Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (22 page)
Read Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon Online
Authors: David Landau
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Political, #Historical, #History, #Middle East, #Israel & Palestine, #eBook
To the north, Bren’s division made major gains, too, blocking and crushing Egypt’s Twenty-Third Mechanized Division. In the south, another Egyptian armored brigade, advancing toward the Mitle, was ambushed by armor and infantry forces under Magen, while the Israeli Air Force, beyond ground-to-air missile range in that theater, pounded them from above. “Within two hours,” Herzog writes, “some sixty Egyptian tanks and a large number of APCs and artillery pieces were in flames.” Bar-Lev telephoned Golda. “It’s been a good day,” he reported. “Our forces are themselves again and so are the Egyptians.”
36
For Dayan, the final tally of some 260 Egyptian tanks was still lower than he had hoped. Not all the top-of-the-line Egyptian forces had yet been committed. But the IDF had shown that it was finally learning to deal with the Egyptian infantry’s antitank missiles, particularly the wire-guided Sagger, which had been deployed to such devastating effect in the first days of the war. Israel’s own infantry, moreover, was proving effective with its SS11-type antitank missiles.
The cabinet convened that evening for what everyone present understood would be a fateful meeting. Dayan, previously hesitant, now unequivocally recommended approving “Noble Hearts,” the plan for an Israeli crossing at
Deversoir. Some of the ministers were still worried by the thought of a sizable Israeli force being stranded on the far
side of the canal. Elazar said the issue of
bridges was still the weak point. Could they be gotten there in time? How would they survive Egyptian bombing and shelling? But they would have more than one bridge, he assured the ministers. “My best analysis of all the facts tells me the prospect of failure is very low and the chances of success are good.”
The cabinet sat and pondered till long after midnight. In the end, taking Prime Minister Meir’s lead, almost all of the ministers voted in favor. But what precisely did Noble Hearts, in its current form, envisage? More specifically, how many divisions were to cross? One or two? If two, then when? And in what order? These key questions were not unequivocally and explicitly answered. Elazar told the cabinet on the night of the fourteenth that “in the first stage only one division will cross, and if it carries out its assignment successfully it will open the way for the second division.”
37
The discussions on the fourteenth, both in the cabinet and within the army command, seemed to assume a one-divisional crossing—by the 143rd Division. But even before the first soldier had set his boot down on “Africa,” the commander of the front, Bar-Lev, suggested vaguely that perhaps both the 143rd and the 162nd—Arik and Bren—should take part in the operation, with Bren’s division crossing the canal while Sharon’s division broadened and defended the eastern bridgehead.
This obfuscation, as we shall see, became the cause of friction, suspicion, and jealousy for the remainder of the war and long thereafter. Sharon, his senior officers, and his political “hinterland” back home accused the High Command, and especially the Labor Party minister Bar-Lev, of deliberately holding him back and pushing Bren forward in order to deny him, the Likud politician, the glory of the victory. Conversely, Sharon’s rivals accused him—the Likud politician—of deliberately pushing himself forward and attempting to deny Bren his rightful place in the roll of honor.
At
Tasa the next morning, Sharon went over his plans with Bar-Lev and Gonen:
My division would break through the Egyptian lines, secure a corridor to the canal, and establish a crossing point at
Deversoir on the
east bank—at precisely the location where the reconnaissance unit had penetrated six days earlier. Meanwhile,
rubber assault boats would be brought forward to ferry
Danny Matt’s paratroop brigade to the west bank. Once the paratroops had secured the area, a pontoon
bridge would be laid across the canal and Haim Erez’s tank brigade would cross. The great reconstructed rolling bridge would also be towed into place and pushed across.
On the northern edge of the opening, two east-west roads ran to the water line … One, code-named Akavish, connected Tasa with the shore of the
Great Bitter Lake. About five miles to the east of the canal another road started and ran parallel to and north of Akavish. This road, code-named Tirtur, had been especially laid out for towing the 600-ton steel roller bridge to the canal. Its terminus on the water line was just above the enclosed yard I had prepared in May as the staging area for a crossing. These two roads, Akavish and Tirtur, would constitute our corridor to the canal. Along them we would have to move two divisions and all the crossing equipment.
