The trepidation felt by the military photographer as he boarded the missile boat in the Haifa naval base for his first combat mission was somewhat assuaged by the smile and easy manner of the young boatswain who welcomed him. But the sailor’s words quickly restored the knot in the visitor’s stomach.
“It’s going to be lively tonight. You’ll have plenty to photograph.”
The reservist was astonished at the youth of the crew members who had assembled on deck to be briefed by the captain before departure. Almost all seemed to be under twenty — but they were clearly no longer teenagers. He saw in their eyes a sheen of confidence and something like toughness that he didn’t think had been there two weeks before.
On the deck the photographer conversed with an eighteen-year-old sailor cleaning a machine gun. “What’s a battle against a missile boat like?” he asked, certain that the tremor in his voice betrayed him.
“We wait for them to come out,” said the sailor as he rubbed oil into the weapon with a piece of flannel, “they shoot at us a bit, and then we pound them.”
“And what becomes of us if we get hit by a missile?”
The young sailor glanced up at his questioner.
“We become an oil stain.”
The moon that night silhouetted the mountains near Latakia, which seemed to come down almost to the water’s edge. The sea itself was a languid, rippling pool. Aboard the Herev, Lieutenant Peres was struck by the beauty of the scene. In a few minutes, he knew, it would all erupt, but he clung to the picture for as long as he could before descending to the CIC. Soon missiles were lifting off the Herev deck and the Syrian defenses were bursting into life.
When Styxes started descending in his direction, the photographer had to use his thumb to push the camera shutter; his other fingers seemed to have petrified.
“The bastards aren’t coming out,” an officer on the bridge said as he stared toward the harbor from whose mouth the Syrian boats had fired.
The coast was aflame with burning oil tanks. To the north, points of light flew through the sky where Styxes were seeking out the other wing of the attack force. Through the noise of the guns and missiles and engines and incoming artillery, the voice of the skipper on the loudspeaker could barely be heard. “We’re going in to see if we can make contact.”
The boat dashed towards the inferno on shore as if rushing for the gates of hell. Hell seemed to be coming out to greet them as geysers from shore batteries sprang up around them but the boat wove its way through almost playfully. The Syrian boats refused to be tempted out of the harbor and the captain finally gave the order to rejoin the rest of the force.
More than two weeks after the Banias oil tanks had first been hit, a four-boat force was dispatched to set fire to the tanks still intact there. As they headed north, Udi Erell asked Barkai for permission to take the Hanit in first. The boat’s gun had been jamming and Barkai said he would agree if Erell could test-fire eight rounds without clogging. The gun fired eight rounds into the sea, but when Erell ordered a ninth round fired for good measure it jammed. He raised Barkai aboard the Soufa to report.
“You’ve got eight,” said Barkai. “I was counting.”
“I’ve got to tell you it clogged on the ninth,” said Erell.
“Well, I promised,” replied Barkai. “You’re going in first.”
The sea was a dead calm when the Hanit moved close inshore. The other three boats lay back out of range of shore batteries and braced for possible missile boat forays from other ports up and down the coast. The shore batteries were not firing and Erell was almost tempted to shut off his engines in order to provide a more stable firing platform. The boat’s 76mm gun opened fire and oil tank after oil tank erupted in flame, like targets in a shooting gallery. Although the gun clogged periodically, the crew swiftly cleared it. After pumping in eighty shells, the Hanit pulled out to let the Haifa take over the job of “lighting torches,” as the sailors had come to call this kind of mission.
On their instruments the missile boat commanders saw a Syrian missile boat emerging from Latakia, up the coast. Breaking off contact with Banias, they raced north. The Syrian vessel launched its Styxes at maximum range and dashed back to harbor. Almost simultaneously, missile boats emerging from Tartus at the rear of the Israeli vessels fired salvos of Styxes. It was a neatly laid ambush. By utilizing their superior range, the Syrian missile boats were able to unleash their volleys and scamper back to the safety of harbor before the Israeli boats could draw within Gabriel range. The Styxes from Tartus were coming on so steadily through the Israeli deception screens that officers in the CICs thought that this time it might be Russian crews firing.
