Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (4 page)

He carried the memory of that day with him all his life. It taught him tactical truths that he was later to employ in much larger engagements. It taught him lessons of leadership, basics of battlefield morale.

Arguably, it taught him, too, some basic truths about Israel’s place in Palestine and in the wider region. He needed a whole lifetime, though, to learn them. But in the end—before the end—they sank in.

He nearly died there that day, of thirst, of blood loss from a bullet that struck him in the thigh and exited through his stomach. His son Omri attested that whenever his father passed that place, for the next
fifty years and more, he was assailed by an overwhelming thirst.
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His own platoon, much better kitted out than the newcomers, had nevertheless somehow not been provided with water canteens. The platoon was supposed to lead the attack on the hilltop Jordanian emplacements and the fortress and monastery below. Arik planned to cross the Jerusalem highway and come upon the defenders under cover of darkness. The rest of the force would follow.

But logistical delays—a critical unit of mortars failed to arrive; the buses ferrying the troops to the battlefield lost their way
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—meant that the attack didn’t get going till nearly dawn. The rising sun caught the platoon in open country, still on the wrong side of the road, and drew down on them a relentless hail of mortar bombs and machine-gun bullets from the hilltop. Casualties quickly mounted; the radio set was hit. The soldiers tried to flatten themselves into a shallow gully, waiting with gradually flagging confidence for reinforcements.

The Jordanians and the Palestinian irregulars, meanwhile, sensing that Arik was effectively abandoned, advanced on foot toward the beleaguered Israeli platoon.

By this time, almost half of the thirty-six-man platoon were dead and most of the others wounded. The Israeli field guns suddenly fell silent, and Arik, looking around gingerly, saw Arab soldiers on a hill to the rear where another Israeli unit had previously been deployed.

Arik crawled painfully on all fours toward the terraces that rose up out of the burning field. He knew he lacked the strength to climb along them. A young soldier from his platoon half dragged him along. “He was a new boy, just sixteen years old. He had joined us only two days earlier, and somehow I could not remember his name. I stared at him in horror. The bottom of his jaw had been shot up, leaving a mass of gore … He was unable to talk. I was too tired.”

“He kept saying, ‘Get away. Save yourself; run for it,’ ” the young savior recalled years later. “But I insisted. I wouldn’t obey him.”
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“Together we crawled over one rocky terrace, then another,” Sharon continued his account. Eventually, they were picked up by a jeep, driven, coincidentally, by Rifka and Shmuel Bogin, a brother and sister from Kfar Malal. “Then the name of the boy who saved my life came to me. It was Yaakov Bogin, a cousin of theirs. A moment later … I passed out.”

Half conscious on the long and much-interrupted ride to the hospital, he thought he overheard people remark that he had been hit “right in the genitals…[At Ekron] some of the village women came in carrying cans of milk and filling glasses for us. I was so thirsty; but looking down at my abdomen, they wouldn’t give me any. I couldn’t keep my eyes open … But when I was awake I couldn’t keep my mind off my wound.”
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At a field hospital in Rehovot, “my stretcher was placed on the ground, and a charming volunteer nurse asked me to urinate. I couldn’t. She asked for a catheter to be brought, and I said, ‘Wait, I’ll try again.’ This time I succeeded. She kissed me on the mouth, and then I realized that my wound was not where I had feared.”
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Lying in the hospital in Tel Aviv for several weeks, he reviewed the battle in his mind over and over. Fifteen of his soldiers had been killed and eleven others wounded. He had known most of them well; they were from Kfar Malal and the surrounding settlements. He knew many of their families, whose lives would never be the same again. Some of the parents came to visit him in the hospital. He didn’t know what to say to them. He felt he could not claim with conviction that their loved ones’ deaths had been unavoidable.

He never, then or later, questioned the strategic decision by Ben-Gurion to hurl regiment after regiment, some barely trained to shoot a rifle, against the
Latrun defenses, in three successive and failed assaults. In the event, the army found an alternative route up to Jerusalem, dubbed the Burma road, which it was able to roughly pave and use to send in supplies to the city. Military historians argued subsequently over whether the dogged and costly harassment of the
Arab Legion forces at Latrun served at least to reduce their numbers and their effectiveness in the fight for Jerusalem itself (which ended with both sides exhausted and the city divided by concrete walls, barbed wire, and pillboxes for the next nineteen years). Arik’s criticisms were on the tactical level, and they were bitter and devastating. He faulted the more senior commanders for failing to plan the operation in greater detail, failing to ensure that it was launched on time, and above all failing to command the forces in person and from the front—so that they could change plans and improvise as the battle ebbed and flowed. “There wasn’t a single senior officer on the ground, and that was what was lacking at the critical moment,” Sharon told his longtime friend and amanuensis,
Uri Dan, years later.
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Arik was troubled, too, by the almost blithe stoicism with which both officers and other ranks in the fledgling
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) seemed resigned to leaving the injured as well as the dead on the battlefield. He found himself wondering what the proper code of conduct ought to be, especially given that he had seen with his own eyes acts of cold-blooded barbarism perpetrated on abandoned soldiers, both living and dead.

