CHAPTER 3 · DESERT STORM

Sharon arrived at the 143rd Division’s forward base at Tasa, in western Sinai, in mid-afternoon on Sunday, October 7, 1973, to take command of the central sector. Avraham “Bren” Adan was deploying to his north with the 162nd Division, another reserve formation, while the peacetime commander of Sinai, Avraham “Albert” Mandler, took over the southern sector. Shmuel Gonen (still widely known by his original family name, Gorodish), Sharon’s successor as CO of Southern Command, moved with his staff from Beersheba to the forward headquarters at Um Hashiba near the Gidi Pass, which was code-named Dvela.^a

The Yom Kippur War was twenty-six hours old. Hundreds of Israeli soldiers were dead on the two fronts, the Egyptian and the Syrian. Hundreds of tanks had been destroyed or crippled. Five Egyptian infantry divisions had crossed the Suez Canal. The first waves of attackers had swarmed across in shoals of small boats. They then set about erecting ten bridges, swiftly and efficiently, down the entire length of the canal. Thousands of men and hundreds of vehicles were relentlessly streaming across. The Egyptian units were digging in on the eastern bank, fortifying bridgeheads two miles deep. Israeli warplanes sent to bomb the bridges and strafe the advancing columns were being picked off with alarming ease by the ground-to-air missile batteries on the western bank. Many of the Israeli canal-side strongpoints were surrounded and under attack. Others had simply been bypassed: they were six to seven miles apart, and the Egyptians poured through the gaps. The beleaguered men were begging for relief. But efforts to reach them had resulted only in more burned-out tanks and more dead crewmen.

“No, Arik didn’t ask me why my tanks had not deployed according to ‘Dovecote.’ ” Colonel Amnon Reshef, whose Fourteenth Armored Brigade bore the brunt of the fighting in Sinai that first night and day of the war, was at Tasa to welcome Sharon. “Dovecote” was the defense plan centered on the Bar-Lev Line. At times of tension, regular army infantrymen were to man the strongpoints, and regular army tank units were to take up positions on ramps and high ground between them, ready to hold off an Egyptian attack until the reserve divisions arrived. On Yom Kippur, the strongpoints were manned by a battalion of 436 reservists from the Jerusalem Brigade, many of them noncombat soldiers. Reshef’s tanks were assembled in the ta’ozim, the fortified rear staging areas miles back from the canal. The other two armored brigades in Sinai were camped even farther back.

“I was summoned to a briefing with Mandler on Saturday morning,” Reshef recalled. “He was called to the phone. ‘H hour is this evening at six,’ he came back and told us. ‘For what—they still don’t know. It may be the end of the Egyptians’ war games; it may be war.’ We suggested moving the tanks forward to their firing positions, but Southern Command forbade it for fear of exacerbating the tension on the front line.”

The war, confidently undetected by Israeli intelligence until almost too late, was now confidently predicted to begin at 6:00 p.m. precisely. The tanks were to take up their positions at 5:00, and in any event not before 4:00. But the Egyptian bombardment, and the Syrian assault in the north, started at 2:00. Some two thousand artillery pieces rained shells on the Israeli positions across the canal. At the same moment, 240 Egyptian warplanes roared overhead, en route to attack Israeli airfields, radar installations, anti-aircraft batteries, artillery emplacements, and rear bases throughout Sinai. “Over 3,000 tons of concentrated destruction were launched against a handful of Israeli fortifications in a barrage that turned the entire east bank of the Suez Canal into an inferno for fifty-three minutes.”¹ Before the smoke cleared, the first Egyptian boats were in the water.

“The next afternoon, I reported to Arik what was happening,” Reshef said drily. “I explained that opposite each company of mine an entire Egyptian division had crossed. By the time my tanks had reached their firing positions, Egyptian commandos were waiting for them with antitank weapons. Arik didn’t cast blame, and he didn’t complain. There wasn’t time for that. The situation was catastrophic. He was focused, businesslike, constructive.”

Reshef was businesslike, too, despite his night and day of relentless fighting. A soldier’s soldier, six feet tall, ramrod straight with a handlebar mustache, he cut a very different figure from the bulky, silver-haired Sharon. His mauled and shrunken brigade was now ordered integrated into Sharon’s division. “I didn’t know Sharon at all. I’d met him briefly just once, years before.”^b

In April, the IDF had gone on alert in response to intelligence reports that Egypt and Syria might be planning an attack in May. For several weeks, units in Sinai and on the Golan were beefed up with reserves, trained, and held in a high state of readiness. Sharon, still the CO of Southern Command, made plans for a possible crossing at Kantara and farther south at Deversoir, at the top of the Great Bitter Lake. The huge Israeli-built ramparts were a problem there, but he solved it by hollowing out a section from the inside “so that its outward appearance would remain the same, though in actuality it would be thinner and less dense.” He marked out the section with a line of red bricks. “We also built a large enclosed yard with a hardened floor almost a thousand yards in length and several hundred in breadth with roads going in one side and out the other to facilitate traffic.”²

Dayan urged the General Staff to be prepared for war from the end of June. But nothing happened, and by August the state of alert had been reduced, and the languid, torpid sense of false security had crept over the canal front again. On September 13, a dogfight developed over southern Syria in which the IAF brought down thirteen Syrian MiGs for the loss of one of its own planes. This naturally raised tensions again, and on September 24, at the request of the CO of Northern Command, Yitzhak Hofi, a decision was made to reinforce the front line on the Golan with extra tanks. This was done, in part, by bringing up an armored brigade from Sinai.

The next day, Prime Minister Meir met secretly with King Hussein of Jordan and heard from him an explicit warning that war was imminent. But, reassured by Military Intelligence that the likelihood of war was low, she paid little heed to this neighborly tip-off. The Egyptians had been observed working feverishly behind their canal embankment, moving heavy equipment and drilling troops. But this was confidently explained by Military Intelligence as a large-scale training exercise.

Only near noon on Friday, October 5, as the country prepared to close down for the fast of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish year, did Military Intelligence’s stolid “low probability of war” assessment finally begin to crack. Reports had come in overnight of urgent instructions from Moscow to the families of Soviet personnel in Syria and Egypt to leave at once, and planes were being sent in to collect them. The standing army went on high alert. Mobilization orders were issued to some air force reserve crews. But it was still a far cry from full war footing. The head of Military Intelligence, Eli Zeira, told cabinet ministers called to a hasty meeting in Tel Aviv that he still believed war was unlikely. Chief of Staff Elazar agreed. The conceptziya, even now, continued to hold sway.

It gave way only during the night, when the director of the Mossad, Zvi Zamir, telephoned from London to say war would break out the following day at sunset. His source was Ashraf Marwan, Gamal Abdel Nasser’s son-in-law and a close aide to his successor as president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat. The Mossad had been running him since 1969. At a dawn consultation in Tel Aviv, Elazar demanded a preemptive strike by the air force. But Dayan balked, and Golda backed him, arguing that the critical factor now was U.S. support. In order to retain it, Israel must be seen not to have started the war. Elazar then demanded total, immediate mobilization of the reserves. But again Dayan opposed him. He suggested two divisions were enough for the moment. At 9:00 a.m., Golda approved the two divisions. Twenty minutes later she approved two more.

Arik Sharon, busy all week running the Likud election staff from an office in Tel Aviv barely half a mile from IDF headquarters, knew nothing of the secret deliberations in the government and the army. On Friday morning, he took a call from Southern Command suggesting that he come down to look at some intelligence data that had been coming in. “One look was enough,” he writes in Warrior. “Near the canal the Egyptians had concentrated all their crossing equipment, a massive deployment that was quantitatively different from the exercises we had gotten used to watching.” “There’s no question,” he told his divisional intelligence officer, Yehoshua Saguy. “This time it’s war.”³

The next morning at 7:30 they both received their mobilization calls and headed for the division’s base camp outside Beersheba. “During the three months since my retirement I had visited the division regularly,” Sharon writes, “and only a short while before, I had conducted a training exercise with them. Knowing how competent the headquarters staff was, it was no surprise to find everything in order when I arrived at the base and the mobilization proceeding calmly.”

This was one of Sharon’s taller war stories. A less tendentious depiction of the scene at the divisional base was “near chaos.” There had indeed been an exercise a short while before, and much of the equipment had not been re-stored or, where needed, repaired. “[A young officer] shot the lock off a storeroom with his pistol, and the crew of the command vehicles and the divisional war room charged in and grabbed whatever equipment was lying around … Technicians repaired communications gear as best they could.”⁴

The tank and armored personnel carrier (APC) crews climbed aboard “and set out on the long drive to Refidim^c—on their tracks.” There were no flatbed tank transporters at this base and no time to wait for any available ones to be sent. The crews also lacked “goggles, personal weapons, fireproof overalls, torches, blankets.”⁵ In other reserve bases around the country, the picture was no different. This was not an army primed and poised for war, but rather one that had grown lax and decadent, basking in its overconfidence. The state of the IDF’s emergency stores on that fateful Yom Kippur was to be one of the grave episodes of negligence investigated by a commission of inquiry, under the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Shimon Agranat, once the war was over.

“The strongpoints were strongpoints as long as the east bank of the canal was in our hands,” Moshe Dayan writes in his memoirs. “Now they became traps for the units caught inside them and surrounded by Egyptian forces.” All the passionate struggles over the Bar-Lev Line for years before the war and during the first, terrible days of the fighting are encapsulated in the defense minister’s morose observation. The strongholds were still in with a chance, Dayan continues, “if we could succeed within a very short time either in evacuating them or in pushing the Egyptians back out of the east bank. The chief of staff and the CO of Southern Command seemed to think we could. I, sadly, did not share their optimism.”

This unshared optimism apparently prompted both Gonen and Mandler to decide against ordering any of the strongpoints to be evacuated during the first twenty-four hours. “The soldiers were begging to be brought out,” Sharon wrote, “but the tanks could not do it.”

They had their orders—not to extricate them but only to support the strongpoints and relieve the pressure. Some of the tanks were able to take wounded out. Others simply roared into the Egyptian lines blazing away in a futile attempt to push the enemy back. Suffering terrible losses, the tank crews continued to assault as long as they could. And as second-echelon tanks arrived they too were fed into the carnage … In the first twenty-four hours we lost two hundred of our three hundred first-line tanks.

