Commander Yaacov Nitzan gripped the gun in the darkness as he sat in the high-backed commander’s chair on the open bridge of a missile boat cutting through a velvet sea. The voices of the watch officer and helmsman drifted out occasionally from the adjacent wheelhouse. Below decks half of the crewmen were trying to catch up on their sleep in the brief interval between watches. Nitzan raised the gun and fired. At three thousand feet a parachute opened and a flare hung in the sky.
“Til,” shouted Nitzan into the intercom. “Til, til.”
As the Hebrew word for “missile” echoed through the vessel, boots pounded across the deck. Within seconds all battle stations reported ready and guns were clattering.
Nitzan had acquired a supply of distress rockets from the merchant fleet and distributed them to the captains of the four boats in his squadron. They would be fired at odd hours of the day or night to simulate a missile attack. The drills were an essential part, psychologically as well as operationally, of antimissile training. With the memories of the Eilat and the Orit never far away, it was essential to inculcate confidence that the Styx could be dealt with. The men were forbidden to take their boots off even when sleeping so that they could get to their stations no more than seven seconds after the alarm was sounded.
* * *
Binny Telem succeeded Botser as O/C Navy in 1972 and gave top priority to completion of the missile boat program with which he had been intimately involved since its inception. The myriad pieces were coalescing but the system was not yet fully operational. Although the Gabriel had proved that it could hit its target, each firing was still being prepared by technicians from Israel Aircraft Industries, not by sailors. The EW system had not yet been completely installed nor the EW tactics fully developed and there were numerous bugs to be worked out of the engines, the 76mm gun, and other elements. The awful memory of the navy’s impotence in the Six Day War instilled a breathless pace into the work of Telem and his officers, even though there was no sense of imminent conflict.
Things began to gel early in 1973. Missiles were now being launched by regular crews and hitting targets as small as dummy torpedo boats. The pinpoint accuracy was a happy mistake stemming from Even-Tov’s poor command of French. The objective he had been given at the beginning of the program was to develop a missile capable of hitting the Skory destroyers then constituting the backbone of the Egyptian fleet. When he conferred with naval officers in France to ascertain the radar cross-section of a destroyer, one of the figures given him was forty thousand but he had misunderstood quarante to mean fourteen thousand. To hit so small a target the radar had to be far more sensitive. The mistake was discovered by Shalif and Peleg Lapid some time afterward on the basis of their own calculations but Shalif urged Lapid to keep quiet about it in order not to cause a delay in the program. Only when it became apparent that their principal opponent was no longer destroyers but missile boats did the Israeli team appreciate their luck.
Lapid, the electronics officer who would inherit Tsemach’s post, was responsible for refining the EW tactics. Although the Soviets had made tremendous advances in rocket engineering since World War II, they were not believed by Western experts to have moved in their radar development much beyond the state-of-the-art at the end of the war. To be safe, however, Lapid adjusted the EW defenses as if he were up against the current state-of-the-art.
In May, a four-boat squadron was put at his disposal for the first extensive exercise in the EW tactics that had been developed. The lessons learned were spelled out for the entire flotilla and the new tactics were driven home with repeated exercises at sea and in the tactical simulator.
In July, Commander Michael Barkai was appointed flotilla commander. Known to his colleagues as Yomi, the Rumanian-born officer was a short, combative figure whose aggressive style of command set him apart in the navy. He thrived on pressure himself and maintained pressure on all around him. His men feared his tongue-lashings, which were laced with vulgarisms in Hebrew and Yiddish and he did not hesitate to chew out officers in front of their men. The officers came to refer to these dressings-down as Yomization.
Anecdotes about him were legion. On a training exercise as a squadron commander, one of the two staff officers running the exercise with him in the CIC failed to heed an order quickly enough, and Barkai sent him up to the bridge in punishment. When the other officer attempted to say something in defense of his colleague, Barkai sent him down to the engine room and ran the rest of the exercise himself. During his term as commander of the Ashdod naval base, the diminutive officer used to take on hulking stevedores in fistfights when they tried to bar the entry of his car into the strikebound port area he had to pass through in order to reach the base.
His aggressiveness was offset by other traits which made him respected by all who dealt with him. On a personal level, he was regarded as a mensch who did not stand on ceremony. Any sailor could approach him with his problems and be assured of a sympathetic hearing. Operationally, the tension he introduced into his command translated into a high state of readiness. His grasp of the complicated elements involved in this new kind of warfare, and his capacity for command, inspired confidence. Although he had been with the flotilla just two years and was junior squadron commander, it had been his squadron that Lapid chose to carry out the EW exercise, because of the electronic engineer’s admiration for Barkai’s quick grasp. Like Kimche, Barkai had come to the missile boats from the submarine flotilla, where he had spent ten years. He brought with him the submariner’s analytical approach, exactitude, and operational discipline.