“The decision to withdraw and to leave wounded men in the field was mine, and I had to live with it,” said Brigadier General (res.)
Asher Levy, Arik’s company commander at Latrun. “If I hadn’t taken that decision, they’d have all been killed. As it was, some were killed, and some were taken into captivity by the Jordanians. Of course the battle was a deep trauma both for Arik and for me. The realization that you’ve left your comrades wounded or dead on the battlefield, justifiedly or not, is a most terrible experience.”

Sharon was later to claim that as a result of his experience at Latrun he instituted in the forces he commanded—and this later percolated throughout the army—a strict, almost hallowed code that forbade leaving anyone, alive or dead, on the field of battle. In fact,
Asher Levy explained, that principle was rehearsed, and was supposed to apply, in the pre-state
Haganah and in the IDF from its very first day. The question was how determinedly the principle was put into practice.
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D
espite the repeated defeats at Latrun, the IDF held its ground elsewhere until a truce brokered by the UN mediator
Count Folke Bernadotte went into effect on June 11. It was to last for just one month, but Ben-Gurion made good use of every moment of it, dramatically bolstering the firepower of his army with weapons that his emissaries had purchased around the world and that were now flowing freely into the country. The size of Israel’s armed forces also increased significantly as the inflow of immigrants swelled the available pool of manpower. In early June, 40,000 men (and women: about 10 percent of those mobilized were women) were under arms; by mid-July, the figure had risen to 63,500. By the end of the year, it stood at more than 100,000. The invading Arab states—Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt,
Transjordan, and
Saudi Arabia—were vastly larger than Israel, but they failed to bring to bear their manpower potential on the Palestine front.

Ben-Gurion used the brief respite, too, to organize and consolidate the IDF. He insisted that the Etzel, and the
Palmach, too, merge into the general army and not retain a separate command structure or separate units. The standoff with the Etzel climaxed with the arrival of an arms ship, the
Altalena,
which Ben-Gurion ordered shelled rather than allow its cargo to be distributed in large part to Etzel units, as the Etzel leader,
Menachem Begin, was demanding. Historians give credit to Begin for avoiding a civil war in the midst of the War of Independence by ordering his men not to fight back.

On July 9 the fighting resumed. The IDF quickly conquered the Arab towns of Ramle and Lydda in the center of the country. They were both to have been included in the Arab state under the
Partition Resolution of the previous year. Their fifty thousand inhabitants fled east, actively impelled to do so by the victorious Israeli forces. Arik had recovered sufficiently to rejoin his battalion by this time, and he took part in operations in the Lydda area. In his memoirs he wrote of a Transjordanian counterattack, “overrunning a unit, then massacring the wounded. Twenty-eight bodies had been found, many with their
ears missing, some with their genitals cut off and stuffed into their mouths. For days we scoured the area looking for missing pieces, and scattered around the hills we found them: fingers, ears, penises caked into the dusty earth … I caught myself thinking about having been left behind on the field.”
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After ten days of intense fighting a second truce was called. Arik spent this one, too, in the hospital. Driving his jeep with his company commander alongside him, “somehow I managed to roll it over on us, breaking some ribs and injuring my spine in the process.”
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In mid-October, the fighting resumed for a third and last time. Israel strove mightily to drive the Egyptians out of the
Negev, the south of the country, and the Syrians, the Iraqis, and the Lebanese out of the Galilee, the north. It was largely but not entirely successful. The main Negev town of
Beersheba was taken on October 21, and IDF units swept across the northern border into Lebanon later that month. But an Egyptian brigade of some four thousand men was dug in around the area of Faluja in the northern Negev and refused to give ground.

Arik, on his feet again and now serving as reconnaissance officer of his battalion, tasted bloody defeat once again. “This Taha Bey [the Egyptian brigadier] was a true hero. Without any real hope of breaking out or being rescued, his brigade was … repelling every attack … Finally a major effort was planned for the night of December 27. Our battalion would keep the village of Faluja busy while a second battalion would carry out the main assault on Iraq Manshiyeh [a British-built fortress held by the Egyptians]. It was a disaster. By the time we were able to disengage we had lost ninety-eight men out of a total of six hundred.”

The war ended with armistice agreements, signed during the first half of 1949, with Egypt, Lebanon, Transjordan, and Syria (Iraq refused to sign). Israel had expanded from the 55 percent of Palestine allocated to it under the UN
Partition Resolution to 78 percent. Most Palestinian inhabitants of this expanded Jewish state had gone or been expelled. Of the remaining land, the West Bank was annexed by Trans-jordan (henceforth known as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan), and the Gaza Strip was taken over by Egypt.

Despite the very steep price in blood—5,682 dead, almost 1 percent of the population—the IDF had emerged victorious.

With demobilization, the IDF lost not only its wartime bulk but also many of its best young officers. The
Palmach, which had been the Haganah’s only professional fighting force before the state, did not take kindly to being disbanded and merged without trace into the
regular army at Ben-Gurion’s insistence. Many of its men preferred to return to their
kibbutzim rather than pursue military careers.

Arik was appointed commander of the reconnaissance company of the
Golani Brigade. “The end of the war had left many frontier areas disputed or unclear, and skirmishes with the Egyptians, Jordanians, and Lebanese were a regular fact of life. It was a time for establishing borders and training new recruits in patrolling, intelligence gathering, and night fighting. The job was just down my alley.” His commanding officer, Colonel
Avraham Yoffe, promoted him to captain in 1950 and recommended him for a battalion commander’s course.