In the first ever missile-to-missile battle at sea, five Israeli missile boats destroyed three Syrian missile boats on the first night of war. Also sunk were a Syrian minesweeper and torpedo boat. There were no Israeli losses.
The four boats in the northern task force were waiting for Barkai off the Lebanese coast when he arrived on the Miznak in the darkness. On the way up, headquarters had informed him that a state of war existed and authorized him to sink any enemy ship he encountered. Barkai felt personally affronted by the Arab surprise attack; that it had come on Yom Kippur made him angrier still. Before moving into Syrian waters, he detached one of the radio headsets dangling from overhead hooks in the CIC.
“This is number one. Captains, to your communications stations.”
From one of the loudspeakers in the CIC ceiling came the first response.
“Number two here, sir.”
The other captains responded in pre-designated numerical order.
Although there was a Russian spy ship in the area, Barkai spoke in the clear in order not to waste precious time coding and decoding messages. If the Russians did pick up his words, by the time they were translated in Leningrad and sent on to Damascus the action would be over.
The task force’s objective, Barkai told his captains, was to draw Syrian warships out of Latakia, Syria’s main harbor, and sink them.
“If they don’t come out, I mean to sail into the harbor and destroy them with our guns. We’re going in close enough to heave our docking lines if we have to.”
In his combative mood, that was precisely what Barkai intended to do, despite the danger of the coastal guns. This would be the first testing of the system on which the navy had expended its energies and hopes for the past decade. He was determined that this night would not end without drawing blood.
Deploying the boats in battle formation, Barkai swung his force wide to the west, towards Cyprus, in order to avoid Syrian coastal radar. The approach to Latakia would be made from the north, the direction least expected. The boats sailed in two parallel columns — the Miznak, Gaash, and Hanit to port and the Mivtach and Reshef several miles closer to shore and slightly astern.
Thirty-five miles southwest of Latakia, the Miznak at the head of the western column picked up a sighting on its radar. At the plotting table in the center of the CIC, a seaman receiving the targets’ position from the radar operator placed a dot on the translucent map spread across the tabletop. Although the two men were just a few feet from each other, they conversed via headsets in order to keep down the noise in the confined space. The Miznak’s own position was indicated by a slowly moving point of light projected upward from a lamp beneath the table’s translucent top linked to the vessel’s gyroscope. A second seaman, using colored pencils to differentiate friend from non-friend, linked the dots placed by the first seaman, giving the officers scanning the table a clear picture of the course, identities and relative speed of all boats in radar range.
Watching the radar reports being plotted on his own vertical board, Barkai followed a vessel four miles to the northwest moving across their course at rapid speed as it headed toward Latakia in an apparent bid to escape the Israeli formation. The bridge reported her to be sailing without lights and having a low silhouette. It was almost certain to be a Syrian warship, perhaps a torpedo boat on picket duty, but Barkai could not rule out the possibility that it was a civilian vessel, perhaps from Cyprus, caught in the war zone.
To test its reaction, Barkai ordered the Miznak captain to fire shells in the boat’s direction, but not to hit it. Doubts about the vessel’s identity ended when it responded to the 40mm rounds with several desultory bursts of machine-gun fire. A projector on one of the Saars illuminated the target and showed it indeed to be a Syrian torpedo boat. The vessels in Barkai’s column opened fire, but the small craft, in full flight, passed unharmed through the plumes.
In the CIC of the Reshef on the right flank of the Israeli formation, Commander Micha Ram ordered full power as he moved to head off the Syrian craft. Sitting on a high stool from which he could see all the instruments around the room, he called out the code designation assigned to the target and ordered the weapons officer to fire on it with the vessel’s guns. The torpedo boat was too small to warrant expenditure of a missile.
Firing was directed entirely from the CIC. The gun was even loaded from below decks, a carousel automatically feeding shells upwards. The radar and fire-control systems on the Reshef, unlike those on the Saars, were Israeli-manufactured. The weapons officer checked a scope to ensure that the gun’s fire-control radar was locked on the designated target and then pushed a console button. The men in the CIC could hear the 76mm gun begin to bark overhead.
