The last time Yitzhak Shoshan encountered the German military he was a boy of ten scrambling over the rooftops of Brussels in 1940 with his family to escape a roundup of Jews. It was surrealistic now to be sitting as an Israeli naval officer in the German Defense Ministry in Bonn.
The future commander of the Eilat and another Israeli naval officer had come to Germany to inspect the Jaguar torpedo boat. It was the end of December 1960 and they had already visited several European countries to view similar craft, traveling by night train to save the navy hotel expenses. The staff meeting with Admiral Bin-Nun on the navy’s future had occurred a few months before and the small boat-big punch concept was still only a wistful thought. Israel, meanwhile, had an immediate need for torpedo boats.
The Germans were in civilian clothing, except the admiral at the head of the table. At one point Shoshan posed a technical question about the Jaguar no one could answer. “I’ll call someone,” said the admiral.
He spoke into a phone and a uniformed naval lieutenant strode into the room, his cap under his arm. The officer had blond hair, a scar on his face and was old enough to have served in the war. He clicked his heels, saluted the admiral, and barked his salutation.
Shoshan felt a hot flush followed by a sense of bloodless cold. Swept by nausea, he begged leave and hastened from the room. In the toilet he vomited and shivered uncontrollably as sweat soaked his shirt. When he returned to the meeting room the lieutenant was gone and a younger officer was waiting to respond to the earlier question. Shoshan glanced at the admiral and sensed that he had understood.
The next day the two Israelis were taken to a port on the North Sea. The squadron commander who received them aboard a Jaguar, Korvetten Kapitan Noodt, was a veteran seaman with a warm face and easy manner. Noodt told his guests that they had the run of the boat and could see everything except the codebooks. Although the captain had fought in the war — the Israelis immediately noted his limp — Shoshan took an instinctive liking to the man. As the squadron put out to sea, Noodt related that he had been a naval cadet in the same port when World War II broke out. He had been wounded on a torpedo boat and hospitalized, then transferred to submarines but the war ended just as he was to sail on his first mission.
At lunch Noodt said he understood there was a problem about kosher food. Wincing at the prospect of again facing the potatoes and hardboiled eggs being pressed upon them by the fastidious Germans, Shoshan said, “Well, there’s not really much of a problem.” German punctiliousness prevailed, however, and two kosher lunchboxes were produced.
The Jaguar had begun life in World War II as a Schnellboot (S-boat), harassing Allied shipping in the North Sea and the English Channel. It was a healthy craft, Shoshan saw, with room for considerable armament and electronic apparatus. Although it was not very comfortable for the crew, it was powerful and built for fighting. The captain was able to control the vessel effectively from the bridge. At Shoshan’s request, Noodt executed squadron maneuvers to demonstrate the ease with which the boats could keep formation.
From Germany the Israeli officers traveled to England to assess a British torpedo boat and write their final report. It was Christmas and Shoshan, forgetful of the customs of the gentile world, vainly scoured the streets of central London in search of an open restaurant. On returning to the Israeli embassy, he drafted his report. He was lukewarm about the other boats they had seen, but of the Jaguar he wrote, “This is a ship of war.”
* * *
Ori Even-Tov was outlining his idea once again, this time in naval headquarters in Haifa. Facing him and Hyman Shamir across the table were Captain Erell and the navy’s top technical officers. Erell was an enthralled listener. When an electronics officer flanking him attempted to demolish Even-Tov’s presentation on technical grounds, he was signaled into silence by a discreet kick beneath the table from the deputy naval commander. The officer on the other side of Erell was likewise kicked in the shins when he laughed at the paltry sum Even-Tov suggested would be necessary to develop the missile.
“We need their help,” Erell told his aides after the visitors left. “Israel Aircraft Industries is a good horse to run with. What we can’t push they can push.”
Erell found a sympathetic ear when he called on the director general of the Defense Ministry, Moshe Kashti, to request funds for a feasibility study by the IAI. Although the General Staff preferred investing in proven armaments purchased off the shelf abroad, Kashti and his boss, deputy defense minister Shimon Peres, believed it imperative to divert some of these funds to the development of a military industry at home. Israel’s political isolation demanded this, and so did the desire to develop a modern industrial infrastructure.
Even-Tov was summoned by Kashti to spell out his proposal. “What would you need to develop this missile?” asked Kashti.
