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The height of hutzpa DAY 2 For Golda Meir, the descent into the General Staff "Pit" the morning after Yom Kippur could have served as metaphor for what she would experience this day — a descent into a trough of despair deeper and more charged than any she had ever imagined. The visit itself was less devastating than it might have been, thanks to the positive twist put by chief of staff David Elazar on reports from the battlefield. He made it sound like the situation, while serious, was in the process of being resolved, or at least stabilized. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan knew otherwise. His visit to Northern Command at dawn had colored his mood darkly. With his visit to Southern Command later in the morning, concern turned to despondency. The war room at Umm Hashiba was better organized than Northern Command’s and Gen. Shmuel Gonen was far more confident than Gen. Yitzhak Hofi, his northern counterpart. That, however, was part of the problem. "He was too sure of himself,‘ Dayan would write, ’about knowing what was happening and understanding the situation as it really was." With the arrival of the reserve divisions, Gonen told him, it would be possible to drive the Egyptians out of Sinai and perhaps to cross to the West Bank as well. Annoyed at Gonen’s easy optimism, Dayan told him that top priority must be given to forming a fallback line that could be held if the current front crumbled. The Bar-Lev forts must be given up. Garrisons that were surrounded should attempt to make their way out on foot after dark. Wounded should be left behind to be taken prisoner. On the helicopter ride back to Tel Aviv, Dayan pondered the implications of what he had seen on his visits to the two fronts. Like everyone else, he had been shocked by the Arab attack. Unlike anyone else, except Elazar, the major burden of responsibility for what had to be done fell upon him. What he sensed now was Israel’s mortality and it shook him. He was gripped, he would later write, by an anxiety he had never before known. An unspoken premise on which Israel had built its defense strategy — and he its prime architect — was that the Arabs they would face in the next war were the same Arabs they had so handily defeated in the Six Day War and the Sinai Campaign of 1956. It was a premise that permitted strategic corner cutting, such as maintaining small forces along the front lines opposite mammoth armies. A single day’s battle had now demonstrated that these were not the same Arabs. Both the Egyptians and Syrians were attacking according to a well thought-out plan — better thought-out, clearly, than Israel’s own. They had been massively supplied with modern weapons by the Soviets, including weapons Israel had no answer for, like the SAM-6 and the Sagger. More troubling still, they were infused with a fighting spirit they had never before shown. They were not running, even when hit hard. Israel had not reckoned on the vital psychological boost the Arabs would derive from having seized the initiative. What concerned Dayan most was not the immediate battle, troubling as that was. Beyond the front lines, beyond Egypt and Syria, lay the rest of the Arab world. Israel’s three million Jews were facing 80 million Arabs. Syria and Egypt might accept a UN-imposed cease-fire but they could renew the fighting at any time with reinforcements from other Arab countries and fresh arms from the Soviet Union. Israel would be steadily worn down. The breadth of Dayan’s strategic vision had become the depth of his despair. Before the helicopter landed at Sde Dov Airfield on the Tel Aviv seafront, he determined to share his nightmare with Elazar and Mrs. Meir. Most Israelis had little doubt that while the situation was difficult, the country had the resilience to recover and win the field. The day before, with the war only two hours old, Dayan himself had spoken optimistically at a meeting with Israeli newspaper editors. "The Egyptians have embarked on a very big adventure they haven’t thought through. After tomorrow afternoon (when the reserves begin to reach the front) I wouldn’t want to be in their place.‘ Now it was tomorrow afternoon and it was Israel that was in trouble, not the Arabs. ’Do you know what I fear most in my heart?‘ he said to Elazar and other senior officers in the Pit upon returning to Tel Aviv. ’That Israel will be left without sufficient arms to defend itself, regardless of where the new line is drawn. This is the war of Israel against the Arabs.