks carrying fuel and ammunition, and hit several heavy mortars.

Motta sent an urgent message to Haka, asking him to come back into the pass and rescue the trapped soldiers. He also requested from Davidi that Micha Kapusta's commando should attack the Egyptian positions from behind.

Micha's commando—the finest paratrooper unit—climbed to the tops of the hills. His platoon commanders started moving down the northern slope, annihilating the Egyptian positions. But at this point a terrible misunderstanding occurred.

The commando fighters that destroyed the enemy positions on the northern slope clearly saw the road. They didn't notice that the slope turned to a sheer drop almost at their feet, and most of the Egyptians were entrenched there. They also failed to notice other Egyptian positions that were located on the southern slope, across the road.

Suddenly, Micha's men were hit by a hail of bullets and missiles from the southern slope. Micha thought that the trapped paratroopers by the road were firing at him. Furious, he yelled at Davidi on his radio to make Motta's people stop firing, while Motta, who couldn't see the enemy positions on the southern slope that were firing at the commando, did not understand why Micha didn't continue his advance.

These were tragic moments. “Go! Attack!” Davidi yelled at Micha, while Micha saw his men falling. The paratroopers dashed forward under heavy fire. Some reached the edge of the rocky drop without noticing it and rolled down, in full sight of the Egyptians, who shot them.

Facing heavy fire, Micha decided to retreat to a nearby hill. But another Israeli company appeared on top of that hill and mistakenly started firing on Micha's men. Micha's fury and pain echoed in the walkie-talkies. His soldiers were fired at from all sides, by Egyptians and by Israelis.

At last Davidi understood the mix-up that had caused Motta's and Micha's contradictory reports. He made a fateful decision: send a jeep that would attract the enemy fire into the pass. Davidi's observers would then locate the sources of the Egyptian fire.

For that mission he needed a volunteer who would be ready to sacrifice his life.

“Who volunteers to get to Motta?” he asked.

Several men jumped right away. Davidi chose Ken-Dror, his own driver.

Ken-Dror knew he was going to his death. He started the jeep and sped to the pass, immediately becoming the target of heavy fire. The jeep was crushed and Ken-Dror collapsed beside it. His sacrifice was in vain. Motta and Micha didn't succeed in pinpointing the sources of enemy fire.

Davidi sent a half-track with four soldiers and a lieutenant to the pass. The carrier reached Motta, loaded some wounded soldiers and returned, unharmed.

And the sources of the shooting still were not discovered.

Davidi again ordered Micha to storm the Egyptian positions. His soldiers ran again down the slope. Another platoon was hit by crossfire from the southern hill. And Micha suddenly saw the abrupt drop at his feet and understood where the Egyptian positions were.

At that moment he was shot. A bullet pierced his chest, he lost his breath and he felt he was going to die.

“Dovik!” he shouted at his deputy. “Take over!”

A bullet hit Dovik in the head. The two wounded men started crawling up the hill. In front of them they saw other paratroopers. They feared their comrades would shoot them by mistake. “Davidi! Davidi” they shouted hoarsely.

At 5:00
P.M
. a rumble of tanks suddenly echoed in the narrow canyon. Haka's two tanks returned from the western exit of the pass and turned the tide. They first set their guns toward the southern hill and blasted many of the enemy positions. Egyptian soldiers started fleeing in a disorderly way but were mown down by the paratroopers' machine guns. Simultaneously, two paratrooper companies reached the crests of
the two ridges rising on both sides of the road. They came from the western entrance to the pass and systematically mopped up the Egyptian positions. They agreed that their finishing line would be a burning Egyptian half-track in the center of the canyon. Other fighters would come from the east and destroy the remaining enemy positions on the northern and southern hills.

At nightfall fifty paratroopers scaled the hills—half of them, commanded by a twice-decorated veteran, Oved Ladijanski, turned to the southern ridge; the other half, under the leadership of a slim and soft-spoken kibbutz member, Levi Hofesh, attacked the northern one. Their goal was to reach the burning half-track with no Egyptian soldier left behind.