…It was outrageous that those men had been left in the strongpoints in the first place. But sending the tanks to support them in that fashion was a clear sign of panic and of an inability to read the battlefield. Instead of gathering our forces for a hard, fast counterattack, we were wasting them in hopeless small-unit actions … I began to feel that Gonen’s headquarters was not comprehending the situation on the ground.⁶

As soon as he arrived at the front, Sharon began pressing to reverse the no-evacuation order and get the beleaguered men out. This quickly became an early flash point of tension between the 143rd Division and Southern Command. Making matters worse—and unforgettably poignant for everyone who heard those radio exchanges and lived through the war—the men in the strongpoints began addressing their increasingly desperate appeals to Sharon personally. “We recognize your voice, ‘40’ ”—this was Sharon’s designation on the divisional network—“we know who you are. We know you will get us out of here. Please come to us. Please send us help.” One soldier in Purkan, the strongpoint opposite Ismailia, recalled “a moment of exultation when we heard Sharon had arrived. If we’d had champagne we’d have opened it. Just his voice on the radio was like salvation.” Sharon for his part promised them, for all to hear, that he would help them get out.

“It took years,” Sharon reminded the commission of inquiry in his testimony months later, “until the IDF established the norm that we don’t leave the wounded on the battlefield and we don’t leave men to fall into the enemy’s hands. To me, this matter is of cardinal importance.” He said that he had submitted a detailed rescue plan on the afternoon of October 7, “based on the experience of the night before. We would break through on a very narrow front, creating a virtual moving box of fire with tanks and artillery. When we approach the strongpoints, we send a small force in, they get the men out, and we disengage.”⁷

“Not only would they [the Command] not approve any attempt at evacuation that afternoon,” Sharon recalled bitterly after the war to another of the men trapped in Purkan. “They told me to come and talk about it in the evening, and then they didn’t send a helicopter for me. I waited for hours on some sand dune at Tasa until they deigned to send one to take me to Um Hashiba. They deliberately delayed so that I should not be able to raise the subject of the strongpoints at the meeting. I had called the minister of defense and told him that in my view it was possible to rescue the men from the strongpoints.”⁸

This delayed helicopter—the Command’s explanation was technical problems—became the next point of friction in the already-worsening relationship between Sharon and his erstwhile-subordinate-now-superior, Shmuel Gonen. Sharon repeatedly urged the CO of Southern Command to come up to the front and see the situation for himself. But Gonen preferred to run things from Um Hashiba. Now, on the night of the seventh, with the reserve divisions more or less deployed, they were to have a first war council there in the underground war room and decide on how to parry the Egyptian thrust. Thus far, as Dayan records in his stark, unvarnished tone, “We had not only failed to prevent the Egyptians from crossing; we had hardly hurt them at all. Their casualties … were negligible. Hardly any of their equipment had been destroyed. We had barely disrupted their crossing operation.”

By the time Sharon arrived, close to 10:00 p.m. for the meeting scheduled for 7:00, the key decisions had been made. Dayan, who did not attend, had been lugubrious all afternoon, trying to persuade the army and the cabinet to abandon the canal altogether and withdraw to a new defensive line based on the Mitle and Gidi passes.

On the Syrian front, where Israel’s lines had been breached, too, the defense minister believed there must be no withdrawal.

It will be hard—but possible. In the south, though, I propose that we stabilize a new line … thirty or more kilometers from the canal. I propose that tonight we give orders that those strongpoints which we have no chance of reaching should try to evacuate … Those that can’t should leave the wounded and try to escape. If they decide to surrender—then so be it. We should say to them, “We cannot reach you. Try to break through or else surrender.” Every attempt to reach these strongpoints means losing more tanks. We should withdraw from the canal line with the intention not to return … The war will continue. The Mitle line has its advantages and disadvantages. The canal line, at any rate, is lost.⁹

Chief of Staff Elazar was far from such despondent thinking. He believed the IDF, despite its early and heavy losses, would be able to beat back the Egyptians and eventually take the battle to them across the canal. He did, however, agree with Dayan that the talk—from Gonen and also from Sharon—of Israel crossing the canal in an immediate, large-scale counterattack was premature, unrealistic, and dangerous. If the IDF were to commit the bulk of its depleted southern forces to a cross-canal operation and get bogged down there, there would be precious little preventing the Egyptian forces already in Sinai from marching on toward Tel Aviv.

It was this strategic thinking that lay beneath Elazar’s plan for the next day’s fighting on the canal front, which he envisaged as an initial, limited counterattack on the Sinai side. He unfurled it before Gonen and his generals (minus Sharon) in the command bunker at Um Hashiba. Bren’s division was to attack the Egyptian Second Army along the east bank of the canal, pressing its assault from north to south, starting in the area of Kantara. Sharon’s division, deployed around Tasa, would serve as a reserve, supporting Bren if needed. Assuming Bren’s attack went well, Sharon’s division would then swing into action, attacking the Egyptian Third Army, also from north to south, along the shore of the Great Bitter Lake. Mandler’s division would continue blocking attempted breakouts in the south and would support Sharon’s attack if needed. “Two feet on the ground,” Elazar said repeatedly, “and the third up and attacking.”¹⁰

According to his biographer, Elazar also sketched out his longer-term strategy for the Egyptian front. “I want to attack [across the canal],” he said, “but first we will need to defend when they attack us.” He anticipated the Egyptians hurling their heavy armored divisions across the canal, which they were scheduled to do, under their Soviet offense doctrine, once their infantry divisions had fully deployed. “We’ll break that attacking force,” said Elazar, “and when it has been seriously weakened—then we’ll attack.”¹¹

Sharon met Elazar leaving the command bunker, accompanied by Yitzhak Rabin, the 1967 chief of staff. He immediately began expounding his own basic belief: that it would need a mighty armored fist comprising two whole divisions attacking together to smash through the Second Army and then move down to the Third. One division with the others held in reserve would not be enough. But Elazar rehearsed his view that one division needed to be ready at any time to block an Egyptian advance toward the heart of the country. Sharon countered that the Egyptians were not aiming for Tel Aviv, but rather to consolidate their gains in Sinai to a depth of five to seven miles. They would not want to step beyond their surface-to-air missile coverage deployed on the west bank.

But Elazar’s mind was made up. “Rabin put his hand on my shoulder,” Sharon writes. “ ‘Arik,’ he said, ‘we’re counting on you to change the situation.’ With that they shook hands with me and disappeared into the darkness.”¹² Sharon went down into the bunker and argued his case for trying again during the night to relieve the strongpoints. Gonen, despite himself, seems to have been affected by Sharon’s remonstrations. “He did not turn him down flat,” Bren writes, disapprovingly, in his own book on the war. “He said only that at this stage we were not going to approach the strongpoints, though developments during the night might lead to a change in plan.” This nuance was to grow to critical importance in understanding what went so terribly wrong the following day.

OCTOBER 8

Gonen was accused by his many critics of arbitrarily changing Elazar’s plan when he issued his final orders to his divisions. In his first order, issued during the night, he approved plans submitted by the 143rd Division to rescue the strongpoint crews in its sector—Hizayon, Purkan, and Matzmed^d—before Bren began his attack. At dawn, however, he reverted to the original order for the 143rd to stand in reserve while the 162nd attacked. But he left in place, in his orders to the 162nd, the goal of rescuing strongpoints and even attempting a limited crossing. This implied, as Elazar’s biographer points out, approaching the canal bank, which Elazar had explicitly forbidden; it implied attacking from east to west, whereas Elazar explicitly and repeatedly ordered a north-to-south attack across a narrow front; and it implied trying to cross the canal, which Elazar had expressly discouraged and hedged with conditions.¹³

Bren’s brigades began to move south at 8:00 a.m. But it was far from a divisional armored fist scything through the Egyptian deployments. While one brigade did encounter enemy infantry and armor, and engaged them successfully, the two others drove along in uneventful silence. Chaim Herzog writes sourly:

In the late morning, it suddenly became clear to Bren that his brigades were not moving in accordance with orders and were, in fact, moving too far to the east, along the Artillery Road, and away from the bulk of the enemy forces. Arieh’s brigade was actually some 20 miles from the Canal at one stage of the operation.

The result of this mistake was that instead of rolling down the north flank of the narrow Egyptian bridgehead, the massed forces of Bren’s division were moving across the front of the Egyptian bridgehead. Accordingly, when the attack was finally launched, it developed from east to west right into the deployed Egyptian positions—instead of from north to south, where the Egyptians least expected it.

The result was a veritable rout. Sharon, deployed in reserve to the west of Tasa, writes that he saw the disaster shaping up:

At about 9:45 I saw them [the 162nd Division]. But they were not moving along the front a couple of miles east of the canal as I had expected. Instead, the dust columns were rising in back of us, seven or eight miles from the front. I watched as Adan’s tanks pressed southward, passed to our rear, and then turned westward toward the Egyptians … I was dismayed by what was happening. Only a relatively small number of tanks were involved, perhaps two battalions charging valiantly into the Egyptian artillery fire. It was not a divisional attack; it was not even a concentrated effort. There was no way it could succeed.

“But,” Sharon continues, “I did not have much time to worry about it.” In a decision that remains essentially inexplicable to the present day, Gonen now ordered Sharon’s division to pull back eastward to Tasa and drive south down the Lateral Road for some fifty miles with a view to seizing Egyptian bridges opposite the city of Suez and crossing on them.

This idea seemed to be that since Adan had now rolled up the Egyptian Second Army, I could smash through the unsuspecting Third Army. It was unreal. First of all Adan had not rolled up anything … Second, my division was occupying critical high ground that would cost us dearly to get back if we gave it up. And if we did not get it back we could forget about any future assault on the canal in this sector. Third, the idea that we might fight our way through to the canal in the south and find intact Egyptian bridges there was based on the merest wishful thinking. And even if we did, we knew the Egyptian bridges were constructed for the lighter Soviet-made tanks and would not support ours…

When I got the order to move south, I called Gonen immediately. In the strongest terms I told him that what he was asking would be a disastrous mistake … The answer was shouted back. If I didn’t obey the order I would be dismissed immediately. Immediately! “Then come down here and look yourself,” I repeated. “No!” Gonen shouted. “You will be dismissed. I will dismiss you right now!”

I thought about it for a moment, then decided I had no choice except to obey. So I gave my own order for the division to pull back to Tasa and head south … If I had to strike in the south I was going to do it as fast and as hard as I could. But even as I did, I deviated slightly from Gonen’s order. Instead of disengaging completely, I left my divisional reconnaissance unit holding two absolutely critical ridges, one code-named Hamadia, the other Kishuf. These positions were on either side of the Akavish Road, which led to the canal in the region of Deversoir. This was where I had prepared the crossing site five months earlier, with its walled “yard” and its thinned-out ramparts. I was simply not going to hand control of these ridges over to the Egyptians.^14e

Three and a half hours later, and fifty uneventful miles farther south,

a helicopter overflew the column and landed near my APC. A liaison officer from Southern Command climbed out and told me briefly that Adan’s attack had failed. There had been no Israeli crossing as had been mistakenly reported to Southern Command … We were ordered to get back as fast as possible to support Adan and recover as much of the ridgeline as we could.