‘ This was the message he intended transmitting in the coming hour to Mrs. Meir. ’If you take exception to anything,‘ he said to Elazar, ’tell me now." Elazar did not address Dayan’s apocalyptic visions, only his operational recommendations. He agreed that efforts to reach the Bar-Lev forts should be abandoned and that a second line of defense should be established along the Lateral Road where Sharon and Adan’s divisions were already forming up. However, Elazar favored a counter-attack once the reserves were ready. Dayan departed for his meeting with Golda and her inner cabinet, leaving behind a cavernous gloom among the officers who heard him. For them as for the general public, Dayan was a military icon embodying the nation’s self-confidence and its ability to meet any challenge. He was now probably the most depressed man in the country, certainly the most depressing. The impact of Dayan’s words on Mrs. Meir was predictable. She heard them "in horror,‘ she would write, and the thought of suicide crossed her mind. Her long-time assistant, Ms. Lou Kedar, was at her desk in the room next to the prime minister’s when Mrs. Meir rang after Dayan’s departure. ’Meet me in the corridor,‘ she said. There were other people in Mrs. Meir’s office and she wanted a private space. Although she had the country’s top military and political advisers on call, she could share her deepest feelings only with an old friend. When Kedar emerged into the corridor, Mrs. Meir was already waiting for her. Kedar was shocked at her pallor, which matched the grey jacket she was wearing. Kedar would remember the prime minister leaning heavily against a wall and saying in a low and terrible voice ’Dayan is speaking of surrender." If Dayan had used that word, it is inconceivable that he used it in the conventional sense. But he had spoken of surrendering territory — pulling back from the Bar-Lev line — and of his belief that it would be impossible to force the Egyptians back across the canal. He had offered his resignation, which Mrs. Meir refused. When she asked what his reaction would be if the UN ordered an immediate cease-fire, he said he would grab it, even if this meant the Egyptian army remaining on the east bank of the canal. Mrs. Meir stared hollowly at Kedar, her mind elsewhere. Slowly, the expression on her face changed and color began to seep back into her cheeks. "Get Simha," she said. Kedar heard the familiar determination once again in her voice. Through Ambassador Simha Dinitz in Washington, Mrs. Meir intended to start putting pressure on the American administration for arms. Many excruciating days still lay ahead, but psychologically the prime minister had touched bottom and begun to regain her balance. Many in Israel would be going through similar emotional plunges as the country reeled from the war’s opening blows. Senior officers realized with a stab that they had prepared for the wrong war, that basic assumptions on which their confidence had rested were illusions. The Arab soldiers were not running — they were attacking and they were fighting well with new weapons and new spirit. The Israeli air force was hardly being felt on the battlefield and it was losing planes at an alarming rate. Israeli tank forces had been unable to hold the line on either front except on the northern Golan. Israeli intelligence was not all-knowing; it had been responsible for an astounding glitch that threatened to bring disaster on the country. Everything was coming apart and the war was hardly a day old. If the Arabs had succeeded in accomplishing so much in this span of time, what else lay in store? The soldiers on the front line were generally too busy to spare thoughts about national survival. Sometimes, however, they too were gripped by dark thoughts, particularly airmen who had a broader view. A Phantom pilot who returned to base from a mission over the Golan on Sunday was asked by an operations clerk what it had been like. He described to her columns of dark Syrian tanks rolling slowly across the Golan Heights like hordes of giant ants, with nothing to stop them. Alarmed by his description, the clerk said that her brother, a tank crewman, "is up there.‘ She wanted the pilot to tell her that things would be alright. Instead, he said absently ’was up there,‘ as if nothing could survive the Syrian juggernaut. The acting commander of a Phantom squadron, briefing his pilots after their first day’s encounter with the SAMs, said ’Take a good look at each other. When this war is over, a lot of us won’t be here." For civilians too, the abrupt switch from tranquility and national self-confidence on Yom Kippur afternoon to all-encompassing war and existential alarm — without what psychologists would call "the positive process of anticipatory fear" — was a shock that would not quickly heal. The distress was amplified by realization that the battle lines were not holding. In this, the most perilous period in Israel’s history, the effort to avoid national disaster hinged in good measure on the steady nerves of one man. Given the gloom all about him, given the debacle on the battlefield and the abrupt collapse of the military doctrine on which Israel had rested its security, given too the appalling prospect of national annihilation that was suddenly perceived, David Elazar merits a niche in history’s pantheon of military leadership just by virtue of not losing his head. He was hardly without sin. He had accepted and propagated a doctrine that left the IDF unprepared for this war. He bore responsibility as chief-of-staff for deferring to military intelligence and not seeking partial mobilization in the days before Yom Kippur. He advocated a static defense on the canal in all circumstances, against basic military sense, and it was he who appointed Gonen head of Southern Command. Nor would he be without occasional error in the conduct of the war