Oved's unit moved up the hill in silence, holding their fire. They reached a fortified machine gun position, hewn in the rocky slope. They attacked it from below with hand grenades, but some of those bounced off the rock and exploded. Oved threw a grenade toward the machine gun, but the grenade rolled down. “It's coming back,” Oved whispered to the soldier beside him, pushed him aside and covered him with his body. The grenade exploded against Oved's chest and killed him. One of his comrades succeeded in dropping a grenade into the position, burst in and killed the Egyptians cowering inside.

The survivors of Oved's unit kept advancing and destroying the enemy positions. Levi Hofesh did the same on the northern hill. He realized that the Egyptians had placed their forces in three tiers, one above the other. He divided his soldiers in three detachments, and each mopped up one of the enemy lines. The fighting was desperate; the trapped Egyptians had nothing to lose. It took the paratroopers two hours to advance three hundred yards. Shortly before 8:00
P.M
., Levi completed his operation, leaving behind ninety Egyptian dead.

The paratroopers now were the masters of the Mitla Pass. During the night, cargo planes landed nearby and evacuated the wounded—Dovik and Micha, Danny Matt and another 120 paratroopers. Among the seriously wounded was also Yehuda Ken Dror, hanging to life by a thread. In a few months he would succumb to his wounds.

Thirty-eight paratroopers and two hundred Egyptian soldiers died in the Mitla battle. Four more Israelis would die later of their wounds. Dayan seethed with fury, accusing Sharon of losing so many lives in a totally unnecessary battle. Ben-Gurion, alerted, refused to interfere in a row between two senior officers whom he especially liked. But the Mitla battle actually sent Sharon to an informal exile and delayed his advancement in the IDF by several years.

The Mitla battle was gratuitous, indeed. Yet it was a bravely fought battle, in which Sharon's paratroopers demonstrated his principles that one doesn't abandon comrades on the battlefield, even if it costs human lives, and an IDF team doesn't bend, doesn't give up and doesn't retreat until the mission is achieved.

The Sinai campaign lasted seven days and ended with an Israeli victory. Israel had beaten the Egyptian Army and conquered all of the Sinai Peninsula. The Franco-British invasion, on the other hand, failed miserably. The Israeli triumph marked the beginning of eleven years of de facto peace on the southern border that would abruptly end with the Six Day War.

   
RAFAEL “RAFUL” EITAN, COMMANDER OF THE 890TH PARATROOP BATTALION AND LATER THE CHIEF OF STAFF

          
[From an excerpt from his book,
A Soldier's Story: The Life and Times of an Israeli War Hero,
written with Dov Goldstein, Maariv, 1985]

              
“I was standing closest to the aircraft door. A bit of excitement always hits you over the parachuting site, even if you've done it many times before. All the more so at the start of a large-scale military campaign, at such a distance from Israel. You're plunging into the unknown, into enemy territory. The cockpit of the next plane in the formation was directly across from me, mere feet away. I waved to the copilot. He held his head in both hands, as if to say, ‘What you're about to do . . .'

              
“Red light. Green light. I'm in the air, floating down, over the Mitla crossroads. It's five in the afternoon, dusk. The sun
is setting. You can hear a few shots. My feet hit the ground. I release myself from my parachute, get organized quickly. We take our weapons out of their cases. We hold positions in the staging territory. The companies spread out. It's already dark. We put barriers into place. We lay mines. We dig in, hole up. There are trenches there from the days of the Turks. This makes our work easier. Our two forces take positions at the Parker Memorial, to the west, and en route to Bir Hasna, to the north. We mark the ground intended for receiving the supplies being parachuted in.

              
“At night I went to sleep. . . . One must muster his forces before experiencing the pressure of combat. One must remove the stress and the emotions to a secluded corner. I dug myself a foxhole, padded it with the cardboard from the parachuted supplies, spread down one or two parachutes, and tucked myself in. Good night by the Mitla.”