Firing had commenced at six miles — an extreme range. The results were too distant for the men on the bridge to observe in the darkness but after several dozen shells the radar operator announced “Target dead in the water.”
The commander of the Syrian torpedo boat, Lieutenant Ali Yehiya, had accomplished his mission as an outer picket. A few seconds before his radio went dead, he alerted his headquarters that he was being attacked by three enemy warships, as Syrian records obtained by Israeli intelligence would reveal. Syrian naval headquarters ordered a minesweeper on picket duty closer to shore to head for the cover of the coastal guns at full speed. Three Syrian missile boats that had just headed south from Latakia were notified of an enemy force approaching from the west.
At this critical juncture, on the verge of the first hazardous crossing of the missile belt, Barkai decided to abandon major elements of the plan that the flotilla had worked on so arduously and to improvise. He had considered requesting air assistance; if the enemy boats were kept busy dodging planes the Israeli vessels stood a better chance of making it across the fifteen-mile missile belt safely. But it was questionable on this first night of the war whether planes would be available on short notice and there was no time to wait. If the Syrian missile boats had left harbor and the torpedo boat had alerted them to the Israeli presence the boats were probably already scurrying back to port, he believed.
Addressing his captains on the radio, Barkai ordered the Hanit to stay behind to finish off the torpedo boat with gunfire. He was determined that the battle results be decisive and that every disabled enemy vessel be sunk. The remaining four missile boats would move directly towards the coast. They would forsake not only air cover but also some of the intricate EW maneuvers they had rehearsed so painstakingly. The bantam-sized officer who had not hesitated to take on the longshoremen of Ashdod in fist fights was determined to intercept the Syrian boats and did not want to risk precious time by being overly artful. “If the enemy’s out there he’s between us and the coast,” Barkai told his commanders. “It’s not important to know exactly where. We’re going full speed for Latakia.”
The Reshef, in the lead as the boats swung east, picked up a radar sighting fifteen miles to their front. It was the Syrian minesweeper. Still out of Gabriel range, it was running for shore. The two Saars in Barkai’s wing, his own Miznak and Gaash, were moving at forty-knots and drew parallel to the Reshef and Mivtach.
The Gaash fired first, launching a Gabriel at the maximum, twelve-mile, range. Barkai winced and felt like swatting the captain of the Gaash on the head. “Too long,” he groaned as he watched the image of the missile on the radar screen fruitlessly chasing the target. The target had been in range when Gaash fired but in the two minutes the missile was in the air the minesweeper pulled out of range.
Aboard the Reshef, Ram focused on the plotting table as the range closed. When the Reshef was less than eleven miles from target, he addressed the weapons officer: “Prepare missile for firing.”
At the missile-selection console, the operator designated one of the boat’s missiles and pushed buttons to confirm that its electrical connections were functioning. “Missile ready,” he said. The weapons officer locked the fire-control radar onto the minesweeper. “System on target,” he announced. Ram descended from his stool to check the radar in one corner of the room, the plotting table in the center, and the three consoles against the opposite wall. Satisfied that the radar was locked onto the correct target and that the target was in range, he leaned over the operator at the central console and pressed a white button labeled “Permission to Fire.” In missile firings, only the captain was permitted to push this button. As he did so all the buttons on the panel turned red, and a grating alarm sounded throughout the vessel, below decks and above. The bridge officer looked down at the deck to make sure that no sailor was standing near the launchers.
The center of activity now shifted to a rotating cubicle on the open bridge, the optical director. Atop the cubicle was the fire-control radar, with its large dish antenna. The cubicle was a “slave” to the radar, turning as it turned. The radar was locked on the Syrian ship, invisible in the darkness. Inside the cubicle, wearing a helmet, was the “aimer,” who would physically launch the missile and start it on its course. With the alarm raucous in his ears, he kicked aside with his left foot a metal safety shield and pressed down on the firing pedal beneath. Instantly the alarm ceased throughout the boat and the top of one of the white fiberglass missile pods on deck swung open, revealing the pointed snout of a Gabriel. The engine of the missile ignited for a fifth of a second and the Gabriel shot into the sky.