itself, although the great bulk of his decisions would prove sound. But in the cruel testing, with basic concepts giving way and strong men about him faltering, his was the stable hand on the tiller. Examination of the protocols of his meetings shows the steadiness, and even good humor, with which he directed operations, although there were moments when he too was close to despair. Around his firm presence a calm space emerged where issues could be objectively analyzed and sensible decisions made. In the circumstances, it was not a foregone conclusion that Israel’s center would hold but it did hold and David Elazar was the center. "He was a rock," Golda Meir would later say. It would be on him, rather than Dayan, that she would primarily rely for the difficult decisions that had to be made. Elazar’s coolheadedness in crisis had been noted in 1948 when, as a junior officer in the elite Palmach strike force, he took part in the battle of San Simon Monastery in Jerusalem against hundreds of Arab militiamen. "He had a special tone of voice during a battle,‘ recounted an officer who was there, Mordechai Ben-Porat, ’quiet-like, as if he were singing, as if he were having a friendly chat or explaining something. I didn’t know him before but I remember saying to myself then: ’What a character that one is.’" The harrowing battle helped shape all those who survived it. Several were now senior officers serving under Elazar — among them Raful Eitan, now commanding a division on the Golan. Unlike Dayan, who served up the cruel truth cold, Elazar warmed it to digestibility with an innate optimism. Things, after all, had looked much worse at San Simon and they had come through. At Orkal, the northernmost outpost on the Suez Canal, permission for a break out was received Sunday night. The Egyptians had already captured the entrance to the sprawling compound. As soon as darkness set in, the garrison survivors climbed onto a halftrack sandwiched between the two remaining tanks. The three vehicles charged towards the exit and broke through the surprised Egyptians. Commanding the first tank was Sgt. Shlomo Arman who had been leading the platoon since his officer was killed at the opening of the war. The convoy stopped after two miles to pick up several men from observation posts who had been cut off when the fighting broke out. One of them, Yitzhak Levy, a 33-year-old reservist, climbed into Arman’s tank. The 21-year-old tank commander patted Levy on the shoulder and said "Soldier, you’re saved. There’s nothing that can stop this tank.‘ Levy recognized the confident voice as that of the tank commander he had heard on the radio conducting the battle in Orkal. He had heard him report knocking out 17 tanks. As the convoy started forward again, the halftrack and rear tank were hit by RPGs. Arman reported the ambush to a company officer and said he was going to their assistance. ’Negative,‘ came the response. ’Keep moving.‘ Arman protested but the officer at the other end said ’Negative. They’ll kill you all. Move out of there fast. Out." The tank resumed movement but after 400 yards it too was hit. The crew leaped out to the left and Levy jumped to the right. He landed among a group of Egyptian soldiers. They struck at him with rifles and he punched back. Suddenly, he heard Arman’s voice: "Reservist, where are you?‘ Levy managed to get away in the dark and joined the tank crew plunging through the lagoon. After a few hours, Levy’s strength gave way and the young tank crewmen supported him. But Levy felt he could no longer go on. Leave me, he said. I’ll continue later by myself. ’No one stays in this swamp,‘ said Arman. ’If we make it, we’ll all make it. If we don’t, it’ll be all of us.‘ As they continued on, Arman asked Levy to talk about his wife and children. ’We’ll soon be there," he said. It was close to midnight when they saw the outline of Israeli tanks to their front. "Hey tankers,‘ shouted Arman. ’We’re from the forts." "Don’t move,‘ came the reply. ’Who are you?" "We’re from Orkal." "Who knows you?" Arman gave them the names of his battalion and brigade commanders. "Where in Israel are you from?‘ A series of other questions followed. And then: ’What company are you from?‘ L Company, said Arman. There seemed to be a consultation among the dimly visible figures to their front. ’What company did you say?" "L Company." A tank fired a shell which exploded alongside the five men, killing Arman and another crewman. Levy, who survived intact, would never know why the gunner fired. Another reservist, Yeshayahu Mor, was escaping alone through the lagoon when a voice asked in Arabic "who’s there?" "Me," replied Mor. "Who are you?" "A soldier." Mor, of Yemenite origin, had come on an Egyptian outpost on a dry elevation in the lagoon. The Egyptians could not make out his uniform in the dark and took him for one of their own. They saw that he had been shot in the arm and they dressed the wound. The soldiers offered him coffee, the first hot drink he’d had since the onset of Yom Kippur. Mor managed to avoid saying anything during the night that would indicate his identity. With dawn, however, the Egyptians discovered that the congenial comrade-in-arms with whom they had spent the