Armies of Sand Read online

  The Arab coalition threatening Israel had every material advantage. Altogether, the main Arab combatants—Egypt, Jordan, and Syria—would deploy roughly 275,000 men against Israel with about 1,800 tanks, 2,000 armored personnel carriers (APCs), and 1,700 artillery pieces. For its part, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would field about 130,000 troops with roughly 1,000 tanks, 450 APCs, and maybe 500 artillery pieces. In the air, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) had 207 combat aircraft, against 716 Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian, and Iraqi warplanes.4

  A range of other factors also seemed to be on the side of the Arabs. In every category of weaponry, Arab equipment was at least as good as Israel’s if not better. For instance, although the IAF had 72 advanced Mirage IIIs, the rest of its planes were older French models while the Arab air forces boasted 305 Soviet MiG-21s and British Hawker Hunters, both of which were rough equivalents of the Mirage. Israel would be forced to fight on three fronts. At least a third of the Egyptian soldiers deployed to Sinai for the war were veterans of Cairo’s military campaigns in Yemen. To top it all off, all of the Arab armies would start the war dug-in behind heavily fortified positions in difficult terrain. Israel’s defeat and then destruction seemed like a foregone conclusion based on these “objective” measures.

  But there were deeper truths known to a small number of people, particularly the leadership of Israel’s armed forces. They knew that Israeli intelligence had penetrated to the highest echelons of the Arab militaries, and this access had brought them a wealth of information. From this, Israel had developed a remarkable profile of the Arab armed forces, their capabilities, deployment, operating procedures, and leadership. The IDF high command also knew that their own forces had become highly proficient in modern mechanized and air warfare, but that Arab doctrine was random and honored more in the breach than the observance. Moreover, training in the Arab armies was pathetic and their leadership poor. Israel’s generals had also used their intelligence advantage to devise a brilliant war plan that they expected would allow the Jewish state not just to survive, but to win.5

  The Israeli Air Strikes

  In the early hours of June 5, 1967, the IAF put its well-rehearsed plans into motion, launching a massive air strike that caught the Egyptians by surprise and crippled the Egyptian Air Force (EAF).6 For three hours, every 10 minutes, 10 flights of four Israeli aircraft attacked airfields and other installations throughout Egypt. During the course of the morning, the Israelis struck 18 of Egypt’s airbases, cratering runways, blowing up aircraft, and destroying support facilities. The EAF lost 298 of its 420 combat aircraft, and at least 100 of its 350 combat pilots.7

  As if that weren’t bad enough, Cairo’s air force commanders tried to cover up the disaster. These were all highly political officers, some of them jumped up from low ranks to the highest echelons because they had participated in the Free Officer’s coup of 1952 that brought Gamal ’Abd al-Nasser to power. They were not about to admit to anyone, even Nasser, that the mighty air force they had built had been lost in a single morning. So they lied, telling Nasser that they had won a great victory: They had destroyed three-quarters of the Israeli air force and Egyptian planes were now pounding Israel’s airbases.8

  When the Syrians heard of the incredible victory the EAF had won, they wanted in on the action. Damascus launched a handful of its own aircraft to join the fray. The Syrian planes arrived over Israel while the IAF was finishing off the Egyptians and so faced no opposition. Yet there was no particular purpose or strategy to their attacks. In the words of a former IAF officer, “they sent a duo here and a trio there in a disorganized fashion, somewhat hysterically and with no real preparation.”9 They did no damage to any military targets, but provoked the IAF to retaliate by striking Syrian airbases as they had the Egyptians. Syrian aircraft were lined up neatly on the tarmac of each airfield, making them easy prey for the Israelis, who destroyed about half the Syrian Air Force including all but four of its MiG-21s. The Syrians also lost four MiG-17s in air-to-air combat with the Israelis, while the IAF lost only one older Mystere.

