Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (21 page)

The immediate upshot of Bar-Lev’s appointment was that Sharon grew even more offhand and insolent toward Gonen. The crisis came on Tuesday, the ninth. “After that there was a complete rupture,” according to Yisrael Itkin, who served as the staff sergeant aboard Sharon’s command APC. “Arik ordered me not to reply to Gonen’s calls. For me this was a really weird feeling. I’m sitting over the radio, and the CO of Southern Command calls and says, ‘I know you’re there. Answer me!’ And Arik signals me with his hand not to answer. On the other hand, he was respectful toward Rabin, Tal, and Dayan. He would talk to them every day. From them he was ready to take any criticism.”
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The ninth was to be another dramatic day, fraught with suspicion and recrimination among the Israeli commanders that resonated long after the din of battle died down and the dead were buried. “In accordance with the orders I had received,” Sharon writes, “in the early morning of October 9, I gave instructions to my three brigade commanders—Amnon Reshef, Haim Erez, and
Tuvia Raviv—that we would conduct a holding operation, containing the expected Egyptian advance.” Sharon made it clear that he was unhappy with these orders. “For me, this was not the time to sit back and allow the Egyptians to build up their bridgeheads … We should be pushing them, probing them for their weak points, looking for openings to exploit.” He told the brigade commanders that even while they were defending and containing, “I expected them to use their initiative … They should watch for any opportunity to recover the ridgeline positions we had given up the previous day.”

In the morning, Reshef executed one of the most breathtaking operations of the war, rescuing thirty-three survivors from the strongpoint of
Purkan under the noses of the Egyptian infantry. Sharon had urged their commander, Major Wiezel, to break out under cover of darkness and head for
Hamutal, where he would send tanks to pick them up. Reshef himself led the rescuing force, and though many of its vehicles were hit and disabled, one tank made the rendezvous. “With all thirty-three of them clinging to its hull,” Sharon wrote, “the tank emerged out of the maelstrom looking like something from an alien world.”

Sharon now asked Gonen’s permission to strike out along
Akavish Road toward the beleaguered strongpoint of
Matzmed.
^h
He also told Gonen, quite without foundation, that “Talik’s invention”—the steel
rolling bridge—would be ready that day. (In fact it would not be ready until the twelfth or thirteenth.) He urged the CO to let his division approach the canal at
Matzmed rather than Adan’s. “You didn’t let us yesterday. So let us this time. We know the terrain very well.”
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An hour later, Chief of Staff Elazar issued a formal and categorical order to Gonen not to get into tank battles and not to approach Matzmed. Gonen transmitted the order to Sharon. He phoned Reshef directly and stressed there must be no further attacks that risked IDF lives.
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Raviv’s and Reshef’s brigades nevertheless engaged in pitched tank battles during the afternoon in order to retake Machshir and Televizia, second-line
fortifications northeast of Matzmed that had fallen to the Egyptians the day before. Gonen repeatedly ordered Sharon to stop. He flew by helicopter to Sharon’s forward headquarters and ordered him personally to stop. But still the battles continued, the Israeli forces losing tanks but taking a heavier toll of the enemy and nudging steadily west. “After this incident,” Herzog writes, “Gonen telephoned the chief of staff asking for Sharon to be relieved of his command.”

By evening, Reshef’s brigade faced the “
Chinese Farm.” Reshef ordered the divisional reconnaissance battalion to probe gently forward. “I ordered the probe; Sharon took the credit,” Reshef recalled without rancor. “I told him I’m moving the battalion forward, westward, and he said okay.” The unit moved gingerly to the southwest, reaching the bank of the
Great Bitter Lake and then turning north and driving silently up the bank, until close to the point where the canal feeds into the lake at
Deversoir, where Sharon had prepared his “yard.” It was a definitive moment. “The probe had revealed the boundary between the Egyptian Second and Third armies,” Herzog affirms, “and the soft underbelly of the Second.”
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“Here if anywhere was a situation that begged to be exploited,” Sharon writes.