An Israeli war correspondent who had joined the Hanit for the mission grew animated as the balls of fire began descending towards them. Standing on the deck next to “Starter,” he urged him to begin firing his machine gun.
“My captain says not to fire until ordered,” said Starter. “Even if that missile goes through my belly and comes out my backside, I’m not firing until he says so.”
When the insistent reporter got too close, Starter held him in his giant’s grip at arm’s length, keeping his other hand on the machine gun. A moment later the hapless reporter was stunned as a cluster of chaff rockets just above his helmet was fired.
On the Egyptian front the reins on the Israeli boats were loosened as the war progressed. They began to prowl farther and farther westward, past the Nile delta toward Alexandria, shelling military targets along the coast and raising the threat of a seaborne landing. On the night of October 21, a force led by Barkai was dispatched to Abukir Bay, on the approaches to Alexandria. Near Rosetta, a large fishing boat close to shore flashed a signal light toward the Herev and the Hanit. The sighting was reported to Tel Aviv headquarters.
“Sink it,” ordered Admiral Telem.
Peres and Erell were taken aback by the order but the Herev’s gun opened fire, shattering the wooden vessel. Three Egyptian sailors were pulled from the water. They identified themselves as naval personnel and confirmed that the fishing boat had been on picket duty to warn of Israeli raids. Half an hour later, the Hanit sank a fishing boat farther west. Two more Egyptian naval personnel were rescued. The four Israeli boats continued into Abukir Bay.
The Israeli boats began shelling targets ashore in the hope of drawing missile boats out of Alexandria, 15 miles to the west. Barkai asked permission to fire a Gabriel at a large coastal radar: a special technique had been developed in the past few days for using the missile against shore targets, but it had not yet been tried.
“We’ve got to do it, if only to honor the name of this place,” said Barkai to Telem, a reference to Abukir’s place in naval history as the site of Nelson’s destruction of Napoleon’s fleet.
Telem gave Barkai his go-ahead and the Saar (Boat Number Seven, which Tabak had sailed from Cherbourg in the first breakout) fired a missile over the shallow waters in which Nelson had broken the French line. It struck the coastal radar dead center.
***
In the Red Sea command, Zeev Almog decided to have another go at Ardaka. At least one other missile boat was anchored there. Even if a commando attack failed to sink it, the very fact that the anchorage was again penetrated would keep the Egyptians busy looking to their own defenses, he believed, rather than planning another crossing. When Telem visited Sharm al-Sheikh Almog obtained his permission for the operation.
On the Suez Canal, the tide of battle had turned. Israeli armor had crossed the canal westward after finding a gap between two Egyptian armies. Almog believed that pressure on the Egyptians in the Red Sea sector would help the main effort. This time the attack on Ardaka would be made on the surface, using a device similar to the one Yohai Bin-Nun and his men had used so successfully in the War of Independence — a small boat loaded with explosives that would be aimed at the target by an operator who leaped clear before impact. The seaborne bomb was an American speedboat that had been modified for the task. Almog had two of the boats flown down to Sharm.
The attack force set out for Ardaka on October 19, eight days after the previous penetration. The Israelis hoped that the Egyptians would not believe them so foolhardy as to try entering the same harbor twice. (This would actually be their third visit but the Egyptians were unaware of the first foray, which had not been pushed home.) The two attack boats, each loaded with 270 kilograms of explosives, were accompanied by two retrieval boats which were to pick up the operators after they went into the water.
The crossing of the gulf was extremely rough. As the commandos reached the mouth of the Ardaka channel in the darkness, they found no sign of Egyptian alertness. With the boats’ exhausts below water level, they made scant noise as they proceeded towards the anchorage. The commandos scanned the shore on either side for signs of ambush, but all was still. At last the jetty came into view. The outline of a missile boat could be made out alongside it. Nearby the missile boat holed in the previous attack lay half sunk in the shallow waters.
The first boat began its run, the operator opening the throttle and aligning his bow with the missile boat. As the vessel gathered speed, he ejected and the retrieval boat following him swooped in.
As the operator was being hauled out of the water, the commandos heard the sound of a motor racing toward them. The unmanned attack boat had turned full circle and was coming back. Missing them by a few feet, the boat kept circling until a self-destruct device detonated the explosives with a tremendous roar.