My inner feelings at that point were simply not describable. If on the surface I appeared normal, it was because I was numbed with rage. It was now October 8. Two days earlier the entire division had been called out of their homes and synagogues. In less than twenty-four hours they had fully mobilized and had driven two hundred miles to the battlefield … And now, on this absolutely crucial day of battle, they had spent their time driving around the desert like idiots.

As the 143rd Division made its frustrating way back during the afternoon, Bren Adan’s battered division was able to regroup and strongly resist Egyptian advances eastward opposite Firdan, taking a significant toll of Egyptian armor and infantry in some of the bitterest fighting of the war. Farther to the south, however, Bren’s forces failed to hold the key area of Hamutal, which commands a section of the Talisman road from Tasa to Ismailia. Here, a tragedy of “friendly fire” was only narrowly averted when Bren’s retreating forces encountered a brigade from Sharon’s division, under Haim Erez, also intent on recapturing Hamutal. Neither brigade was aware of the other. “The confusion on and around Hamutal was tremendous,” Bren writes.

Bren was sharply critical of Sharon’s behavior once the 143rd Division had returned to within striking distance of the battlefield. He accused Sharon of evading appeals from Gonen that he deploy his unblooded brigades to assist the hard-pressed sister division.

But Bren directed the full brunt of his resentment, recrimination, and disdain at Gonen, accusing him of transmitting overoptimistic, inaccurate, and sometimes wholly fictitious reports to the High Command in Tel Aviv. These were based not on the 162nd Division’s reporting to Southern Command, Bren insisted, but on Gonen’s strange misunderstanding of the true situation on the battlefield. “Gonen behaved as if we were conducting some kind of war game, an exercise involving no troops—neither ours nor the enemy’s—and in which there was no battlefield reality. For him the battle ended the moment he had had his say. The moment he made a decision, he could move ahead to the next stage.”¹⁵

Elazar’s approval of Gonen’s wildly optimistic plans came after he had himself presented a wildly optimistic picture of Bren’s unfolding attack to the cabinet. This fantasy world in Tel Aviv was not to be shattered until late in the evening of October 8. “I want to know,” Golda Meir asked her top ministers and generals that night, “has the situation on the canal got better or worse since the morning?” The first, faint reply came from General (res.) Zvi Zamir, head of the Mossad. “My impression is that it hasn’t got better … Our tanks are being consumed.” “And only in the morning they had to ‘hold Arik back,’ ” the prime minister retorted sardonically. The bitter irony in her comment echoes down the decades.¹⁶

In Gonen’s view, the blame for the misreporting up the chain of command lay wholly with Bren, who “never reported to Southern Command on the setbacks he encountered. While he was reporting that everything was all right, key areas of high ground were falling into the Egyptians’ hands … There was confusion, too, within his division. At one point, a brigade commander Natke Nir told Adan that [a battalion commander Assaf] Yaguri might have crossed the canal, when in fact he had already been taken prisoner and his battalion smashed. My sending Sharon’s division south came in the wake of Adan’s optimistic reporting.”

Gonen denied, moreover, that he had changed the original plan. The main assignment remained destroying the Egyptian forces in Sinai. Bren was ordered, as concomitant assignments, to rescue Hizayon and Purkan and to cross to the other side there. “But the final decision on these was left in his hands, depending on the battlefield conditions, and he acknowledged as much in his response. The failure of his division was not in the assignment but in the execution. He never actually mounted a divisional attack.”^17f

•   •   •

Churning beneath all the arguments and analysis of the events of October 8 was an ugly subtext, replete with political rivalries and personal animosities. It ran through the minds of all the major players at the time and continued to fuel passions and suspicions long after. “They’re turning us away [from the canal] deliberately,” Sharon said to the officers in his APC when the order came through to head off to the south.

“I know what he thought,” the division’s chief intelligence officer, Yehoshua Saguy, recalled decades later.

He thought—and in fact he said—that they want to head him off because they envisage a great and glorious victory for Bren’s forces. And the plain fact is that they did head us off southward. There was no way we were going to reach our ostensible destination in the south before nine or ten o’clock at night. This is a whole division traveling … hundreds of tanks and APCs and trucks. To launch an attack there at night would have been suicide.

Don’t forget, Arik’s not just a general. He’s a political figure. He’s just set up the Likud … After the cease-fire, we were called “the Likud division,” and they [the 162nd] were called “the Labor division.” Those were the names people used, even on the radio network.^g In addition, the tank men were a junta—Dado [Elazar], Gorodish [Gonen], Bren. They stuck together and supported each other automatically.¹⁸

General Abrasha Tamir, another of Sharon’s staff officers, put it even less subtly:

Arik thought Bren was an idiot before the war. He thought Gorodish was crazy before the war. And they thought the same about him. But Bren and Gorodish basked in Dado’s favor. He always gave them his backing … There’s a picture of me standing with Arik on the top of a hill on the first day of the war when we reached the front, with him looking ahead through his binoculars and me with my head turned around looking back. I remember he said to me, “What are you looking at? The enemy’s over there” [pointing forward]. And I said, “No, sir. The enemy’s not there. The enemy’s back here, behind us.”¹⁹

One high-ranking officer who rejected this political subtext, at least as regards the events of October 8, was Sharon’s old commander from 1948, Asher Levy. Levy, by now a brigadier general, served as operations officer (the No. 3 man) in the 162nd Division during the first week of the war, after which he was transferred to a senior post at Southern Command headquarters. His appraisal of Bren’s performance on the eighth was devastating. He insisted, though, that Elazar’s decision to split the two divisions rather than launching a combined two-divisional attack was made “because he genuinely believed we needed to sweep up the Egyptians all the way down the canal. The purpose was not to prevent Arik from crossing on Egyptian bridges … The ‘war of the generals’ started later.”²⁰

In Tel Aviv the day’s disaster gave new impetus to Moshe Dayan’s suggestion that Israel abandon the canal and pull back to a new line of defense deep inside Sinai. Other ministers and advisers now seemed prepared to consider it. But Golda Meir was rocklike in her resistance. “I warn us all against planning new defense lines. They won’t hold. If we move to some new line inside Sinai, it will not hold.” If there was no choice, she said, then of course they would have to dig in farther back. But that was not the situation at the present time, and she would not hear of withdrawal.²¹

The news from the Syrian front was better—though still far from good—and a consensus evolved that Israel must press home its counterattacks on the Golan while containing the Egyptian bridgeheads without initiating further risky and costly operations against them at this stage. This meant the air force would continue to devote most of its efforts to support the forces in the north and to bomb strategic targets inside Syria. Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon said it was important to defeat the Syrians quickly so as to deter Jordan and Iraq from entering the fray.

OCTOBER 9–14

The next morning, back from visiting the headquarters in Sinai, Dayan was still grim. “In my best judgment,” he reported, “there is no chance of crossing the Canal. In the immediate future we should not try to cross, nor even to approach the Canal and drive back the Egyptians. We’d pour out our life’s blood and it wouldn’t make any difference … Even Arik agrees that crossing the Canal now will not radically change things.”

Elazar, once again, refused to be drawn into despondency. The day before had been a failure, he admitted. Now the divisions in Sinai would be on the defensive. But he hoped the Egyptians would attack—and be broken. Eventually, he insisted, the IDF would cross the canal.

GOLDA: But when Arik’s on the other side, won’t he be in a trap?

ELAZAR: In certain circumstances—yes. Right now, it’s not possible. But it might become possible by Wednesday night or Thursday … or Friday…

GOLDA: Tell it to me in plastic terms. He crosses; they’ve got tanks, etc., there; what happens?

ELAZAR: They’ll attack him. He’ll go in with two hundred tanks. They won’t have aerial superiority…

GENERAL AHARON YARIV: He will neutralize the missiles; he’ll destroy a lot of them. The Egyptians will direct part of their force to confront him. If it works, it will be very good.

GOLDA: What I’m afraid of is if it doesn’t work. It’ll be a catastrophe. He’ll be stuck over there, in their hands.

ELAZAR: Anyway, it’s not doable in the present situation. Only if things improve.²²

One area where Dayan and Elazar did see eye to eye was the creaking command structure in Sinai. “I don’t think Gonen can handle it,” the defense minister told the other ministers bluntly, “especially with Arik under him.” At a predawn meeting with Elazar, he proposed that either Sharon or Bar-Lev be appointed to head Southern Command.

Elazar, unsurprisingly given their various past histories, plumped for Bar-Lev. The eventual decision was not to depose Gonen but to appoint Bar-Lev over him as “personal representative of the chief of staff”—in effect, commander of the front. For Sharon this was “the last thing I needed to hear … I felt I was in a hornets’ nest.”²³ But for Golda and the ministers, the slow-talking, unflappable Bar-Lev inspired confidence.

Bar-Lev took up his new posting in Sinai on the morning of the tenth. Uri Ben-Ari, Gonen’s deputy, later described to army historians the sense of calm he felt almost palpably descending on Southern Command from the moment Bar-Lev took over. “It began at HQ and spread instantly over the radio. Before he came, staff meetings were one long shout from Gonen. Bar-Lev put in place proper work methods. No one questioned his authority. The country owes him a great deal.”²⁴

The immediate upshot of Bar-Lev’s appointment was that Sharon grew even more offhand and insolent toward Gonen. The crisis came on Tuesday, the ninth. “After that there was a complete rupture,” according to Yisrael Itkin, who served as the staff sergeant aboard Sharon’s command APC. “Arik ordered me not to reply to Gonen’s calls. For me this was a really weird feeling. I’m sitting over the radio, and the CO of Southern Command calls and says, ‘I know you’re there. Answer me!’ And Arik signals me with his hand not to answer. On the other hand, he was respectful toward Rabin, Tal, and Dayan. He would talk to them every day. From them he was ready to take any criticism.”²⁵

The ninth was to be another dramatic day, fraught with suspicion and recrimination among the Israeli commanders that resonated long after the din of battle died down and the dead were buried. “In accordance with the orders I had received,” Sharon writes, “in the early morning of October 9, I gave instructions to my three brigade commanders—Amnon Reshef, Haim Erez, and Tuvia Raviv—that we would conduct a holding operation, containing the expected Egyptian advance.” Sharon made it clear that he was unhappy with these orders. “For me, this was not the time to sit back and allow the Egyptians to build up their bridgeheads … We should be pushing them, probing them for their weak points, looking for openings to exploit.” He told the brigade commanders that even while they were defending and containing, “I expected them to use their initiative … They should watch for any opportunity to recover the ridgeline positions we had given up the previous day.”

