Armies of Sand Read online

  With Israeli armor blocking the passes, beginning late on June 7, the Israeli Air Force increasingly directed its ground attack sorties against the masses of Egyptian vehicles bottled up in central Sinai. Between these constant air strikes and the destruction of the few remaining cohesive Egyptian units by the Israeli ground forces at the passes, the Egyptian army dissolved. Units began to surrender en masse, while large numbers of other Egyptian soldiers abandoned their equipment and set out across the desert on their own. Most either died or were picked up by Israeli forces days later.

  The Jordanian Front

  The Jordanians had done an even better job than the Egyptians in deploying their forces to repel an Israeli invasion of the West Bank. They correctly deduced that the IDF would conduct two major thrusts—one against Jerusalem and the other southward along the Janin-Nablus axis—coupled with a “defensive” attack around Qalqilyah/Tulkarm to push the Jordanians back from the Israeli population centers along the coast. The Jordanians marshaled nine brigades (seven infantry and two armored) and several independent battalions for the war. Amman deployed five of the infantry brigades in Jerusalem and along the borders with Israel. Another infantry brigade and the elite 60th Armored Brigade were bivouacked in the Jordan Valley near Jericho where they were to move forward to support Jerusalem. Similarly, an infantry brigade and the elite 40th Armored Brigade were held back near the Damiyah Bridge to support Janin and parry the expected Israeli thrust toward Nablus. Finally two armored battalions were deployed forward to provide support for the front-line infantry, one near Janin and the other near Hebron.

  This deployment scheme concentrated division-sized forces in the two main Israeli breakthrough sectors: Jerusalem and Janin. For this reason, and because the Jordanians had had 19 years to fortify their lines in the superb defensive terrain of the West Bank, Amman was confident that it could hold the West Bank against an Israeli offensive for two to three weeks. Moreover, the Jordanians intended to use their concentration around Jerusalem to take most or all of the Jewish half of the city, which they could use as a bargaining chip to be traded for any Israeli gains elsewhere.

  Despite Amman’s prescience in forecasting the Israeli battle plan, the IDF made short work of the Jordanian army. The Israelis deployed eight brigades (one armored, two mechanized, and five infantry) against the West Bank. Brigadier Uzi Narkiss, in charge of Israel’s Central Command facing Jordan, launched a three-brigade ugdah from the Galilee south toward Janin and Nablus, used two other infantry brigades to seize the Jordanian stronghold at Latrun and push the Jordanians back from the coastal plain between Qalqilyah and Tulkarm, and employed another three-brigade ugdah to conduct a double-envelopment of Jerusalem—exactly as Amman expected.

  MAP 2 The Jordanian Front in the Six-Day War

  Yet, as in Sinai, on June 5th and 6th, Israeli ground forces cracked the Jordanian front-line infantry positions and then defeated Amman’s armored reserves with relative ease. During the morning of June 5th, Jordanian forces attacked the neutral UN compound at Government House to secure their southern flank. The Israelis correctly read this as the opening move in a larger Jordanian attack on Jerusalem, which prompted the IDF to shelve its hopes that Amman would stay out of the war and reluctantly launch its own offensive against the West Bank. An Israeli Infantry Brigade checked and then counterattacked the Jordanian forces in southern Jerusalem, clearing the formidable Jordanian fortifications there with minimal losses. During the night of June 5/6, the IDF also attacked Ammunition Hill in the Shaykh Jarrah area north of the Old City. This was the most heavily fortified part of the entire Jordanian line, and Amman had a reinforced battalion entrenched there, supported by artillery and mortars. That night, the Israelis mounted a frontal assault into the Jordanian lines with a paratrooper brigade and a company of Sherman tanks. Although the attack was hastily planned and poorly executed, the Israeli paratroopers overpowered the Jordanian defenders in a few hours of fierce combat. The Israelis took probably their heaviest losses of the war in this fight (50 dead and 150 wounded), but they quickly regrouped and pushed on to envelop the Old City from the north that morning.