Directly south of Akavish was the undefended seam between the two Egyptian armies, so we had plenty of maneuvering room on that side. But on the northern edge of the seam,
Tirtur Road skirted the perimeter of the Second Army bridgehead, and this perimeter was very heavily defended. Here the Egyptians had established a major fortified base known as “Missouri,” whose southwestern anchor was an area we called the “
Chinese Farm”—an agricultural station set up with Japanese equipment years earlier. This Chinese Farm … sat on the Tirtur Road and on the junction of Tirtur and Lexicon, the communication road that ran parallel to the canal bank. The deep irrigation ditches and the mounds of dirt thrown up when they were excavated made this a natural defensive site where machine guns and anti-tank weapons could dominate the field.
The strange, slightly comical code names—
akavish
means “spider,”
tirtur
means “clatter”—were to become etched on the Israeli public mind like Antietam and Monte Cassino, with all the pride but also all the grief and the heart searching that those names evoked among the victors of those terrible battles. The technical, euphemistic term that Sharon uses, “secure a corridor,” was to translate into bloody and costly fighting in the nights and days ahead.
My plan … was to attack at dusk and fight the main battle during the night.
Tuvia Raviv’s tank brigade would assault Missouri from the east, a head-on thrust that would appear to the Egyptians very much
what they expected. But in fact Tuvia’s attack would be a diversion, meant to draw their forces and attention. At the same time, Amnon Reshef’s brigade would execute a hook to the southwest through the unoccupied gap between the Egyptian armies, then north into the rear of the Egyptian base area. Here his missions were to secure the yard as a crossing site, push the Egyptians northward, and open up Tirtur and Akavish from west to east—that is, from behind. With the roads clear,
Danny Matt’s paratroop brigade would move into the yard along with the assault boats and cross the canal. Once the paratroop bridgehead was secure, engineers would push the
bridges across.
It was a brilliant plan, reminiscent in its daring and complexity of the multipronged nighttime attack on Abu Agheila in the
Six-Day War. And despite every form of snafu and misfortune, the glaring lack of battlefield intelligence, and the yawning gaps that opened, perhaps inevitably, between the plan and the reality, in essence it worked. By dawn of the sixteenth, the paratroopers were across, fortifying their eerily peaceful bridgehead. So were Haim Erez’s tanks, foraging as deep as eighteen miles into the countryside, overrunning missile batteries and radar sites, cutting a swath of Israeli control through the Egyptian rear.
But as Sharon outlined his tactics on the morning of the fifteenth, speaking with fluent confidence, the unresolved dilemma lurked into focus.
SHARON:
The order of crossing will be 421 (Erez), and then 600 (Tuvia) and then 14 (Reshef).
BAR-LEV:
Just a minute. How’s that? How’s that?
SHARON:
421’s at the bridge already…
BAR-LEV:
No, no. You’re not transferring three [brigades]?!
SHARON:
No, no. I’ll leave [forces] here. I suppose I’ll leave a battalion of tanks. It depends…
BAR-LEV:
No, no. You’ll leave a brigade.
SHARON:
Okay, then I’ll leave 600 Brigade.
Sharon continued talking, assuring his superiors that the operation is “complicated but doable.” He talked about the rolling bridge and the self-propelled rafts and the Gilowa amphibious tugs cum rafts, and the need to get the forces across to the west bank “on whatever is available” as soon as they reached the canal shore. But Bar-Lev, as slow speaking as Sharon was fast, hauled him back to the east bank again.
BAR-LEV:
Now, regarding the brigade that remains here … who secures the bridgehead?
SHARON:
600 does the containment.
BAR-LEV:
And what infantry remains here to secure the bridgehead?
SHARON:
I’ll leave a battalion of paratroopers…
BAR-LEV:
Have they got those LOW [antitank] missiles?
38
The contours of the looming dispute are already discernible: Who crosses? Who stays to defend the eastern bridgehead? Who breaks out to the west and cuts off the enemy army? The war against Egypt was about to be turned around. It was a great martial triumph for Israel. But the triumph was marred—some claim actually diminished—by the “war of the generals” that seethed within the Israeli camp.