night was the enemy. He was taken prisoner. In Tel Aviv, when the cabinet met at 9 p.m. Sunday night, Mrs. Meir regretfully noted that Elazar had not yet returned from Sinai. She had come to rely on his positiveness as a balm against the gloom projected by Dayan. However, the defense minister, aware of the demoralizing impact his words had had on his colleagues, made a supreme effort to sound optimistic as he outlined the military picture. He now advocated a quick counterattack across the canal. "The chief-of-staff’s optimism has gotten to me,‘ Dayan acknowledged to the ministers. ’We’ve got to smash the Egyptian armor as soon as possible and also (to smash) the new legend that’s beginning to be woven about the Arabs having become phenomenal warriors. There may be some narrowing of the gap but a nation doesn’t change in six years. Individuals change. Not nations. This is not just a war of armor but a serious war of nerves." He seemed to be regaining his. A colleague who had worked with Dayan for many years knew him to be an instinctive pessimist, despite the cavalier, self-confident air he projected. However, the colleague would say, Dayan was a "constructive‘ pessimist. ’Instead of saying ’everything will be alright’, he would say ’everything won’t be alright unless we do something so let’s figure out what we’re going to do.’" Even though he had lost his composure, Dayan had in fact been in constructive mode from the beginning of the war, rationally trying to identify the holes in the dam and the ways best to plug them. The change in the Arabs’ warmaking ability was indeed not due to an overnight change in national character. In 1967 they had seemed totally inept because they had been stunned by Israel’s opening blow and were ordered by their high command into a catastrophic, headlong retreat. Now, they were executing a meticulous plan that they had been exercising regularly for three years. They had seized the initiative, they were well prepared operationally to meet the Israeli counter-attack and psychologically the wind was at their back. It was Israel that had taken the opening blow this time, one even more stunning than the air strike inflicted on Egypt in 1967, and it was still struggling to find its feet. But it had not broken. Day 6 Close to midnight Thursday, after another briefing to the cabinet and before another helicopter flight to the front, the unrelenting stress of running two wars simultaneously for six days caught up with Elazar. He was discussing the next day’s battle plans with two generals and leafing through a batch of fresh reports on his desk when he turned pale and seemed about to faint. Alarmed aides brought him something to drink. "I don’t want any pills," he hastily said. He would need his wits for a major decision that had to be made in the coming hours. Southern Command had been marking time since Tuesday as Northern Command drove the Syrians back across the 1967 cease-fire line. It was time now to decide about the next step in Sinai. The process would involve a day-long exercise in thinking out loud and challenging his peers to react. In the end, after sharp changes in position, the way forward would emerge. Intelligence chief Zeira opened the discussion by noting that the Security Council was expected to pass a cease-fire resolution within 48 hours. He and Air Force commander Benny Peled believed that the IDF should move swiftly to cross the canal before then. "You don’t have to convince me that we have to attack by tomorrow night,‘ said Elazar. ’The question is what happens afterwards?" Expanding on the motif he had sounded in a talk with Dayan two days before, Elazar made it clear that his goal was no longer victory but a stable cease-fire that would permit Israel to rebuild its armed forces. Defeating Egypt was no longer a near-term option, said Elazar. This was a painful admission for the commander of an army which until a few days before had been considered unbeatable by any combination of armies in the Middle East — an assumption he himself heartily shared. It was to Elazar’s credit that he was not reduced to denial or paralysis by this startling turn of events. He was convinced that Sadat would not accept a cease-fire unless shaken by some dramatic military move, like Israel’s crossing of the canal. But he was not sure that even a crossing would do it. Dayan in fact argued that the Egyptians would never agree to a cease-fire if Israel gained a foothold on the west bank, with Cairo no longer protected by the waterway. There was also the possibility that if the IDF did cross the canal and achieved a cease-fire, the situation would deteriorate swiftly into a war of attrition. In that event, the army would find itself in a dangerously vulnerable deployment with thin, extended lines on both sides of the canal. Despite these serious concerns, Elazar inclined towards a canal crossing because he could think of no other possibility, however remote, of jarring Sadat into a cease-fire. "I would be happy, and you don’t know how happy, if you have any better ideas,‘ he said to the officers. They didn’t. Day 7 Gen. Haim Bar-Lev, the newly appointed southern commander, arrived in the Pit from Sinai Friday at 9:30 a.m. He