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

  Dayan had a younger brother Zohar, called Zorik, who had served during World War II in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army. At war’s end Zorik bolted from the English and joined a clandestine Jewish outfit called “the Gang.” This group had taken upon itself the business of stealing supplies and guns, even seagoing ships, in the service of helping Jews from the death camps make their way to Israel. One night this outlaw band was spiriting survivors of Bergen-Belsen across the frontier from Germany into Holland. At the crossing point, the party’s passage was impeded by an entanglement of barbed wire. Zorik laid his body across this obstacle, declaring, “Let these men and women cross to freedom upon my back.”

  Zorik was killed fighting a Druze battalion from Syria at Ramat Yohanan on April 14, 1948. He was twenty-two, with a young wife, Mimi, and a three-month-old son, Uzi. Moshe sent his second-in-command, Israel Gefen, who was married to Moshe’s sister Aviva, to tell his and Zorik’s mother Devorah the terrible news. Devorah was on the farm at Nahalal then. She was walking up the path from the little kitchen garden when she saw Gefen approaching.

  Before this officer could say a word, Devorah asked, “Which one?”

  The War of Independence exacted a devastating toll from the population of our infant nation. Dayan’s wife, Ruth, told me that seventeen young men were lost just from her tiny village. At one point, Ruth said, preparations were being made for weddings in the houses on each side of hers. Both grooms were killed before the ceremonies could take place. Fatalities across all Israel totaled six thousand—1 percent of the population.

  In November 1948 the invading Egyptian Army, whose advance had been halted south of Tel Aviv, still had not withdrawn. Instead, this force had linked with Iraqi units and elements of the Jordanian Arab Legion. The combined formation had redeployed south, to the waist of the coastal plain, where it had succeeded in establishing a belt of fortifications that effectively cut Israel in two.

  The anchor of this line was a Tegart fort (so named for the British architect who designed this type of police/military stronghold, of which there were dozens throughout Mandate Palestine) called Iraq Suwedan.

  Iraq Suwedan dominated the approaches to the Negev, isolating and blocking all overland access to the kibbutzim of the south. Seven times the soldiers of the Haganah had tried to take this stronghold, and seven times they had been beaten back.

  14.

  IRAQ SUWEDAN

  There was a fort east of the Arab village of Ishdud named Iraq Suwedan. We called it “the Monster on the Hill.” The British had built it and many others and gave it to the Egyptians when they pulled out in ’48. This is another reason why I hate the British.

  Lou Lenart, after leading the fighter mission that halted the Egyptian Army south of Tel Aviv in May 1948, became operations officer for the fledgling Israel Air Force.

  When I say fort, I mean fort. The place was huge and square and tall, with gun towers and parapets and walls two meters thick with the red, white, and black Egyptian flag flying over everything. Nasser himself had commanded the place as a major. It sat smack in the middle of a plain as flat as a floor of linoleum, with not even a blade of grass that an attacking force could use as cover. The Haganah had trench works at about two thousand meters. That’s where we set up, with a few trucks and cars but mostly everybody on foot. The Haganah had been attacking the fort for months. They had mounted seven assaults and been cut to pieces every time. But the place had to be taken because it blocked the roads to the south and cut Israel in half.

  The Jewish commander was Yitzhak Sadeh, who had been a hero in the Russian Army. Sadeh’s operations officer was twenty-six-year-old Yitzhak Rabin, who would become army chief of staff before and during the Six Day War and later prime minister. I was ops officer for the air force.

  The way we were going to take the Monster was by hitting it from the air with a bomb. We had a British Beaufighter that Haganah agents had stolen from the Royal Air Force by pretending to rent it for a movie.

  A Beaufighter is primarily a fighter but we had managed to rig it as a bomber, carrying a single 500-pound bomb. As operations officer, I had two jeeps with a generator and a radio. My role was ground control. The plane had a pilot and a copilot and one other flier who went along at the last minute just for fun.