The Suez campaign brings Israel almost eleven years of peace. In 1963, Ben-Gurion resigns and is replaced by Levi Eshkol. The chief of staff is Yitzhak Rabin. Ben-Gurion, Dayan and Peres are the leaders of a small party, Rafi, created after a violent clash between Ben-Gurion and Eshkol. On May 15, 1967, Egypt's President Nasser suddenly triggers a sequence of military moves that threaten Israel with annihilation: he announces that the end of Israel is near. Israel's efforts to obtain the support of the Great Powers end in failure. France switches camps; President De Gaulle, Israel's great ally, unexpectedly imposes an embargo on weapons for Israel. Under popular pressure Eshkol reluctantly appoints Moshe Dayan as defense minister in a Government of National Unity in which opposition leader Menachem Begin is minister without portfolio. Israel feels it has no choice but to attack Egypt before it, itself, is attacked and invaded.

June 5, 1967

A
t four-thirty in the morning, every pilot in the Israeli Air Force was awakened. Their planes stood ready for takeoff, fueled and armed, at the Ramat David, Hatzor, Tel Nof and Hatzerim airbases, and even at the civilian airport in Lod. In their cockpits, the pilots, barred from operating their communications systems, maintained complete radio silence; the control towers had also gone quiet. It was forbidden that anyone, anywhere, might receive even a hint of the massive takeoff. The ground crews directed the planes using signals from colored lanterns. At seven-fourteen, the first planes, French antiquated Ouragans, took flight, followed two minutes later by another takeoff of Ouragans. After they roared into the morning skies, in accordance with a timetable calculated down to the last minute, Vautours, Mystères, Super Mystères and Mirages took flight. The planes took off at a frenzied pace, from several bases, at a frequency of a plane per minute; at the Hatzor airbase, seventy-seven planes took
off between seven-fourteen and eight-fifteen, an average of one every forty-eight seconds. Very quickly, there were 183 planes in the sky—in fact, Israel's entire air force. They entered formations of four and set forth, each on its own flight path. Twelve Mirages were left to guard the skies over Israel.

The planes' takeoff was the opening act of the Six Day War.

T
he descent into war had begun three weeks earlier, on Israel's Independence Day, May 15. Divisions of the Egyptian Army had unexpectedly thundered into the Sinai Peninsula, stationing themselves along the Israel border. Egypt's president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, expelled the UN observers from Sinai, closed the Straits of Tiran and signed military agreements with Syria and Jordan. Even Iraq announced it was joining in. The Arab street reacted with tremendous excitement, the masses dancing in the squares, waving flags and posters, and screaming slogans of rage and hatred against Israel. Nasser's image appeared across the media, smiling and confident, surrounded by Egyptian fighter pilots, young eagles clad in their G-suits, at the Bir Gifgafa airbase. Turning to the television cameras, Nasser made his historic statement, “If Israel wants war,
ahlan wa sahlan
—welcome!”

Radio and television across the Arab world reported Israel's imminent demise. Britain and the United States couldn't find a way to solve the crisis and reopen the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. The president of France, Charles de Gaulle, abandoned his alliance with Israel and imposed an embargo on the delivery of arms to the IDF.

The people of Israel sensed the danger of extermination hovering overhead. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and his government appeared hesitant, afflicted with paralysis and trying to buy time. The public forced the leadership to establish a unity government, in which Moshe Dayan, the celebrated hero of the Sinai campaign, was appointed defense minister.

On June 4, the government decided to go to war. The first step would be the air force's Operation Focus, and victory in the war would depend on its success.