The small flame from its exhaust traced its trajectory as it arced upward for 1,000 feet, then dove towards the sea, leveling off at 60 feet. Looking through fixed binoculars, the aimer used a joystick, reminiscent of the Luz control, to guide the missile, which had been launched only roughly in the direction of the target, into the center of the circles etched on the binocular lenses. In doing so he was placing the missile in the path of the radar beam with which the binoculars were aligned.
As soon as the aimer reported the missile in the center of his binoculars, the weapons officer in the CIC below said “Over to beam-ride.” A console operator pushed one of the buttons before him. The missile now flew down the track of the boat’s radar beam which was locked on the target. As it neared the minesweeper, the missile signaled that its own radar had picked the target up.
“Missile ready for homing,” said the radar operator.
“Over to homing,” said the weapons officer.
A button on one of the consoles lit up, indicating that the missile was now homing on the target with its own radar, freeing the Reshef’s fire-control radar to start a second missile on its way while the first was still in the air. The first missile, which had been programmed to stay at 60 feet for most of its flight to avoid being hit by waves should there be any, had dropped down as it approached the target and was now skimming six feet above sea level. The image of the missile on the radar screen merged with the target and the bridge officer reported on the intercom a flaring of light on the horizon.
The cheer that went up aboard the Reshef was echoed by the men in the naval command center in Tel Aviv which was monitoring the task force’s radio communications. The first Gabriel ever fired on an enemy target within range had struck home. The fire control radar meanwhile had locked onto the target with a second missile. The captain again pushed the “Permission to Fire” button and two minutes later the bridge reported a second hit.
The Reshef’s Israeli-developed search radar picked up three unidentified vessels close to the Syrian shore. The vessels were not discerned by the Saars’ European-purchased search radar on which they were swallowed up by the land mass behind them. The Israelis had presumed that their ESM would give ample warning of enemy missiles but the Saar commanders were totally surprised when fast-moving dots suddenly appeared on the radar screens heading in their direction. On the decks, men could see balls of light arcing over the horizon to the southeast, off their starboard beam, and heading towards them.
“Til, til, til.”
Silence gripped naval headquarters in Tel Aviv the moment Barkai’s report of incoming missiles was heard on the radio net. His voice was level, but the officers in the command room could detect its tautness. It was the first time missiles were being fired at Israeli vessels since the sinking of the Eilat and the Orit. The devastating results in both cases were etched in the mind of every man aboard the boats and in the command center.
No one in headquarters was tenser than Herut Tsemach. On his educated guesses the lives of the two hundred men in the attack force were at that instant riding. So was the navy’s ability to wage this kind of warfare. In the absence of hard intelligence on the Styx’ electronic parameters, the success of the Israeli EW system depended entirely on Tsemach’s intuition. He himself could not guarantee it and he had therefore sought backups. To supplement his electronic systems which were aimed at jamming or deceiving the Styx radar, he had installed chaff – both long-range chaff and short-range chaff. He tailored most of the chaff to the wavelength he guessed the Styx were using but he had included other lengths as well as backup to the backup.
Tsemach had devised the broad mix of EW elements in the hope that at least one of them would prove effective. There had been objections at naval headquarters to turning the boats into “Christmas trees” with space-consuming EW equipment but Tsemach convinced the commanders that a multi-optional defense was necessary to give the boats a reasonable chance of getting through the missile belt. Still another backup were the boats’ speed and maneuvering.
The Reshef and Mivtach were closest to the Syrians and appeared to be the principal target. Both began throwing up chaff clouds as they turned toward the enemy and slalomed wildly.
The Reshef’s deceptor and jammer automatically kicked in — instantly analyzing the Styx radar’s characteristics and sending back signals to it on the same wavelength in the hope of blotting out the Israeli boat’s image and creating imaginary images for the Styx to chase. It was electronic ventriloquism and the men on the boats were for the moment passive spectators. They were aware, however, that among the numerous images the Syrian radars were scanning might be the Israeli missile boats themselves.
As the Syrian missiles headed towards the Israeli boats, the EW decoys began tugging at the Styx’s guidance systems. Unlike the Gabriel, which could be guided directly onto target by an operator in the mother ship if enemy EW tried to confuse it, the Styx was a fire-and-forget missile whose dispatchers had no control once it was launched.