Elazar by this time was following Sharon’s operations closely. When he learned of the recon battalion’s position and of Sharon’s proposals, he exploded. “Get him out of there!” he shouted. “I say he is not to cross. Not to cross! Not to cross!!”
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At dawn the next morning, Reshef made his reluctant way back to the division.

To Sharon, this reaction to Reshef’s remarkable breakthrough reinforced his worst suspicions. “They” would never allow him and his division to cross the canal. “They” were reserving that honor for Bren, one of their own. “They” were determined to link Bren’s name, not his, to the hoped-for victory.
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To judge from the records of the cabinet consultations cited above, however, these suspicions seem groundless, indeed almost paranoid, at least at this stage of the war. Golda, the ministers, and the generals all clearly assumed in those meetings that when and if there was a crossing, Sharon would be the man to make it.

For Elazar at any rate, the overriding concern at this stage was the fact that the main body of Egypt’s armor, the Fourth and Twenty-First Armored Divisions, had not yet crossed into Sinai. Better, the chief of staff reasoned—and Haim Bar-Lev fully concurred—to wait patiently for the Egyptian armored divisions to cross, defeat them in battle in Sinai, and only then abruptly shift the focus of the war to the other side.

Sharon’s own senior officers also broadly agreed with that military logic, despite their commander’s fulminations. “I thought the considerations of the High Command were totally correct,” Reshef said. “I didn’t feel we were ready to cross,”
Gideon Altschuler recalled frankly. “I was a product of the British army, where things were done in proper order. Arik would talk to Dayan … would try to exert influence so that we’d cross earlier than the chief of staff wanted. I wasn’t comfortable with that.”
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Even
Abrasha Tamir, who, as we have seen, was entirely at one with Sharon in his conspiracy theory regarding
who
was to cross, was on Bar-Lev’s side over
when
to cross. “I thought Bar-Lev was right,” Tamir recalled. “What opened the way to our successful crossing was our destruction, effectively, of the Twenty-First Armored Division on October 14. I recognized at the time that Bar-Lev was right and I told Arik as much.”
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Both Reshef and Jackie Even, the deputy commander of the division, maintained, moreover, that—despite his fulminations—Sharon himself did not seriously intend or attempt to cross before everything was ready and before the High Command gave its assent. Even insisted that Sharon’s talk on the ninth of the rolling
bridge being ready was pure bluster. “I was his deputy. I was in charge of this business. And I got no order at all from him throughout that day regarding the bridge
or other crossing equipment. He clearly did not have any serious intention of crossing then. He was trying to stabilize a defensive line as ordered. He didn’t talk to me about any crossing; we both knew there was nothing to cross on. The idea of crossing on Egyptian bridges was nonsense, delusional nonsense.”

For his senior officers, the best proof that Sharon was not swept along by his own bluster came a day later, on the tenth. “Sharon presented us three brigade commanders with a plan for attacking the Third Army and trying to drive it off the east bank,” Reshef recalled. “I objected outright, and so did Haim Erez. What is Sharon’s greatness? He knows we object, yet he takes us with him in the helicopter to Dvela to present the plan. When Arik submitted the plan to Bar-Lev, Bar-Lev asked, ‘What do the brigade commanders think?’ I said straightaway that I opposed the plan because it would be like banging our head on a wall. I’d already lost a hundred men killed in the brigade. I thought it would be wrong to court more casualties now. Haim Erez also spoke against it.”

“Bar-Lev then turns to me,” Jackie Even said, continuing his account. “I had worked on the plan together with Sharon and agreed to it. I look at Bar-Lev. I look at Sharon. And I say, ‘What I’m hearing from my comrades the brigade commanders is that they’re not ready for this assignment. So I say to you, we’re not ready.’ ” Bar-Lev thereupon ruled against Sharon’s plan and sent the 143rd Division back to its original assignment, so unloved by its commander: containment and waiting. Sharon was furious, but he swallowed it. “He didn’t speak to me for twenty-four hours,” Even recalled. “He could have thrown me out for a thing like that. But … nothing.”