Fire was coming from the shore as the second attack boat started its attack. It also missed the target and exploded against the jetty. The two retrieval boats sped up the channel as the Egyptians fired into the darkness behind them.
The men were downcast when they returned to Sharm but Almog was elated. The penetration of Ardaka was itself the accomplishment. The commandos’ report that the Egyptians were firing wildly in every direction was exactly what he had hoped to hear. It was safe to assume that the Egyptians would be busy fighting ghosts for awhile.
The small commando force had been operational now almost every day for two weeks in extremely difficult conditions involving rough waters, long periods at sea in a rubber boat, and enemy fire at close quarters. In addition to their attacks on Ardaka and the attempted rescue of the garrison on the Bar-Lev line, they had harassed the Egyptian garrison on Shadwan Island. With the Israeli bridgehead across the Suez Canal now secured and the end of the war in sight, Almog decided to let the exhausted commandos return to the north. They were already at the airfield at Sharm al Sheikh when Telem contacted Almog and ordered him to recall the men immediately.
“I want you to hit Ardaka again tonight.”
Almog was stunned. Ardaka was a difficult target in the best of circumstances. To hit it for a third time — just two nights after the previous attack — was pushing luck too far. He remained silent for several seconds. “I think the chances of success are small,” he said finally. “I’d like your permission to command the operation myself.”
Almog intended to signal to Telem the grave dangers he saw for the mission— so grave he would not ask his men to go while remaining behind himself. Telem agreed to Almog’s request. The high command was preparing finally to send the T-34 tanks across the gulf in order to gain territory for bargaining purposes before the looming cease-fire came into effect. It was therefore imperative to eliminate the remaining Egyptian missile boat at Ardaka and any other that might have joined it to ensure safe crossing of the LSTs.
At Telem’s suggestion, the attack was to employ bazookas. The Egyptians could be expected to have reinforced their defenses against underwater attack and boat bombs but this time the commandos would stand off from their target.
Yohai Bin-Nun asked to participate in the mission. Almog tried to convince him of the psychological blow it would be if an admiral, even a forty-nine-year-old retired admiral, were to be killed or fall into enemy hands, but Bin-Nun insisted.
“If Binny agrees I’ll agree, too,” said Almog, convinced that Admiral Telem would turn down Bin-Nun’s request. To his astonishment, Telem gave his assent.
Bin-Nun was assigned command of the backup boat that would follow the two attack craft. Almog donned his rubber combat suit for the first time since leaving the commandos almost two years before and joined the lead boat.
Ardaka would be hit this time in the last hour before dawn. After a long night’s uneventful watch, there was a chance that the Egyptians might conclude that the Israelis would not attack so close to sunrise and so far from their base. The boats set out from Sharm several hours after darkness following a brief training exercise in which one man from each of the two attack boats fired anti-tank rounds at a target. The results from a rocky boat had not been very encouraging.
Halfway to target, the motor of Almog’s boat began to act up and he and his crew swapped boats with Bin-Nun. A halo of light could be seen from the direction of Ardaka from a distance. The Egyptians had installed floodlights on the approaches to the naval base but it was not clear whether the lights were covering the northern entrance to the anchorage, where the previous penetrations had been made, or the southern approach. As they drew near, it could be seen that the light was at the southern end. The Egyptians seemed convinced that the Israelis would not attack from the same direction three times.
The attack boats moved down the narrow channel toward the anchorage. It seemed inconceivable that the Egyptians had left the approach unguarded. Perhaps the timing of the attack had indeed deceived them. Or perhaps they were lying in ambush. At eight hundred yards the commandos could make out the outline of a Komar missile boat.
“Maybe it’s the one we already hit,” said a commando to Almog. “Maybe they set it out to draw us in.”
At four hundred yards it could be seen that the missile boat was riding high in the water and was undamaged. Oddly, it was not tied up at the jetty but anchored offshore. At 150 yards fire was opened on the Israeli boats from the shore and from the Komar itself.
“Move up to firing range,” shouted Almog.