  Other Israeli units moved to secure the northern shoulder of the Jerusalem corridor. An Israeli infantry brigade overpowered the Jordanian 2nd Infantry Brigade defending the stronghold at Latrun, which dominated the western end of the corridor. Closer in to Jerusalem, the Israeli 10th Mechanized Brigade assaulted up the slopes of Radar Hill and the escarpment marking the corridor’s northern boundary. Although several Jordanian battalions were entrenched in this outstanding defensive terrain—and the Israeli attack should have been suicidal—Jordanian resistance was so inept that the Israelis punched through their lines with ease in just a matter of hours. With the Jordanian infantry in full retreat, the Israelis turned east and marched on Tel al-Ful, a key height commanding both the northern approaches to Jerusalem and the southern approaches to Ramallah.

  In northern Samaria, the key contest was the battle for Janin. The Israelis attacked south from the Galilee with three brigades (one armored, one mechanized infantry, and one infantry) in a complex pincer movement. The mechanized brigade busted through the Jordanian 12th Armored Battalion to envelop Janin from the west, while the Israeli infantry brigade completed the encirclement from the northeast. Meanwhile, the IDF armored brigade bypassed Janin altogether and headed south to seize Nablus in central Samaria. The next morning (June 6) the Israelis smashed the Jordanian 25th Infantry Brigade entrenched in Janin. Meanwhile, an Israeli infantry brigade attacking from the coastal plain drove back Jordan’s 1st Infantry Brigade, which collapsed under minimal pressure, leaving Tulkarm, Qalqilyah, and the borders of the West Bank open to the IDF.

  The most remarkable aspect of all of these battles on the West Bank is how closely they mirrored the fighting in Sinai. Accounts of the two campaigns read like virtual carbon copies of one another. Despite the reputation of Jordanian forces—and their better performance in 1948, discussed later in this book—they fought just like the Egyptians. Jordanian forces often stoutly defended their fixed positions, and they were generally better marksmen than Cairo’s troops. But like the Egyptians, the Jordanians refused to counterattack, shift their forces, or reorient their defenses to meet Israeli penetrations or flanking attacks. The Jordanian units themselves simply did not maneuver, they could not shift their artillery fire, and their tanks either rumbled forward in slow, clumsy frontal assaults or sat in place till they were picked off by Israeli armor or infantry that could stalk them as if they were fixed bunkers. Jordanian units showed effectively no capacity to integrate the different combat arms into combined arms teams, and their commanders were also prone to exaggerate and even lie to their superiors about their situation to cover up their mistakes and defeats. As in the Sinai, the Israelis found that they simply needed to turn or penetrate a Jordanian defensive line, and then it was just a matter of rolling it up from the flank. It was frightening work in the hills of the West Bank and narrow streets of Jerusalem, but it was straightforward, even simple.

  For its part, the Jordanian high command was just as stunned by the destruction of their air force as the Egyptians, but it was not paralyzed like ’Amr and his generals, and Amman began shifting reserves to reinforce threatened sectors. Late on June 5, the Jordanians moved additional infantry to shore up the defenses of Jerusalem, and ordered the main body of the 60th Armored Brigade to Tel al-Ful to block the Israeli 10th Mechanized Brigade. Meanwhile, Amman ordered its 40th Armored Brigade to counterattack the Israeli penetration at Janin.

  In part because of air strikes, but mostly because of the superiority of Israeli ground forces, these smart Jordanian countermoves failed to stop the tide of the advancing Israeli army. The Jordanian 60th Armored Brigade was trounced by a much smaller and worse-armed force of Israeli tanks and mechanized infantry as it attempted to reinforce the Jordanian positions in Jerusalem. In northern Samaria, the 40th Armored Brigade—with one of the finest field commanders any modern Arab army would ever produce in Brigadier Rakan al-Jazi—counterattacked the Israeli forces at Janin around mid-morning on June 6th. Al-Jazi’s Patton tanks mauled an Israeli reconnaissance company and a battalion of refurbished World War II–era Shermans at Qabatiyah crossroads south of the town before falling back to a good defensive position blocking the Israeli advance. At dawn the next morning (June 7), however, the Israelis launched a set-piece assault preceded by a brief, fierce air and artillery bombardment. One Israeli combined-arms team pinned the Jordanians while another swept around its flank, forcing the Jordanians to fall back to the south. Once the Jordanian tanks were out in the open, they became vulnerable to Israeli armor and air strikes. The brigade suffered heavy casualties and slowly disintegrated as it tried to retreat.