  If the Beaufighter could succeed in dropping the bomb in the central square of the fort, the explosion would be contained within the walls and the blast effect would be doubled or tripled. It would blow the crap out of the place. Our assault troops then had a chance of taking it.

  The attack was ready to go. At the last minute a half dozen trucks rumbled up, bringing reinforcements. The men got off. They were pale and thin. They had numbers tattooed on their arms. Someone said they had spent the last two years in relocation camps—under the British, of course—in Cyprus. They had got to Israel just a week earlier and been given only a few days of military training.

  They came up and were issued rifles. I will never forget their faces. They were certain they were going to die. But their eyes were shining. They had weapons in their hands. They were men.

  The Beaufighter made its pass. But something went wrong on the approach. The plane hadn’t gotten aligned right; it had to bank off at the last minute.

  There’s an axiom in every air force in the world: “One pass and go to the grass.” This means that once you’ve lost the element of surprise, get down to ground level and run like hell.

  I knew I should order the mission aborted. If the bomber attempted a second pass, the Egyptians would be waiting for it. Every gun in the fort would be firing at it and nothing else.

  But we couldn’t stop. The assault was ready. The men’s blood was up. Sadeh waved me to go. I brought the plane around again. The guys dropped the bomb dead on target. The blast blew the hell out of the fort; our troops assaulted and overran the place.

  But the Beaufighter had gotten shot up. Smoke was pouring from one of its engines. I was shouting to the pilot over the radio to turn east across the plain, to where our people were, where it was safe. But something had gone wrong with his radio. The plane turned west toward the sea. Maybe the pilot was thinking of the flat, open beach along the coast, where he could make an emergency landing. I couldn’t follow him. The ground fight was just starting. Days passed before we could assemble a force and search for the aircraft.

  The plane had crashed on the shore alongside the Arab village of Ishdud, which is the Israeli city of Ashdod today. We went in with six or seven trucks and jeeps, lots of guns.

  Yitzhak Rabin was ops officer for the army, as I said. I was the same for the air force. The wreckage of the plane was on the beach, burned to a cinder. Our guys rousted out the whole village, including the mukhtar, the mayor. We gathered them in the central square, with the trucks and guns around. A Haganah intelligence officer was interrogating the mukhtar in Arabic.

  The plane had been on fire when it crashed, this guy was saying. The villagers had tried to save the crew but the flames had kept them back. The Haganah officer asked what had happened to the bodies. The jackals got them, said the mukhtar. He and the villagers had tried to keep the beasts back but they couldn’t. The parts of the fliers’ flesh that hadn’t been burned in the crash were devoured by wild animals.

  While the mukhtar was reciting this bullshit, my eyes were fixed on his left wrist. He was wearing the watch that had belonged to the pilot of the Beaufighter.

  I got Rabin aside, pointed out the wristwatch, and told him to burn down the village. Put a bullet in the mukhtar’s head and drive all the villagers out. I pointed across the plain. The Egyptian lines are only a few hundred meters away. Let the villagers take their belongings and get out.

  “I can’t do that,” said Rabin.

  “Why not?”

  I told him that was what U.S. Marines would do. We did it on Okinawa all the time. Marines wouldn’t even think twice.

 
“Lou, collective punishment is against the Geneva Convention.”

  “The hell with the Geneva Convention! You think these Arabs are following the Geneva Convention? They burned our guys to death, then cut ’em up and fed ’em to their dogs—if they didn’t carve ’em up first while they were still alive!”

  Already I was thinking that I would have to tell the fathers and mothers of these airmen what had happened to their sons. I would lie like hell, I knew that. I would never tell them the truth of how their sons had died.

  I told Rabin again: Shoot the mukhtar and burn the village.

  He refused. “We are Jews. We can’t do that.”

  Rabin was an idealist. That’s what was wrong with Israel then and it’s what’s wrong with Israel today. The founders had suffered pogroms and persecution for so many centuries in Russia and Eastern Europe that it had become a point of honor with them that if they ever got their own country, they would not treat others with the same cruelty that they’d been treated with. You have to admire that. It’s honorable. It’s noble. But in war it’s bullshit.

