The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War Read online

  Also by Steven Pressfield

  FICTION

  The Profession

  Killing Rommel

  The Afghan Campaign

  The Virtues of War

  Last of the Amazons

  Tides of War

  Gates of Fire

  The Legend of Bagger Vance

  NONFICTION

  The Authentic Swing

  Turning Pro

  The Warrior Ethos

  Do the Work

  The War of Art

  SENTINEL

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  First published by Sentinel, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by Nine Sisters Imports, Inc.

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  Map design by Christy Henspetter.

  Graphics by Jasmine Quinsier.

  Photograph credits appear here.

  ISBN 978-0-698-16397-3

  Version_1

  This book is dedicated with respect and deep appreciation to Lou Lenart,

  Captain, U.S. Marine Corps, 1940–1947, Israel Air Force, 1948–1954.

  Lenart with his F4U Corsair at the battle for Okinawa, 1945.

  CONTENTS

  MAP

  ALSO BY STEVEN PRESSFIELD

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  A NOTE ON HYBRID HISTORY

  EPIGRAPH

  BOOK ONE: THE WAITING

  BOOK TWO: EN BRERA

  BOOK THREE: THE WAITING, PART TWO

  BOOK FOUR: MOKED

  BOOK FIVE: SINAI

  BOOK SIX: JERUSALEM

  BOOK SEVEN: THE DEEP BATTLE

  BOOK EIGHT: THE LION’S GATE

  POSTSCRIPT

  IN GRATITUDE

  THE FALLEN AND THE DECORATED OF THE RECONNAISSANCE COMPANY OF THE 7TH ARMORED BRIGADE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  INDEX

  A NOTE ON HYBRID HISTORY

  Before I address what this book is, let me state what it is not.

  It is not a comprehensive history of the Six Day War. Entire battles have been left out. Critical contextual material such as the international diplomatic and political state of affairs prior to the war, the point of view of the Arabs, even the history of the Jewish people, has been included only as it touches upon the testimony of the central personalities of this piece, the war veterans themselves. Even within the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), units whose contributions to victory were essential—the Golani Brigade, Ugda Yoffe, the Harel and Jerusalem Brigades, the Sayeret Matkal, the navy, and many others—receive only passing mention.

  The Lion’s Gate tracks the experiences of a limited number of IDF units—Mirage Squadron 119 of the air force, the 7th Armored Brigade (in particular its Reconnaissance Company), Helicopter Squadron 124, Paratroop Battalion 71, and several others. Even within these formations, only a limited number of individuals are profiled. The book’s primary material comes from sixty-three interviews I conducted in Israel, France, and the United States, totaling about 370 hours. The focus is deliberately personal, subjective, and idiosyncratic.

  Nor does this book pretend to document the “facts” of the war. The meat of this narrative is the testimony of soldiers and airmen. It is their memories. Memory can be a tricky animal. Is it “truth”? Is it “history”? Is it “fact”?

  I am less concerned with these questions, which are ultimately unanswerable, than with the human reality in the moment. What fascinates me is the subjective immediacy of the event. I want to be in the cockpit, inside the tank, under the helmet. What is important to me is the event as the man or woman experienced it.

  Memory, we know, is notoriously unreliable. Memory can be self-serving, self-glorifying, self-exonerating. Memory fades. People forget. Memory contains gaps and blank spots.

  Then there is the Rashomon effect. The attentive reader will discover instances in this book where three individuals present three different versions of the identical event in which all three participated. This phenomenon happened during the interviews themselves. When I spoke with more than one person at a time, one friend would often contradict another. “No, that happened before dark. Don’t you remember?”

  The reader must keep these considerations in mind when evaluating the accounts presented in these pages.

  A word, too, about the treatment of material within the interviews. In some instances the interviewee’s speech is transcribed verbatim. In others, I have edited, inverted order, altered tense, used time compression, and employed other narrative devices. The interviews were conducted in English. For most participants, English is a second or third language. Several interviews involved translation on the spot by my colleague Danny Grossman. In configuring the material for use in this book, I have sometimes retro-imagined the interviewee’s prose as if it had been spoken in his or her primary language.

  Books. A number of the individuals interviewed—Yael Dayan, Ruth Dayan, Eliezer “Cheetah” Cohen, Uzi Eilam, Ran Ronen, Giora Romm, Morele Bar-On, Avigdor Kahalani, and others—have themselves written works in full or in part about the Six Day War. I have, with these writers’ permission, interpolated material from their published works into these spoken narratives.

  One unit featured in this book is the Reconnaissance Company of the 7th Armored Brigade. Members of this group produced a documentary, We Looked Death in the Eye . . . , about their experiences in the 1967 War. I have employed the same practice with this film as I have with books, taking certain quotes spoken on camera and integrating them into the individual speakers’ narrations.