In the morning, Reshef executed one of the most breathtaking operations of the war, rescuing thirty-three survivors from the strongpoint of Purkan under the noses of the Egyptian infantry. Sharon had urged their commander, Major Wiezel, to break out under cover of darkness and head for Hamutal, where he would send tanks to pick them up. Reshef himself led the rescuing force, and though many of its vehicles were hit and disabled, one tank made the rendezvous. “With all thirty-three of them clinging to its hull,” Sharon wrote, “the tank emerged out of the maelstrom looking like something from an alien world.”

Sharon now asked Gonen’s permission to strike out along Akavish Road toward the beleaguered strongpoint of Matzmed.^h He also told Gonen, quite without foundation, that “Talik’s invention”—the steel rolling bridge—would be ready that day. (In fact it would not be ready until the twelfth or thirteenth.) He urged the CO to let his division approach the canal at Matzmed rather than Adan’s. “You didn’t let us yesterday. So let us this time. We know the terrain very well.”²⁶ An hour later, Chief of Staff Elazar issued a formal and categorical order to Gonen not to get into tank battles and not to approach Matzmed. Gonen transmitted the order to Sharon. He phoned Reshef directly and stressed there must be no further attacks that risked IDF lives.²⁷

Raviv’s and Reshef’s brigades nevertheless engaged in pitched tank battles during the afternoon in order to retake Machshir and Televizia, second-line fortifications northeast of Matzmed that had fallen to the Egyptians the day before. Gonen repeatedly ordered Sharon to stop. He flew by helicopter to Sharon’s forward headquarters and ordered him personally to stop. But still the battles continued, the Israeli forces losing tanks but taking a heavier toll of the enemy and nudging steadily west. “After this incident,” Herzog writes, “Gonen telephoned the chief of staff asking for Sharon to be relieved of his command.”

By evening, Reshef’s brigade faced the “Chinese Farm.” Reshef ordered the divisional reconnaissance battalion to probe gently forward. “I ordered the probe; Sharon took the credit,” Reshef recalled without rancor. “I told him I’m moving the battalion forward, westward, and he said okay.” The unit moved gingerly to the southwest, reaching the bank of the Great Bitter Lake and then turning north and driving silently up the bank, until close to the point where the canal feeds into the lake at Deversoir, where Sharon had prepared his “yard.” It was a definitive moment. “The probe had revealed the boundary between the Egyptian Second and Third armies,” Herzog affirms, “and the soft underbelly of the Second.”²⁸

“Here if anywhere was a situation that begged to be exploited,” Sharon writes.

The Egyptians had not noticed the reconnaissance unit’s penetration. The path to the Canal beckoned—wide and open. At 6:30 p.m. I contacted Gonen to tell him that we were on the water. “Shmulik, we are near the canal,” I said into the phone. “Shmulik, we can touch the water of the lake”…We were in a position to start bringing assault rafts down from Baluza and preparing the bridging equipment. Right now we could begin organizing for our own crossing. In parallel with Adan’s division, we could grab the whole area and push across. Why just sit back and wait for the Egyptians to discover the seam and close it up?

Elazar by this time was following Sharon’s operations closely. When he learned of the recon battalion’s position and of Sharon’s proposals, he exploded. “Get him out of there!” he shouted. “I say he is not to cross. Not to cross! Not to cross!!”²⁹ At dawn the next morning, Reshef made his reluctant way back to the division.

To Sharon, this reaction to Reshef’s remarkable breakthrough reinforced his worst suspicions. “They” would never allow him and his division to cross the canal. “They” were reserving that honor for Bren, one of their own. “They” were determined to link Bren’s name, not his, to the hoped-for victory.³⁰ To judge from the records of the cabinet consultations cited above, however, these suspicions seem groundless, indeed almost paranoid, at least at this stage of the war. Golda, the ministers, and the generals all clearly assumed in those meetings that when and if there was a crossing, Sharon would be the man to make it.

For Elazar at any rate, the overriding concern at this stage was the fact that the main body of Egypt’s armor, the Fourth and Twenty-First Armored Divisions, had not yet crossed into Sinai. Better, the chief of staff reasoned—and Haim Bar-Lev fully concurred—to wait patiently for the Egyptian armored divisions to cross, defeat them in battle in Sinai, and only then abruptly shift the focus of the war to the other side.

Sharon’s own senior officers also broadly agreed with that military logic, despite their commander’s fulminations. “I thought the considerations of the High Command were totally correct,” Reshef said. “I didn’t feel we were ready to cross,” Gideon Altschuler recalled frankly. “I was a product of the British army, where things were done in proper order. Arik would talk to Dayan … would try to exert influence so that we’d cross earlier than the chief of staff wanted. I wasn’t comfortable with that.”³¹ Even Abrasha Tamir, who, as we have seen, was entirely at one with Sharon in his conspiracy theory regarding who was to cross, was on Bar-Lev’s side over when to cross. “I thought Bar-Lev was right,” Tamir recalled. “What opened the way to our successful crossing was our destruction, effectively, of the Twenty-First Armored Division on October 14. I recognized at the time that Bar-Lev was right and I told Arik as much.”³²

Both Reshef and Jackie Even, the deputy commander of the division, maintained, moreover, that—despite his fulminations—Sharon himself did not seriously intend or attempt to cross before everything was ready and before the High Command gave its assent. Even insisted that Sharon’s talk on the ninth of the rolling bridge being ready was pure bluster. “I was his deputy. I was in charge of this business. And I got no order at all from him throughout that day regarding the bridge or other crossing equipment. He clearly did not have any serious intention of crossing then. He was trying to stabilize a defensive line as ordered. He didn’t talk to me about any crossing; we both knew there was nothing to cross on. The idea of crossing on Egyptian bridges was nonsense, delusional nonsense.”

For his senior officers, the best proof that Sharon was not swept along by his own bluster came a day later, on the tenth. “Sharon presented us three brigade commanders with a plan for attacking the Third Army and trying to drive it off the east bank,” Reshef recalled. “I objected outright, and so did Haim Erez. What is Sharon’s greatness? He knows we object, yet he takes us with him in the helicopter to Dvela to present the plan. When Arik submitted the plan to Bar-Lev, Bar-Lev asked, ‘What do the brigade commanders think?’ I said straightaway that I opposed the plan because it would be like banging our head on a wall. I’d already lost a hundred men killed in the brigade. I thought it would be wrong to court more casualties now. Haim Erez also spoke against it.”

“Bar-Lev then turns to me,” Jackie Even said, continuing his account. “I had worked on the plan together with Sharon and agreed to it. I look at Bar-Lev. I look at Sharon. And I say, ‘What I’m hearing from my comrades the brigade commanders is that they’re not ready for this assignment. So I say to you, we’re not ready.’ ” Bar-Lev thereupon ruled against Sharon’s plan and sent the 143rd Division back to its original assignment, so unloved by its commander: containment and waiting. Sharon was furious, but he swallowed it. “He didn’t speak to me for twenty-four hours,” Even recalled. “He could have thrown me out for a thing like that. But … nothing.”

Gonen and Bar-Lev, not disposed like Sharon’s admiring officers to discern between his bluster and his obedience, would still have been happier to get rid of him. But Dayan, vacillating and unassertive about so many decisions in the war, stood firm on this one. “I have to admit,” he told Elazar, in response to Gonen’s demand on the ninth to fire Sharon, “I prefer Arik’s pressures and initiatives tenfold to the hesitations and excuses of other divisional commanders.”

On the twelfth, Bar-Lev tried his hand. He, too, urged the chief of staff to fire Sharon. Elazar, after all, had specifically asked his “personal representative on the southern front” to make a recommendation on this fraught matter. But Elazar would not act on his own authority. Once again, he took it to Dayan, knowing, presumably, what the response would be. And sure enough, Dayan demurred. In Chaim Herzog’s words, “Dayan said that such a move could create political problems.”³³ Bar-Lev, never one to ventilate his emotions, took this expected rebuff in stride. His biographer has him going off to sleep at one point during this waiting period, with the explanation that “a tired general is a stupid general,” and leaving orders “to wake me only if Arik makes trouble.”³⁴

During the four days that now followed of relatively low-key warfare on the southern front, from October 10 to 13, the Egyptian infantry pushed forward time after time in local attacks, backed by armor and artillery. Each time they were driven back, often with heavy losses. They made no further territorial gains.

As the IDF regained its balance and its confidence, Dayan’s idea of a strategic withdrawal to the passes finally receded. The cabinet and the High Command waited anxiously for the Egyptians to commit their main armored strength to the battle for Sinai. Time was becoming critical. If the two superpowers jointly resolved to impose a cease-fire, their client-protagonists would hardly be able to balk. The Syrians certainly had nothing more to gain from an extended war. Their forces had been pushed back beyond the prewar line, and Israeli long-range artillery threatened the suburbs of their capital, Damascus. Israel, too, could not long go on hemorrhaging the blood of its young men.ⁱ The home front, laboring under near economic paralysis, had yet to assimilate the true figures of dead and wounded sustained thus far.

Yet without a turnabout on the canal front, the war in the south, if it ended now, would end as a defeat. It would be Israel’s first-ever battlefield defeat—with all the psychological and political ramifications that that could entail. On October 12 in Tel Aviv, the top ministers and military commanders convened to grapple with this quandary. As good luck would have it, the first intelligence reports of an Egyptian crossing started to come in while their meeting was still in progress. Units of the Fourth and Twenty-First Armored Divisions were beginning to move across the canal. There were indications that they intended to mount a major attack and try to strike deeper into Sinai. Presumably, Anwar Sadat was acting to take the pressure off his Syrian ally, now reeling under IDF counterattacks. This was the news the cabinet had been waiting for.

Both divisions in central Sinai, the 143rd and the 162nd, now braced to take on the Egyptian armored columns. This occasioned a visit by Bren to Arik’s headquarters, where, he writes primly, he was “reminded that ‘civilization’ still continued to exist.” First, Amnon Reshef talked him into taking a shower at the empty base camp of the Fourteenth Brigade nearby. “I’d gotten used to the dirt and the unshaven cheeks,” Bren writes, “and had almost forgotten there were showers in the world.” Then, as he waited for Chief of Staff Elazar to arrive at Sharon’s bunker at Tasa, “one of Sharon’s officers turned to me and said it was time to taste some of the delectable cheeses. And, indeed, there was a rich and impressive assortment to choose from.”³⁵

The great armored encounter, when it finally came on October 14, was “one of the largest tank battles ever to take place in history,” according to Herzog, “with some 2,000 tanks locked in battle across the entire front.” Once again, Reshef’s brigade was in the thick of the fighting. But this time the tide of battle was unmistakable. Deployed on higher ground in front of Hamadia and waiting patiently until the vast Egyptian armored column rolled into range, Reshef’s tanks culled dozens of the enemy armor. He used the divisional reconnaissance battalion, reinforced by additional tanks, to hit them from the flank. By the end of the engagement, the Egyptians had lost more than a hundred tanks to Reshef’s three. The First Brigade of the Twenty-First Armored Division was effectively destroyed.