In each boat the designated gunner rose and braced himself with the weapon on his shoulder. They had been told not to hit the Styx missiles for fear that they would be engulfed in the explosion. Instead, they were to aim at the body of the boat. Each had only five rounds. As the roll of their boats brought the target into their sights, they fired. The first rounds missed. So did the next three. Almog ordered the boats to close the range to forty yards. If the final shells missed, Almog had decided to close on the missile boat and destroy it with satchel charges.
The last two rounds hit the Komar and set it ablaze. In the light of the flames, Egyptian crewmen could be seen jumping into the water. Almog’s boat began to turn away but shuddered to a stop when it ran onto a reef.
The commander of the boat fired a machine gun to keep the swimming Egyptian sailors away. As Almog looked about him, he saw why the Komar had been anchored where it was. The reef surrounded it almost completely. The anchorage had been chosen to foil any repeat of a boat-bomb attack. Almog ordered his men into the water. When the lightened boat floated free, they clambered back aboard. But the propeller had been damaged and as the boat began to move off it zigzagged uncontrollably. The second boat took Almog’s in tow and they headed back up the channel. As they reached its mouth and turned eastward into the gulf, dawn began to brighten the sky ahead of them.
* * *
Egypt had issued a warning to all maritime interests at the beginning of the war that the eastern Mediterranean was a war zone. Merchant shipping to Israel halted but resumed after a few days. Some foreign vessels refused to make the final leg of the run and offloaded in Italy or Greece, where Israeli freighters picked up the cargo. Most, however, continued to Haifa. Although the Arab missile boats had been effectively neutralized, six Egyptian submarines were still at large. Except for the reported sinking of a 3,000-ton Greek freighter by an Egyptian submarine near Alexandria, however, no other attacks were attributed to them.
Armaments brought by ship were increasingly vital to Israel’s staying power as the war went on. Freighters coordinated the timing and route of the final leg to Haifa harbor with the Israeli navy. More than a hundred merchant ships entered Haifa during the three weeks that the war raged.
In the third week, Telem dispatched one of the Reshef-class boats to the Strait of Messina, a thousand miles to the west. It was accompanied by a Saar which refueled as needed from the larger vessel. An Egyptian destroyer operating out of Bengazi in Libya was reported to be stopping merchant vessels and searching for Israel-bound cargoes. The Egyptians had shifted their destroyers to distant ports on the eve of the war as a precaution. The central Mediterranean was a relatively safe area for them, since they were out of operational range of Israeli aircraft and of the Cherbourg boats. However, the two Reshef-class vessels had been designed for precisely this range and for four and five-day sweeps.
Apart from protecting Israel-bound shipping, the navy was hoping to catch up with the destroyer in order to even the score for the Eilat. When the Egyptians learned of the Israeli naval presence, however, the destroyer no longer ventured out from Bengazi.
Revenge for the Eilat would be wreaked on the southern front. The Komar sunk in the last attack on Ardaka, Israel would learn, was the missile boat that had sunk the Israeli vessel. The day after the attack the Egyptians abandoned Ardaka. A naval base so powerfully defended with SAM missiles that Israel’s air force had been reluctant to attack had been closed down by fewer than a dozen naval commandos.
* * *
Shlomo Erell joined the missile boat flotilla during one of its final forays against the Syrian coast. Udi Erell did not agree to have his father sail with him. Still adjusting to his new command, he did not want the extra pressure of his father, the admiral, looking over his shoulder. The elder Erell was welcomed aboard the Keshet instead.
The battle that night was another of the seemingly chaotic skirmishes in which the Israelis harassed the Syrian ports and fruitlessly attempted to draw out the Syrian missile boats. But to Shlomo Erell it was a fabulous sight. He was captivated by the way Barkai and his captains coordinated their operations despite the wild weavings and intensity of a night battle at forty knots.
Coming up from the CIC as the boat approached Banias, Capt. Eli Rahav found Erell standing on the bridge bareheaded. “How am I going to explain it if you’re injured?” said the squadron commander, handing Erell a helmet. The boat was to shell the oil tanks at Banias. Erell and the officers on the bridge debated what kind of fuel the tanks likely held and whether they would burn if hit. The debate ended when the first shells set the tanks aflame.