  I must alert the reader to another intentional violation of the conventions of history writing. Moshe Dayan died in 1981. I conducted my interviews during 2011 and 2012. Clearly I could not have spoken with Dayan. Yet I have written “his” chapters in the first person, as if in his own words.

  Why am I calling this book “hybrid history”? Because I have elected in its composition to employ techniques from a number of disciplines—from journalism and academic history, from conventional nonfiction and narrative nonfiction, and from New Journalism.

  The Dayan chapters must be considered the latter. Dayan did not dictate these sentences into my tape recorder. They are not his testimony or his recounting of events. However, I have made every effort to be as true to the historical Moshe Dayan as my limitations of knowledge and imagination permit.

  Fortunately Dayan left an autobiography, a diary of the Sinai Campaign of 1956, an extraordinary personal testament titled Living with the Bible, and a number of other published works. In addition, many excellent biographies exist, penned by his colleagues and contemporaries. I was privileged as well to interview a number of individuals who were extremely close to Dayan: his first wife, Ruth; his daughter, Yael; his ne
phew Uzi; as well as associates and fellow officers Neora Matalon-Barnoach, Shlomo Gazit, Morele Bar-On, Michael Bar-Zohar, Aharon Yadlin, and Zalman Shoval. That being said, the reader should bear in mind while reading the Dayan chapters that I have at some points crossed the line into pure speculation.

  On my office shelves sit 107 books about the Six Day War and its antecedents. Why write another? The answer is I wanted to tell the subjective story, the on-the-ground and in-the-air saga, in a way I have not seen it told before, even if it meant taking liberties with academic and journalistic conventions.

  The swift passage of the years is a factor as well. Many of the veterans interviewed for this book are in their late sixties; no few are in their seventies, eighties, or nineties. They may not tell their stories on the record again.

  I am a Jew. I wanted to tell the story of this Jewish war, fought by Jews for the preservation of the Jewish nation and the Jewish people. I don’t pretend to be impartial. At the same time, I have tried, despite license taken, to tell the story straight.

  I alone am responsible for the structure, theme, and editorial choices in this book. I chose what to put first and what to put last, what to leave in and what to leave out. The veterans honored me by telling me their stories, but responsibility for the final shape and content of this work rests with me alone.

  STEVEN PRESSFIELD

  2014

  And it shall be that if the king learns of any nation and people seeking to take away violently anything that belongs to Israel, he shall send unto the captains of thousands and of hundreds stationed in the cities of Israel, and they shall send to him one tenth of the host to go with him to war against their enemies, and they shall go forth with him. And if a great host comes against the land of Israel, they shall send him one fifth of the men of war. And if a king with chariots and horse and a great host come against Israel, they shall send him one third of the men of war, and the two thirds that are left shall keep the ward at their cities and borders so that no company shall come into their land. And if the battle goes sorely with him, they shall send him one half of the host, the soldiers, and one half of the host shall not be cut off from their cities.

  From the 2,000-year-old Temple Scroll, recovered one day after the liberation of Jerusalem, 7 June 1967

  BOOK ONE

  THE WAITING

  1.

  TWO BROTHERS

  Three weeks before the war, I went to visit my brother Nechemiah in Jerusalem. He and I were born there. The city is our home.

  Major Eliezer “Cheetah” Cohen is a pilot and commander of Squadron 124, Israel’s first and leading helicopter formation.

  Nechemiah was twenty-four years old then, a captain in the Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s special forces. Along with Ehud Barak, the future prime minister, he was the most decorated soldier in the army. Nechemiah had been awarded five medals for valor—one Medal of Distinguished Service and four Chief of Staff Citations.

  Nechemiah had been promoted from lieutenant four months earlier, transferred to the elite 35th Paratroop Brigade, and made a company commander. This was to give him experience commanding formations larger than the twelve-man teams of the special forces.

  The date of our visit was May 15, Independence Day. My wife, Ela, and I had gone with our children to the parade in West Jerusalem. Nechemiah phoned and invited us to come out to his command post for a visit. “It’s safe,” he said. “Bring the kids.”

  Nechemiah’s outpost was at Abu Tor, in the middle of no-man’s-land. Abu Tor is the highest hill immediately south of the Old City. The site controls access by road from Jordan and dominates the southern approach to Old Jerusalem.

  Nechemiah had about fifty paratroopers in posts along the armistice line, four or five in each. He had set up his headquarters in a beautiful old red-stone villa, which had been abandoned for almost twenty years, since the fighting in 1948. All around the house were barbed wire, barricades, machine-gun posts. Signs read DANGER—MINES. It was a gorgeous spot in the middle of a junkyard.

  Down the hill were posts and fortifications of the Arab Legion. These were King Hussein’s elite troops, British trained, wearing their famous red-and-white-checked keffiyehs. My kids were thrilled to see enemy soldiers so close.