had come to the same conclusion as Elazar. Only a canal crossing, he said, had a chance of salvaging something from the war. ’Regretfully,‘ he said, ’I don’t have another solution." For Egyptian chief-of-staff Gen. Saad el Shazly too, this was a day for excruciating decisions. The satisfaction he had permitted himself at the way the war was going had been badly jarred Thursday when he returned to Center Ten from a tour of the front. He had found his divisions well dug in and officers and men confident they could meet anything the Israelis could muster. The armed forces had given Sadat exactly what he had asked for, a firm foothold from which he could begin leveraging Israel out of the rest of Sinai through political means. A message was waiting in the Operations Room for Shazly from War Minister Ismail asking him to stop by. The question put by Ismail was one Shazly had been dreading — could the army continue eastward to the passes? The IDF counterattack in the north had failed to force Syria out of the war but it had succeeded strategically in an unexpected way by forcing Assad to call on Egypt for help. In responding, Sadat would provide Israel what it was waiting for — a major, head-on battle with Egyptian armor. DAY 8 Saturday, Oct. 13, was Sgt. Nadeh’s 24th birthday. The Egyptian soldier had survived a week of war, which was itself reason enough to celebrate. His unit was in Fort Botser, mid-way on the Sinai shore of the Bitter Lake, from which the Israeli garrison had escaped. Nadeh and his comrades found it an amazing oasis — a veritable underground city with a trove of canned goods and water, toilets, pinups, and cigarettes. "The Jewish cigarettes are really good,‘ he wrote in his diary. A birthday, like the war itself, was occasion for reflection — the kind common to young men gone to war. ’I’ve achieved many things which I had thought impossible. I used to be afraid and miserable. I became someone with strength. I tried to love and I passed through all the stages of love, from the pleasures of the flesh to real love, in which I failed. Now that I am in war I feel I need someone who would appreciate me." Flying over the Israeli lines in a helicopter, Elazar had a view of the vibrant army that had sprouted on the dunes of western Sinai — thousands of vehicles, endless encampments, figures moving purposefully. Egypt had staggered the IDF but it had expended its bag of surprises. Arrayed against it now was an army with its fighting ability honed and its psychological balance restored. The scene Elazar witnessed radiated an energy and optimism that became even more tangible when he landed. Maintenance units were swarming over damaged tanks. Avraham Adan’s division was taking up position east of Ariel Sharon’s in order to cross the canal once the bridges were up. Bar-Lev termed the limited bridging equipment "a joke‘ and the crossing itself brazen. A few shells hitting the bridges and the army would find itself stranded west of the canal with no way to get back — at least, not the tanks. But, Bar-Lev reiterated, it was a risk he was ready to run. The Egyptians had a dozen bridges along the length of the canal; Israel would be lucky to have two and they would be close together, within the range of hundreds of Egyptian guns and mortars. Returning to Tel Aviv and the dour confines of the Pit, Elazar shared his uplift with his staff. ’Whoever feels depressed in these dark corridors should go into the field and see the boys. You’ll come back in a grand mood. We’re eight days into the war but when you meet the tankers they talk as if this is the third year of World War 11. They’re on top of things. They know what the Egyptians are up to and have an answer for everything. The repair shops are working, the tanks are fine, there’s ammunition. The best of our people are down there.‘ That night, Sharon tried to reach Dayan in order to win his support for an immediate attack. Unable to track him down, he telephoned Dayan’s daughter, Yael, who had served as a soldier in Sharon’s divisional headquarters in the Six Day War. She didn’t think her father would return home before morning, she said. ’What, he’s not sleeping at home again?‘ joked Sharon, a reference to Dayan’s once notorious reputation for one-night stands. Yael took umbrage. ’Come on, Yael, what happened to your sense of humor?‘ asked Sharon. Dropping his jolliness, he asked her to pass on a message to her father if she spoke with him this night. ’Tell him that the whole division here is stamping its feet. The horses are ready for battle. You remember the picture — like the eve of the Six Day War. Explain this to him. He must understand that there’s enough initiative here to break the Egyptians. Otherwise, we’ll enter a cease-fire in the present miserable situation.‘ In a telephone conversation with Ezer Weizman the day before, Sharon had complained of the mood at the rear — ’as if this is the final battle of the Warsaw Ghetto.