To the north, Bren’s division made major gains, too, blocking and crushing Egypt’s Twenty-Third Mechanized Division. In the south, another Egyptian armored brigade, advancing toward the Mitle, was ambushed by armor and infantry forces under Magen, while the Israeli Air Force, beyond ground-to-air missile range in that theater, pounded them from above. “Within two hours,” Herzog writes, “some sixty Egyptian tanks and a large number of APCs and artillery pieces were in flames.” Bar-Lev telephoned Golda. “It’s been a good day,” he reported. “Our forces are themselves again and so are the Egyptians.”³⁶ For Dayan, the final tally of some 260 Egyptian tanks was still lower than he had hoped. Not all the top-of-the-line Egyptian forces had yet been committed. But the IDF had shown that it was finally learning to deal with the Egyptian infantry’s antitank missiles, particularly the wire-guided Sagger, which had been deployed to such devastating effect in the first days of the war. Israel’s own infantry, moreover, was proving effective with its SS11-type antitank missiles.

The cabinet convened that evening for what everyone present understood would be a fateful meeting. Dayan, previously hesitant, now unequivocally recommended approving “Noble Hearts,” the plan for an Israeli crossing at Deversoir. Some of the ministers were still worried by the thought of a sizable Israeli force being stranded on the far side of the canal. Elazar said the issue of bridges was still the weak point. Could they be gotten there in time? How would they survive Egyptian bombing and shelling? But they would have more than one bridge, he assured the ministers. “My best analysis of all the facts tells me the prospect of failure is very low and the chances of success are good.”

The cabinet sat and pondered till long after midnight. In the end, taking Prime Minister Meir’s lead, almost all of the ministers voted in favor. But what precisely did Noble Hearts, in its current form, envisage? More specifically, how many divisions were to cross? One or two? If two, then when? And in what order? These key questions were not unequivocally and explicitly answered. Elazar told the cabinet on the night of the fourteenth that “in the first stage only one division will cross, and if it carries out its assignment successfully it will open the way for the second division.”³⁷

The discussions on the fourteenth, both in the cabinet and within the army command, seemed to assume a one-divisional crossing—by the 143rd Division. But even before the first soldier had set his boot down on “Africa,” the commander of the front, Bar-Lev, suggested vaguely that perhaps both the 143rd and the 162nd—Arik and Bren—should take part in the operation, with Bren’s division crossing the canal while Sharon’s division broadened and defended the eastern bridgehead.

This obfuscation, as we shall see, became the cause of friction, suspicion, and jealousy for the remainder of the war and long thereafter. Sharon, his senior officers, and his political “hinterland” back home accused the High Command, and especially the Labor Party minister Bar-Lev, of deliberately holding him back and pushing Bren forward in order to deny him, the Likud politician, the glory of the victory. Conversely, Sharon’s rivals accused him—the Likud politician—of deliberately pushing himself forward and attempting to deny Bren his rightful place in the roll of honor.

OCTOBER 15–16

At Tasa the next morning, Sharon went over his plans with Bar-Lev and Gonen:

My division would break through the Egyptian lines, secure a corridor to the canal, and establish a crossing point at Deversoir on the east bank—at precisely the location where the reconnaissance unit had penetrated six days earlier. Meanwhile, rubber assault boats would be brought forward to ferry Danny Matt’s paratroop brigade to the west bank. Once the paratroops had secured the area, a pontoon bridge would be laid across the canal and Haim Erez’s tank brigade would cross. The great reconstructed rolling bridge would also be towed into place and pushed across.

On the northern edge of the opening, two east-west roads ran to the water line … One, code-named Akavish, connected Tasa with the shore of the Great Bitter Lake. About five miles to the east of the canal another road started and ran parallel to and north of Akavish. This road, code-named Tirtur, had been especially laid out for towing the 600-ton steel roller bridge to the canal. Its terminus on the water line was just above the enclosed yard I had prepared in May as the staging area for a crossing. These two roads, Akavish and Tirtur, would constitute our corridor to the canal. Along them we would have to move two divisions and all the crossing equipment.

Directly south of Akavish was the undefended seam between the two Egyptian armies, so we had plenty of maneuvering room on that side. But on the northern edge of the seam, Tirtur Road skirted the perimeter of the Second Army bridgehead, and this perimeter was very heavily defended. Here the Egyptians had established a major fortified base known as “Missouri,” whose southwestern anchor was an area we called the “Chinese Farm”—an agricultural station set up with Japanese equipment years earlier. This Chinese Farm … sat on the Tirtur Road and on the junction of Tirtur and Lexicon, the communication road that ran parallel to the canal bank. The deep irrigation ditches and the mounds of dirt thrown up when they were excavated made this a natural defensive site where machine guns and anti-tank weapons could dominate the field.

The strange, slightly comical code names—akavish means “spider,” tirtur means “clatter”—were to become etched on the Israeli public mind like Antietam and Monte Cassino, with all the pride but also all the grief and the heart searching that those names evoked among the victors of those terrible battles. The technical, euphemistic term that Sharon uses, “secure a corridor,” was to translate into bloody and costly fighting in the nights and days ahead.

My plan … was to attack at dusk and fight the main battle during the night. Tuvia Raviv’s tank brigade would assault Missouri from the east, a head-on thrust that would appear to the Egyptians very much what they expected. But in fact Tuvia’s attack would be a diversion, meant to draw their forces and attention. At the same time, Amnon Reshef’s brigade would execute a hook to the southwest through the unoccupied gap between the Egyptian armies, then north into the rear of the Egyptian base area. Here his missions were to secure the yard as a crossing site, push the Egyptians northward, and open up Tirtur and Akavish from west to east—that is, from behind. With the roads clear, Danny Matt’s paratroop brigade would move into the yard along with the assault boats and cross the canal. Once the paratroop bridgehead was secure, engineers would push the bridges across.

It was a brilliant plan, reminiscent in its daring and complexity of the multipronged nighttime attack on Abu Agheila in the Six-Day War. And despite every form of snafu and misfortune, the glaring lack of battlefield intelligence, and the yawning gaps that opened, perhaps inevitably, between the plan and the reality, in essence it worked. By dawn of the sixteenth, the paratroopers were across, fortifying their eerily peaceful bridgehead. So were Haim Erez’s tanks, foraging as deep as eighteen miles into the countryside, overrunning missile batteries and radar sites, cutting a swath of Israeli control through the Egyptian rear.

But as Sharon outlined his tactics on the morning of the fifteenth, speaking with fluent confidence, the unresolved dilemma lurked into focus.

SHARON: The order of crossing will be 421 (Erez), and then 600 (Tuvia) and then 14 (Reshef).

BAR-LEV: Just a minute. How’s that? How’s that?

SHARON: 421’s at the bridge already…

BAR-LEV: No, no. You’re not transferring three [brigades]?!

SHARON: No, no. I’ll leave [forces] here. I suppose I’ll leave a battalion of tanks. It depends…

BAR-LEV: No, no. You’ll leave a brigade.

SHARON: Okay, then I’ll leave 600 Brigade.

Sharon continued talking, assuring his superiors that the operation is “complicated but doable.” He talked about the rolling bridge and the self-propelled rafts and the Gilowa amphibious tugs cum rafts, and the need to get the forces across to the west bank “on whatever is available” as soon as they reached the canal shore. But Bar-Lev, as slow speaking as Sharon was fast, hauled him back to the east bank again.

BAR-LEV: Now, regarding the brigade that remains here … who secures the bridgehead?

SHARON: 600 does the containment.

BAR-LEV: And what infantry remains here to secure the bridgehead?

SHARON: I’ll leave a battalion of paratroopers…

BAR-LEV: Have they got those LOW [antitank] missiles?³⁸

The contours of the looming dispute are already discernible: Who crosses? Who stays to defend the eastern bridgehead? Who breaks out to the west and cuts off the enemy army? The war against Egypt was about to be turned around. It was a great martial triumph for Israel. But the triumph was marred—some claim actually diminished—by the “war of the generals” that seethed within the Israeli camp.

October 15 was the fifth day of the eight-day Jewish festival of Sukkot, or Tabernacles. “As we headed toward the front,” Sharon writes, “we passed dozens of jerry-rigged Sukkot huts. Traditionally these huts are made of branches and foliage and are hung with the season’s harvest. Often they are elaborate and elegant. But for this Sukkot in the Sinai, ammunition cases and packing crates were the main building material, supplemented by an occasional scraggly bush the soldiers had managed to dig up from the desert.”

Amnon Reshef’s much-mauled brigade had been beefed up for this operation with additional units. He had four tank battalions under him and three more of mechanized infantry. “We knew they had two divisions at Missouri, the Sixteenth Infantry and the Twenty-first. But they were just large eggs on our maps. We didn’t know precisely how and where they were deployed. I hoped to slide through like a knife, from the rear, where we were least expected.”

The reconnaissance battalion slid through, the sound of its clanking treads drowned by the din of battle raging to the north where Raviv’s 600th Brigade had launched its diversionary attack on Missouri. The battalion swung out wide, crossed Tirtur, and headed on toward the canal shore at Matzmed, ready to assist the paratroopers’ crossing. Reshef himself, with two other tank battalions, now also crossed Tirtur from the south, also without incident, and hurried north to engage the Egyptian positions in Missouri. The next battalion, however, the 184th, suddenly found itself under murderous fire as it followed north. “I’m with half the brigade,” Reshef recalled, “and we’re in a major tank battle north of Akavish. Tanks are exploding and burning all around. I’m looking at Egyptian tanks from a range of two meters. I’m looking at dozens of Egyptian soldiers.”

Click here to see a larger image.

“Unknown to Reshef,” Chaim Herzog explains, “his force had moved into the administrative center of the 16th Egyptian Infantry Division, to which the 21st Armored Division had also withdrawn after being so badly mauled on October 14. His force found itself suddenly in the midst of a vast army … Pandemonium broke out in the Egyptian forces. Thousands of weapons of all types opened fire in all directions and the whole area as far as the eye could see seemed to go up in flames.”³⁹

Behind Reshef and his troops, the Tirtur-Lexicon crossroad was blocked by intense and sustained Egyptian fire. Efforts by Reshef’s infantry battalions to open Tirtur from west to east resulted in repeated, costly failure. The reconnaissance battalion, fighting to free up the crossroads, also sustained mounting casualties.

“From 9:00 p.m. to midnight we fought like madmen,” Reshef continued:

I was shooting nonstop, and every one of my men likewise. From Sharon—hardly a sound. This was his greatness. If he trusted someone, he’d let them get on with it and didn’t pester. Once or twice, pleasantly and politely, he would say to me over the radio that it was really important that we opened Tirtur. And I’d say, “It’ll be all right, Arik. I’m working on it.” And he said, “I always know that with you there everything will be all right.” He heard how we were fighting, at ranges of half a meter. It was like inside hell. Thousands of men fighting for their lives.