  Nechemiah and I spent two hours together. We went up on the villa’s high, flat roof. The site looked like any other field outpost occupied by young soldiers—sandbags and high-powered binoculars, cases of combat rations, bedrolls tucked into corners, a half circle of rucksacks with weapons and helmets ready for action.

  You must understand that Nechemiah and I come from a very humble family. We grew up playing in alleys and side streets and on the stony hillsides of a city we could not claim as our own. Jerusalem was under British rule then. There was no Israel. We Jews had no country.

  When the state was founded in 1948, the army of Jordan won the battle for Jerusalem. The Arab Legion drove our forces out of the Old City, burned over fifty synagogues, killed every Jew they could find.

  Nechemiah and I understood this and hated it, even as boys. When we grew up we became soldiers and officers. We ceased talking like angry children and began planning like military professionals. Nechemiah is a paratrooper, I am a pilot. It’s up to us. We have to do the job.

  This is how we saw the situation, Nechemiah and I, on the roof of the villa above no-man’s-land. We both knew that war was coming. “Does it frustrate you, brother,” I asked, “to be stuck here in Jerusalem when the fighting will surely be in Sinai or Syria?”

  Our understanding in that moment was that war would not come to the Holy City. Jordan wouldn’t risk attacking Israel; she might lose. And Israel could not make the first move. The outside world would never let her.

  From our rooftop, my brother and I could see the poplar grove above the Western Wall—our people’s most sacred site—so close it seemed we could almost touch it, yet cut off from us by barbed wire and minefields and the combat posts of the Arab Legion.

  “Look there, brother,” I said. “I can spit and reach Mount Moriah, where Abraham bound Isaac. There you see David’s Tower and what is left of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. All this is ours. What is stopping us from taking it, ahuyah?” I employed the Arabic word for brother, which we all used in our family. “Are we waiting for the United Nations or the world powers to give us permission? The Jordanians don’t hold the Old City by ancient right. It was never part of their country. They seized it by force in 1948!”

  I asked Nechemiah what he thought the Americans would do in our place. Would their army sit still for one minute if a foreign power occupied Pennsylvania Avenue? Would the British stand idly by if another nation held even one lane of London? What would the Russians do?

  I can hear my brother’s answer as if he were standing before me now. “Ahuyah,” he said, “if war comes, it will come to Jerusalem too. We are going to liberate the Old City.”

  I didn’t believe him. I thought to myself, This is only a dream. Every combat alert at the time was against the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Iraqis. Never against the Jordanians.

  “It will happen,” my brother said. “You will see.”

  We embraced then and took our leave. That was the last time I saw Nechemiah alive.

  My younger brother—I am older by eight years—was ordered with his company to join the main body of the 35th Paratroop Brigade along the frontier with Egypt. He was killed in Gaza on the first day of the war.

  My helicopter squadron was assigned that day to fly medevac missions in northern Sinai and the Gaza Strip. The emergency call came over my own squadron radio net: “Mass casualties near Gaza City.”

  I dispatched one of my pilots, Reuven Levy, to handle the evacuation. It never occurred to me that my brother could be among the dead. He was too good, too smart. Nothing could happen to him.

  Levy was ordered by an officer on-site to say nothing to me about Nechemiah�
��s death. “Cheetah is a critical squadron commander,” Levy was told. “The nation needs him operating at full capacity.”

  So I flew night and day throughout the war, in Gaza and Sinai, in the West Bank and Jerusalem and on the Golan Heights, and knew nothing of what had happened to my brother.

  On the last day, when all Israel was flooding into liberated Jerusalem to touch the stones and behold the miracle that many had believed would never come to pass, I was in the office of the base commander at Tel Nof Air Base, being informed at last that my brother had not survived to witness this day. In that hour, my world ended.

  2.

  THE VOICE OF THUNDER

  The state of Israel is the size of New Jersey. The combined landmass of its twenty Arab enemy states is more than a million square miles larger than the rest of the United States.

  In 1967, the population of Israel was 2.7 million. Many were immigrants recently evicted from Arab countries of North Africa and the Middle East. These newcomers possessed few skills that could be used in the defense of the nation. Most could not even speak Hebrew. The state of Israel existed within a sea of 122 million Arabs, outnumbered by more than forty to one.

  Lieutenant Zeev Barkai is the twenty-three-year-old operations officer of Paratroop Battalion 71. He is a kibbutznik from Kibbutz Kinneret on the Sea of Galilee. He will be awarded the Itur HaOz, Israel’s second-highest decoration for valor, for his actions during the Six Day War.

  In 1967, there was no TV station in Israel. We had only one radio station, Kol Israel, the Voice of Israel. But we could see Arab TV. There was a station in Jordan and one in Egypt, along with the Voice of Thunder out of Cairo, an all-day radio broadcast (in occasionally laughable Hebrew) whose normal propaganda had been cranked up now to crisis-hysteria level, seeking to terrify the Israeli populace.