No Mission Is Impossible (11 page)

The battle ended at six-fifteen in the morning. Thirty-six paratroopers and seventy legionnaires died on Ammunition Hill.

Some legionnaires were captured, and their first task was to bury their fallen comrades. A paratrooper stuck an improvised sign by their grave: H
ERE ARE BURIED
28
LEGIONNAIRES
. Another fighter corrected the sign to read, “ . . . 28
brave
legionnaires.”

Ammunition Hill was in the paratroopers' hands, but at what price! Only a few survivors remained of the two companies. An Israeli poet, Yoram Taharlev, wrote a chilling poem about the battle:

T
he paratroopers now held the Police Academy, Ammunition Hill and the Rockefeller Museum, which had been captured by Eilam's 71st Battalion and A Company of the 28th. The road to Mount Scopus was open; that very morning Dayan and several senior officers visited the Israeli enclave. The paratroopers and the other units fighting in that sector were now ordered to encircle the Old City from all over till it fell “like a ripe fruit.” The Jerusalem brigade completed the conquest of the Abu Tor neighborhood, south of the Old City; Colonel Uri Ben-Ari, commanding an armored brigade, captured the Mivtar Hill and the French Hill, on the northeastern approaches to the city. The Jordanian high command hurriedly dispatched a task force of forty-two superior Patton tanks to Jerusalem, but Israeli jets destroyed them on the road before they even approached.

At nightfall, Motta Gur dispatched a unit of tanks and Micha Kapusta's paratrooper commando to the last hill rising in the north of Jerusalem—the Mount of Olives and the Augusta Victoria compound. Once again, the Israelis took the wrong turn; the tanks got stuck on a bridge over the Kidron creek, facing the legion's positions. They were met by a stunning volley of shells and machine-gun fire. The commando fighters were hit: some were
killed, some fell into the creek and a few of their jeeps overturned or caught fire. Micha Kapusta ran down to the dried-up creek to try to save some of his men. He was joined by the legendary Meir Har-Zion, who was not on active duty but had rushed to Jerusalem to be with his comrades. The slaughter in the Kidron creek was very hard on Motta Gur, who followed it from his new command post at the Rockefeller Museum; beside his troubles with the Kidron creek, he was now subjected to a fierce shelling by the Jordanians. He almost lost his voice shouting at his men to take cover. He sat on the ground among them, dejected and pained by the thought of all these fine soldiers who had died. But he soon regained his composure; on the evening of June 6, it seemed that the Jordanians were breaking down.

At 4:00
A.M
., Menachem Begin heard a news broadcast on BBC radio, claiming that the combats in Sinai were coming to an end, and the UN Security Council was about to declare a cease-fire. Begin conveyed the news item to Eshkol and Dayan. They took it very seriously; if they didn't act immediately, the Old City might remain as a Jordanian enclave in Israeli-occupied territory. They therefore overcame their hesitations and gave the order to conquer the Old City.

Motta Gur and his officers watch the Old City from the Mount of Olives, minutes before the final attack.
(GPO)

At dawn, Motta's paratroopers and several tanks conquered Augusta Victoria and the Mount of Olives. One of the casualties at Augusta Victoria was Giora Ashkenazi, the company commander who had led his men in the storming of the Police Academy the previous night. The advanced command post of Motta settled on the Mount of Olives, close to the InterContinental Hotel. Before them lay, in all its beauty, the fairy-tale scenery of the Old City.

“Jerusalem” was like a magic word that reignited the fighting spirit in the mutilated brigade's soldiers. The 71st Battalion reorganized on the Mount of Olives; the 66th on Scopus, and the 28th by the Old City Wall, also reported they were ready for battle.

The moment had come. Motta radioed an order to his men and the tanks supporting them: “Storm the Old City!”

Motta jumped into his half-track and darted toward the Lions' Gate in the Old City Wall. On the way he bypassed the tanks and emerged at the head of the column. His driver, a huge soldier named Bentzur, accelerated like mad, yet Motta kept shouting at him, words that would become famous in Israeli lore: “Go, Bentzur, go!”

The half-track broke into the Lions' Gate. Perhaps the gate was booby-trapped; perhaps the legionnaires were waiting in the narrow, crooked alleys; perhaps a mine was concealed in the motorcycle lying in the middle of the street, blocking Motta's way. He didn't think of all that. He ordered his driver to run over the motorcycle and head for the Temple Mount, where Solomon's temple had stood thousands of years ago. “Go, Bentzur, go!” he repeated, his mind obsessed by a single thought: what will his little daughter Ruthy say when she hears that he conquered the Temple Mount? The half-truck climbed the narrow streets and suddenly emerged in the large concourse on top of the mount. The golden dome of Omar Mosque glistened in front of him.