At one juncture, Reshef, in his command tank, believed he was joining one of his own companies when suddenly, at a distance of fifty meters, he saw they were enemy tanks. “I knocked out all five of them,” he recalls matter-of-factly.

“Did you contact Sharon and tell him?”

“I told him I’d knocked out three.”

“What was his reaction?”

“He was pleased. I told him in order to boost his morale.”⁴⁰

Morale, that intangible but all-important substance, was what decided the 143rd Division’s battle that night, and with it the war. As Reshef and his brigade fought their vastly more numerous foe, Sharon himself, just a few miles to the south, led Danny Matt’s paratroopers into the “yard.” “Unnoticed,” Sharon recalls in Warrior, “we entered into the protection of the yard’s sand walls. Though we did not know it, behind us the reconnaissance battalion was dying in a barrage of Sagger missiles and tank fire. By 1 a.m. lead elements of the paratroopers had started crossing to the west bank in their rubber assault boats. On the other side of the canal the troopers found the area almost deserted. We had taken the Egyptians utterly by surprise. As they established their beachhead, the paratroopers radioed back the code word Acapulco—Success.”

By this time, the first Gilowas were lumbering into the yard. With the traffic backed up for miles on the road from Tasa and only one of the two access roads to the canal open, Sharon had ordered his deputy, Jackie Even, to have these amphibious tugs^j “jump the queue.”

Inside the yard the bulldozers had been unable at first to breach the wall, until I pointed out the red bricks that marked the specially thinned area. Now they were digging fiercely at the ramparts, while the engineers had already started wrestling with the bridging equipment. A unit of antiaircraft machine guns had taken up positions on the walls ready for the air attacks that we knew would come in the morning. Elements of Haim Erez’s tank brigade were also crowding into the enclosure, waiting to join the paratroopers on the other side. Akavish was open; it was along that road that the paratroopers, rafts, and tanks had made their way into the yard. But Tirtur—crisscrossed by the Chinese Farm—was still shut tight.

Tirtur was extremely important. It was only along this road that the giant rolling bridge could be towed to the canal, while the extension of Tirtur to the canal bank itself had been especially prepared as a launching site for the bridge … But as Amnon’s units hammered all night at the Egyptians in the Chinese Farm, it became clear that we simply did not have the strength to dislodge them from Tirtur itself. For the moment, at least, we would have to rely on Akavish to conduit men and armor toward the crossing site.

The morning of October 16 dawned on the most terrible sight I had ever seen … As the sky brightened, I looked around and saw hundreds and hundreds of burned and twisted vehicles. Fifty Israeli tanks lay shattered on the field. Around them were the hulks of 150 Egyptian tanks plus hundreds of APCs, jeeps, and trucks. Wreckage littered the desert. Here and there Israeli and Egyptian tanks had destroyed each other at a distance of a few meters, barrel to barrel. It was as if a hand-to-hand battle of armor had taken place. And inside those tanks and next to them lay their dead crews. Coming close, you could see Egyptian and Jewish dead lying side by side, soldiers who had jumped from their burning tanks and died together. No picture could capture the horror of the scene, none could encompass what had happened there. On our side that night we had lost 300 dead and hundreds more wounded. The Egyptian losses were much, much heavier.

…At almost the same moment … the bulldozers broke through the last of the ramparts, opening the yard to the canal. And now, directly in front of us across two hundred yards of water was Egypt … On our side everything was barren sand and dust. On theirs the palm trees and orchards grew in lush profusion around the Sweet Water Canal. From where we stood it looked like paradise.

During the night we had managed to get Danny Matt’s entire paratroop brigade to the western side of the canal. Now they were quickly joined by a number of APCs and twenty-eight of Haim Erez’s tanks, which were ferried over on rafts. As soon as they landed, Haim’s armor raced westward, destroying the surprised Egyptian units and positions that had the misfortune to be in their path. By nine o’clock they reported they had eliminated five ground-to-air missile sites, tearing a gaping hole in the Egyptian anti-aircraft umbrella that had effectively closed this area to Israeli jets. Now they were marauding at will, picking off the last Egyptian units in the area. Nothing stood in their way; the region west of the canal was virtually empty. Haim’s voice came over the radio: “We can get to Cairo”…

Inside the yard and in the canal opening, engineers were working like mad, directing traffic, widening the breach, getting tanks, men, and supplies onto the rafts and across to the other side. A race was on. The Egyptians were still not aware of what we had done. They were not trying to interdict the crossing, and as yet there was no pressure on the yard itself.

It was right in the middle of this frenzy of activity that an order came through from Southern Command that was so outrageous I at first refused to believe it. All crossing activity, it said, was to cease immediately. Not a single additional tank or man was to be transferred. According to them, we were cut off, surrounded by Egyptian forces.⁴¹

The next battle in the “war of the generals” was shaping up, threatening to dull the heroism and sacrifice of the night’s titanic struggle.

•   •   •

The rolling bridge, or “the 600-ton monster lying on its belly,” as the 143rd Division’s deputy commander, Jackie Even, dubbed it, was a doubly beached whale that night. Tirtur, the ruler-straight access road forking off from Akavish, remained closed. And the tank battalion detailed to drag it along was neither trained nor qualified to do so. “We were Pattons,” Even explained. “American M60s. The tanks originally trained to drag the bridge were British Centurions from the Seventh Brigade. But they had been sent to the Golan before the war to reinforce positions there.”

During the morning, Sharon kept hurling the remnants of Reshef’s brigade at Tirtur, bolstered by battalions from the 600th and the 421st. But to no avail. Even when Reshef finally took the crossroads at Lexicon, the road east remained impassable, at the mercy of the Egyptian artillery and armor deployed in Missouri to the north. He suffered still more casualties. Sharon asked for reinforcements from Bren’s division.

By now, the High Command had decided on a radical change to Noble Hearts: Sharon’s division would not be crossing the canal; Bren’s would instead. Sharon’s division would be tasked with widening the eastern bridgehead and defending it. For the moment, Bren’s division would help with this while preparing to cross.

In the late afternoon, Reshef and Sharon, both bone tired and both at once exultant over the initial crossing and devastated over the casualties, met on the battlefield, overlooking the crossroads. It was a moment of profound emotion and of intense comradeship. It remained engraved on Reshef’s memory, despite the subsequent vicissitudes in their relationship—and despite the incongruity of the gourmet feast they consumed amid all the carnage and destruction:

We’re sitting on the tank engine. His guys bring us food. Arik had two four-by-four Wagoneers. One for milk and one for meat! Because you mustn’t mix swiss cheeses with Hungarian horse-meat sausages! It’s not kosher!! Anyway, he had two separate vehicles full of food. It was Lily’s doing really.

They hand up the food … all sorts of delicatessen, and the two of us are talking and eating. He talks, and I fall asleep. I talk, and his head lolls. Somebody comes and tells us that they’re sending in the 890th Paratroop Battalion—attached to the 162nd Division—into the Chinese Farm, attacking on the east side of it. He was pretty astonished, I think. He couldn’t understand it. But both of us were too tired to analyze it anymore. We didn’t have the facts.

Reshef said he wanted to cross, too, and Sharon said he wanted him to as soon as possible, as soon as his brigade was relieved. “In the end, it took several days—because they didn’t let our division cross,” Reshef recalled, dredging up the old recriminations decades later.

They transferred the other division first. Arik wanted us to cross first. He believed in us. He wasn’t going to send me across in defiance of his orders, but he wanted me to be relieved so I could cross. And so did I. I’d taken a sort of oath: I was the one who tried to stop the original Egyptian onslaught on Yom Kippur, and now I wanted to cross over first into Egypt. Yes, Erez had crossed already. But Erez was our comrade, from our division. I wasn’t jealous of him. But I wanted to be next in line after him. Yes, someone’s got to fight against Missouri. But I’d been doing that since the first day of the war.⁴²

The paratroop attack on the Chinese Farm that night, which Sharon and Reshef spoke of but failed to take action to prevent—it was under Bren’s command—became, for Israelis, one of the most famous and tragic battles of the war. The heroism of the men of the 890th Battalion under Yitzhak Mordechai^k furnished books, songs, and legends for a generation and more. The battalion was cut to pieces. Forty of its men died in fourteen hours of incredible tenacity against hopeless odds. A hundred more were injured. Historians and old soldiers still pick over the records, trying to understand what went wrong. The core mystery centers on the informational lacunae. How was it possible that word of the 143rd Division’s desperate battles there the night and day before, involving both armor and infantry—including paratroopers—apparently failed to reach the 162nd Division, deployed nearby?

It was a near-suicidal assignment, probably superfluous, and plainly conceived in profound error. But it could justly be crowned a success, indeed a historic victory. While the paratroopers fought and died to try to free up Tirtur, just behind them on Akavish a convoy of uni-float rafts^l was being tenaciously dragged and pushed toward the canal. Together they would form the bridge on which, the next day, the 162nd Division crossed into Egypt, thus finally clinching the turnabout in the war. The blood of the paratroopers had not flowed in vain.

It was a disaster nevertheless, and Sharon’s officers had no hesitation in bad-mouthing Bren for it. After all, he had assumed overall responsibility for securing the roads to the canal. The episode brought the underlying tensions and recriminations among the generals into even sharper relief. The order that morning, so hateful and misguided in Sharon’s eyes, to stop the crossing had come from both Gonen and Bar-Lev. “As long as there’s no bridge, there’s no crossing” is how Jackie Even remembered Bar-Lev’s fiat. “I’m not transferring the IDF aboard those Gilowas!” Chief of Staff Elazar reacted in the same way—increasingly so during the day as the strength of the Egyptian resistance at Missouri/Chinese Farm became clearer. “As long as we do not have a safe and stable bridge, we will hold on to the west bank with limited forces only,” he ruled.

Elazar was angry that the situation at Missouri was not made clear to him in real time. He was bitter and furious at what he felt was glib and inadequate reporting by Sharon’s division—both about the true state of the roads and about the true intensity of the resistance they had encountered. He was even angrier to hear that Sharon was vociferously criticizing the order to stop the crossing until a bridge was up. Sharon’s officers were saying that a whole division could have crossed on the Gilowas—had the High Command not wasted this crucial day with its overcautious hesitations.⁴³

To Sharon, Elazar and Bar-Lev were indeed squandering the military opportunity that his division had paid much blood to create. The whole strategy of crossing, he argued, was designed to throw the enemy off balance and recapture the initiative. He had successfully plunged through the gap between the two Egyptian armies. Surprise had been total—and was still in effect. Despite Haim Erez’s vigorous rampage on the western shore, the bridgehead on both banks was still amazingly quiet and peaceful. This was the time to exploit the breakthrough by pouring more and more armor and supplies over to the other side. Granted, there was no bridge yet, and no real prospect of getting one up soon. But the Gilowas were doing the job.