From the direction of Tartus, four Styxes appeared in the sky. The missiles, heading straight for them, seemed like balls of fire flying in formation. Erell was petrified but if the others on the bridge were too they masked it well. This was the vision Tsemach had seen a decade before when Erell had called him in to discuss the Styx and asked “Do we have a problem?”
“They’re beginning to turn,” said the bridge officer.
To Erell the lights still seemed to be heading straight between his eyes but the bridge officer, with weeks of combat behind him, could already sense the missiles succumbing to the tug of the electronic decoys. Soon Erell could make it out as well. The complex offensive and defensive systems crammed into the small boats were functioning in the ultimate test better than anyone could have imagined. Recalling his first conversation about the boats in the German Defense Ministry ten years before, the admiral permitted himself a smile and thought, “They’ve even put in the grand piano.”
* * *
Since the second week of the war, Daburs had been arriving overland at Eilat from the Meditrranean, where they were not needed, and speeding off toward Sharm al-Sheikh as soon as they were fueled. Almog pushed them on into the Gulf of Suez. Now, in the final days of the war, he had thirteen Daburs under his command — three times as many as at the war’s outbreak. They would have an important role to play in maintaining the encirclement of the Third Army trapped in Sinai. The Israeli crossing of the canal had severed the Third Army’s supply lines. The Daburs broke up repeated attempts by the Egyptians to ferry supplies across the gulf at night in small boats to the beleaguered army.
On October 23 Almog was informed that an Israeli armored brigade that had crossed the canal was moving south to capture the port of Adabiya, on the west side of the gulf. He decided to try to take the port first. Flying by helicopter from Sharm to Ras Sudar, he boarded a waiting Dabur and ordered all Daburs in the area to proceed at top speed to Adabiya.
A column of smoke rising from the harbor told Almog as he approached that he had lost the race. Israeli tanks could be seen along the waterfront and others were coming down the road from the north. An Egyptian patrol boat, hit by a tank shell, was burning in the anchorage and two Arab freighters, one from Saudi Arabia, were tied up at a jetty.
Leaping ashore, Almog shook hands with the Israeli brigade commander, Colonel Dan Shomron. “We got here twenty minutes ago,” said the dust-covered colonel.
Desultory fire could be heard around them as they talked. Shomron said the Egyptian naval commander for the Red Sea— Almog’s opposite number—had been captured in his command bunker. “I think it would be more appropriate if you took his formal surrender,” said Shomron.
The Egyptian officer saluted when Almog was presented.
“I’m sorry we have to meet under such circumstances,” said Almog in English.
“So am I,” said the Egyptian.
In the bunker Almog noted a large wall map on which the Egyptian plan for the capture of southern Sinai was depicted with arrows and timetables.
Over lunch aboard Almog’s Dabur, the two commanders discussed the war they had been fighting for the past three weeks. The Egyptian, acknowledging the Israeli naval successes, said, “But you had missiles.” Almog did not reply but it occurred to him that the Egyptians may have believed that the antitank shells had been guided missiles of some sort. The planned Israeli trans-gulf armored incursion had been canceled but a use was found for the LSTs when Shomron asked Almog if the navy could transfer fifteen hundred prisoners to the Sinai shore.
* * *
Gadi Ben-Zeev was on the bridge of a Saar escorting an ammunition-laden freighter on the last leg of its run through the eastern Mediterranean when he saw an almost forgotten glow tinting the sky as they neared Haifa. The lights of the city, blacked out since Yom Kippur, were glittering again, from the port at the foot of Mount Carmel to Stella Maris on the crest. The war was over, at least officially.
* * *
Although a cease-fire had been accepted by Israel on October 22 under pressure from the United States and the Soviet Union, the most dangerous phase of the superpower confrontation was only now beginning. The fighting in Sinai was continuing despite the cease fire — both sides blaming the other for initiating it. Cairo claimed that the encirclement of the Third Army had been completed by Israel after the cease-fire went into effect. Israel said the fighting was due to elements of the Third Army trying to break out. In a message to President Nixon on October 24 the Soviet leadership made it clear that it would not let its client — and itself — be humiliated. Soviet officials warned that the Israelis were “embarked on the path to their own destruction.” If the United States did not join with the Soviet Union in lifting the siege of the Third Army, they said, Moscow would have to consider unilateral action – that is, direct military intervention on the ground.