Operation Focus had been designed to wipe out the Egyptian Air Force—or, if needed, all enemy air forces—on the ground. Rafi Sivron, a young captain, had prepared the original plan, which rested on a surprise attack on the enemy's airfields, the bombing of the runways to prevent landings and takeoffs, and the destruction of planes on the ground. In 1965, Sivron had been taken on by Major Yossi Sarig, a former commander of the 110 Squadron's Vautour planes, who had been appointed the head of the Attack Section within the Operations Department. The new role fit Sarig like a glove. He had previously carried out dozens of daring photo-surveillance missions, both during the day and at night, over almost every Arab airfield in Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. He knew the fields like the back of his hand. In light of the drastic changes that had occurred in the Middle East and within the region's air forces, Sarig immersed himself in the detailed, constantly changing plan for the operation. The surprise factor would be an essential condition of the plan's success. The attack planes would need to strike the Egyptian airfields suddenly and at precisely the same moment. Consequently, they would need to take off and fly in complete radio silence, at the lowest possible altitude—below the zone covered by radar—and to reach their targets at exactly the same time. Most of the flights would need to be carried out over the Mediterranean Sea in order to reach Egypt from the north. Others, directed at the most remote airfields, would fly over Israel's Negev Desert and the Red Sea. It was necessary to lay out precise flight paths and timetables, and endless drills were conducted involving takeoffs and flights at an altitude of up to one hundred feet above sea level.

To carry out its plan, the air force would need 530 attack planes, even though it possessed just two hundred. The solution, it turned out, was born out of a remark made by David Ben-Gurion during a visit to the Ramat David airbase, when he asked the base commander, “How long does it take you to prepare a plane that has just returned for another mission?”

That vital period of time—for refueling from tankers, bringing in ammunition trucks and more—was between an hour and an hour and a half. Ben-Gurion's remark was a wake-up call for the air force staff,
who decided to shorten drastically each plane's prep time before its next flight. Fueling pipelines and hoses were laid to the underground hangars where the planes were parked so that they could be refilled the moment they arrived. In each hangar, a load of munitions and bombs for one or two missions was kept at the ready, and the moment it was placed on the plane, another load was sent to the site for the next flight. Ground crews were trained to perform all the preparations and checks in record time. Their commanders stood next to the planes with stopwatches, assessing ways to cut additional minutes and seconds. Contests began among the squadrons' air crews and even among the different bases.

Each fighter plane's prep time was shortened to between five and seven minutes; as a result, the air force's power increased several times over, as the number of planes was multiplied by the number of additional missions they could now carry out. And, as the Arab Air Forces' planes spent longer periods on the ground between flights, it was possible for Israel's Air Force to launch several offensive waves with a much smaller number of aircraft.

The bombing of the airfields was now planned. At some, the runways had been paved with concrete, and with asphalt at others. Each type of runway required a different weapon. The air force had bombs weighing 110, 154, 551 and 1,102 pounds, and needed to match the types of explosives and attack planes with the airfields. Some airfields had just one runway, but Egypt's MiGs could also take off from the taxiway that ran parallel to it; it would be necessary to hit that strip as well. At other airfields, the runways intersected. Several had runways that were more than 1.85 miles long, even though the MiGs needed only a third of that distance; in those cases, it would be necessary to divide the runway into thirds and hit each part with precision strikes.

The research lab at Israel Military Industries (IMI), under the management of the engineer Avraham Makov, had overseen the development of the anti-runway penetration bomb, which would be dropped from roughly 330 feet overhead. A tiny parachute would immediately eject, directing the nose of the bomb at a sixty-degree angle toward the ground; simultaneously, a retro-rocket in its tail would activate, propelling
it with great force toward the runway. The 154-pound bomb would penetrate the concrete runway and explode six seconds later, leaving a crater nearly five feet deep and more than sixteen feet in diameter. IMI had also developed a large anti-runway penetration bomb of even greater strength and, by the start of the war, had supplied the air force with sixty-six of the larger model and 187 of the smaller.

The question was how to bomb the runways. Would a plane carrying two bombs drop both during the same pass or would it need to carry out another pass? What should be done in the event of strong winds? What were the chances of strong winds in the morning? And how much damage would the bombs cause the runways?