OCTOBER 17–22

“October 16 could have been the day of our real triumph,” Sharon writes.

But it was not. Instead, after the previous night’s immense efforts, the advance was halted. That day and more than that day were wasted … That night, exhausted and morose, I went to sleep on the warm engine cover of a tank. Early on the morning of the seventeenth I was awakened by the sound of self-propelled rafts being towed into the yard. They were a welcome sight. With enough of these rafts on hand we would now be able to assemble the bridge. Once that was done, we might finally be able to change some minds about getting our forces across fast, even though by this time surprise was no longer with us.

That last assessment was now violently confirmed with a sudden and intense artillery bombardment of the yard.

Almost simultaneously MiG fighters swarmed over the yard in an attack that turned the compound into an inferno … Suddenly I felt a smashing pain on my forehead. But an instant later my eyes opened and I realized that whatever had hit me was just a glancing blow. Though my head was bleeding heavily, nothing else seemed wrong…

I felt I had to get the command vehicles out of there. The fire was so heavy that our aerials were taking hits and we were in danger of losing radio control. So I ordered them to the gate area … As I looked I realized that while inside the yard we were under artillery fire, outside the vehicles were being hit by direct flat-trajectory tank fire … Through my binoculars I looked toward the road junction several hundred yards away and was shocked to see an Egyptian counterattack of tanks and supporting infantry coming directly toward us. It was an absolutely critical moment. These Egyptians were about to close the yard behind us. The only force I had under my hands at that instant was the command APCs, those five M113s.

Sharon described how they charged the junction, all their machine guns blazing, and somehow held off the advancing Egyptians for a few precious minutes until a rescuing force of Israeli armor swung into view and drove them off.

His forehead swathed in bandages and his heart racing from this narrow escape, Sharon was now summoned to a consultation at a point several miles back from the canal.

When we got to the co-ordinates on the dunes, I saw waiting for me Moshe Dayan, Haim Bar-Lev, David Elazar, and Avraham Adan. As I approached, nobody said a word—except Dayan, who greeted me with a normal, friendly “Shalom, Arik.” I hadn’t seen any of them since the fourteenth. Since that day virtually the entire crossing battle had been carried out by my division alone. But now there was not a single word or an outstretched hand. Just silence.

Then Bar-Lev said, very quietly and deliberately, “The distance between what you promised to do and what you have done is very great.” At that moment I felt tired to death … I knew there was only one thing to do. I had to smack Bar-Lev in the face. I felt I just had to do it.

To this day I do not know how I kept myself from hitting him. Instead, I simply clamped my mouth shut. After a moment more of silence, a short discussion took place and they decided to do what they should have done two days earlier. Very soon the pontoon bridge would be completed. Now we could proceed across the canal. My division would hold the yard, secure the corridor, and proceed north on the west bank of the canal toward Ismailia, and westward twenty-five to thirty kilometers in the direction of Cairo. Adan and Kalman Magen would cross the bridge and would proceed southward around the shores of the Great Bitter Lake to the rear of the Egyptian Third Army. It was a brief exchange. When it was over, Gonen, Bar-Lev, and Elazar got into their helicopter and flew off. Adan mounted his APC to go back to his division. I was there alone with Moshe Dayan … He asked me about my head. It was, at least, a human interaction.⁴⁴

Perhaps it was the sight of his head that momentarily dehumanized the others. Perhaps they realized that the bloodstained bandage, with Arik’s telltale gray locks peeking out from on top of it, was about to become one of the iconic images of this war—in Israel and throughout the world. With one superficial head wound, Sharon had dealt his rivals a mortal blow in the public-relations race for glory.

The “war council on the dunes” should have been the moment of greatest gratification, when the principal commanders paused to rejoice together as they finally set about turning the tables on the enemy. Instead, they could barely speak a civil word to one another. In the days that followed, as the military situation improved, their relations continued to deteriorate. The cease-fire with Egypt and Syria, on October 22, ushered in an even more public and acrimonious round in the “war of the generals.”

Dayan, at any rate, remained with Sharon for a couple of hours and visited with him in “Africa.” He could scarcely have failed to sense the outpouring of love and adulation for the divisional commander wherever they went. The simplistic but evocative sobriquet “Arik, king of Israel,”^m was already making the rounds of the division. Within days it would be on all the soldiers’ lips and on makeshift banners hung from their tanks.

Dayan, describing the “war council on the dunes” in his own memoirs, supplies the recognition and appreciation that the other generals could not bring themselves to utter. “Sharon’s division had fought with total self-sacrifice,” he writes.

It had suffered very heavy casualties, but it had not wavered from its assignments. Its soldiers had conquered the bridgehead on the eastern bank in devastating armored battles. All of the men—from Arik and his staff to the last field unit—were under constant bombardment. In the battles for the eastern bridgehead the division had lost some two hundred men. In Amnon Reshef’s brigade all the senior commanders were killed and replaced twice over. The company commanders were now the “third generation.” Dozens of the brigade’s tanks had been hit and left burned out and destroyed at Lakekan, at Matzmed, and at the Chinese Farm.

Within hours of the “council on the dunes,” tensions were running high again, this time over what Sharon and his staff regarded as Bren’s sluggishness—unpardonable in the circumstances, they maintained—in crossing the canal even once the bridge of rafts was up. “At 1600 the bridge was ready,” Jackie Even recalled, “and nothing happened! Total silence. I’m screaming at Bren on the radio that we’re open for business, and no one comes. For seven hours no one came.”

Bren’s division had been fighting all day against a determined Egyptian effort to break out of Missouri and cut off the Israeli eastern bridgehead by severing both Akavish and Tirtur. In the afternoon, a separate Egyptian attack, by the Third Army’s Twenty-Fifth Armored Brigade, was mounted from the south. Reshef lay in wait for the Egyptian column, and he was supported by two of Bren’s brigades, the 217th under Natke Nir and the 500th under Arieh Keren. It was an important battle and ended in a huge success for Israel with more than eighty Egyptian tanks knocked out.

Regrouping, refueling, and reorganizing after these battles naturally took Bren’s brigades hours, and it was nearly midnight by the time the 162nd Division began its crossing.

Even recalled:

At last, Bren arrives with his command unit and another brigade. And Natke Nir also begins arriving. The Egyptians must have twigged what was going on, and a bombardment from hell opens up on us. The whole area seems to be burning. It’s midnight, but it’s light like day. I say to myself, “Whether you die or not, if this operation doesn’t succeed, everything is lost.” After Bren and the first brigade are across, the bridge is hit and breaks apart. A tank on a raft is hit and sinks with its crew inside. Gilowas—now ferrying Bren’s tanks across—are hit and several sink. I’m in the middle of the bridge, on my own with no engineer officers. Our people are being killed and wounded all around me. I maneuver a bridging tank into position to span the break in the bridge—and the division continues to cross … The cries of the wounded mingle with the crashing of shells, but I say to myself, “We’ve won the war.” Getting the 162nd over to the other side, to join the force already over there, was the event that won the war. I had this feeling of sudden, total relief. We’d won.⁴⁵

The next day, in hard battles against Egyptian reinforcements rushed in from around Cairo, the 162nd Division broke out of the west bank bridgehead and surged west, intent on swinging down the coast of the Great Bitter Lake to the south and cutting off the Third Army from the rear. It was joined later by elements of Magen’s division, striking out farther to the west and then sweeping south. Together in the days ahead they would advance down the coast and cut the Cairo–Suez road that was the Third Army’s vital supply route. An attempt to take the city of Suez itself ended in costly failure.

“Of course,” Sharon writes bitterly, “by the time Adan broke out of the bridgehead the Egyptians had managed to concentrate forces opposite him. And what could have been done so easily on the sixteenth and even on the seventeenth became a hard and costly job on the eighteenth.”⁴⁶

Back in Tel Aviv, Dayan batted away renewed efforts by Gonen and Bar-Lev, working through Elazar, to engineer Sharon’s removal. With the end of the war in sight, the defense minister told the chief of staff, it simply wasn’t going to happen.

Sharon, meanwhile, was preparing to send Reshef’s brigade across the canal at last, to join Erez. Crossing was no longer a problem: the huge roller bridge was finally dragged to the canal, and on the morning of the nineteenth it spanned the two banks about half a mile north of the pontoon bridge made from the self-propelled rafts. Reshef and Erez, together with Danny Matt’s paratroopers, were to press north toward Ismailia. But Gonen still wanted the bulk of the 143rd Division to stay on the east bank and keep attacking Missouri in order to widen the bridgehead and push the Egyptian artillery out of range.

Sharon argued, more and more vehemently, that attacking Missouri would be costly, misguided, and unnecessary. “On the contrary, the most effective thing to do would be to move northward along the west bank of the canal, behind the Egyptian positions. As we moved up behind them toward Ismailia, the Egyptians would be so menaced themselves, they would not even begin to think about threatening our lines of communications.” But he was ordered to bring back forces from the west bank to beef up the projected assault. Sharon kept dragging his feet. On the afternoon of the nineteenth, Gonen once again asked Elazar to fire Sharon on the grounds that he was defying Southern Command’s orders.

These were not without logic. The area of the bridgehead was still under constant, heavy shelling, and the toll on IDF lives was unbearable. October 19, Dayan writes, was the worst day of the war in terms of casualties, with one hundred dead and more than four hundred injured, most of them in the bridgehead area.

But Dayan himself was becoming increasingly disenchanted with Southern Command’s adamant insistence on attacking Missouri. The Egyptians, now seriously alarmed at their situation, had begun urgently lobbying their Soviet patrons to procure a cease-fire. Henry Kissinger, the American secretary of state, seemed inclined to go along with it. Prime Minister Meir believed they had three days left before the two superpowers, working through the UN, issued a joint ukase bringing the war to an end. The priority now, Dayan advised her, must be on shaping the cease-fire lines.

“We need to focus on our offensives west of the Canal,” Dayan told the prime minister. “We need to push northwards and southwards, and try to reach Ismailiya and Suez.”

Nevertheless, Dayan was still not prepared to intervene directly on Sharon’s behalf in his struggle against the order to attack Missouri. “I fought it,” Sharon writes.

I railed against it. I tried every way I knew to get the order rescinded. It would be a useless gesture, an absolutely needless waste of lives. But at the end I was not able to change it. On the twenty-first I obeyed the order.