  “Would Alexander hesitate to burn this village? Would Caesar?”

  “Would Stalin?” said Rabin. “Would Hitler?”

  He put his hand on my shoulder.

  “We cannot do it, Lou. If we take such actions, we abandon every principle we are fighting for.”

  What could I say? Israel was Rabin’s country. I was a foreigner. I couldn’t force my way.

  But if you ask me today whether I have any regrets in my life, I will say only one: that I didn’t shoot that mukhtar right then and there, and let Rabin and the Haganah do whatever they wanted with me.

  15.

  UGDA SHARON

  I have been with Sharon’s division for four days now. Still no orders to go to war. Sharon’s headquarters is at Shivta, a few kilometers from the border, though the division’s positions extend west to Nitzana on the frontier. North of us, not far, lies Avraham Yoffe’s division and, farther north, facing Gaza, the ugda of Israel Tal.

  Yael Dayan continues her assignment with Ugda Sharon as a correspondent for the military spokesman.

  What is camp like? A city. A city of sand whose roads are tire and tread tracks, whose gathering places are dugouts beneath camouflage netting, and whose buildings are vehicles—tanks, lorries, ambulances, ammunition and supply trucks, caravans and living trailers, civilian cars and buses, jeeps and command cars and half-tracks—most of which are in motion throughout the day and, to thwart detection and targeting by the enemy, must be moved and repositioned every evening.

  By night our guests are gazelles and desert foxes, by day lizards and hawks. Dune lines are marked by terebinth trees, from which turpentine is extracted (elah in Hebrew, as in the Valley of Elah, where David slew Goliath), castor bushes, and the prickly pear cactus that we Israelis call sabra plants.

  I have given up doing anything with my hair; I simply braid it and pull a desert cap down tight. The fine-powdered dust called loess coats every face. For a ladies’ loo, there’s a square canvas enclosure with a sign: GIRL SOLDIERS. I slept the first night in a trench, the next two on the sand alongside various half-tracks of the command group. Last night’s accommodations felt like the Ritz. I stretched out across the backseat of a station wagon, a reservist’s car called up in the mobilization.

  This morning has started like every other. The soldiers are up and on alert before four; every engine starts, every tank, every half-track; all radio channels are open but no one may speak. Not till the war starts. The din is deafening, the air so acrid with diesel and petrol exhaust you have to spit to get the taste off your tongue. The men stand ready, weapons locked and loaded. Patrols are out. Will the Egyptians attack? By eight it is clear: not today. The order comes to stand down. Postcards are passed out. The men scribble notes using jeep bonnets and the flanks of tanks as writing surfaces. Now every vehicle and every unit moves to a different position. We can count on the enemy learning our disposition, so we must alter it. Our intelligence and reconnaissance units are doing the same thing to them.

  Dov is my guide and mentor in all this. He’s a colonel, as I said, a veteran of two wars, faculty member of the National Defense College, and now Sharon’s liaison with the General Staff. He narrates for me the ever- evolving ballet of move and countermove by the opposing forces. The enemy has shifted a tank battalion! No, a brigade! At once the war room, comprising a colony of communications vehicles, command boards, and map stands, all beneath camouflage nets, counters by repositioning our own armor. The Hebrew word for “reconnaissance outfit” is sayeret. The troopers themselves are sayerim. Out they go, patrolling. A helicopter lands and more maps are altered. Red is enemy, blue is friendly . . .

  Sharon is very much in command and reveling in every moment. He has welcomed me warmly despite the occasionally inharmonious history between him and my father. The man himself: handsome in dark khaki battle uniform, silver hair falling in a forelock; beneath a shoulder flap is tucked the red beret of a paratrooper.