In naval headquarters, the radio connection to Barkai went silent after his report of incoming missiles. The wait was excruciating. A minute passed, then another. Finally, Barkai’s voice filled the room. “Missiles in the water. They missed.” The normally reserved Tsemach let out an Indian whoop as cheering filled the war room. Cupping the top of his head with one hand, he spun himself around the room as if he were a top.
On the boats themselves the tension had not abated. Adjusting their electronic umbrellas, the four Israeli craft charged across the missile belt to press home the first missile boat-to-missile boat battle in history.
The Syrian naval command was stunned by what they were seeing on their radar screens. It thought it knew Israel’s naval strength well but the number of vessels being shown was astonishing. Three fast-moving boats had been sighted eighteen miles west and slightly north of Latakia, and a group of ten vessels was seen moving in pairs southwest of Latakia, as reports reaching the West would later reveal. At the same time, a cluster of four helicopters and another group of three helicopters were reported approaching coastal artillery positions. Eyewitness sightings were reported of missiles being fired in the area of the minesweeper, due west of Latakia. To have mustered such strength and such an offensive momentum on the first night of the war on the Syrian front alone meant, as a summary by the Syrian War Command College would subsequently note, that the Israelis had been planning this action for at least two days. Yet it had been the Syrians and the Egyptians who opened the war with a surprise attack hardly eight hours before.
The three Syrian missile boats, two Komars, with two missiles each, and an Osa, with four, fled southward after firing their opening salvo. With their radars showing a vast hostile fleet erupting around them, the Osa — the only one of the Syrian boats with missiles remaining — turned to face its pursuers. It was a courageous choice, because the Soviet-made boats did not have EW, relying for protection only on the superior range of their missiles. The Osa chose for its target the fast-moving boats west of Latakia.
Aboard the Reshef, Commander Ram gave the order to prepare missiles for firing.
“We’ve got a problem, sir,” said the weapons officer. “Looks like a short circuit. We can’t launch.”
“Execute repairs as quickly as you can,” said Ram.
He altered course to the south in order to head the Syrian boats off from the port of Banias, twenty-two miles from Latakia, to which they seemed headed. If the missile system could not be repaired, he would use his guns.
The Mivtach, accompanying the Reshef, was not armed with missiles. This left only the Gaash and the Miznak capable of launching a missile strike.
The Gaash, captained by Lieutenant Commander Arye Shefler, was closest now to the rapidly approaching Osa. Shefler received Barkai’s permission to engage. The two boats raced directly at each other. At 30 miles, two-thirds of its maximum range, the Osa fired. Spewing chaff and sending electronic decoys, the Gaash began vigorous maneuvers. The Styx was still descending when the first Gabriel lifted off the Gaash’s deck. The Gabriel and the Styx passed each other, heading in opposite directions. The Styx exploded in the water harmlessly but the Gaash’s sensors picked up a second Styx coming at them. The first Gabriel was still in the air when Shefler pressed the “Permission to Fire” button, which dispatched another Gabriel at the same target. The Osa’s second Styx exploded harmlessly in the sea. The Miznak, meanwhile, fired two Gabriels at a fleeing Komar.
The Israeli bridge officers saw the Gabriels erupt from their containers on the Gaash and Miznak. The missiles were distinguishable for a while by their white exhausts as they rode electronic beams toward invisible targets. Then the exhausts became too small to see and for a moment all was silent. The horizon abruptly erupted in jagged light and across the water came the roll of two violent explosions.
The 560-ton Syrian minesweeper had earlier absorbed two Gabriels and remained afloat. However, the effect of the Gabriels on missile boats one-third the minesweeper’s size and loaded with fuel was devastating.
Barkai was monitoring the narrowing gap between the two forces on the radar screen and saw the missile trajectories reaching out towards the enemy. Suddenly part of the screen went blank.
“Udi,” he called to his operations officer.
“Sir?”
“Where are the Syrian missile boats?” The two targets had disappeared.
Erell glanced at the screen. “Sunk,” he said.
Barkai was stunned. He had sunk enemy vessels innumerable times in simulator exercises but it had not occurred to him that in reality they would instantly be wiped off the radar screen.