The morning of the attack I stood on a rampart on the western bank and watched Tuvia’s tanks and APCs rush the Egyptian positions. I saw them penetrate deep into the defenses, and as they did I saw them hit by a torrent of RPGs, Saggers, and tank fire. One after another Tuvia’s vehicles stopped and burst into flame. It was a sight that sickened all of us who were watching…

That evening Southern Command ordered me to attack again … to take forces from the western side of the canal … and transfer them back to the east to take part in a battle that should never have been fought in the first place … It was generalship of the worst kind. But I am afraid that it was more than just bad generalship … To this day [sixteen years later] I cannot free myself from the feeling that one of the reasons they were pressing me to attack the Sixteenth and Twenty-first divisions on the east side of the canal was not because they considered the corridor too narrow, but because they wanted to keep my troops on the eastern side. They would allow me to proceed north, but they did not want me to have sufficient forces to do it effectively. These are hard things to say. But my strong impression then was that the antagonisms of years between myself and those in command (Bar-Lev and Elazar), augmented now by political considerations, played a considerable role in the military decisions.⁴⁷

“Do you intend to reinforce Tuvia?” Gonen yelled at Sharon on the radio that night.

“No way,” came the laconic reply.

“So I say reinforce!”

“No way!”

“You should know—this is insubordination.”

“Oh come on, leave me alone with that kind of talk.”

Bar-Lev got on the radio and gave Sharon a specific order to transfer forces back to the east bank and to attack Missouri again in the morning. Sharon transferred five tanks. But now, at last, Dayan stepped in. Sharon called him to appeal Bar-Lev’s order. Dayan called Yisrael Tal, the deputy chief of staff. “An appeal like that from Arik can’t just be ignored,” he said. He asked Tal to review the arguments and “issue appropriate orders.” “Fifteen minutes later,” according to Chaim Herzog, “Tal phoned Gonen to transmit an order from the minister of defense not to attack Missouri.”⁴⁸ⁿ

Dayan, having exercised his waning authority at last, did not make do with that. At dawn he flew down to Sharon’s division, heard his side of the story, flew on to the Southern Command headquarters, and poured out his wrath on Gonen (Bar-Lev was not in the war room). “You told him to take Missouri. That is scandalous. Attacking Missouri is suicidal. There is a conditioned reflex in this Command against every suggestion from Sharon.”

GONEN: Arik is conducting his own private war.

DAYAN: There are those who say that it’s this war room that has been infiltrated by political considerations.⁴⁹

By now, the cease-fire was imminent. Sharon’s division had the Ismailia–Cairo road within its gun sights, but Sharon wanted the town itself, and he pushed his armor forward. The column was stopped by two battalions of Egyptian commandos dug in around a sewage plant on the southern outskirts. A desperate battle developed. The cease-fire hour agreed to by Israel, Egypt, and Syria, 18:52 on the twenty-second, came and went, but the fighting outside Ismailia raged on until close to midnight as the Israelis sought to evacuate all their dead and wounded.

“It wasn’t till the last night that the Command allowed us to attack Ismailia,” Abrasha Tamir recalled.

What can you achieve in an attack that you mount helter-skelter at the last minute? I’m not saying Arik’s behavior all through the war was right, his tantrums, his not answering on the radio, and so forth. But the fact is that Southern Command forbade us to transfer more of our forces to the west bank and forbade us to go onto the attack against Ismailia until the twenty-second. It wasn’t because Bar-Lev and Gorodish really thought the eastern bridgehead needed widening. They simply didn’t want us to attack! They wanted the only attack to be accomplished by Bren and Kalman, while we stayed with the bridgehead … All in order that Arik shouldn’t strut around as though he were the victor.⁵⁰

Tamir’s judgment was shared, to a greater or lesser extent, by other key figures on Sharon’s staff. “If you’ve decided to cross, then cross!” said Yehoshua Saguy, the divisional intelligence officer.

Arik was there on the canal bank with the Gilowas [on the morning of the sixteenth]. They should have tasked Bren’s division with clearing the area of the approach roads. And let Arik cross.

They stopped Haim Erez and turned him around. And soon enough, of course, the Egyptians recovered and built a new defensive line with vast minefields and reinforcements. Instead, we should have continued advancing westward toward Cairo with two divisions. I’m not saying we should have entered Cairo. I’m not saying the Great Powers would have allowed us to approach Cairo. But that would have meant decisive victory. If the powers had intervened to stop us, that means we have achieved a decision in this war. As it was, the war ended indecisively.

The contrary viewpoint is perhaps best expressed by Asher Levy, the brigadier-general who fought the war first in Bren’s division and then in Southern Command headquarters. Best expressed—because Levy, at the end of the day, is among those who believes passionately that without Sharon there would have been no crossing of the canal. But as regards what came later, he says,

It was because of his character, the bad traits in Arik’s character. He saw that he was left behind while Bren began to sweep ahead, down the coast of the lake toward Suez. Not because [Bren] was such a great general, but because things went well for him. The IDF was back to its old self. The plans for racing down southward were good, and all went fantastically—until Suez. All the glory was over there. And Arik’s sitting over here…

He was wrong about Missouri. It was vital to ensure at all costs that the eastern bridgehead stay open. That was Southern Command’s most crucial task, and they assigned it to Arik. But he didn’t like it, because the glory wasn’t there. The plan was that he takes care of the bridgehead and Bren crosses. But he wanted to cross. And Haim Bar-Lev wouldn’t let him. He said, Bren crosses and you broaden the bridgehead. And Bar-Lev was 100 percent right.

And so he decided that we’ve got to conquer Ismailia. The Command were against it. They said it would be too great an effort, and they were opposed to making another such effort at that stage of the war. But Arik dragged them into it, and many men were killed there.

It is that sort of scathing and forthright criticism of Sharon—Levy, it will be recalled, is similarly unbiased about the events of October 8—that gives cogency and conviction to Levy’s ultimate verdict on Sharon’s war record. “The fact that Arik Sharon was there meant that despite all the setbacks and difficulties and despite the fact that the bridge hadn’t arrived, Arik Sharon with his tenacity and perseverance determined that Israel crossed the canal. No one can take that away from him, ever. Whoever denies it is simply not telling the truth.”⁵¹

Levy’s appraisal, shared by every last soldier in the 143rd Division, has long become a part of the national ethos. It is not assailable in the collective public mind. Sharon, whatever the subsequent—and previous—controversies surrounding him, has his place assured in the Israeli pantheon on the basis of that one night’s battle.

In a way, that makes the “war of the generals” that followed all the more pointless and perverse. If, as Sharon and his friends say, Bar-Lev was trying to rob him of the glory, he failed. If, as Sharon’s many enemies say, Sharon was obsessively and selfishly pursuing the glory on the west side of the canal, he didn’t need to. He’d got it already. As far as Israeli history is concerned, Arik Sharon crossed the canal. As soon as the first paratrooper on the first rubber dinghy touched down on the west bank at 1:32 a.m. on October 16, that was the story: Sharon had crossed. When Haim Erez’s tanks were trundled over five hours later, it was sealed in the nation’s annals.

---

^a Dvela means “dried fig” in Hebrew. IDF code names are eclectic and arbitrary; they have no intrinsic significance.

^b Eight years later, with Reshef now a full general and Sharon the minister of defense, Reshef resigned from the army rather than fight, he says, in Sharon’s looming war in Lebanon. In civilian life, he became a prominent dove. But his assessment of Sharon the battlefield commander never changed. “He radiated presence, charisma, leadership. Men followed him willingly. They heard his voice on the radio, his assurance, his encouragement, his motivation. They saw him; he was with us. He was always there.” Reshef shared his memories and assessments in a series of interviews in his home in Tel Aviv in 2006–2007.

^c The large IDF base in central Sinai.

^d Lakekan, on the shore of the Great Bitter Lake to the south of Matzmed, had been successfully evacuated by order of Reshef the previous afternoon (http://www.hativa14.org.il/).

^e This is another of Sharon’s tall war stories. “It was I who disobeyed orders,” said his deputy divisional commander, General Jackie Even, “his orders. And after the war he thanked me for it.” In fact, it was two of Sharon’s most senior subordinates, Jackie Even and Colonel Gideon Altschuler, who together ensured that a sufficient force remained on the key strategic hill of Hamadia to stave off the Egyptian assaults.

^f Sharon, in Warrior, delivers a trenchant critique of the day’s disaster, setting it in the wider context of the cursed conceptziya that blighted the post-1967 IDF. He does not expressly include himself among the targets of his grim retrospective. But nor does he entirely exculpate himself. He scarcely could, given the central role he had played in the army over those past six years.

October 8 was the black day of the Israeli Defense Forces, a day that traumatized the army. On the first two days of the war in Sinai, we had suffered defeats. But for those defeats it was easy enough to find scapegoats; poor intelligence, Defense Minister Dayan’s miscalculations, the government’s errors. October 8, however, belonged to the IDF alone.

The failure stemmed from a combination of major tactical errors and also from an attitude of overconfidence that since the Six Day War had hardened into arrogance. After the victories then, the idea had taken hold that the tank was the ultimate weapon … The IDF was overcome by a kind of tank mania. Other combat arms—infantry, armored infantry, and artillery—were neglected. Standard battle doctrines such as ratios of force and concentration of effort were taken less seriously. The commanding idea seemed to be that the business of the Israeli tanks was to charge and the business of the Arab infantry was to run away … But this psychological flaw was not Gonen’s alone. Adan’s Centurion and Patton tanks were hit at long distances by a hail of Sagger missiles and other anti-tank fire. Those that managed to close with the enemy found themselves surrounded by swarms of Egyptians firing Sagger and RPG bazookas. Natke Nir, who led the attack, left eighteen of his twenty-two tanks burning on the field. It was only by incredible courage that he managed to penetrate to within eight hundred yards of the canal before ordering his few survivors to withdraw in reverse gear, firing as they retreated.

^g Saguy himself later entered the Knesset as a Likud member. He served as mayor of Bat Yam, a town bordering Tel Aviv, from 1993 to 2003.

^h Unbeknownst to Sharon and his brigade commanders, Matzmed had in fact fallen earlier that morning.

ⁱ Among the fatalities during this waiting period was General Mandler, killed by artillery fire on his command vehicle on October 13. Kalman Magen was immediately appointed in his place to command the southern division.

^j See above, p. 88.

^k He rose to become a general and, later, minister of defense (1996–1999).

^l See p. 87.

^m The original slogan, millennia old, applied to the biblical king David.

ⁿ According to Elazar’s biographer, it was Elazar who in fact rescinded the order to attack. Tal awoke Elazar before dawn, Bartov writes, and briefed him on the crisis. Elazar sided with Sharon. “There’s a limit to how often you can tell a senior commander who’s in the field and thinks he can’t do it and thinks he’ll have casualties,” Elazar explained later. “That morning—I thought, enough is enough!! And so Tal called Gonen and told him to call off the attack” (Bartov, Dado, 313).