Six Days (18 page)

By now the main runway at Fayed was cratered and unusable. But the side runway was only blocked, by Shafei's plane, which was burning. Some of the Sukhoi pilots started up their aircraft to try to manoeuvre their way past it and take off. Zaki ran across, shouting and waving his arms to stop them leaving. Vice-President Shafei lay behind his small hummock and watched what was happening. ‘It was an unforgettable sight. Our fighters were lined up in rows and the Israelis took them out with single bursts from their guns. They were an easy target.' The Israeli pilots flew so low that Shafei could see their faces. Zaki and ground crew and construction workers who had been working at the base tried to push some of the Sukhois out of sight, behind buildings or under the trees. ‘There were explosions everywhere but we kept going and managed to save a few planes although some of the men doing the pushing were killed.' Zaki sent a pilot in a jeep to get Shafei and the Iraqi deputy prime minister out of the trench and into the base offices. After the jeep had careered to a halt outside the building and Shafei was dusting himself down inside, he was faced with a group of furious Egyptian pilots, who had watched their fighters being blown to pieces. Before the attack the air force had been full of the supposedly secret information that the previous Friday Nasser had ordered Sidqi Mahmoud to ride out an Israeli first strike. Now they were getting hammered. Look what you've done, they told him. Are you happy with this? Why didn't you let us strike first? Outside some of the anti-aircraft gunners had recovered themselves sufficiently to open up on the Israelis. Other soldiers were firing into the air with rifles and machine guns. Somehow, one of the Israeli aircraft was brought down. Tahsen Zaki, the squadron commander, went out to inspect the wreckage. The dead Israeli pilot was still strapped into his seat.

‘He looked as if he was asleep. He was a handsome, elegant young man. I told the men to bury him immediately.' Zaki was hoping that the attack was limited. But when he went to his operations room, he found out just how much the Israeli first wave had destroyed – and more attacks were being reported all the time. He looked round his airfield. Burning aircraft were everywhere. The runways were destroyed. He thought about trying to get his few remaining fighters into the air from the road outside the base, but that would mean demolishing a perimeter wall. At 1100 he had a call from Field Marshal Amer – the first time in his life he had ever spoken to the commander-in-chief. He gave him a damage report. All the MiG-21s were destroyed. Twelve Sukhois and three MiG-19s had been saved. Very well, Amer said, execute Operation Leopard, which was the plan to attack Israeli airbases. Zaki told Amer that he would try to clear the side runway. He would report back in two hours. Amer was so panic-stricken that he had forgotten about the chain of command. He was bypassing his subordinates and phoning desperately, on open lines, to try to make something happen. In the first few hours of the war, the Egyptian high command was already close to collapse.

Cairo, 0900

Mahmoud Riad, the foreign minister of Egypt, was sleeping late. He was woken by ‘a shattering explosion'. He realised Israel must have started its attack. He left his house in a hurry for his office at the foreign ministry. Most of the foreign journalists were staying at the Nile Hilton, Cairo's most modern hotel. Trevor Armbrister of the
Saturday Evening Post
was having a lazy morning. He was woken by the rattling of the hotel's windows. He decided it was just the wind and called room service to order breakfast. The operator said, ‘We cannot serve food, we are being bombed.' The lifts were not working so Armbrister rushed down the stairs. Winston Burdett, a veteran reporter who had been a correspondent for CBS News since 1943, heard a ‘deep and laboured pounding'. He went to the balcony of his room to see what was happening. A few minutes later the first air-raid siren of the war wailed out across the city. There had been rehearsals for air raids before. But they had all been announced in advance. This one wasn't. It must, he realised, be the real thing. The traffic stopped outside the hotel, on the broad corniche that runs along the bank of the Nile. Burdett noticed the traffic lights went on flicking from green to red. Then, ‘as silence fell on the streets, the smothered pounding of the ack-ack batteries grew more distinct.'

No one at the Soviet Embassy that morning was expecting war. They had gathered at the monthly meeting where they paid their subscriptions to the Communist Party. A deputy military attaché was the centre of attention, lecturing them on his theories about the coming war. It was going to be resolved in the next few days, and Israel would shoot first. He had just finished when a diplomat stormed into the room. ‘Switch the radio on! It's war!' They heard the final phrase of the official announcement, that Egyptian troops ‘have repelled Israel's treacherous aggression and are now advancing on all sections of the front'.