In order to check, it was decided that the IAF would bomb Israel's Hatzor airbase. At the time, the runway had been taken out of service for repairs. The crews' families were evacuated, and at night IAF planes dived over Hatzor and bombed the runway. After the results were assessed, the air force also calculated how long it would take the Egyptians to plug the holes in their runways and restore the fields that had been bombed. The estimate was roughly forty minutes, starting from the moment the Egyptian base commander took a jeep, went to check the damage and ordered the holes filled in. But the air force wanted the repairs to last two hours and then for the second wave of planes to bomb the field again.

The solution: bombs with timed fuses that could lodge at a great depth without blowing up. The Egyptian commander would surely order that the craters be covered over, and after a predetermined amount of time, the buried bombs would explode, causing damage that would again paralyze the field. It was agreed that any formation going out on a bombing mission would have a bomb or two with a delay mechanism.

And how could Israel be defended while all its planes were in Egypt? Air Force Commander Mordechai (“Motti”) Hod took a tremendous risk by placing Israel in the care of ten to twelve Mirages. The air force also decided that several Mirage formations would attack enemy airfields close to Israel so that they could return immediately and defend the country as needed.

The final question: when to attack? Some commanders preferred last light before sunset, knowing that the Egyptians didn't fly at night. But intelligence reported that Egyptian Air Force preparedness focused on first light: the pilots got up early, went out on reconnaissance missions and landed at their bases around 7:30
A.M
. (6:30 A.M. Israeli time). Then they would go to drink coffee and eat breakfast. At the same time, the base commanders and General Staff officers were on their way to their offices. Hod himself explained, “When I go from my house in Tzahala to headquarters at seven forty-five
A.M
. and they tell me on my Motorola that there's a problem, I can't do anything.”

The decision was made: the attack would be at 7:45 in the morning.

The plan was rehearsed endlessly. Everything was prepared, but no war appeared on the horizon—until, on May 15, 1967, everything changed.

Sarig had completed his role and departed for the United States to receive Skyhawk aircraft for a new squadron. But ten days later he received an urgent call telling him to come back to Israel immediately. He was driven straight from Lod airport to the so-called “Pit,” the underground operational command post at IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv, where he reclaimed his former position and started receiving updates. Intelligence reported that the Egyptian Air Force was changing alert levels and its Tupolev Tu-16 bombers departed for more distant airfields, such as Luxor and Ras Banas.

Hod, Sarig and Ezer Weizman, the IDF's deputy chief of staff and a former commander of the IAF, appeared at a General Staff forum, and Sarig presented Operation Focus. General Herzel Shafir asked, “And what about Syria and Jordan?”

Sarig replied, “Three hours later, we'll carry out Focus in Syria and Jordan, too.”

General Yitzhak Hofi interjected, “Look at these air force guys. Ezer Weizman and Motti Hod are bragging, as usual, but now a major is talking this way, too?”

On the night of June 4, final briefings were conducted with the base commanders. The order issued to the pilots was to maintain complete radio silence: “Even if there's a problem with your engine, if you need to
come back or even abandon your plane, don't turn on your communications system.” The pilots were permitted only the use of a watch, a compass and a map and could have no other aid on hand to help lead them to their targets in Egypt. They were allocated five to seven minutes to bomb the runways and to carry out three more passes over the airfields, to strafe planes and other targets in the area.

The pilots were sent to bed early so that they would be fresh by morning. Many couldn't get to sleep. At stake was a tremendous operation whose goal was the destruction of the entire Egyptian Air Force. The outcome of the war, and even the existence of Israel, depended on it.

One of the pilots, Yair Neuman, wrote in his squadron's log, “June 5, 1967. A day before the great fall of Egypt and its satellites. My hand is shaking!” (Neuman was killed on the first day of the war.) Another pilot wrote, “We felt as though the fate of the entire people of Israel were placed on our shoulders.” Another penned, “The eyes of all the world's Jews are on us, in deep anxiety,” and his friend added, “God is with the Jews—the burning bush and the burning tanks are in Sinai.”

At seven-fourteen, the first plane rocketed skyward, followed by 182 more.