“I’ve got to design it first. And for that I’ll need a few people and a year.”
“You’ve got it.”
* * *
Returning home with a beard and degrees acquired during five years of advanced studies in London, the young mathematician wondered whether any challenging work would be available for him in Israel, with its limited technological infrastructure. When he inquired at Israel Aircraft Industries he was told that there was a job opening up that would possibly require someone with his background, which also included studies in electrical engineering. He was shown into a large office where a solitary figure sat behind a desk. Ori Even-Tov set down the textbook he was reading and chatted briefly with the new arrival. When Even-Tov had arrived three weeks before he asked for two things — a mathematician and a set of basic American textbooks on airborne radar and allied fields. He now had both.
The two men closeted themselves in the office for the next few weeks, poring over the books like students cramming for an examination. They paused occasionally to exchange comments and make notes. Ground-to-air and air-to-air missiles employing radar to home on targets were already operational in the West but Israel was not privy to their secrets. What was available was textbook theory and this the two men now digested. When they had finished, Even-Tov had a clear vision of his direction. It was one never taken before.
Using an altimeter to have the missile fly just a few yards over the sea surface would make it difficult for an enemy to spot with his own radar in time to take evasive action or to shoot it down. The warhead would also strike near the waterline. Radar could not guide the missile on such a low-level flight, because the reflection of the waves — “sea clutter,” in electronics jargon — confused the sensors. Radar could, however, be used to home in on the target on the horizontal plane while the altimeter kept the missile at its pre-determined height. Even-Tov’s proposal to split the guidance system by using both an altimeter and radar in order to create a sea-skimming missile was a major innovation in missile technology.
He was fortunate in having in hand existing hardware — the Luz — with sound aerodynamic features and a reliable warhead. The problem was that it had not been designed as a homing missile that tracked a target on its own but as an optically guided missile steered by impulses sent from the ground. The cone, instead of housing a rotating radar antenna as in air-to-air missiles, was packed with 150 kilograms of high explosives. To redesign the Luz in order to shift the warhead farther back and put the radar in its place would have entailed a budget allocation and a delay that would probably have doomed the project.
Even-Tov elected to solve the problem cheaply with stationary antennas projecting from the missile’s sides. It was a solution that any radar expert would have told him could not succeed, for clear mathematical reasons. Even-Tov was not acting in defiance of these opinions but in ignorance of them. The textbooks he had read did not allude to stationary antennas. The calculations he and his assistant arrived at showed that a fixed antenna of a missile fired in the general direction of the target would have enough lateral vision — about five or six degrees—to track a ship whose relatively slow speed would not permit it to reach the radar’s blind zone before impact.
There was no computer in Israel capable of checking these calculations except one at Rafael, which denied Even-Tov access after he had quit and gone over to its competitor, Israel Aircraft Industries. With the navy footing the bill, Even-Tov flew to Italy. The computer results there confirmed that the missile should fly with its dual control system and its fixed antenna if Even-Tov had made his calculations correctly and the laws of physics held.
Even-Tov and his assistant were shifted from their bookish retreat to a large workshop and provided with a small staff of engineers and technicians to begin building a prototype. Their work had hardly begun when they learned that they were already behind. The Soviet Union had developed its own missile boats — the first in the world — and had begun supplying them to Egypt and Syria.
The Soviets had conceived their missile boats in the 1950s to deal with a problem at the margin of the superpower confrontation — the prospect of an American carrier task force approaching the Soviet coast and launching nuclear strikes against the nation’s heartland. Until their own fleet was strong enough to confront the Americans on the high seas, the Soviet naval command proposed to deal with the carrier threat by developing a seaborne missile with a powerful warhead.
The Germans had introduced guided weapons against ships when they attacked Allied convoys from the air in 1943 with radio-controlled bombs. The Russians, technologically the most backward of the major Allied combatants in the war, had been advanced in rocketry research in the 1930s and resumed this avenue of development following the conflict. They were assisted to a limited extent by captured German rocket scientists — lesser luminaries left behind after the Americans had transported the cream of the German missile program to the United States.
By 1957 the first sea-to-sea missiles in the world were mounted on a number of Soviet destroyers. Dubbed Scrubber, the missile had a hundred-mile range. Two years later the Soviets introduced the Styx missile — much shorter in range but capable of being fired from small vessels with a high degree of accuracy.