  In Jerusalem, the IDF was still working to cut off the Old City. In southern Jerusalem, Israeli infantry launched a clumsy frontal assault that still smashed the entrenched Jordanian defenders in their second and third lines of defense. From there, the Israelis turned northwest and hit Mt. Zion from the rear, causing a Jordanian brigade to collapse and flee. The IDF’s northern pincer made similar progress. After taking Tel al-Ful, the Israeli 10th Mechanized Brigade had dispatched a battalion task force to capture Ramallah, and then sent another east to join the envelopment of Jerusalem. This allowed the IDF to move a combined force of paratroopers and Sherman tanks to take the Augusta-Victoria ridge east of the city and complete its encirclement late on June 6.

  Thus, by the morning of June 8th the West Bank was lost. The Jordanian Air Force lay in ruins. Frontline Jordanian forces defending heavily fortified positions had been routed at Latrun, Tulkarm, Qalqilyah, Janin, Ammunition Hill, Shaykh Jarrah, Mivtar Hill, Abu Tor, and Mt. Zion while Jordan’s armored reserves had been broken at Te
l al-Ful, the Dotan Valley, the Janin-Tubas road, and eventually Qabatiyah. There were few reserves left to the Jordanian high command, and Israeli air power was making a coordinated defense of the West Bank impossible. At noon, the king ordered a withdrawal of all his forces from the West Bank. Amman’s army streamed down to the Jordan river bridges with Israeli units close on their heels.

  MAP 3 The Golan Front in the Six-Day War

  The Syrian Front

  Unlike the Egyptians and Jordanians, the Syrians were kept in suspense for four days. After the destruction of much of the Syrian Air Force on the 5th, Damascus launched a halfhearted attack on the Israeli kibbutzim in the exposed “finger” of Galilee. The attack was clumsy and slow, and was stopped by the kibbutzniks themselves. Thereafter, the Syrians were largely content to trade artillery rounds with Israeli forces while the IDF made short work of Syria’s Egyptian and Jordanian allies. In addition, the IAF began to work over Syrian defenses on the Golan in preparation for the Israeli ground assault, flying roughly 100 ground-attack sorties against Syria on June 6 and 7, and 225 sorties against Syria on June 8.14 In that time, the Israelis kept only a single ugdah of one armored and two infantry brigades to watch the Syrians, while the rest of the army fought in Sinai and the West Bank.

  Nevertheless, when the Israelis finally attacked the Golan, the odds still did not seem terribly favorable. Damascus deployed 12 of its 16 brigades on the Golan—including both of its armored brigades and its lone mechanized brigade—in three brigade groups. In addition to the size and weaponry of these forces, the Syrians also had the advantage of extremely formidable natural positions and extensive fortifications. The Golan is a forbidding obstacle to assault, especially from the west, where it climbs sharply from the Huleh Valley in an escarpment rising 1,000–2,000 feet to the crest in many places. With the help of their Soviet advisers, the Syrians had developed a sophisticated series of fortified positions throughout the depth of the Golan. The Syrians and Soviets had identified most of the key avenues of advance and had carefully sited defensive positions to block and trap an Israeli attack along any of them.

  Against the Syrians on the Golan, Israel mustered a smaller force than it had against Egypt or Jordan. The Israelis attacked with seven brigades (two armored, one mechanized infantry, two paratrooper, and two infantry) grouped into two ugdot. Four of these had fought in Sinai or the West Bank and were rushed north with little rest or refit. One advantage the IDF possessed was that by the time of their attack on the Golan, the IAF was free to participate fully against the Syrians, all of its other missions having been completed. Despite its busy week, the IAF could still muster over 150 serviceable combat aircraft.

  The Israeli offensive began on the morning of June 9, 1967, with a tremendous air assault. The IAF directed its full might against the Syrians, flying 299 air-to-ground sorties, while IDF engineers cleared paths through the Syrian minefields.15 Although the air strikes caused few casualties among the Syrian forces, who were well protected in their deep bunkers, it pinned them and prevented them from interfering with the work of the Israeli sappers. At 1000 hours, after their air strikes had shifted eastward, the Israeli armor and infantry began climbing the Golan. The main Israeli attack came in the far north because the terrain was so forbidding here that the Syrians thought it precluded an Israeli attack, and so had left it more lightly defended.