Meanwhile, nerves in both the Soviet and American fleets grew increasingly frayed as the tension mounted. The Soviet tattletales usually consisted of a single destroyer but each aircraft carrier was now being followed by two destroyers armed with missiles and a “spy trawler” capable of providing mid-course corrections onto the carrier for missiles fired from beyond the horizon. Listening devices aboard the carriers picked up submarines shadowing underwater as well. The transports carrying the marine force had shadows of their own – five Soviet warships, some armed with missiles.
Ranking officers in the Soviet squadron had never before been noted on the tattletales but the Americans were now made aware of two admirals on the ships following them. “The object of this presence may simply be to let us know that they are aware of our activities and to make us aware of theirs,” wrote Admiral Murphy in a message to Washington.
The Russians were riding herd on the American vessels so aggressively that Murphy sent a message to his Soviet counterpart by semaphore asking him to adhere to an accord between the two countries signed the previous year obliging their vessels not to point missiles or guns at each other. The State Department sent a note in the same vein to the Soviet Foreign Ministry and the squadron commander was ordered by his superiors to comply. Compliance, however, was short-lived.
Capt. Semenov wrote in his diary: “Over the last few days the situation has become so complicated that it seemed we were on the verge of war.” Pressure on the exhausted Soviet crews was constant and some senior officers, including Semenov and the deputy squadron commander, were standing 12-hour watches. The life of the fleet’s staff, wrote Semenov, had become one of “wild, frantic work”. He wistfully noted that “the mind of a staff officer works better under calm circumstances.” The captain described the squadron commander, Admiral Yevgeni Volubuyev, and his deputy as “emotional persons”. Wrote Semenov: “They go berserk in unison.” Given the hair-trigger situation, it was a dangerous mindset.
The Soviets gave clear signs that they were preparing for direct involvement in the fighting on the ground. A fleet of transport planes that had been landing in Egypt with military supplies suddenly halted their flights on October 24. Intelligence agencies believed that the planes were being reconfigured in the Soviet Union to carry troops. Forty thousand Soviet airborne troops were reported in staging areas awaiting airlift and Soviet combat pilots were now back in Egypt, flying modern Foxbat aircraft. A ship said to be carrying nuclear devices was monitored as it passed through the Dardanelles and docked in Alexandria. And the Mediterranean Squadron’s buildup continued.
The commander-in-chief of the Soviet navy, Admiral Sergei Gorshkov, ordered the squadron to form a naval infantry brigade made up of “volunteers” to be deployed in Port Said at the mouth of the Suez Canal in a demonstrative show of support for Egypt. “Seems we’re going to save Port Said from Israel,” noted Semenov in his journal.
* * *
At a White House meeting with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger running into the early hours of October 25, the National Security Council decided that the Soviet challenge had to be forcefully met. It ordered a worldwide alert — Defcon (Defense Condition) 3. An airborne division was put on standby for imminent departure to the Middle East and more than fifty B-52 strategic bombers were recalled from Guam to the United States.
Admiral Murphy was taking a shower at 7:30 a.m. when an aide rapped on his cabin door to inform him of the heightened alert. Murphy had been pressing for two more carriers to cope with the augmented Soviet vessels swarming over and under the Mediterranean. The Pentagon now informed him that he was getting one, the John F. Kennedy. As the Kennedy passed through the Strait of Gibraltar into the western Mediterranean, the Roosevelt was ordered to sail from there to join the Independence off Crete. The marines at Suda Bay likewise joined the Independence task force south of the island, placing them in position for quick commitment should the Russians land forces in Egypt. The fleet’s electronic monitors picked up Soviet search radar constantly targeting the American carriers. Each side was letting the other see it raising the stakes. Murphy kept the Roosevelt and the Independence seventy-five to one hundred miles apart— close enough to render mutual assistance but far enough to determine which was being targeted by Soviet missiles.