The Styx was not a sophisticated sea skimmer like the missile Even-Tov was envisioning, but it packed a five-hundred-kilogram warhead capable of causing havoc even to an aircraft carrier. Its range of twenty eight miles meant that the vessel firing it could stay out of gun range of major warships. About six miles from its target, a small radar in the Styx’s nose switched on and glided towards the target on the track of its own reflected beam.
The missile was installed on a converted torpedo boat called the Komar, which the Soviets viewed as an extension of their shore batteries. Sent out in swarms, a sufficient number would evade air attacks, the Soviet planners hoped, to get within striking distance of the carriers.
By 1962 the Soviets had begun distributing Komars, with their two Styx launchers, to Warsaw Pact allies and friendly countries like Egypt because a more advanced missile boat, the Osa — armed with four launchers and with better seakeeping qualities — was already in the pipeline to the Soviet fleet. The appearance of the Styx in the eastern Mediterranean stunned the Israeli naval command and lent urgency to their own missile program. Admiral Bin-Nun decided that the time had come to seek government backing — and funding — for the missile boat concept.
The admiral requested an interview with Shimon Peres, the dynamic young deputy defense minister. Although Prime Minister Ben-Gurion held the defense portfolio it was Peres who effectively ran the ministry. Bin-Nun knew him as a ubiquitous troubleshooter for the prime minister, frequently traveling abroad on secret diplomatic missions, and as a technocrat intent on building up Israel’s industrial infrastructure. It was Peres who had developed the arms link with France in the mid-1950s that brought Israel the planes, tanks, and artillery used to win the Sinai Campaign. He had done it by circumventing diplomatic channels in order to cultivate French political figures in and out of power. Employing both political argument and appeals to sentiment, he had persuaded them to supply arms to Israel even at the risk of Arab anger. This was the first break in the near-total embargo imposed on Israel by major arms suppliers since the state was created in 1948, a period during which large amounts of arms were reaching the Arab countries. From France, Peres would also obtain reactors for nuclear research in Israel.
At their meeting, Admiral Bin-Nun said that the navy could no longer continue as a collection of floating hand-me-downs. The refitted Arab navies could strangle Israel’s maritime lifeline and bombard its coast. The answer — the only answer Israel could afford — was the missile boat concept. There was still no operational missile to counter the Styx but Bin-Nun expressed confidence that one would be developed. If the navy could obtain six missile boats it would scrap all its other surface vessels. The first step was to acquire a suitable torpedo boat from abroad to serve as a missile platform. The boat the navy believed most suitable was the German Jaguar, which Shoshan and his colleague had reported on two years before.
Peres responded immediately. “You have my blessing and you’ll get the money.”
Bin-Nun, who had been braced for a lengthy exercise in persuasion, was surprised by the speed with which Peres had grasped the concept and his readiness to commit funds. The money did not exist in the defense budget. There was, however, another possible source — the Federal Republic of Germany. The opening to Germany had again been forged by Peres himself. A year after the Sinai Campaign, he had driven through the December snows of Bavaria for a secret meeting with Germany’s defense minister, Franz-Josef Strauss, at the latter’s small-town home. While the constricting arms embargo had been broken by France, it was imperative to widen that lifeline and Peres had decided to cross forbidden ground.
The emotional chasm that lay between the two countries was unbridged by diplomatic ties. Ironically, it was Israel that was interested in such ties and Germany that was hesitant. Ben-Gurion believed that beleaguered Israel’s national interests demanded diplomatic relations with Bonn. Germany feared that such ties would lead the Arab states to sever diplomatic relations with Bonn and establish them with East Germany instead.
After a lunch served by Mrs. Strauss, Peres outlined Israel’s military needs and Strauss discussed the danger of Soviet penetration of the Middle East. At the center of their five-hour discussion was the relationship between the Jewish state and the country that little more than a decade before had murdered six million Jews. Peres suggested that Germany would take a significant step toward acknowledging its responsibility for that past by furnishing Israel with arms for its survival -- doing so without publicity, to avoid Arab ire, and without payment since Israel was as poor in resources as it was rich in enemies.