O
ctober 15 was the fifth day of the eight-day Jewish festival of Sukkot, or Tabernacles. “As we headed toward the front,” Sharon writes, “we passed dozens of jerry-rigged Sukkot huts. Traditionally these huts are made of branches and foliage and are hung with the season’s harvest. Often they are elaborate and elegant. But for this Sukkot in the Sinai, ammunition cases and packing crates were the main building material, supplemented by an occasional scraggly bush the soldiers had managed to dig up from the desert.”
Amnon Reshef’s much-mauled brigade had been beefed up for this operation with additional units. He had four tank battalions under him and three more of mechanized infantry. “We knew they had two divisions at Missouri, the Sixteenth Infantry and the Twenty-first. But they were just large eggs on our maps. We didn’t know precisely how and where they were deployed. I hoped to slide through like a knife, from the rear, where we were least expected.”
The reconnaissance battalion slid through, the sound of its clanking treads drowned by the din of battle raging to the north where Raviv’s 600th Brigade had launched its diversionary attack on Missouri. The battalion swung out wide, crossed Tirtur, and headed on toward the canal shore at
Matzmed, ready to assist the paratroopers’ crossing. Reshef himself, with two other tank battalions, now also crossed Tirtur from the south, also without incident, and hurried north to engage the Egyptian positions in Missouri. The next battalion, however, the 184th, suddenly found itself under murderous fire as it followed north. “I’m with half the brigade,” Reshef recalled, “and we’re in a major tank battle north of Akavish. Tanks are exploding and burning all
around. I’m looking at Egyptian tanks from a range of two meters. I’m looking at dozens of Egyptian soldiers.”
Click
here
to see a larger image.
“Unknown to Reshef,” Chaim Herzog explains, “his force had moved into the administrative center of the 16th Egyptian Infantry Division, to which the 21st Armored Division had also withdrawn after being so badly mauled on October 14. His force found itself suddenly in the midst of a vast army … Pandemonium broke out in the Egyptian forces. Thousands of weapons of all types opened fire in all directions and the whole area as far as the eye could see seemed to go up in flames.”
39
Behind Reshef and his troops, the Tirtur-Lexicon crossroad was blocked by intense and sustained Egyptian fire. Efforts by Reshef’s infantry battalions to open Tirtur from west to east resulted in repeated, costly failure. The reconnaissance battalion, fighting to free up the crossroads, also sustained mounting casualties.
“From 9:00 p.m. to midnight we fought like madmen,” Reshef continued:
I was shooting nonstop, and every one of my men likewise. From Sharon—hardly a sound. This was his greatness. If he trusted someone, he’d let them get on with it and didn’t pester. Once or twice, pleasantly and politely, he would say to me over the radio that it was really important that we opened Tirtur. And I’d say, “It’ll be all right, Arik. I’m working on it.” And he said, “I always know that with you there everything will be all right.” He heard how we were fighting, at ranges of half a meter. It was like inside hell. Thousands of men fighting for their lives.
At one juncture, Reshef, in his command tank, believed he was joining one of his own companies when suddenly, at a distance of fifty meters, he saw they were enemy tanks. “I knocked out all five of them,” he recalls matter-of-factly.
“Did you contact Sharon and tell him?”
“I told him I’d knocked out three.”
“What was his reaction?”
“He was pleased. I told him in order to boost his morale.”
40
Morale, that intangible but all-important substance, was what decided the 143rd Division’s battle that night, and with it the war. As Reshef and his brigade fought their vastly more numerous foe, Sharon himself, just a few miles to the south, led
Danny Matt’s paratroopers into the “yard.” “Unnoticed,” Sharon recalls in
Warrior,
“we entered into the protection of
the yard’s sand walls. Though we did not know
it, behind us the reconnaissance battalion was dying in a barrage of Sagger missiles and tank fire. By 1 a.m. lead elements of the paratroopers had started crossing to the west bank in their
rubber assault boats. On the other side of the canal the troopers found the area almost deserted. We had taken the Egyptians utterly by surprise. As they established their beachhead, the paratroopers radioed back the code word Acapulco—Success.”