Gonen and Bar-Lev, not disposed like Sharon’s admiring officers to discern between his bluster and his obedience, would still have been happier to get rid of him. But Dayan, vacillating and unassertive about so many decisions in the war, stood firm on this one. “I have to admit,” he told Elazar, in response to Gonen’s demand on the ninth to fire Sharon, “I prefer Arik’s pressures and initiatives tenfold to the hesitations and excuses of other divisional commanders.”

On the twelfth, Bar-Lev tried his hand. He, too, urged the chief of staff to fire Sharon. Elazar, after all, had specifically asked his “personal representative on the southern front” to make a recommendation on this fraught matter. But Elazar would not act on his own authority. Once again, he took it to Dayan, knowing, presumably, what the response would be. And sure enough, Dayan demurred. In Chaim Herzog’s words, “Dayan said that such a move could create political problems.”
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Bar-Lev, never one to ventilate his emotions, took this
expected rebuff in stride. His biographer has him going off to sleep at one point during this waiting period, with the explanation that “a tired general is a stupid general,” and leaving orders “to wake me only if Arik makes trouble.”
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D
uring the four days that now followed of relatively low-key warfare on the southern front, from October 10 to 13, the Egyptian infantry pushed forward time after time in local attacks, backed by armor and artillery. Each time they were driven back, often with heavy losses. They made no further territorial gains.

As the IDF regained its balance and its confidence, Dayan’s idea of a strategic withdrawal to the passes finally receded. The cabinet and the High Command waited anxiously for the Egyptians to commit their main armored strength to the battle for Sinai. Time was becoming critical. If the two superpowers jointly resolved to impose a cease-fire, their client-protagonists would hardly be able to balk. The Syrians certainly had nothing more to gain from an extended war. Their forces had been pushed back beyond the prewar line, and Israeli long-range artillery threatened the suburbs of their capital,
Damascus. Israel, too, could not long go on hemorrhaging the blood of its young men.
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The home front, laboring under near economic paralysis, had yet to assimilate the true figures of dead and wounded sustained thus far.

Yet without a turnabout on the canal front, the war in the south, if it ended now, would end as a defeat. It would be Israel’s first-ever battlefield defeat—with all the psychological and political ramifications that that could entail. On October 12 in
Tel Aviv, the top ministers and military commanders convened to grapple with this quandary. As good luck would have it, the first intelligence reports of an Egyptian crossing started to come in while their meeting was still in progress. Units of the Fourth and Twenty-First Armored Divisions were beginning to move across the canal. There were indications that they intended to mount a major attack and try to strike deeper into Sinai. Presumably,
Anwar Sadat was acting to take the pressure off his Syrian ally, now reeling under IDF counterattacks. This was the news the cabinet had been waiting for.

Both divisions in central Sinai, the 143rd and the 162nd, now braced to take on the Egyptian armored columns. This occasioned a
visit by Bren to Arik’s headquarters, where, he writes primly, he was “reminded that ‘civilization’ still continued to exist.” First, Amnon Reshef talked him into taking a shower at the empty base camp of the Fourteenth Brigade nearby. “I’d gotten used to the dirt and the unshaven cheeks,” Bren writes, “and had almost forgotten there were showers in the world.” Then, as he waited for Chief of Staff Elazar to arrive at Sharon’s bunker at
Tasa, “one of Sharon’s officers turned to me and said it was time to taste some of the delectable cheeses. And, indeed, there was a rich and impressive assortment to choose from.”
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The great armored encounter, when it finally came on October 14, was “one of the largest tank battles ever to take place in history,” according to Herzog, “with some 2,000 tanks locked in battle across the entire front.” Once again, Reshef’s brigade was in the thick of the fighting. But this time the tide of battle was unmistakable. Deployed on higher ground in front of
Hamadia and waiting patiently until the vast Egyptian armored column rolled into range, Reshef’s tanks culled dozens of the enemy armor. He used the divisional reconnaissance battalion, reinforced by additional tanks, to hit them from the flank. By the end of the engagement, the Egyptians had lost more than a hundred tanks to Reshef’s three. The First Brigade of the Twenty-First Armored Division was effectively destroyed.