Motta's voice echoed hoarsely in the radios and walkie-talkies of the army, soon to be repeated over the Israelis' and the world's radios: “The Temple Mount is in our hands!”

Motta's deputy and close friend Moshe (“Stempa'le”) Stempel ran with Yoram Zamosh and a few other paratroopers to the Western Wall, the last
vestige of Solomon's Temple. Zamosh drew a folded flag from his pouch. It was the flag old Mrs. Cohen had brought over in 1948 from the Jewish Quarter in Old Jerusalem and given to him a few hours before the battle of Jerusalem began. Zamosh and his comrades raised it over the wall.

The Jewish people in Israel and the Diaspora felt like they were dreaming. The prayer of thousands of years had come true.

O
ne hundred and eighty-two soldiers, ninety-eight of them paratroopers, fell in the battle of Jerusalem.

Three days later, the Six Day War ended. Israel had conquered Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights.

Was peace any nearer?

   
GENERAL MORDECHAI (“MOTTA”) GUR—FORMER 55TH BRIGADE COMMANDER

          
[Translated from his speech at the paratroopers' victory ceremony on the Temple Mount, December 6, 1967]

              
“To the paratroopers, conquerors of Jerusalem:

              
“When the Temple Mount was occupied by the Greeks, the Maccabees liberated it; Bar-Kochva and the zealots fought the Second Temple's destroyers. For two thousand years, the Temple Mount was barred to the Jews.

              
“Until you came—you, the paratroopers—and brought it back into the heart of the nation. The Western Wall, every heart beating toward it, is again in our hands.

              
“Many Jews put their lives in danger, throughout our long history, to reach Jerusalem and live there. Countless songs of yearning expressed the profound longing for Jerusalem beating in the Jewish heart.

              
“During the War of Independence, tremendous efforts were made to restore the nation's heart—the Old City and the Western Wall.

              
“The great privilege of closing the circle, of returning to our people our capital and center of holiness, fell to you.

              
“Many paratroopers, among our best and most experienced comrades, fell during the cruel combat. It was an intense, hard-fought battle, and you acted as one body, storming forward, crushing all the obstacles without paying attention to its wounds.

              
“You didn't argue. You didn't complain. You didn't file claims. You simply pressed onward—and you conquered.

              
“Jerusalem is yours—forever.”

The conquest of Sinai, the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights have put an end to the Six Day War. Israel now expects her Arab neighbors to engage in peace talks in order to recover their lost territories, but the Arab leaders stubbornly stick to their former positions: no to negotiations, no to reconnaissance and no to peace with Israel. Egypt starts a “war of attrition” against Israel.

Some of the main players on the Israeli side have changed. Eshkol has died, in February 1969, and been replaced by Golda Meir. Yitzhak Rabin is now ambassador to Washington and been succeeded as chief of staff by General Haim Bar-Lev, whose cool, soft-spoken behavior hides nerves of steel and an inclination for bold commando operations. He is supported by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan.

“I
heard members of Sayeret Matkal getting closer, and I called out for them to get into position. Suddenly a grenade exploded beside me. I stopped feeling my right side. My arm was fine, but a warm object had pierced my neck, and I felt I was suffocating. It was an impossible thing to endure. Suddenly, I heard a death rattle coming out of my throat, a terrible sound I remembered hearing from Egyptian soldiers who'd been hit moments earlier,” recalled Ami Ayalon, a naval commando who took part in the battle for Green Island, was severely wounded and later received a Medal of Valor.

It was the summer of 1969, during the war of attrition with Egypt. In an attempt to exhaust Israel, the Egyptians had been attacking IDF forces in Sinai, causing heavy losses. A week before the raid on Green Island, the Egyptians had assaulted an Israeli position facing Port Tewfik. Seven IDF soldiers had been killed, with five wounded, one taken captive and three tanks destroyed. A gloomy atmosphere
reigned within the General Staff. In order to recover the IDF's confidence, they decided to launch an effective deterrence operation.

The commander of Shayetet 13 naval commando unit, Ze'ev Almog, devised a plan for a raid on Green Island, submitting it to the General Staff's chief operations officer, David (“Dado”) Elazar. Green Island was a formidable fortress located in the northern Gulf of Suez and was originally intended to defend the southern entrance to the Suez Canal. There were roughly a hundred Egyptian soldiers stationed on the island, with six dual-purpose guns on the roof of the fortress, antiaircraft fire-control radar, and twenty positions for heavy and medium machine guns and light artillery. It was also within the range of Egyptian 130-millimeter cannon batteries located on the coast.