  Israel didn’t want to go to war with Jordan in 1967, and tried as late as the morning of June 5th to convince King Hussein to remain on the sidelines. However, the king had reluctantly agreed to support Nasser and so rejected the Israeli entreaties. Like the Syrians, upon hearing the Egyptian reports that the IAF had been annihilated, Amman dispatched its own small air force to attack Israel. They too did poorly, causing only light damage. Nevertheless, this raid, coupled with Jordanian shelling of Israeli cities and a ground attack on Israeli positions in Jerusalem, was enough to convince the Israeli government that Jordan would not sit this war out. At about 1300 hours, while the Jordanian planes were being refueled and rearmed for their next mission, eight Israeli planes struck, destroying 16 of Jordan’s 22 Hawker Hunters and badly damaging another four. Another two Hunters were late returning from Israel and were shot down by Israeli Mirages as they came in to land.

  The final act of the day for the Israeli Air Force was dealing with the Iraqis. At about 1400 hours, two Iraqi Tu-16 bombers tried to bomb Israel, but could not locate either Ramat David airbase or the city of Tel Aviv, and so dropped their ordnance on Israeli farmland. An hour later, Israel responded. Eight planes flew 500 miles across the Syrian desert and attacked Iraq’s al-Walid (H-3) airbase near ar-Rutbah, the westernmost Iraqi airfield. In this raid, and a subsequent strike on June 6, the Israelis destroyed 10 Iraqi aircraft on the ground. In addition, on both days, Iraqi fighters rose to meet the attackers, allowing the IAF to shoot down 21 Iraqi aircraft while losing only 3 of their own.

  MAP 1 The Sinai Front in the Six-Day War

  The Egyptian Front

  The terrain of Sinai makes east-west movement difficult, effectively channeling an attacking army into three or four well-known corridors. The Egyptians deployed all seven of their divisions and another eight independent brigades along these routes in a Soviet-style defense-in-depth to block an Israeli offensive. Three infantry divisions and a mechanized division—reinforced by three attached armored brigades and extra artillery—held the forward line of fortifications. Farther west, Cairo deployed its operational reserves, two armored divisions, and a motorized infantry division in position to reinforce the forward infantry divisions or counterattack the main Israeli penetration when it was identified.10

  On June 5, while the Israeli Air Force was pounding Egypt’s airbases, the Israeli army hit the Egyptian forces in Sinai with 11 brigades: six armored, one infantry, one mechanized infantry, and three paratroop. Most of these were grouped into three divisional task forces, or ugdot (sing. ugdah) in Hebrew. Beginning at 0800 hours, the three Israeli ugdot smashed through the first line of Egyptian infantry divisions in their fortified positions. Farthest north, an ugdah under Brigadier Israel Tal drove straight into the formidable Egyptian defenses at Khan Yunis and Rafah, punching through the Egyptian lines in a few hours. While its paratrooper brigade turned north to clear the Gaza strip, its two armored brigades turned west and fought their way through the narrow and heavily defended Jiradi defile. The Egyptians resisted fiercely but not effectively, and the Israelis won quickly and with relatively minor losses. By the end of the first day, Tal’s vanguard had broken through and was racing westward toward the Canal.

  In central Sinai, another ugdah under Brigadier Ariel Sharon moved forward into attack positions during the day on June 5th, and that night executed a complex series of enveloping maneuvers that overcame Egypt’s formidable, Soviet-devised defenses at Abu Ageilah and Umm Qatef. Sharon’s infantry rolled up the Egyptian trench lines from the flank, his paratroopers made a heliborne descent on the Egyptian artillery batteries, and one of his tank battalions outflanked the entire Egyptian position and smashed both an Egyptian armored battalion and an armored brigade in a series of tank battles during the night. Meanwhile, the lead armored brigade of Brigadier Avraham Yoffe’s ugdah had pushed through the sand dunes between Rafah and Abu Ageilah, overwhelmed the Egyptian defenses at
B’ir Lafhan, and during the night of June 5/6 had taken position where it could block an Egyptian move into the flank of either Tal’s ugdah to the north or Sharon’s to the south.

  Thus, by the end of the first day of the war, and with minimal direct assistance from the Israeli air force, Israel’s ground forces had busted through the toughest part of the Egyptian defenses. In every case, they did so remarkably easily, taking only a few hours and suffering very modest casualties compared to what comparable armies had suffered assaulting similar defenses in World War II and Korea. Part of that can be attributed to Israeli tactical skill, which was superlative. However, at least an equal part stemmed from Egyptian tactical incompetence.