The Soviet squadron had grown in three weeks from 57 vessels to 97, including 23 submarines. The Sixth Fleet had grown from 50 to 60 vessels, including nine submarines. Murphy calculated the Soviets could launch 88 missiles and 250 torpedoes in a first strike.
With the superpowers thus locked in confrontation in the confined waters of the Mediterranean, the scenario of an old-fashioned naval shootout at close quarters no longer seemed a fantasy. If either side believed the other was about to attack it would have no option but to launch an immediate preemptive strike if it wished to survive.
Admiral Murphy would write that the two fleets were “sitting in a pond in close proximity and the stage for the hitherto unlikely war-at-sea scenario was set.”
Semenov noted in his journal that the fleet’s missiles would be aimed at only five targets in a first strike – the three American aircraft carriers and two helicopter carriers. “All other (targets) are secondary. Everybody’s waiting only for a signal. The pressure has reached the breaking point.” Missiles would be saved for the ships carrying the marines.
The fate of the beleaguered Third Army had become linked, without almost anyone in Israel or Egypt being aware of it, to the fate of the superpower fleets which were confronting each other out in the Mediterranean for geo-political reasons of their own. Moscow would do all it could to spare its client and itself the humiliation of having the trapped army captured or destroyed. For Israel, the encirclement of the Third Army was psychological nourishment, a desperately needed reaffirmation of strength after the severest and most costly testing in its history. It balked at American requests not to destroy the army or force its surrender. If it came to it, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was willing to let the trapped army withdraw without its weapons, except for officers who would be traded for Israeli prisoners of war. On second thought, he was willing to let the army go even with its weapons as long as it gave up the foothold it had won in Sinai in an acknowledgement of defeat. As the days passed and the trapped army’s water supply dwindled in the desert, a Defense Department official in Washington snapped at the Israeli military attaché, Gen. Motta Gur: “I hope you know you’re playing with a superpower confrontation.”
In fact, the Third Army’s entrapment would prove a gift to American diplomacy. It made Sadat dependent on the Americans if he wished to lift the siege. The Egyptian Second Army was still holding firm in the bridgehead it had won along the northern half of the Suez Canal in the opening days of the war. But Israeli division commander Gen. Avraham (Bren) Adan believed that the smaller Third Army to the south could be smashed in one night’s battle.
Kissinger would adroitly exploit the situation to preserve the Third Army and Egyptian honor and thus open the door to direct dialogue between the warring parties. Kissinger was also opening the way to displacement of Soviet influence in Egypt by American influence. Summoning Israeli ambassador Simha Dinitz to his office close to midnight, Kissinger said that the destruction of the Third Army “is an option that doesn’t exist”.
Kissinger warned, in President Nixon’s name, that unless water and food were permitted to reach the beleaguered army the U.S. would support the UN demand for an Israeli pullback. He demanded a reply by 8 A.M. A few hours before his ultimatum expired, a message was received from Egypt agreeing to Prime Minister Meir’s earlier suggestion that Egyptian and Israeli officers meet face-to-face to discuss the fate of the Third Army and a prisoner exchange. The Egyptians demanded, in turn, non-infringement of the cease-fire and the immediate transfer of non-military supplies like water, food and medicines to the Third Army. Mrs. Meir accepted both conditions.
As the cease-fire took hold, the Sixth Fleet and the Mediterranean squadron slowly disengaged and sailed over the horizon – almost totally unnoticed by their proxies on land in whose name they had come so close to the edge.
There was no victor in the shadow sea encounter between the two superpowers — neither had blinked — but for the first time since World War II the American navy had found its deterrent power effectively checked by a Soviet fleet armed with a new equalizer -- the sea-to-sea missile.
* * *
Israel had come through the Yom Kippur War bloodied and sobered. It had glimpsed its own mortality and been shaken out of the sense of invincibility engendered by the Six Day War. The navy was the one military arm not burdened by glory in that earlier conflict, a fact that would account in good part for its superb performance in 1973. Driven by the need to prove itself it had invested original thought and years of intense labor to enter a new era of its own creation.
