Six Days (15 page)

Jordan's air force was efficient, but tiny, with only 24 Hawker Hunters. Just before the war, American military experts analysed the Syrian and Egyptian air strength. The Egyptian air force looked strong. It had 350 jet fighters. But it was in a poor state of readiness. Only 222 aircraft were assigned to the 18 operational fighter squadrons, of which only 2 MiG-21 and 3 MiG-17 squadrons were fully operational. The rest had only 30–50 per cent of their aircraft ready for combat. The Egyptian bomber fleet of 29 Tupolev-16s and 35 Ilyushin-28s was ready to go and was its strongest strategic weapon. Syria had 58 jet fighters and 4 Ilyushin-28 bombers. But of those only one squadron of MiG-17s was operational. The remaining fighter squadrons and the four bombers operated, the Americans said, at less than 50 per cent efficiency – in other words, for more than half the time, they were out of action. Both countries had a shortage of combat-trained pilots. Egypt had 700 pilots in total, but only 200 were considered ready to go into action. For Syria, it was 35 out of 115.

Ekron Airbase, Israel, 0430

Major Ran Pekker, commander of 102 squadron, made sure coffee was waiting for his pilots when they arrived in the briefing room. When they were seated, he turned the blackboard around. 0745, the time the war was going to start, was already chalked up. Next to the pilots' names were their targets and with whom they would be flying. He ran through the procedures. Radio silence was all important. If an aircraft had a mechanical problem, the pilot was to signal to the rest of the flight by dipping his wings, then without a word, he would turn for home. Even if the aircraft was going down, no Mayday messages were allowed. They would have to eject into the sea and wait for rescue. Pekker kept emphasising that it was not a drill. They were going to war.

Similar briefings were being given at airfields across Israel. Captain Avihu Bin-Nun was deputy commander at Tel Nof, leading a formation of Mysteres. He was talking to his men. The essentials – timing, radio silence – were all the same. Only the target details were different. Bin-Nun was solemn, convinced Israel's future rested on the shoulders of the air force. He was going to be one of the attack leaders. ‘We trained, exercised and learned our targets by heart. Each formation had several targets, which it practised attacking in complete radio silence. We had reached a point where no words were necessary. We could have executed the plan with our eyes closed.'

No opening to a war had been better rehearsed than Operation Focus. The idea behind it was simple. If Israel could destroy the Arabs' air forces before the fighting had even started properly, it would win. The Israelis had first thought about a devastating air strike on Egyptian air force bases at the end of their war of independence in 1949. In those days the Israeli air force was still tiny, equipped with Dakotas and Spitfires, which had just replaced Messerschmidts, to the enormous relief of the first Israeli fighter pilots like Ezer Weizman, who thought the German fighters had ‘an evil nature'. But in 1949 David Ben-Gurion thought the air force was not strong enough and, besides, the war against Egypt was as good as won. France and Britain proved the idea worked in 1956, when they destroyed most of the Egyptian air force when it was drawn up in neat lines at its bases. Weizman was frustrated and angry in 1956 that Britain and France had taken the lead in the air. When he became head of the air force in 1958, he made the pre-emptive strike the centre of the Israeli air strategy for the next war. He worked on the idea constantly, pushing the government to buy the right aircraft and demanding the best training. To relax he would fly a black Spitfire, which was kept for his personal use until he retired after the 1967 war.

By 1963, when the young and ambitious pilot Herzl Bodinger graduated from flying school, the idea was well-established. Every few months, Bodinger's routine training included simulated operations to bomb Arab airfields and to destroy parked aircraft by strafing. Every six months the entire air force rehearsed going to war. The pilots made models of their targets, based on intelligence reports, marking out the runways, main hangars and the positions of anti-aircraft batteries. The models were used to finalise and polish their tactics. Once the crisis started in May 1967, rehearsals stopped. Reservists were mobilised, the aircraft were fuelled and armed and put on stand-by for immediate action. But as the days went by, training resumed so the pilots could go through their missions yet again. They rehearsed by flying in attack configuration exactly the distance they would have to cover to get to their first targets. Herzl Bodinger, who was to attack Beni Sweif airfield in Egypt, would run up the same mileage by flying south from Ramat David airfield in northern Israel to the Egyptian border at Eilat, back north to the Lebanese border, turning round and going back to Beersheba before attacking a simulated airstrip in the Negev desert.

