Six Days (36 page)

DAY 4

8 June 1967

Sinai

Sharon's division, minus his infantry brigade, had a difficult journey south to Nakhl, which is in the centre of the Sinai desert. They slept ‘like the dead' for two hours just before dawn while the engineers cleared mines. After first light they moved on until they saw an entire brigade of Egyptian Stalin tanks, reinforced by self-propelled guns. When the Israelis went forward to engage them, the Stalins did not move. They had been abandoned intact. Their commander Brigadier Abd el-Naby was captured a little later. He said he had left them the way they were because ‘my orders did not say to destroy my tanks … if I had blown up my tanks the Jews would have heard me. It makes a lot of noise to destroy a tank.'

Sharon sent an officer up in a helicopter. He saw a column of Egyptian armour approaching. Sharon hurriedly set up an ambush. Fighting started at ten in the morning, with the Israelis destroying around 60 Egyptian tanks, around 100 guns and more than 300 other vehicles. Hundred of Egyptians were killed and wounded. At least 5000 more managed to escape the carnage and moved away into the desert. Many of them died of exhaustion, heat stroke and thirst. When the fighting stopped at around 2:30 p.m., Sharon surveyed the battlefield. ‘This was a valley of death. I came out of it like an old man. Hundreds were killed. There were burning tanks everywhere. One had the feeling that man was nothing. A sand-storm had been churned up by the tanks. The noise was tremendous … vehicles loaded with ammunition were exploding all along the line. The dead lay all around.'

After the war Ariel Sharon offered a blunt assessment:

I think the Egyptian soldiers are very good. They are simple and ignorant but they are strong and disciplined. They are good gunners, good diggers and good shooters – but their officers are shit, they can fight only according to what they planned before. Once we had broken through, except for the minefield between Bir Hassneh and Nakhl, which was probably there before the war, the Egyptian officers placed no mines and laid no ambushes to block our line of advance, but some soldiers, particularly at the Mitla [Pass] where we blocked their line of retreat, fought to the death in an attempt to break westwards towards the canal.

Brigadier Abdel Moneim Khalil's paratroopers had lost men throughout Wednesday to Israeli air raids, but they were dug in and dispersed while they were under attack and it could have been worse. By the early hours of Thursday they were on the move towards the Suez canal, still a relatively intact fighting unit. All along the horizon black smoke was rising from dozens of fires. Coming in the opposite direction was an envoy from Field Marshal Amer in Cairo, sent to check rumours that the brigadier had abandoned his men. Khalil pointed to his troops, still armed and well disciplined. The envoy relaxed and told him about what had been happening at Amer's headquarters since Monday. Like most of the Egyptian officer corps, Khalil liked Amer, who had promoted him. But he had always thought he would crack up under pressure. Once, during the war in Yemen, they had been discussing a plan for an offensive that was likely to cost many Egyptian lives. Amer had withdrawn from the meeting to return to his bedroom. Khalil went to see what had happened to the field marshal. ‘I went into Amer's bedroom. He was sitting down, with his head tilted back. You could see the veins in his temples pounding. I told him he was tired and gave him an aspirin and some water.' Amer was grateful for the attention. When Khalil suggested it would be more efficient to cancel the offensive and bribe the local tribesmen instead, Amer agreed.

Standing in the desert, Khalil wondered what state Amer was in by now. At dawn, Khalil and his men started to cross the Suez canal. As they moved over to the west bank of the canal, engineers were dismantling the bridge beneath them. By the time their self-propelled guns arrived the bridge was down. They had to push the guns into the canal. Khalil was pleased. He had extracted his men successfully, with only moderate losses. But all around them was chaos. Officers were stopping convoys and frantically redeploying every soldier they could see to the town of Suez, which they were certain was Israel's next target. Khalil rang Amer when he arrived at Suez. ‘He gave me orders that were puzzling, confusing and unexpected, to sack the head of the 1st Armoured Brigade, take over the command and take them back to the Mitla Pass, where Amer said Israeli paratroops were landing.'