Green Island, a fortress in the Red Sea.
(IDF Spokesman)

The goal of the operation was to undermine Egyptian confidence with a strike deep in the country's territory, where its soldiers felt safe and secure. Moreover, the mission was simultaneously intended to raise IDF soldiers' morale, which was at a nadir because of the growing number of casualties at the canal. The attack could persuade the Egyptians to respect the cease-fire with Israel. The destruction of the Green Island radar would also disrupt the early-warning system of the Egyptian Air Force and facilitate the task of the IAF aircraft on their frequent sorties over Egyptian territory.

The task of seizing the island was assigned to Shayetet 13 and Sayeret Matkal under the command of Menachem Digli. The chief paratroopers' officer, Raful Eitan, was in command of the operation. Raful, who had led his paratroopers on the jump in Sinai in 1956, as a major, had distinguished himself during the Six Day War and was now a general. He realized that forty soldiers would be needed, as it was clear that a raid on the fortified island would require an amphibious landing, face-to-face combat and a high risk of the loss of life.

According to the plan, the raid force would sail in twelve rubber boats. Twenty Shayetet commandos, constituting the penetration force and the first to land, would be in the first five, and the rest of the boats would carry the twenty soldiers of Sayeret Matkal. The Shayetet fighters were instructed to get within just under three thousand feet of the island, and from there to move forward by swimming and diving toward it. The moment they managed to break through the fences and gain a foothold on the island, they would alert the rest of the boats, which would be waiting just under a mile away. The Shayetet soldiers were to swim and dive while equipped with personal weapons and other combat gear weighing just over eighty-eight pounds, and would be linked by rope to the lead commander—not a simple task, as would become clear.

After a model of Green Island was built and the teams had practiced the raid, it was decided that the operation would be carried out on the night of July 19, between 1:30 and 2:30
A.M
.

Shortly before H-Hour, Chief of Staff Haim Bar-Lev arrived at the gathering point. Slight of build, always wearing a black armored-corps
beret, Bar-Lev had a slow manner of speaking, and his calm, matter-of-fact elocution inspired confidence in his listeners. In a conversation with the soldiers, Bar-Lev emphasized the subject of losses, commenting that if there were more than ten casualties, the mission would be considered a failure. The remarks were delivered against the backdrop of heavy recent IDF losses at the canal; to the chief of staff, a mission with a high human toll was dangerous to morale and outweighed the benefits of capturing the target.

At 8:00
P.M
. on July 19, the rubber boats and a small submersible nicknamed “Pig” were lowered into the water, and the soldiers sailed toward their destination. The Shayetet fighters were ready to dive, clad in wetsuits and in Dacron uniforms, wearing sneakers with flippers attached, combat vests outfitted with significant battle gear, as well as life jackets, oxygen tanks, submachine guns, grenades and magazines. At 11:00
P.M
., they reached the dive point, three thousand feet from their objective, and started swimming toward the island. Then the complications began: the twenty Shayetet soldiers were situated along two ropes, led by two officers, each pulling ten men carrying nearly ninety pounds of gear apiece. The equipment was too heavy and the number of soldiers too large; the currents were much stronger than they had thought. They lost stability, some men got bogged down and the force struggled to move forward. Dov Bar, the commander of the first wave, decided to transition to diving earlier than planned—but that, too, turned out to be less than easy. The force was carried off course by the current, and half an hour later, Captain Bar rose to the surface and discovered that they were almost two thousand feet from their objective. It was 12:30
A.M
.; Eitan and Almog were waiting for updates and calling on the radio, expecting to hear that the fence had already been breached, allowing the Sayeret soldiers to be brought in for battle—but the force hadn't even reached the island.

Bar made a decision on his own: “I decided that I'm getting to the target, no matter what,” he later said. He signaled to everyone else to rise to the surface and to continue forward by swimming, contrary to the accepted plan, and only to submerge again just before reaching the target.
The moonlight threatened to expose them, but Bar remained calm. After another half hour of swimming, they reached the island.

It was 1:38 by the time they stripped off their diving gear, eight minutes past the operation's start last deadline. The penetration team cut the first fence with ease but found two more, which would have taken too much time to get through. From an earlier observation, the planners concluded that there should be another opening in a fence nearby. The soldiers, who had surreptitiously taken cover under a small bridge, could make out three Egyptian guards, one with a lit cigarette in his hand. They could spot the fence in question, but it was directly below the Egyptian position. The head of the penetration team feared that the force would be discovered and decided to surprise the Egyptians by opening fire on the guard, and, in doing so, delivering the opening shot of the operation. The battle had started.

The Egyptians, caught very much off guard, responded immediately with gunfire, which passed over the commandos' heads. In less than a minute, they had sent up flares that illuminated the entire island. The Israeli diversion force began firing bazookas at the target.