Bodinger, who had moved down to Tel Nof the night before, woke at 0430 on 5 June with the rest of the pilots. He phoned his wife to tell her that the war was starting in a few hours. He told her to take their baby from their married quarters at Ramat David to her parents in the Tel Aviv suburbs. ‘She wasn't worried. She had been an officer in air force intelligence and she was as confident as we were that the plan would work.'

Hod and his commanders did not think of Focus as a gamble. For them it was audacious and sound. That morning, Israel had 197 operational combat planes. Only four were held back to defend Israeli airspace. One of the pilots who had to stay at home was Uri Gil. He had known for two weeks that he would be in an interceptor, waiting to see if there would be an Arab counter-attack. Gil told himself he was proud that his skills as an expert dogfighter had been recognised. But he was jealous when he saw his colleagues preparing for their missions. For a fortnight, he had been sitting in his jet, ready to be scrambled, while the pilots who were on bombing missions seemed just to be hanging out, playing ping-pong and waiting for their moment of glory.

Air Force Command Centre, Ministry of Defence, Tel Aviv, 0600

The next stage of the deception plan was put into action. Five flights of the Israeli air force's Fouga Magister trainers took off. It was meant to look like just another day. In the skies above Israel they used the radio channels and call signs normally allocated to the front-line strike aircraft to play tapes of radio conversations between fighter pilots and their controllers to make it sound like routine training. The plan was that they would be picked up, as the IAF's manoeuvres were every morning, by the powerful Jordanian radar station high above the Mediterranean in the mountains at Ajloun. They stayed in the air until 0745, H-Hour.

Israel–Gaza border, 0600

The soldiers of the reconnaissance unit of Israel's 7th Armoured Brigade had risen before dawn. Their jeeps, armoured cars and tanks were lined up along an avenue of eucalyptus trees on a road leading to the border with Gaza. The company commander, Ori Orr, knew that his men had spotted him coming back late the previous night from a briefing at regimental headquarters. He had already told them that his gut feeling was that war would start this morning. He knew they would be wondering whether it would. The morning was very quiet, no aircraft overhead and no shelling. Complete radio silence was already in force. The only walkie-talkie turned on in the whole company was in Orr's armoured command car, and it was set for listening only. Orr's senior NCO, Sergeant Bentzi Zur, was in the command car making some last checks. Everything was ready.

The headquarters of the Egyptian field army in Sinai was quiet too. Its commander, General Muhsin, and his deputy had gone to the conference with Field Marshal Amer at Bir Tamada airfield. Captain Salahadeen Salim, left behind with the other junior officers, was a little uneasy. He felt they should have done more by now. Salim's mind was racing. Why wasn't there more reconnaissance? Shouldn't they have established better co-ordination between the different units under Muhsin's command? Everybody at headquarters also knew that far too many of the forces that Egypt had poured into the Sinai were not fit for combat. Thousands of them were badly trained, barely equipped reservists. Some men who had done their military service in the artillery had been called up to serve in tanks. But all Salim could do was grumble discreetly to his contemporaries. In a deeply hierarchical army a 25-year-old captain, one of the most junior officers at field headquarters, was expected to be seen and not heard. General Muhsin had let it be known that they would have time to do everything that had to be done. He had assured them that they would be ready.

Egypt's position was even worse than Salim realised. Some of the units in the Sinai were 40 per cent under strength. Some armoured units had only half the number of tanks they were supposed to have. Overall, they were down 30 per cent in small arms and 24 per cent in artillery. One-third of the standing army, 70,000 men, was in Yemen. In the late 1960s the United States was so committed in Vietnam that it doubted it could fight a second conventional war elsewhere. Yet on 5 June 1967, Egypt found itself trying to do what the United States could not. Still, Egypt had deployed in the Sinai around 100,000 men, 950 tanks, 1100 armoured personnel carriers and over 1000 artillery pieces. The Egyptian force was made up of four infantry divisions, two armoured divisions and one mechanised infantry division, along with four independent brigades. Against them were 70,000 Israelis in eleven brigades, two of which were independent with the rest split between three divisional task forces. Four brigades were armoured, with up-to-date Centurion and Patton tanks. Two were mechanised, each with a battalion of Sherman tanks and two battalions of infantry who rode into battle on old American Second World War half-tracks. The two infantry brigades were transported in hundreds of requisitioned civilian buses, lorries and vans. Israel also had three brigades of paratroops, one of which was mechanised and reinforced by a battalion of Pattons.