  In battle after battle, Egypt’s field commanders demonstrated almost none of the skills needed to prevail in mechanized maneuver warfare. Egyptian soldiers fought hard enough—and their units typically maintained their cohesion—while the Israelis were attempting to breach their fortified lines. But as soon as the Israelis had broken into their positions, let alone after they had broken through, Egyptian tactical formations became helpless. Time and again, Egyptian tactical commanders simply failed to react to Israeli penetrations or flanking attacks. They would not counterattack, they would not refuse a flank, they would not reorient their defenses to meet the new direction of the Israeli assault, they would not even withdraw from a position that had been compromised by Israeli maneuver. As a result, all across the front, once Israeli forces had penetrated an Egyptian defensive line, it was merely a matter of rolling up the rest of the line from the flank.

  Similarly, it was the rare occasion when Egyptian reserves moved to reinforce or counterattack an Israeli assault. There were only a handful of latecoming, slow-moving counterattacks by Egyptian armored reserves, and these were clumsy frontal assaults into the teeth of the Israeli attack. In the vast majority of instances, however, the Israelis moved so fast and the Egyptians so slowly (or not at all) that Israeli mechanized forces caught the Egyptian reserves still in their staging areas, and crushed them effortlessly. The Egyptian mechanized forces performed worst of all in these fights because their junior officers seemed to have no understanding of combined arms cooperation, their formations could not maneuver, their armor acted like movable pillboxes rather than mobile tanks, their infantry did not seem to know either how to take out Israeli tanks or how to guard their own against Israeli infantry, their artillery was incapable of shifting fire to keep pace with the Israeli maneuvers, and their tank crews were dismal marksmen who rarely, if ever, moved to get flank or rear shots against the agile Israelis.

  If Egypt’s tactical commanders were badly outfought by the Israelis, their senior leadership was psychologically paralyzed by the speed and extent of the unfolding catastrophe. Egypt’s high command was largely manned by cronies of Marshal ’Amr, the commander-in-chief of the Egyptian armed forces. These men were chosen more for their loyalty to ’Amr than any innate ability. Although initially euphoric at the chance for what they believed would be an easy victory over the despised Jews, they were then shocked that the IAF had been able to obliterate their own air force in one fell swoop. They were further stunned at the ability of Israeli armored columns to punch through their fortified lines in Sinai so quickly and then pulverize their tactical reserves with such ease.

  Egyptian junior officers in Sinai contributed to that shock by thoroughly misleading their superiors. At first, Egypt’s frontline commanders refused to admit that they were being defeated and instead sent glowing reports up the chain of command that they were crushing the Israelis. By midday on June 5, this misinformation left the Egyptian high command believing that its army was advancing into Israel itself, prompting Cairo to beg King Hussein of Jordan to launch his own offensive out of the West Bank in the fantastical belief that their armies could link up and cut Israel in half. Later, when it became impossible to hide the scope of the defeat, Egyptian junior officers reversed themselves and began claiming that they were being overwhelmed by enormous Israeli forces far greater than their own. ’Amr himself apparently suffered a nervous breakdown of sorts (or a drug- or alcohol-induced stupor) on the first day, overwhelmed by the defeat of his army.11 The result was chaos in the Egyptian chain of command, and paralysis in Sinai as none of Cairo’s field commanders—from the division commanders on down—would take the initiative to act without explicit orders from the high command.

  With the Arab air forces all but obliterated, the IAF was able to devote most of its assets to attacks on the Arab armies starting on June 6th. Because of Israel’s geographic vulnerability to Jordanian forces and respect for the reputation of Amman’s army, IDF units on the West Bank had first call for air support. Of the ground-attack sorties Israel flew against Egypt, the vast majority were interdiction missions against rear echelon targets. The IAF essentially began by hitting targets in the Canal Zone and, as these were eliminated, slowly worked their way eastward, back toward the advancing Israeli ground forces.12

  Of course, a number of Israeli fighters were still required for counter-air missions. Although the Syrian and Jordanian air forces were removed from the fray after June 5, the remnants of the EAF fought on, mustering 150 attack sorties during the war. These strikes did little damage, but they still occupied a fair number of IAF fighters over the next several days. The Israelis prevailed easily in these air-to-air engagements as well. Few Egyptian pilots could really take advantage of the capabilities of their aircraft, fewer still seemed proficient at air-to-air tactics, and almost none could act and react as quickly as the IAF fighter jocks. Altogether, the IAF shot down 42 Egyptian aircraft for the loss of only 6 of their own.