  The assault was not the most elegant breaching operation ever conducted. Because of the difficulty of the terrain, the Israelis lost large numbers of tanks and other vehicles to boulders, ditches, and loose gravel, which caused tanks to slide down the hillsides. In addition, the limited road network in the area channeled Israeli movement, causing traffic jams and confusion whenever lead elements hit Syrian resistance or terrain obstacles. Finally, several Israeli units took wrong turns and got lost in the winding paths of the Golan.

  The Syrians, however, failed to take advantage of any of these Israeli miscues. Rather than counterattacking the vulnerable Israeli columns as they stumbled through the forward defenses, the Syrians sat in their positions. Syrian units fought back hard whenever the Israelis came into their fields of fire, but they made no effort to hit the Israelis while they were disoriented, constricted, and confused during the initial assault and so throw them off the Golan altogether. Syrian artillery units proved useless. Their batteries could only fire pre-planned fire missions into the Huleh Valley (far behind the advancing Israelis) and would not adjust their fire to hit the Israeli forces climbing the escarpment and penetrating their front lines.

  This pattern held true at every level of the Syrian hierarchy. The company, battalion, and brigade commanders manning the forward defensive positions failed to order counterattacks against the Israelis as they breached the Syrian lines. This greatly eased the burden on the Israelis, because it meant that all they needed to do was silence the defenders immediately in front of them and then clear away minefields and earthworks. At a higher level, the reserves of the Syrian brigade group in the north—an armored brigade and an infantry brigade—failed to counterattack or even move up to support their forward infantry brigades when the Israelis successfully breached the forward defense lines. At a higher level still, the Syrian General Staff would not release the 42nd Brigade Group from GHQ reserve to counterattack or reinforce the forward Syrian lines when the Israeli penetration in the northern sector began to unhinge the entire defensive system on the Golan.

  The passivity of the Syrians gave the IDF a crucial grace period, which they used to get their assault back on track. Demonstrating the improvisational abilities the IDF has always nurtured, Israeli units simply kept moving forward, finding new paths east and unplanned routes to outflank and overpower Syrian defensive positions. By the end of the day, they had worked their way along a number of routes to the east, at which point they began pushing southward in a wide flanking maneuver designed to envelop the entire Golan.

  At this point, the campaign had effectively been decided. Although there were plenty of Syrian units still manning formidable defensive positions in the southern and central Golan, the entire northern quarter of the plateau was in Israeli hands, and it was simply a matter of time before the IDF pushed south, rolled up the Syrian lines from their flank or rear, and cut off the entire Syrian army on the Golan. Because the Syrians would not counterattack or reorient their defenses, there was no real chance that they could stop the Israelis. Indeed, rather than even try, the Syrian General Staff responded by pulling most of the 42nd Brigade Group back to Damascus during the night of June 9/10 to guard against an Israeli attack on the capital. Syria’s military leadership appears to have been in a state of chaos, and left the rest of the army on the Golan to their own devices.

  The IDF offensive resumed early in the morning of June 10. Israeli armor and infantry task forces made their way south and east, seizing crucial road junctions and clearing important defensive positions, mostly from the rear. Throughout the Golan, the Syrians fought back bravely, but because they continued to remain immobile in their bunkers it was only a matter of time before each Syrian position was reduced by the Israelis.

  Then, at 0845 on June 10, Syria’s government-controlled radio announced the fall of al-Qunaytarah to the Israelis.16 Israeli units were still several kilometers from the town and were mystified by the announcement. Most of the Syrian units on the Golan were not as clear about the situation and took this report to mean they were trapped. The result was the general collapse of the Syrian Army. Some units remained in place and continued to defend their fortifications because they had not been ordered to do otherwise. These units had to be mopped up by Israeli forces in difficult hand-to-hand fights. However, the bulk of what was left of the Syrian Army ran. In a number of cases, Syrian officers simply jumped into their staff cars and fled, abandoning their troops, who were forced to make their way out on their own as best they could. Because al-Qunaytarah had not fallen to the Israelis, some Syrian units in the central and southern sectors were able to escape in relatively good shape, while others dropped their weapons and fled pell-mell. By the end of June 10, the Syrian Army had deserted the plateau, and the Israelis had accepted a UN-brokered ceasefire.