As a traumatized post-Yom Kippur War Israel tried to understand what had stalled its vaunted military machine, the navy’s performance was little noted; its astonishing success was as marginal to the overall picture as its total failure had been in 1967. But the navies of the world would take note. The United States navy sent to Israel a large team, including top EW experts, to analyze how the small navy had managed to overwhelmingly defeat a Soviet weapon system that the U.S. navy itself had been deeply concerned about since the sinking of the Eilat. The U.S. had invested astronomical sums in shipboard antimissile systems in an attempt to cope with the threat of Soviet missiles, whereas the Israelis had performed superbly with a system so seemingly simple that the Americans were amazed it had worked at all.
With the close cooperation of the Israelis, the American experts subjected the results of the Israeli-Arab sea battles to intense scrutiny over the course of weeks, including computer analyses of the missile clashes. One of the Americans was Admiral Julian Lake, considered by many the foremost expert on EW in the American navy. After undertaking a worldwide study of the impact of modern weapons on the battlefield, he would say that the way the Israeli navy had analyzed the nature of the threat facing it and the steps it had taken to meet the problem “stands out as the one clear example [in the development of modern weapon systems] where everything was done right.” The Israeli experience would have a powerful impact on the development of missile boats, missiles, and EW systems throughout the world.
In the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli missile boats -- outnumbered and outranged by their adversaries -- drove the Syrian and Egyptian navies from the sea, prevented attacks on Israel’s vulnerable coastline, kept the vital sea lanes to Haifa open, sank six Arab missile boats and two other warships with two additional “possibles”, caused severe damage to Syria’s oil reserves, shelled targets the length of Egypt’s coast, and pinned down enemy troops far from the main battlefield. All of this was accomplished without a single casualty or loss of a vessel. In the war, the navy lost two frogmen who penetrated Port Said harbor and two more men were lost in patrol boat actions in the Gulf of Suez. But the missile boats themselves successfully eluded all 54 missiles fired at them. Rarely has there been such a sweeping naval victory unmarred by loss.
The missile boat program spurred Israel into the era of high tech on which much of its future economy would rest. The missile boat was the first major weapon system Israel developed and its success would lead to numerous others, from the Merkava tank to the Iron Dome system that would intercept hundreds of rockets. The technological standards developed during the missile boat development would spill over into the civilian sector and brilliant engineers who had honed their talents on the project, such as Tsemach and Lapid, would assume top research positions in civilian firms.
Apart from their military and technological impact, the Cherbourg boats were a reaffirmation of a beleaguered nation’s most important asset — national will. In daring to conceive and undertake something so unorthodox and risky, in the dedication invested in the Shalechet development program, and in the tough-mindedness with which the boats were snatched from Cherbourg and deployed in the Yom Kippur War, the small band of men associated with the missile boats proved that despite the apparent passing of the heroic age a generation after independence, Israel’s life force had not ebbed.
* * *
In the weeks after the war, cases of whiskey, champagne, and gourmet foods filled the corners of Yomi Barkai’s office in the Haifa naval base. Although most of the nation, burdened by the trauma of the war, was unaware of the dramatic missile battles that had been fought at sea and the magnitude of the navy’s victories, the maritime community did know. Naval suppliers, shipping companies, and importers sent an endless stream of gifts to the naval base in appreciation. As the cases began to edge toward the center of the office, Barkai said to Udi Erell one day, “We’ve got to get rid of this stuff. Let’s have a party.”
The party was set for the Hanukkah holiday, two months after the war. The flotilla commander organized it the way he would a military operation, assigning tasks to his officers, setting timetables, and establishing a chain of command. Erell’s job was to get an appropriate song written about the missile boats for performance at the celebration.
The party was held in a large customs shed. Barkai issued an order that all the liquor must be consumed this night, and the men did their best to comply. As the festivities swirled around them, Barkai and Erell, each sitting on the shoulders of two men, engaged in a chicken fight in which each tried to knock the other off his perch.
The party would last until dawn. Midway, Barkai mounted a makeshift stage and took the microphone. As the noise died down, he thought about the first time he had addressed the flotilla, just half a year before. Looking about him now at the officers and men in the shed sitting with their wives and girlfriends, he began with the same salutation he had used then: “Fighters of the Missile Flotilla.”
This time no one laughed.