‘ To his right, said Sharon, was Adan. To his left, (Albert) Mendler. The troops on the front line were ready. ’Believe me, we can finish everything quickly." In Cairo, General Shazly contemplated the coming battle with trepidation. For five days, ever since Israel’s failed attack of October 8, both sides had been hoping for an enemy attack that would break against its defenses. Syrian pressure had now put the onus on the Egyptians to take the offensive. The attack plan was devised by War Minister Ismail himself. In all, 400-500 tanks would participate in the six thrusts. Israel had 700 tanks in Sinai, half deployed on the line, half in reserve. The Israelis would be waiting on high ground. DAY 9 By late afternoon Sunday, the surviving Egyptian tanks had pulled back. Egyptian losses for the day were estimated at between 150-250 tanks. A score of Israeli tanks were hit, but most were soon repaired. For the first time since the start of the war on the southern front, the inherent strength of Israel’s armor had come into play. Since the beginning of the war, the Egyptian field commanders — and to a large extent even the Egyptian media — had been sticking to more or less reliable reporting, a far cry from the "oriental imagination‘ Israel had chortled at in previous wars. This ability to deal with reality worried Israel since it suggested a change in Egypt’s mindset that made it a more formidable opponent. Now, however, towards the end of the day, wishful thinking once again could be heard on the Egyptian radio net, including reports of the capture of the Mitla Pass and other imagined successes. Bar-Lev would sum the situation up succinctly in a telephone conversation with Golda Meir — ’We’ve returned to ourselves and the Egyptians have returned to themselves." Sharon would put it even more pointedly as he tried to cajole Bar-Lev into letting him take up pursuit of the retreating Egyptians. "I saw the 21st Division today,‘ he said, ’and if I may use a crude expression in a conversation with a minister (a lighthearted reference to Bar-Lev’s just vacated position as minister of commerce) they’re the same old shits. They came, they were hit and they started to run." He himself would be reminded soon enough that the Egyptians were not to be dismissed lightly. But after the most difficult week in the country’s history, Israel had cause to celebrate its first clear battlefield victory in Sinai. Elazar appeared Sunday night before the cabinet which had yet to give its approval for a canal crossing. "We’ve built our plans on sound military thinking. If I thought there was a risk of disaster I wouldn’t propose it. The plan is not built on luck. We’re not going to all this trouble so that if a bridge is hit, the show is over.‘ Nevertheless, he did not deny there was risk. ’The outcome of a battle can only be presumed. It can’t be divined with absolute certainty.‘ In a worst-case situation, where the bridges were demolished after a small force had already crossed, the men could be brought back in rubber boats even if tanks had to be left behind. ’I believe that the chances of failing are pretty meager and the odds of success are good. How great the success will be I can’t say but it may be very great." Only three days before, he had proposed a canal crossing in order to achieve a desperately needed cease-fire. He was now seeing the crossing possibly leading to victory. It was not an easy decision for the cabinet. The worst-case situation Elazar described was not the worst case imaginable — instead of a small force being cut off it could be a substantial part of the army. But Mrs. Meir trusted Elazar’s judgment. The cabinet in turn relied on hers. She had recovered her composure and become a source of strength for the ministers. Half an hour after midnight the crossing was approved. Elazar had not troubled the cabinet with his own nightmare — crossing the canal and getting bogged down in a war of attrition. He had ordered his staff that morning to prepare for such an eventuality by drawing up plans for training new recruits, returning wounded men to their units, repairing damaged tanks and acquiring new ones. The pending operation already had a name — Stout-Hearted Men. The crossing would be from Fort Matsmed. A major advantage of the site was that it was approachable along the seam between the Second and Third armies which Yoav Brom’s reconnaissance battalion had discovered the previous week. The force would thus avoid a costly plunge through the Egyptian bridgehead, bristling with anti-tank weapons and minefields. However, Matsmed lay only 800 yards south of the Chinese Farm. Once the waterline was reached therefore, a major effort would have to be made to push the Egyptians back in order to create a safe corridor. Another advantage of Matsmed was that the opposite bank was apparently empty of enemy forces. Sharon’s division, already deployed in the sector, was assigned the breakthrough. Its task was to establish a bridgehead, throw two bridges across the canal and push back enemy forces in the Chinese Farm at least four kilometers. Bridgeheads are not considered secure unless they are out of enemy artillery range but in the circumstances this was not an option. The attack force would be plunging through a hole in the very center of the Egyptian lines. The best that could be hoped for was to secure the crossing point and its approaches from direct fire weapons like tanks and Saggers. An asphalt road codenamed Akavish would serve