  On the ground on the second day of the war, the Israeli army effectively finished off the Egyptian army. During the night of June 5/6, Cairo had collected its senses long enough to order two brigades of the elite 4th Armored Division to counterattack either Sharon’s or Tal’s ugdot. At B’ir Lafhan, these brigades were caught by two tank battalions from Yoffie’s ugdah, which destroyed them in another churning tank battle with help from the IAF.13

  The defeat of the 4th Armored Division at B’ir Lafhan appears to have been the last straw for Marshal ’Amr. With his theater reserve (and the best unit in the Egyptian Army) defeated by a much smaller Israeli force, ’Amr conceded that he could not hold Sinai. In the afternoon of June 6, he ordered a general retreat back to the Suez. He did not bother to inform his theater or front commanders to allow them to develop a plan for an orderly withdrawal, but instead called up division staffs directly and ordered them back to the Canal immediately, setting off a mad rush westward. Later that evening, several professional General Staff officers persuaded ’Amr that the situation was not irretrievable and convinced him to amend the original withdrawal order, but by then the damage had been done and the retreat was irreversible.

  The Egyptian withdrawal turned into a rout almost from the start. Many senior field commanders simply jumped in their staff cars and fled, often without issuing any orders to their subordinates as to how to conduct the withdrawal. In most of these cases, no one stepped forward to fill the leadership void with the result that some units began to fall apart immediately. Taking a cue from their superiors, some Egyptian junior officers also decided that it was every man for himself and set out on their own, abandoning the soldiers under their command. Other large formations stuck together despite the desertion of their senior officers, but without direction from the GHQ, most Egyptian units proved incapable of any action except uncoordinated flight. Only a few tried to stand and fight to cover the Army’s retreat or even deployed rearguards to cover their own withdrawal.

  Compounding Egyptian problems, the Israelis were now in their element. The IAF bombed command and control facilities and movement chokepoints, and flew constant road reconnaissance sorties, strafing Egyptian columns as they fled for the Canal. Having broken through the initial fortified lines of the Egyptian army and penetrated into its operational depth, Israeli armor now had room to run an
d cause havoc. The Israelis quickly developed an exploitation strategy by which they sent armored columns deep into central Sinai to cut the Mitla, Giddi, and B’ir Gifgafah passes before most of the Egyptian army could get through them. Most Egyptian units, including two intact Egyptian heavy divisions, were cut off by Israeli armor at the passes and then destroyed by Israeli air and ground forces. In many cases, even this was unnecessary as large numbers of Egyptians abandoned their vehicles and attempted to make it out on foot when they saw the passes were blocked.

  Some Egyptian units tried to fight their way past what were initially very small Israeli blocking forces at the various passes, but without much success. For example, for most of the day on June 7th there were only nine Israeli tanks (four of them without any fuel) holding the Mitla pass against the bulk of three Egyptian divisions trying to escape to the Canal. Given this absurd force imbalance, it would be an understatement to say that the Egyptians fought poorly. At the Mitla and elsewhere, the Egyptians mostly did not maneuver or counterattack at all but just kept pressing forward, occasionally trying to drive the Israelis off with inaccurate tank fire. In those rare instances when the Egyptians launched a determined attack against an Israeli blocking force, in every case it was a clumsy, slow-moving frontal assault that the Israelis had little trouble dispatching with a few deft maneuvers and deadly long-range gunnery. Moreover, the Egyptian attacks were conducted only with armor—no effort was made to have infantry engage what were often unsupported Israeli tanks and hit them with antitank weapons. Similarly, the Egyptians directed very little artillery fire against the Israeli blocking forces, and the few barrages they did conduct were inaccurate and caused almost no damage.