At the flotilla ceremony in which he assumed command, Barkai opened his address with a salutation that drew laughter from the ranks: “Fighters of the Missile Flotilla.”
The navy’s combat history had been modest at best, and the only unit whose men were ever referred to as “fighters” was the commandos. But the laughter died quickly before Barkai’s sober mien. He made it clear to the men in the olive-drab ranks before him that he regarded them as fighters, not just sailors. If the testing came, he affirmed, they would prove it to the world.
Barkai undertook the study of his new command methodically. Leading the flotilla out on exercises, he found to his dismay that he could not wield control over more than two or three boats at a time. With larger formations the radio net produced a confusing babble of voices. He could not follow what was happening, let alone direct it effectively. The flotilla commander did not have his own staff or his own vessel but made use of the CIC of the boat in which he happened to place his flag. Both he and the boat’s captain used the same plotting table, on which the battle picture was displayed in the form of dots representing the shifting position of the boats of both sides. Barkai had to rely on the boat’s officers for his staff needs and for communication. The quality of these officers varied with each vessel.
After a few brief exercises, Barkai decided that it was impossible to continue operating this way. Missile boat formations moving into combat at forty knots in intricate maneuvers aimed at evading incoming missiles were more difficult to control than conventional task forces in the best of circumstances. Close coordination was essential, because the EW efforts had to be carefully orchestrated if they were to induce nervous breakdowns in the incoming Styx missiles. Coordination was also necessary in order to maneuver the enemy fleet into effective range of the Gabriel.
Barkai decided to create his own hand-picked staff which would operate with him independently of the staff of the boat they happened to sail on. He would choose for this the best of the officers available to him. From his former flotilla Barkai obtained one of the vertical plastic panels used in submarines as plotting boards. It would be hung in the CIC of whatever missile boat he was on to spare him the need to share the boat's plotting table. It was primarily to test this new command system that Barkai called for three days of maneuvers by the entire missile boat flotilla to be held the first week in October. The maneuvers would be ending on Thursday night, less than twenty-four hours before the onset of Yom Kippur.
The two new Reshef-class missile boats would participate. The Reshef had come off the ways of the Israel Shipyards in February in the presence of Prime Minister Meir; the Keshet had been launched at the end of August. The boats hit the water virtually combat-ready, unlike the Cherbourg boats, which had required years to be converted from boat platforms to missile boats. The two boats were to depart in mid-October for their month-long foray around Africa to the Red Sea. Israeli merchant ships would fuel them en route, as with the Cherbourg boats, and they were to be ready for the possibility of a military challenge from Egypt when they penetrated the Strait of Bab al-Mandeb.
Although Dayan had ordered construction of the large boats for the Red Sea area, the navy believed their primary usefulness would eventually be in the Mediterranean. The Saars did not have the range or the stability in bad weather for long-range operations, and the navy command, increasingly confident of the missile fleet’s combat potential, was now thinking in broad operational terms, not merely of coastal defense. The Reshefs’ larger size permitted the mounting of a second 76mm gun along with seven missiles, and there were fifty crewmen compared with forty on the Saars.
Commander Eli Rahav, the torpedo-boat officer who had been appointed commander of the Reshef-class squadron, took the Keshet out on a three-week shakedown cruise to Italy in mid-September. The Reshef was waiting off Crete to meet it on its way back. The two boats, approaching from the west, would play the role of the enemy in the maneuvers Barkai had organized.
To Admiral Telem the Saars made a grand sight as they swept past the breakwater in column and headed out into the Mediterranean Tuesday morning, October 2. It had taken all of the three years and nine months since the last of the Cherbourg boats arrived in the Bay of Haifa to create an operational missile boat flotilla. From a “fourteen-knot navy” — the cruising speed of the destroyers — they had become a thirty-knot navy. Shaping the original concept into a steel-and-electronic reality had been an excruciating task, and two of the Saars were still not fitted with missiles. They were still useful as gunboats, however, and were favored as command vessels by squadron commanders and by the flotilla commander because of the additional space in the CIC afforded by the absence of missile-control consoles. Boat Number Six was now in dry dock for overhaul, so that eleven Cherbourg boats and the two Reshef-class boats would be participating in the exercise, the largest and most extensive yet held. It would be the first time that all systems would be tested simultaneously in what amounted to the missile boat flotilla’s first full dress rehearsal.