as the main approach to the crossing point. Branching off from it six miles short of the canal was Tirtur, a dirt road which ran due west to the canal. Tirtur had been specially built to carry the roller bridge to the canal just north of Matsmed. Tirtur, however, was serving now as the southern perimeter of the Egyptian Second Army. Its double role — Egyptian defense line and would-be Israeli artery — would turn this nondescript desert road into a major strategic pivot. Once the bridges were up and the corridor secured, Adan’s division would cross the canal and turn south to cut the Third Army supply lines. It would eliminate SAM batteries as it went, opening the sky for the Israeli air force, which could then begin providing support to the ground forces. DAY 10 Before dawn Monday, paratroop commander Danny Matt started out for Tasa to attend a briefing by Sharon. Matt had fought in every one of Israel’s wars and in numerous skirmishes in between. But never had he felt the weight of responsibility he did now, charged with seizing a bridgehead across the canal. The battlefield was still fitfully slumbering. Jagged flashes occasionally pierced the darkness and slowly falling flares decorated the night sky like lanterns. From the distance came an occasional rumble of artillery. Sitting in the commander’s chair of the halftrack, a small light illuminating a reading surface in front of him, Matt set aside the map he was studying and removed from his breast pocket a tiny book of Psalms given him by the day before by the chief army chaplain. Although no longer observant, Matt had had a religious upbringing and still drew solace from the psalms. Turning to the first page, he read "Happy is the man that hath not walked in the counsel of the wicked… he shall be like a tree planted by streams of water that bringeth forth its fruit in its season." As always, the words calmed him. Matt’s sense of destiny was shared by the other commanders who assembled at Tasa, an awareness that the turning point was within grasp. Rarely in history — in modern times, at least, probably never — had a nation recovered from so massive a blow so swiftly and seized the initiative. The United States after Pearl Harbor and the Soviet Union after Barbarossa had had the depth and the time to fall back on their resources and prepare the counterblow. Israel did not have resources to fall back on and was pushing the conflict to swift decision. The swings of fortune that in great wars often take place over months or years as nations muster their resources or exhaust them were taking place along the Suez Canal and on the Golan in days. The operation, Sharon told them, would begin at dusk. The brigade commanded by Tuvia Raviv would begin the operation with a diversionary attack. The bulk of the fighting would fall to Amnon Reshef’s brigade. Under its cover, Matt’s paratroopers would cross the canal in rubber boats while Haim Erez’ brigade towed the bridges down Tirtur and Akavish roads. It was a monumental operation in which the division would be engaging the Egyptians in the darkness simultaneously from front, rear and flank. During the Six Day War, Sharon had pulled off a complex night attack at Abu Agheila in Sinai but the stakes — and the odds — now were far higher. "I looked at the faces of the commanders and wondered if, after all that had happened, they believed we could pull this off tonight,‘ he would write. ’They believed." Bar-Lev, appreciating the enormity of the task, asked Sharon in the afternoon if he wished to delay the attack by a day in order to organize. Sharon said he would stick to the schedule. He had his own doubts about being able to get the bridges to the canal on time. But he feared that if the attack were delayed, either the Egyptians might discover what was afoot or the Israeli high command might have second thoughts about undertaking the crossing at all. As he moved towards the front with his mobile command post, Sharon passed encampments embellished with wooden huts made from ammunition boxes and covered with palm fronds. The feast of Succot had arrived and the troops had found time to build the traditional holiday huts evoking the wandering of the Israelites in this very desert more than 3,000 years before. Matt’s brigade had arrived in Sinai in civilian buses which were too vulnerable to carry the men forward into the combat zone. The brigade had received 30 halftracks; 60 more were supposed to be waiting at an assembly area along with the rubber boats. But the vehicles were not there. Capt. Hanan Erez was ordered by a battalion commander to take drivers with him in buses and rustle up halftracks wherever he could. Otherwise the brigade would not be able to get to the canal, which meant no bridgehead. Erez was told to be back by 2 p.m., four hours’ time. "Don’t come back without them." Erez headed for Refidim where he had seen rows of new halftracks lined up two days before. They were still there. His drivers were getting into them when Erez was hailed by a white-haired Lt. Colonel who asked what he was doing. Erez was struck by how clean and well-pressed the officer’s uniform was. The vehicles were urgently needed by Matt’s brigade, he explained. No