It was 0500. Khalil had no intention of obeying Amer's order. As a paratroop commander, he thought it was madness to take over an armoured unit at a moment's notice and then lead it into battle. Instead, he crossed to the east bank of the canal, found the general he was supposed to replace, did not tell him he was sacked, only that he had to take his men to the pass. ‘When I got back to Suez, I called Amer from the Governor's office, who gave me another weird order. He said, have you gone to Mitla? I said, I'm getting ready. He said, good, now you're also commander of a mechanised infantry brigade … take that to Mitla too. I went to the brigade's commander, Suad Hassan, and told him to follow the other armoured brigade to the Mitla. I'll stay here to supervise. It was ridiculous.'

Another Egyptian commander determined not to obey Amer's orders was Major-General Saad el Shazli. He had been hunkered down since Monday with his force of 1500 men in an L-shaped defile just inside Israel. ‘There were some long-distance skirmishes, but during that time we were not in a war.' He had heard nothing from Cairo until seven on Wednesday evening. Shazli says they yelled at him: ‘What are you doing there? The troops have pulled out, you have to withdraw immediately. I knew I'd be attacked if I followed orders. So I said yes, but I didn't do it. We waited until it was dark and started moving across the desert. We moved cross country all night.' By dawn on Thursday 8 June, when they had crossed 100 kilometres, they were discovered by the Israeli air force and attacked. ‘We only had machine guns against the aircraft. When the soldiers saw they weren't doing anything they stopped firing. I shouted at them to keep firing. It was good for morale. They didn't feel so powerless.'

Shazli's unit took casualties of 15 per cent. By the standards of the Egyptian army in the Sinai that week, that left him with a formation that was almost intact. They crossed the Suez canal at dusk. Six years later Shazli was chief of staff of the Egyptian army. He was responsible for the assault across the Suez canal at the start of the 1973 war, which was Egypt's greatest modern military feat and Israel's rudest military shock.

Cairo

Cairo had become very uncomfortable for Americans. A siege mentality developed inside the US Embassy in Cairo as reports came in from across the Arab world that demonstrators were gathering almost everywhere that the United States had posts or property. In Dharan, the oil capital of Saudi Arabia, mobs attacked US-owned installations. In Syria the US Consulate in Aleppo was attacked and burned. Ambassador Nolte cabled: ‘Almost total defeat UAR [Egyptian] armed forces is beginning to sink in on populace … we think there is a danger situation here may deteriorate rapidly and that even if the government willing to protect us it may be unable to do so.' A liner was already on its way from Greece to evacuate 800 Americans, but Nolte was worried that it would be too slow. Edgily, he added a note for the commander of the Sixth Fleet. If necessary, did he have enough landing craft to pick them up from ‘some beach west of Alexandria'?

The CIA produced a grim summary of what was happening for President Johnson. Americans in Jordan could become the targets of angry refugees from the West Bank. Nasser was refusing to accept the UN's ceasefire order. Israel seemed to be ignoring it on the Jordanian front. In Cairo the Egyptian leadership was in a state of panic. Nasser was ‘desperate and might do almost anything to maintain his position'.

The English language
Egyptian Gazette
was still insisting that ‘Arab Forces Inflict Big Losses on the Israelis' on its front page. The BBC was reporting that Jordan had accepted a ceasefire and Israel had reached the Suez canal, but Cairo Radio was still making the best of it. It claimed that UAR forces had regrouped at Sharm el Sheikh and had annihilated a regiment of Israeli paratroopers: ‘Today Moshe Dayan, the mouse of the desert, is speechless … Our forces in Sinai have minced his armoured brigade, destroyed it and turned it into fragments and shambles of burnt iron.' In the streets radios blasted out military music in between news bulletins.

Moscow

The Egyptians had never been the most satisfactory allies for the Russians. For a start they found the West attractive, which made the Soviets feel second-best. A member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party remonstrated with Mohamed Heikal, Nasser's favourite journalist. ‘We give you all this aid,' he said, ‘but what do we get out of it? You still talk, and sometimes even write, like Westerners. Why, for example, are there no Soviet films on show in Cairo, but only American ones?'