Almog, Digli and Eitan were waiting with twenty Sayeret fighters for the agreed-upon signal to enter the target. The signal didn't come. But the moment they heard echoes from the shooting and saw flashes of light, Almog decided not to wait any longer and ordered the boats to advance toward the island.

All the same, for ten long minutes the Shayetet commandos fought alone on the island, even though the Sayeret fighters were already supposed to be battling at their side. After crossing through the fence, the Shayetet members had begun advancing while throwing grenades and shooting Egyptian soldiers who crossed their path. This was how they reached the central building. One team went up in the direction of the roof and another turned toward the rooms, with the objective of mopping them. A tall, broad, strong soldier named Jacob Pundik stood under the roof and served as a ladder, earning the nickname “Jacob's Ladder.”

First Lieutenant Ami Ayalon climbed onto his shoulders and reached the roof. His team had been assigned to destroy the cannon and
machine-gun positions on the fortress roof; he had studied the positions of the different weapons during the rehearsals for the mission. The moment he got on the roof, he was wounded by shrapnel to his forehead. “I threw a smoke grenade to get a little cover,” he recounted, “and I shouted to Zali [Zalman Rot], who had gone up, too, to charge the enemy with me, but the grenade didn't explode. I threw an explosive grenade toward the position the shooting was coming from, but it didn't blow up either. Zali threw a grenade at the position from the left side and then, with a long burst of gunfire, I rushed into the Egyptian Position Two. Gunfire came again from Position Ten, which had shot at me earlier. We fired back. The Egyptian, who was shooting with an automatic weapon, fell, and the position started to burn.”

As Ayalon and Rot charged the cannon position, the Egyptians opened machine-gun fire. Rot shouted that his fingers had been cut off but went on fighting anyway. Yedidya (“Didi”) Ya'ari joined the commandos on the roof to hit the third cannon but was immediately wounded: “I took a bullet in the leg and was laid out like a rabbit. . . . They carried me to the side and I was hit again, in the face and body, by grenade shrapnel that made me deaf and blind. . . . My face was burning and I was half-conscious, and I didn't understand what was happening.”

In the meantime the Sayeret fighters landed on the island and joined the fighting. The Shayetet's ammunition started to run out; nevertheless, Bar pressed on with the charge, sending two fighters to Position 5. They were hit by a grenade and killed on the spot. A grenade was thrown at Ayalon, too, badly injuring his neck. He heard himself gurgling like the dying Egyptians and thought that perhaps now was his turn. He crawled back and evacuated to the boats under his own steam.

A detail of Sayeret soldiers joined the fighting on the roof. A team commander, Captain Ehud Ram, advanced, crouching, along the roof; as he was receiving a report from one of his men, a bullet pierced his forehead, and he was killed. After Ram was hit, two teams came down to clear out the internal courtyard; one of the men was hit and later died from his injuries.

It was already 2:15
A.M
.. Almog reported to the command post that the Egyptian gunfire was dying down, and that his forces had suffered deaths and injuries. The fighters now set off 176 pounds of explosives in the northern section of the fortress. A tremendous explosion shook the small island, and its cannons and machine guns were destroyed. Minutes later, Eitan ordered the start of the evacuation. Now that the outcome of the battle was becoming clear, Egyptian cannon, positioned on the mainland, opened heavy fire on the island and blasted one of the Shayetet boats.

“When the evacuation began, I already knew the whole truth,” said Dani Avinun, one of the wounded. “The dead and injured came past by me. We threw Yedidya Ya'ari—later the commander-in-chief of the navy—into a boat because we were convinced he was dead, and we told headquarters as much on the radio. Later it turned out that he was only wounded.”

Close to 3:00
A.M
., at the end of the battle, the boats headed back, carrying the exhausted fighters, six dead and eleven wounded. The Egyptian death toll was more than thirty.

Debriefings conducted after the operation revealed more than a few failures. The intelligence data had not been sufficient in regard to the water currents; the identity of the Egyptian soldiers on the island, who proved to be commandos prepared for a raid; or the radar, which turned out to be a dummy; and the cannons, revealed as heavy, outdated machine guns.

Yet, despite it all, the raid on Green Island is considered one of the IDF's shining successes. Some regard it as a historic turning point in terms of planning, preparation and implementation in the field. Eitan later commented, “The execution of the Green Island raid was exceptional in its inordinate success. The achievement was the operation itself, in which we paved the way for a new method of fighting that strengthened our security. The Egyptians, in their worst nightmares, had never dreamed of such a daring operation. During the action, we demonstrated a capability and performance level that served as a milestone for many years to come.”