problem, said the logistics officer. Just show me your orders. "We’re the force crossing the canal,‘ said Erez. ’I don’t have written orders." "No orders, no vehicles," said the colonel. The paratroop captain attempted unsuccessfully to persuade the colonel. Running out of arguments, he cocked his Uzi. "Enough nonsense,‘ he said ’If you try to stop me, I’ll shoot you." Persuaded, the colonel stepped aside. "Onto the halftracks and follow me," shouted Erez to the drivers. At 4:30 p.m., the brigade moved out. It was soon caught up in the stream of vehicles making their way towards the front. At the Akavish intersection, the paratroop convoy encountered an enormous jam. It took an hour and a half just to make the turning. Periodically, traffic had to pull to the side to make way for vehicles bringing wounded back from the front. The excitement was palpable. Armored units which had been engaged for the past week on isolated missions along the battlefront now saw themselves part of an army moving up for the decisive battle as they joined the flow. Vehicles bore freshly painted slogans like "Cairo Express." A chaplain appeared on the roadside distributing copies of the Psalms, which were snatched up even by avowed agnostics. Col. Reshef had spent the day going over maps and airphotos with his officers and designing the complex choreography of the coming battle. Late in the afternoon, his brigade formed up by battalions off the Artillery Road near the point where they would cross the dunes. Battalion commander Amram Mitzna, in outlining the mission to his officers, tried to make it sound as matter-of-fact as he could. After 10 days of combat, however, they understood that a brigade plunge into the heart of an Egyptian army was an adventure from which few were likely to return intact. A radio-telephone had been made available and Lt.-Col. Mitzna asked every man to call his family. Mitzna himself wrote a farewell letter to his wife which he left with his jeep driver, who would not be coming on the attack. The men sat on the tanks waiting for darkness. Making the rounds of his units, Reshef first visited Brom’s reconnaissance battalion, which would lead the force across the dunes. The battalion had been under Reshef’s command for almost a week but he had not yet had a chance to meet the men. Addressing them now, he emphasized the importance of the coming encounter and the key role that was theirs. Taking leave of Brom, he said, "What matters is stubbornness. Stubbornness. Do you understand what I mean?" Brom said he did. Not far away, Adan took advantage of the brief respite before battle to visit his three brigades as night fell. At each encampment, 2,000 men rose at the shout of "attention" and then sat back down on the ground as the division commander mounted a tank. In the light of vehicle headlamps, Adan addressed the men. He had often wondered, he said, how the younger generation, which had known only quick wars, would bear up to the kind of setbacks he and his generation had known in the War of Independence 25 years before. In the past nine days the men of the division had demonstrated their grit in a series of engagements more intensive than any experienced in 1948. It would be incumbent upon them in the coming battle to fight not only bravely but intelligently in order to overcome the disparity in numbers. They would wait for Sharon to establish the bridgeheads on both banks. They would then cross the canal to rip up the enemy rear in the final campaign of the war. At 5 p.m., artillery opened up on the entire Egyptian line, so as not to give away the point of attack. The diversionary attack on Missouri was launched in the last light. At 6:05, Reshef ordered Brom to move out. In the light of a large moon, the armored vehicles moved in line over the pristine dunes towards the canal, six miles to the east, like a necklace undulating across the white sands. Following their movement from a distance, Sharon was held by the beauty of the scene. To help orientation, Reshef called for phosphorous shells to be fired at Fort Lakekan, the point where they were to emerge onto Lexicon Road. In the crowded war room at Southern Command headquarters, Gonen, the former yeshiva student, quoted to those around him an obscure phrase from the Talmud that contrasted the sweetly scented world of the spice merchant with the malodorous leather trade: "The world cannot function without perfumes and without tanneries. Happy is he who works as a spice merchant and woe to him who works in a tannery.‘ Reflecting a sense of the momentous nature of the enterprise they were embarking upon and his gratitude for being part of it, Gonen added ’As for me, I consider myself a spice merchant." Gen. Yariv shared the sense of magnitude. "I don’t remember a night this fateful in all our wars." Elazar, studying the large wall map, was moved to a reflection of his own. "If the history of how we pulled this off is ever written,‘ he said, ’it will be seen as the height of hutzpa." This is an excerpt from the writer’s The Yom Kippur War: The epic confrontation that transformed the Middle East, due to appear in January by Schocken Books, New York.
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