War seemed well beyond the horizon to Telem, even though his senior intelligence officer, Captain Rami Lunz, had for the past few days been reporting unusual movements of the Egyptian fleet which had gone on alert status September 25. As signs accumulated, it became increasingly apparent to Lunz that this was not just a routine exercise. On Sunday, September 30, Telem summoned a staff conference to hear Lunz’s report.
“The signs are clear,” said the intelligence officer. “I say this is war.”
Telem remained dubious but he ordered Lunz’s warning passed on by telephone to every navy unit by a senior staff officer, rather than by telegram, to ensure that the message was taken seriously. He also requested a meeting for Lunz with the chief of military intelligence on the General Staff, General Eli Zeira. To lend support to his intelligence chief’s presentation, Telem accompanied him to Zeira’s office. After patiently listening to Lunz detail the Egyptian naval preparations, Zeira discounted the idea of war.
“Why do you maintain there will be no war when my G-2 insists there will be?” asked Telem.
“Because I have better information,” said Zeira.
Even though similar signs were coming from other arms of the Egyptian military, Zeira remained convinced that Cairo was not ready for war against Israel and that all these movements were part of a large-scale military exercise. The Syrians had also strengthened the deployment of their army opposite Israel, but Zeira and his staff believed Damascus was bracing for a possible Israeli attack. Syria would not attack without Egypt, Zeira said to the naval officers, and Egypt would not attack before it had bombers capable of striking at Israeli air bases and missiles capable of hitting Israel’s cities in case Israel attacked Cairo. Zeira’s arguments persuaded Telem as they had the rest of the military establishment. Just a few months before, there had been similar indications of Egyptian war preparations. Zeira, standing fast against the prevailing opinion of the General Staff, had said there would be no war and had been proved right. The Egyptians, he argued, simply were not ready to meet Israel in an all-out war and knew it.
Telem left Zeira’s office feeling somewhat chastened at having challenged the intelligence chief’s judgment, but Lunz remained convinced that the Egyptians were about to embark on war. This feeling was reinforced on Monday, October 1, the day before the Israeli missile boats put to sea for their exercise, when the Egyptian navy went to the highest state of alert.
Naval headquarters had been shifted the year before from Haifa to General Staff headquarters in Tel Aviv. Then Chief of Staff Haim Bar-Lev, who ordered the move, believed that the naval command on its “Olympus” atop Mount Carmel, as he referred to it, was too detached from the rest of the armed forces for proper strategic integration. Bar-Lev blamed that lack of integration for the attack on the Liberty in the Six Day War. It was from navy command’s new premises in “the pit,” the underground command bunker in Tel Aviv, that Telem followed the early part of the flotilla’s maneuvers.
He was ferried out to the fleet to join Barkai for the last stages and witnessed the smooth functioning of the new command system. The flotilla commander’s own staff marked positions on the vertical plotting board with grease pencils and transmitted Barkai’s orders to the other boats without interfering with the crew of the host vessel. As they sailed back toward Haifa Thursday evening, Telem looked at the thirteen boats in formation with profound satisfaction. The exercise had gone brilliantly. The missile boat flotilla was now as ready as it could be. The one unknown—one on which all else hinged — was the efficacy of the EW system in diverting incoming missiles. This could be proved only in the ultimate test of combat.
Debriefing of officers got under way early Friday morning. Telem had wanted the men released by 1:00 p.m. so they could reach their homes in time for a last meal before the Yom Kippur fast began at sundown. However, Lunz wakened him at 4:00 a.m. to present worrying new evidence of Egyptian preparations. Telem decided to cancel all leaves. At the General Staff meeting Friday morning, attended by Dayan, it was decided to place the standing army on the highest state of alert. The families of Soviet advisers had inexplicably begun flying out of Egypt the day before. In Syria, Soviet families had been hurriedly placed aboard buses and driven toward the port of Latakia, where a Soviet ship was waiting to evacuate them. Israeli intelligence learned that the buses had been turned around halfway to Latakia and driven back to Damascus Airport where the passengers were transferred to Soviet transport planes for an even speedier getaway. The possibility that the Egyptian military exercise and the Syrian defensive alert were only covers for a planned attack could no longer be dismissed.
The review of the flotilla’s maneuvers had just gotten under way at the naval base when Barkai strode into the room. “The debriefing is off,” he announced. “We’re on alert. Get back to your boats and prepare them for action.”