  You mount to Sharon’s trailer up three steps of a ladder. Inside: two wooden benches atop which are spread blankets at night, a worktable used as well for dining, a cupboard for paper and supplies, a desert-style washstand with water drum, soap, and mirror. Sharon’s kit fits into a knapsack smaller than mine. His driver is Yoram; helicopter pilot Zeev. Asher is operations officer; a pretty blonde named Tzipi serves tea. Among Sharon’s guests are several civilian friends; others come and go, appearing in blue jeans and shirtsleeves, driving their own cars, being fitted in where they can.

  Dov says I must get some gear, so he helps me hunt up socks, a helmet, boiled sweets, Hershey bars. “Always take chocolate.” A sergeant asks me, Will the cabinet give your father Southern Command? Meaning the three divisions—Sharon’s, Tal’s, and Yoffe’s—here on the border of Sinai. Will Dayan be our boss? What is keeping the government from making a decision?

  Radio news is reporting that Hussein of Jordan has signed, this day, a mutual defense pact with Nasser. The king flew himself in his jet Caravelle from Amman to Cairo, carrying a .357 Magnum on his hip.

  Now Israel is surrounded on all sides by hostile states. Worse, Hussein has granted permission to Iraqi and Saudi troops to pass through his territory, an outrage that would have been viewed as a casus belli a week ago but is accepted now as just another dose of spit in the eye.

  Kuwait, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia have promised troops to Nasser. We hear this on the transistor between songs on the Hit Parade.

  This speech by Nasser on Radio Cairo: “If we have succeeded in restoring the situation to what it was before 1956, there is no doubt that we shall restore the situation to what it was before 1948.”

  Before 1948 means: no Israel.

  Our troops seethe, impatient for action. “What are we waiting for?”

  Danny Matt has come by, the paratroop commander. He has known my father since before I was born. I watch the officers come and go to Sharon’s trailer. These men have served together under arms for most of their adult lives. When they meet, they embrace like brothers and immediately begin joking about battles fought alongside each other and wounds sustained at one another’s sides. The more ghastly the recollection, the more pleasure is wrung from its recounting.

  Arik and Danny speak of their friend “Katcha” Cahaner, whom I know well. One night in 1955, Katcha was so badly wounded in a reprisal operation that the medics at the field hospital pulled a blanket over his head, believing him dead. A year later, when the paratroop battalion jumped at the Mitla Pass in Sinai, Katcha was still in a medical ward, classified as 100 percent disabled. Katcha bolted from the hospital. He made his way to Mitla on army trucks and joined his comrades at the pass.

  “Do you know where he is right now?” Arik asks.

  “With Brigade 55, preparing for a combat jump,” says Danny. “If we ever get orders.”


  For security reasons Dov cannot go into detail about what Sharon’s division will face if it must attack, except to explain that there are two linked positions—Abu Agheila and Um Katef. The Egyptian 2nd Division holds a third bastion at Kusseima. These three “defended localities” bestride the central routes leading west into Sinai.

  Our forces must break through them.

  “Complexity at the top, simplicity at the bottom,” Arik declares, defining in a nutshell his philosophy of command. “A commander,” Sharon says, “may keep complicated schemes of battle in his head and among his staff, but when the orders reach the operational units, they must be so simple that a child can understand them. ‘Go here, do this.’ Nothing more complex.”

  Sharon’s eyes light with a smile that I have seen no one resist. “Of course the Israeli soldier will make up his own mind and do whatever he wants. This is as it should be. The reason we will thrash the Egyptians is because they can’t do the same. They can’t improvise.”

  The word balagan is Russian-derived Hebrew for “chaos.” The more I learn of the seeming disorder of this camp, the more I realize it is order within chaos.

  This morning after stand-down I ride with a patrol toward Kusseima. Our jeeps draw up on a ridge across from ancient Kadesh Barnea. Here the children of Israel encamped, following the exodus from Egypt. Nasser’s 2nd Division is dug in across from us now. Through binoculars I can see the enemy’s armor in motion.

  At night Dov drives me into Beersheba to file a report. A waitress at the officers’ club brings us coffee. I ask her what day it is. She smiles. “You’d be surprised how many people ask that same question.”