Tel Nof Airbase, 0630

Captain Avihu Bin-Nun and his flight of Mysteres were ready. The timing of each take-off was a critical part of the plan. Bin-Nun and his men had been told that if their aircraft malfunctioned and risked disrupting the planned take-off times, they were to get off the runway immediately even if it meant crashing the plane. The IAF had five different kinds of combat aircraft, all supplied by France – Mirages, Super Mysteres, Mysteres, Ouragans and Vautours. It was not ideal, but in the 1950s and the early 1960s they had bought what they could when they could. The plan had been tailored to fit the planes' capabilities. All of the aircraft in the first wave had to be over their targets at 0745 sharp, Israel time. Take-off times had to take that into account. Depending where they started and where they were going, aircraft had anything from 10 or 15 to 45 minutes in the air before they reached their targets. So many aircraft would arrive over so many Egyptian airbases at the same moment that Egypt would be caught cold, like a boxer knocked out in the first minute of the first round. And it had been dinned into them – on no account were they to switch on their radios until the attack started.

On the way out to his Mirage Ran Pekker thought of his family. They were about to be woken to be evacuated from the base to hotels. Then, strapped in, he exploded with anger. There had been a foul-up. Something had not been ready. They would be taking off five minutes late, which meant that they would have to fly faster, using up some of their precious fuel.

Herzl Bodinger and his colleagues in their Vautours raced across the Sinai desert at less than one hundred feet. A fear that the plan might have been rumbled ate away at Bodinger. He was frustrated that he could not turn his radio on to have some reassuring chat with his colleagues – and delighted when Egyptian soldiers riding in a big convoy of armour looked up and waved enthusiastically at them as they streaked overhead. So far, it was working.

Air Force Command Centre, Ministry of Defence, Tel Aviv, 0730

General Ezer Weizman was in a state of high excitement. ‘The suspense was incredible … The planes were on their way. At 7:40 they were to deliver the first blow at nine Egyptian airfields … I had been talking of this operation, explaining it, hatching it, dreaming of it, manufacturing it link by link, training men to carry it out. Now, in another quarter of an hour, we would know if it was only a dream, or whether it would come true.' In 1966 he had claimed in a lecture at Israel's command and staff college that the air force could destroy all the Arab air forces within six hours. Now he was going to be proved right or wrong.

The routes the aircraft would take had been plotted and adjusted over a period of years. Most of them had been tested by pilots who had been ordered to violate Egyptian airspace on ‘training missions'. They were not told that their real purpose was to see how efficiently Egyptian air defences, especially radar, locked on to them. This constant probing uncovered gaps in Egypt's military radar system. There was another complication. Nearly a third of Israel's 197 war planes were Ouragans, which had a relatively short range. They could not go beyond the Suez canal. During the build-up to war the Israeli army's frustration increased every time they heard more Egyptian troops were crossing the canal to enter Sinai. In contrast, General Hod of the air force celebrated every time another Egyptian squadron moved into the Sinai airfields. It meant more short-range work for the Ouragans, releasing the Mirages and Mysteres for other missions.

Bin-Nun swung his Mystere out over the Mediterranean. He led a flight of four aircraft, flying as low as they could to avoid detection by Jordanian radar. They were so close to the water that their jet engines left a wake. Maintaining a steady altitude was vital. One dip meant disaster. Bin-Nun was worried about his Number 4, an inexperienced pilot, who seemed to be having trouble keeping his aircraft steady. But radio silence meant he could not say a word. He looked back again and saw Number 4 was not there. He assumed he had crashed into the sea, and pressed ahead with his mission.