Strauss expressed agreement. He saw in such an arrangement a step toward Germany resuming its place in the family of nations. Endorsement of his position would come two years later from German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in an historic meeting with Ben-Gurion in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Meeting in a gilded room filled with ghosts, the two elderly statesmen agreed that there could be no reconciliation between the two peoples — at least not in this generation — but that postwar Germany and the state born out of the ashes of the Holocaust must find a way of relating to each other without forgetting the past. When, in the course of their far-ranging discussion, Ben-Gurion asked if Strauss’s pledge to Peres had his backing, the chancellor replied, “Yes, that is right.”
The next Federal Republic budget would include a $60-million item for “aid in the form of equipment.” The recipient and the type of equipment were not specified. The entire amount was in fact earmarked for Israel over a five-year period and included items such as jet trainers, trucks, helicopters, and field guns. Following Bin-Nun’s conversation with Peres two years later, the list would be adjusted to include six Jaguar torpedo boats.
***
It was as a provincial in search of guidance that Captain Shlomo Erell called on naval commands of NATO countries at the beginning of 1963. He was seeking reassurance from veteran continental navies that Israel was not heading with its missile boat concept into some futile and expensive dead end. Within the Israeli General Staff the notion of the tiny navy, with its total of fifteen years’ experience, attempting to formulate a new type of warfare based on a weapon system that did not yet exist anywhere in the West seemed absurd. Erell himself, on more than one restless night, was less than certain that they were wrong. Endorsement of the concept by European navies would, Erell hoped, lend the program legitimacy in the eyes of the General Staff. He also hoped to enlist a continental partner in the project — a move that would provide both technical backing and reassurance.
He found neither. The Europeans were dismissive of the notion of missile boats as a response to the Soviet Komars. In any major confrontation, they pointed out, the role of European navies within the NATO framework was limited to fringe assignments, such as convoy escort duty and anti-submarine warfare. Confronting the Soviet fleet was a matter for the American navy — in particular, the American carrier task forces. American naval air power would deal with the Soviet missile boats before the latter could get into effective range of the Western fleets. No one was interested in working with the Israeli navy in developing an answer to the Styx.
The Soviets had conceived the sea-to-sea missile as a counter to overwhelming American naval strength, but the United States saw no need for such a weapon. At the end of World War II it had more than a hundred aircraft carriers and more than two dozen battleships. Its navy was unchallengeable by the Soviets or any combination of powers. The U.S. navy had in the late 1940s toyed with the development of a sea-to-sea missile, the Loon, based on the German radio-controlled bomb, but it was soon abandoned. The appearance of the Styx did not alarm the American naval command. The missile was designed for defense against American carriers, but these could strike Soviet targets from 750 miles offshore. Soviet missile boats would have to come out almost all that distance before they reached firing range, running the gauntlet of air attack all the way.
It was the appearance of the Komars in Cuba in 1962, the same year they arrived in Egypt, that turned the American navy’s attention to countermeasures. At the request of the Atlantic fleet, the navy experimented with converting existing surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles for ship-to-ship purposes, but the results were unsatisfactory. Lacking the sense of urgency that had already impelled Israel to seek its own answer to the Styx, the Americans would let the problem ride for almost a decade.
To the extent that there was an attempt among European navies to think about the problem in the early 1960s, it focused on the idea of fast missile boat killers that would be too small a target for missiles to hit. These boats would close on enemy missile boats and destroy them with gunfire. This reminded Erell of the response at the beginning of the 20th Century to the emergence of torpedo boats. Because torpedoes were self-propelled and had no recoil — in effect, underwater missiles — they could be fired from small boats. Their powerful warheads made them dangerous even to capital ships. To counter the threat, the destroyer was developed. These shallow-draft and highly maneuverable vessels, less vulnerable to torpedoes, would screen the main fleet from torpedo-boat attacks. At a later stage, they were armed with torpedoes themselves for offensive operations as fleet destroyers.
Israel, thought Erell, could not afford a conventional approach. Small, fast attack boats might prevail against Soviet missile boats if the missiles weren’t very accurate, but the Israeli navy needed a multipurpose craft that could take on destroyers in surface actions, hunt down subs, stay at sea for extended periods on escort duty, and provide close-in shore bombardment. There was nothing in the naval arsenals of the West that met those specifications. The Soviet vessels, which were basically platforms for missile launchers, were not capable of other missions. To produce a boat tailored to its own needs, Israel, despite its lack of naval tradition, had no choice but to dare to be original.