On the streets it felt as if every transistor radio in the city was on, with a crowd of people gathered around each one. They looked proud and anxious. At first, Cairo Radio just played military music. Listeners who had tuned into the Arabic service of Israel Radio heard the news first, at 0922, seventeen minutes after its Hebrew service had told the people of Israel. ‘A spokesman for the Israel Defence Force has stated that fierce fighting started this morning between the Egyptian air force and tanks which were moving towards Israel, and the Israeli forces which rushed to repel them.' On Cairo Radio the military music faded out just before ten to ten. An announcer, sounding excited, made a brief statement. ‘Citizens, here is important news: Israel has begun to attack Egypt. Our forces are confronting the enemy. We shall give you reports later on.'

In the Jewish quarters in Cairo and Alexandria, Jews were being rounded up by the authorities. Between 350 and 600 men between the ages of 18 and 55 were arrested, including the chief rabbis of both cities, out of a Jewish population of around 3000. In Libya, as soon as news of the war broke, mobs attacked the Jewish quarters of Tripoli and Benghazi. Many buildings were set on fire, including most of the synagogues. The army stepped in to restore order. Up to a thousand Jews were taken to an army camp where they were protected from the riots, which went on until the 8th. But others were still vulnerable – eighteen Jews were killed in the riots. By the end of July 2500 Jews had left for Italy. They were only allowed to take personal effects and £50. Everything else had to be left behind. In Tunis crowds attacked the British and US Embassies, and then moved on to the Jewish quarter. Five synagogues and many shops were burnt down. It took police and firemen four hours to arrive. Tunisia's President Bourghiba, the most conciliatory Arab leader, went on television the same evening to condemn what had happened. He sent two cabinet ministers to apologise to the chief rabbi and to promise compensation. The next day police arrested 330 rioters. In July 113 of them were given sentences from two months to twenty years. In Aden British troops stepped in to protect the remnants of what had been a big Jewish community. There was still arson and after the war a Jew was beaten to death. More Jews left Aden, to Britain and Israel.

Sinai, 0900

Yahya Saad was a junior officer in an Egyptian reconnaissance unit near Kuntilla in the Sinai. One of the patrols they had sent into Israeli territory warned them of a large force of Sherman tanks heading straight towards them. It was the armoured brigade of Colonel Albert Mendler, which had been moving noisily up and down the southern border for several days, reinforced by camouflaged decoys, to convince the Egyptians that Israel was preparing to rerun the 1956 war by moving south to Sharm al Sheikh. Saad's unit fought doggedly, but they were outgunned. They tried to attack the Shermans with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs).

‘I lay down waiting for a tank. When it was in range I fired but the weapon did not work. The whole area was turning into hell. Another soldier's didn't work and a tank came at him shooting. He ran at the tank carrying the RPG. The tank squashed him … They fired machine guns and more soldiers fell … I tried the RPG again and it didn't work. I didn't know whether the weapons were bad, the ammunition was bad or the leadership was bad. Tanks were shooting at short range. We were expecting to die under the tracks like so many others … I was in total shock to see my group torn to pieces after we had fought so bravely. I looked around and saw squashed corpses and injured men I could not save.' The battle moved past Saad. He picked himself up and walked into the desert.

Gaza, 0900

Tal's division started its attack. The 7th Armoured Brigade went west over the border into Khan Younis. His other armoured brigade, the 60th, went south into the sand dunes to outflank Rafah's minefields, barbed wire, dug-in infantry and anti-tank guns. They got stuck in the soft sand. By nightfall, they still had not fired a shot. Between them, the paratroop brigade was supposed to attack the Egyptian and Palestinian forces who were holding Rafah. At first it also lost its way, along with the tanks it had in support.