The Gaash’s second missile exploded in the water because the target had been destroyed by the first Gabriel a minute before. In this type of warfare, it was quite conceivable for two combatants to blow each other off the surface in their first exchange of missiles, leaving their second volleys, already airborne, to strike their respective oil slicks.
There was one more Komar to be accounted for. The radar revealed it heading at full speed for shore. Its captain had seen the fate that had befallen his comrades and made quick calculations. He had no more missiles to fire even if he wanted to, he could not outrun the Israeli boats, and there was no port he could reach before the Israeli missiles intercepted him. In the circumstances, all he could do was try to save himself and his crew.
When the Israelis drew close, they saw the boat driven up onto the coast like a landing craft. Barkai was disappointed at not being able to send it to the bottom but he was determined to finish it off. A missile would be useless because the land mass behind the Syrian boat blotted out the radar but guns could do the job as well. Coastal artillery had begun to open up on the Israelis as they approached and Barkai ordered the other three vessels to stay out of range while he went in with the Miznak. Moving to within a thousand yards of the beached vessel, the Miznak opened fire with its three 40mm guns, stitching the target with shells until it burst into flames and began exploding.
The fifth Israeli boat in the attack force, the Hanit, which had been left behind to sink the torpedo boat, had been silent for more than an hour. Barkai began to wonder whether it had been hit by Syrian missiles that had overflown the other four boats and continued in the Hanit’s direction. The Hanit captain now made radio contact. “I had a communications failure but it’s all right now.” The wooden torpedo boat had taken a long time going under, he said. Barkai ordered the captain to perform the same coup de grace on the stricken minesweeper. The Hanit put another missile into the minesweeper and opened up on it with its 76mm gun. The vessel began exploding, turned on its side, and slowly slipped below the surface.
In Tel Aviv, Admiral Telem ordered Barkai to return to base. As soon as the Hanit rejoined him, the flotilla commander organized his force and turned towards home.
It was shortly after midnight; only an hour and a half had passed since first contact with the torpedo boat. In this brief period, the nature of naval warfare had been changed. The first missile-to-missile battle in history had been fought and the results were spectacular. The Syrian force had been armed with a powerful missile whose range was more than twice that of its adversary’s but the Syrian boats were themselves defenseless. The Israelis had a shorter sword but a powerful shield. The results were more decisive than naval engagements almost ever permit — all five Syrian vessels caught up in the battle destroyed, no Israeli vessel touched.
As the task force set out on the five-hour journey home, Barkai and Erell sat in the cabin of the Miznak with a bottle of whiskey between them. They were exhausted but could not sleep. Their mouths were dry from tension and they were hoarse from shouting orders over the noise of the engines. The implications of what had happened off Latakia was greater than they could yet comprehend.
“We just can’t grasp it,” they kept saying to one another as they tried to subdue their excitement with an occasional swig of whiskey.
For Erell this night had been, apart from everything else, a vindication of his father whose term as commander of the navy had been cut short by the navy’s lackluster performance in the Six Day War. Admiral Shlomo Erell was the man who had turned the wispy notion of a new kind of naval warfare into reality. Udi was a student in Nautical High School when his father began to push the missile boat concept. The young officer recalled his father’s visionary gleam as he spoke to him of this new kind of warship and the special elan that would be needed to command them — a mixture of the dashing “ace” quality of the torpedo-boat captain and the discipline of the destroyer officer. When the first Saars started to arrive, the young Erell would accompany his father, by then commander of the navy, on his dockside visits on Saturdays to observe the Saars like a doting parent. Udi remembered the chewing out his father had once given to a hapless duty officer because the boats were not tied securely enough and could be damaged in a storm.
It was now Udi Erell’s duty as operations officer of the missile boat flotilla to radio to headquarters a preliminary battle report. It would be two hours before he could muster the dispassionate tone appropriate to an official description of the first missile battle in history.
In the first ever missile-to-missile battle at sea, five Israeli missile boats destroyed three Syrian missile boats on the first night of war. Also sunk were a Syrian minesweeper and torpedo boat. There were no Israeli losses.