***
The cry of outrage from Rafael at being informed that the sea-to-sea version of the Luz was being transferred by the Defense Ministry to the IAI under Even-Tov was prodigious. His superiors had been so angered at his leaving that they vowed to prevent him from finding work in Israel. When Even-Tov wrote to Rafael to request data on the Luz’s aerodynamic performance, he received a wire from Professor Ernst David Bergmann, Rafael’s top scientist, informing him that he had no need for the data since Rafael was the sole military R&D enterprise in the country. Peres ordered the data turned over. Most of the information eventually was, but on one occasion a naval officer found it necessary to “borrow” data on the Luz from an army ordnance base after determining when the officer in charge of the records would be out to lunch.
Even-Tov had asked for a year in which to formulate his plans but well before then there was peremptory knocking on the gate of his ivory tower. The appearance of the Styx, the anxiety of the navy, and the angry reaction of Rafael were piling pressures on the IAI to produce some tangible results, and Hyman Shamir had begun looking over Even-Tov’s shoulder. In a display of temperament that was to mark his way, Even-Tov had a falling-out with his patron, but was permitted to carry on.
By the end of 1962 he had completed his plan and submitted it to Shamir in two thick volumes. A few weeks later Even-Tov was invited to Peres’s office in the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv. He carried a copy of his report to the meeting. “You don’t think I’m actually going to read that” said Peres with a smile as his guest entered. Even-Tov noticed that a copy of his report already lay on the deputy minister’s desk. Alongside it was another report, in a black binder. Peres identified this as an analysis of Even-Tov’s proposal prepared jointly by the air force and Rafael at his, Peres’s, request. Its conclusion, he said, was that the project was totally unfeasible. The analysis had made use of data supplied by Even-Tov himself to prove that it was mathematically impossible for the missile to perform as designed.
“How am I going to make a decision?” asked Peres rhetorically.
What he would do, he said, would be to send Even-Tov to France to meet with senior engineers at three of that country’s leading aeronautical plants. The French engineers would provide objective appraisals, said Peres, and he would make his judgment after hearing their opinions.
The trip to France was not an encouraging one. At two of the plants the engineers’ verdict was a resounding negative. The chief engineer at the third plant, a White Russian, had plainly studied the two reports carefully. He questioned Even-Tov closely about the unconventional solutions he was proposing. “I believe it can work,” he said finally. “But it won’t take five years and five million dollars, as you estimate. It would be more like twenty years and fifty million dollars.”
It was with considerable trepidation that Even-Tov returned to Israel for his second meeting with Peres. His faith in his vision had not diminished but the weight of outside opinion against him appeared overwhelming. Peres, however, surprised him again. On the basis of the one quasi-positive French report, Peres said he was authorizing the program to continue.
Tenuous as the missile program seemed, it remained the most hopeful option for the navy. If it were junked, there would be no choice but to face either costly re-equipping of the navy or its abandonment as a serious military arm.
A romantic aura had surrounded Israel’s naval arm since pre-state days, but it had never achieved the status of hard-nosed professionalism earned by the army and the air force. A motley collection of small freighters, an icebreaker, and other castoff vessels had been acquired by the underground Haganah to transport illegal Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine after World War II through the British blockade. With the establishment of the state, many of these vessels were rigged with guns and commissioned into the newly established navy.
During the War of Independence the boats participated in several indecisive engagements with Egyptian vessels and provided occasional gun support for Israeli troops operating along the coast. The only serious naval encounter was the attack by the one-man assault craft led by Yohai Bin-Nun, which sank the Egyptian flagship and badly damaged its minesweeper escort.
The first commander of the Israel navy was an American Jew, Paul Schulman, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who served in the American navy during World War II. He was succeeded at the end of the War of Independence by an army officer, Shlomo Shamir, who was seconded to the navy in order to reorganize it. One of Shamir’s key decisions was to dispatch officers in large numbers to foreign naval academies for courses lasting several years. With their return, the navy’s officer corps, hitherto based on veterans of the merchant fleet, began to take on a new professionalism.
This reshaping of the navy’s command structure in the mid-1950s was not matched by the ships put at its disposal. Although the converted refugee transports gave way to real warships, these were few and antiquated. When the missile boat concept was brought to Peres, he realized that it was the only viable option for the navy. As long as Even-Tov’s proposal offered a thread of hope for keeping the option alive, Peres would go with it.