Heikal replied that most Soviet films were mainly crude efforts about the Second World War, which Egyptians would not go to see. The Russian was insistent. ‘But if you used the right propaganda and educated people, they would be persuaded to go to them. In any case, even granting that people don't want to see our films, why should you let them see American films? These are poison. The result of showing them is that whenever the West chose to beckon, you'll go running to them.'

The Americans, on the other hand, were starting to look at Israel with new eyes. They were delighted that their ally was stronger than Russia's. Western weapons had beaten Soviet weapons. Richard Helms, the director of Central Intelligence, noted with relish that backing Egypt had turned into a bigger miscalculation for the Soviets than the Cuban missile crisis.

In Moscow post-mortems were starting about why Egypt had fallen apart so quickly. Before the war even started one Soviet ambassador was saying loudly enough for the CIA to overhear that the Arabs would lose because ‘they are cowards'. He also could not understand why the USSR had given Egypt so many weapons. Another Soviet official grumbled to the CIA that Moscow had overestimated the Arabs and underestimated the Israelis. He claimed that the USSR had wanted to create another Vietnam for the Americans, but the plan backfired because the Egyptians were so incompetent. But most of the evidence from the Kremlin suggests it was reacting to events it could not control. The Russians were not asked about reimposing a blockade on Eilat. They tried to contain the war once it started, which was difficult because the Egyptians would not tell them the truth about what was happening. The Russians warned Nasser not to count on direct Soviet intervention.

The flip side of Egypt's untrue tale about British and American aircraft bombing them was anger at the Russians for not providing the same service against the Israelis. A columnist in the Cairo newspaper
Al Akhbar
dreamt of being able to turn every word he wrote into a deadly poison ‘to pour down the throats' of Kosygin, Johnson and Harold Wilson.

Nablus

Qalqilya's population started arriving in Nablus during the night. Raymonda Hawa Tawil emerged from her cellar ‘to find our house an island in a human sea. Astonished, I gaze out of the window at one of the most amazing, horrifying scenes I have ever beheld. Outside our house, in the road, in the olive groves, there are literally thousands of people – old, young, families with children, pregnant women, cripples. In their arms or on their backs they carry bundles with a few possessions. Young women clutch babies. Everywhere, the same exhausted broken figures, the stunned, desperate faces … people are sitting there weeping from misery, horror and frustration. Parents beg bread for their children.' She drove into Nablus in a car marked with a red cross to approach the Israelis for food for the refugees. ‘Everywhere we see tanks, roadblocks, barbed wire. Some houses are on fire.' One of the women who were begging for food was the mother of Fayek Abdul Mezied. ‘It was so humiliating for her to be reduced to begging. But she did it for us. I felt dispossessed and lost in my own homeland.' Thirty-five years later, remembering it made him weep.

*   *   *

Tawfik Mahmud Afaneh, the commander of Qalqilya's battered national guard detachment, had hung on in the town until Wednesday morning. Until one of his men found their positions empty, he had no idea that the remains of the Jordanian garrison had slipped away on Tuesday evening. They certainly had not told him. It was hopeless to carry on. He told his surviving men to save themselves and headed for the hills on foot with three of his fighters to try to find their families. They still carried their weapons and their last few magazines of bullets. The four men walked towards Nablus, stopping in villages along the way, asking if anyone had seen their wives and children. Once the villagers told them that the Israelis had smashed the Jordanian army, they buried their weapons. After eight days Tawfik found his family, hungry but unharmed, in a village south of Nablus. When he was with them, he started thinking about everything that had gone wrong. He had fought in Qalqilya to be part of what he had believed would be an Arab victory to avenge the catastrophe of 1948. He thought the Arab forces were strong. After all, Cairo Radio praised them almost every day. Tawfik was shocked by all the lies that the defeat had exposed, lies that Arab leaders told to their own people. He had done his best, he was happy to be back with his family, but he felt beaten and desperate.

Eleven-year-old Maa'rouf Zahran was with his family in Nablus. They had left Qalqilya on Monday, after loudspeakers from the Israeli side of the border told civilians to get out. On the way out, they found his lost sister. Until the shooting died away, Maa'rouf watched Jordanian soldiers and the national guardsmen firing at Israeli warplanes coming in low to attack. Then they hid in caves until it felt safe to move.