Luckily for Tal, his 7th Armoured Brigade executed its mission, though it ran into much heavier fire than expected from a brigade of Egypt's 7th Infantry Division and a battalion of Palestinians, along with about 150 Second World War Stalin tanks – heavy but obsolete – and 90 artillery pieces. Much of the fighting was confused, out of the control of Tal or anyone else for that matter. Colonel Raphael Eitan, the commander of 202nd Paratroop Brigade, led his men through ‘hand-to-hand fighting … We fought for our lives. I kept firing my Uzi, non-stop.' Ori Orr's Pattons, the 7th Armoured's reconnaissance unit, took the direct route, a frontal assault up the road into the suburbs of Khan Younis. Orr, following up the road with his half-tracks, saw ‘Egyptian soldiers stand by the road in amazement, watching the line go past. One waves to our soldiers, who look cautiously back. Is this war? Suddenly, hell opens its mouth.' A radio operator picked up a voice lamenting in Arabic, ‘They are on us. Two great columns of dust. What can we do? What can we do?' But most of the Egyptian and Palestinian soldiers were ready to fight. Heavy fire ripped into the Israelis. The Egyptian position was well prepared, with minefields and anti-tank obstacles that the Israelis had to manoeuvre around slowly. A sniper picked off one of Orr's tank commanders. They rode with their bodies exposed in their turrets. It was supposed to give them a better idea of the battlefield. It also made them easier to kill.

Shelling was coming from both sides of Orr's position. Another half-track was hit. All eight men inside were killed. Orr and his men and the tanks moved forward towards the Egyptian positions. After they had gone 150 metres, he realised they were in a minefield. His own half-track car hit a mine and turned over. He continued on foot, following the tanks, as ‘turning back now would have caused many casualties'. Yarkoni, one of the men who had scribbled out a postcard as they moved off, jumped into a trench to start clearing it. A wounded Egyptian soldier shot him. ‘This is the end,' he said to the men who carried him away, just before he died. Sergeant Bentzi Zur, the senior NCO in Orr's by now crippled command car, flagged down another jeep so he could go on fighting. When they stopped to help the crew of the knocked-out tank, the jeep had a direct hit and blew up. Zur and its other two occupants were killed.

The Israelis changed their plan, encircling Khan Younis before they entered it. Some of them, who had been hopelessly lost in the narrow alleys, noticed that the main attraction at the local cinema was the Beatles film,
Help.

*   *   *

Ramadan Mohammed Iraqi drove one of the Egyptian army's communications trucks. On Sunday night he was warned that war could start in the morning by an officer from a reconnaissance unit who had crossed the border into Israel and seen the preparations. Since morning the two radio specialists who operated his truck had been complaining about the interference. Their sets seemed to be jammed. They were right. Throughout Sinai the chaos that was engulfing the Egyptian army was made worse by the successful jamming of their communications network. In the morning Ramadan and his two comrades felt optimistic about the war. But then stories started to circulate about the destruction of the Egyptian air force, which made them feel vulnerable. Initially their sector, near Rafah, was quiet. ‘Then we were surprised to see the Israelis advancing and destroying our vehicles.' Ramadan left his truck to reconnoitre what he thought could be a way out. When he got back to his truck it was on fire. His two friends who worked the radios were lying in the sand, dead. ‘Their air force was attacking us. It was every man for himself.'

UNEF troops found themselves in the firing line. Three Indian soldiers were killed south of Khan Younis when their column of white-painted vehicles was strafed by Israeli aircraft. At 1230, five more Indians were killed and more than a dozen wounded, by IDF artillery fire directed at their camp. From New York the UN secretary general sent a strong protest to the Eshkol government about the ‘tragic and unnecessary loss of life'.

But the Israelis were making progress. Major El Dakhakny of Egyptian military intelligence was not surprised. He had realised some time before that it was impossible to defend a narrow, flat piece of land like the Gaza Strip from tanks and mechanised infantry, especially when it was backed up by artillery that was safely dug in well behind Israel's borders. He sent his
fedayeen
guerrillas into Israel, each with a target to attack. There was not much more he could do. Major Dakhakny radioed Cairo requesting permission to pull back with his men to Al-Arish. Not a chance, he was told. Tal's tanks had moved on from Khan Younis to Rafah. They put down accurate fire at long range and overwhelmed its defences. Israel had cut the Gaza Strip. Dakhakny knew the battle had been going badly, but the Israelis had moved much faster than he had imagined. He was told to try to escape by boat.