No Mission Is Impossible (21 page)

The paratroopers tried to figure out where the shooting was originating and whom they were fighting against. “I stopped and looked through my binoculars to see the Egyptian force opposite me,” recounted Lieutenant Hezi Dabash. “I was expecting to find bands of tank-hunters, but they looked more like an organized army. I ordered my men to shoot, but not a weapon was fired except for my own Uzi.”

At this stage, Mordechai sent Aharon Margal's company to outflank and attack the Egyptians assaulting Levy's men. As they moved, they were fired upon, and Margal was badly wounded; he later died from his injuries. First Lieutenant Menachem Gozlan's platoon was then dispatched to outflank the Egyptians from the left. Gozlan began running with eight other soldiers and, after covering fewer than two hundred feet, was hit along with all the rest. Groans of pain and calls for help from the wounded drew more shooting. Two companies were trapped in a firing zone, and the ground seemed to boil from all the shells, smoke and shooting in every direction. It was obvious to the battalion commander that, rather than informal squads of soldiers (“tank hunters”), they were up against a well-entrenched formation, reinforced with tanks, anti-tank missiles, mortars and artillery.

Mordechai then dispatched Company H to rescue the wounded from Company B. Eli Shorek, the company commander, got on the radio and heard, “Commander killed . . . deputy commander killed . . . another deputy commander killed . . .” Soon, he himself was injured, and, for the entire night, the soldiers tried to rescue their comrades, dragging them to a little knoll that became known as Wounded Hill.

By four, the command realized that the battle at the Chinese Farm had gone very wrong. The battalion's state was catastrophic. Every attempt to locate the Egyptian core and outflank it had ended in chaos, causing additional losses. Given the situation, Mordechai gave the order to retreat. “All of us got up,” one of the fighters recalled, “and ran wildly toward the canal as bullets flew around us. At the canal, we saw a terrible scene—a defeated paratrooper battalion, licking its wounds. I went into shock, and started to cry.” The medevac station for the wounded filled up. Mordechai pressed for tank reinforcements and armored personnel
carriers for an evacuation. The attack on the Chinese Farm seemed to have failed. Yet, while the battle raged, the pontoons were advancing on Spider road toward the canal, as the Egyptians were too busy fighting the paratrooper battalion.

A few half-tracks from the reconnaissance unit Bamba arrived and evacuated a group of the wounded. But everyone feared the sunrise, which would make it harder to evacuate. A medic remembered, “I ran four times to evacuate the wounded, and dawn lifted during the final trip. I was drained. I've never been as afraid anywhere as I was there.” As the injured were evacuated, the medic spoke with the battalion commander; when he finished, he got up and was hit by a mortar shell. In an instant, he had gone from evacuator to casualty awaiting rescue.

An hour later, several tanks arrived to help the paratroopers. Their commander was Ehud Barak, who had returned from studying in the United States after hearing about the outbreak of war. He had established an improvised armored group, Unit 100. Barak arrived with tanks and armored personnel carriers, but couldn't advance at night, and even when dawn broke, failed to locate the paratroopers. Mordechai informed Barak by radio that he would set off a flare as identification, but then he would need to move fast to a new position, because all the Egyptian fire would be concentrated on the battalion's command post. Barak identified the flare and charged the Egyptian posts but en route drew the fire of Sagger missiles, which rained on his tanks, striking some of them. His Unit 100 retreated, leaving behind burning tanks and tank crews.

The situation in the area continued to worsen. Mordechai ordered all his men to enter the irrigation ditches. Suddenly, two Egyptian jets swooped in to attack. One was brought down and the second dropped altitude before turning back.

At six, the brigade commander, Yairi, asked for authorization to evacuate. But General Shmuel Gonen, the Southern District commander, refused. “We must maintain position at all cost; there is no possibility of reinforcement or replacement.” Gonen believed that the paratroopers' presence in the area prevented the Egyptians from advancing toward Spider road. Only after the intervention of front commander Bar-Lev
was permission given, and, at 11:00
A.M
., the paratroopers' evacuation from the ditches began.

For seventeen hours, from night until the afternoon, the 890th Paratroop Battalion had fought against Egypt's 16th Division, which was reinforced by tanks, anti-tank weaponry and artillery—and against units of Egypt's Second Army. The battalion had lost forty-one dead and 120 wounded.

After more tank battles that lasted the entire day, the Egyptians, who suffered heavy losses, realized they could not continue fighting. In the early evening the Egyptian command ordered its forces to evacuate the Chinese Farm. The evacuation was carried out under cover of night; Rattle and Spider roads remained definitely open.

The heavy price paid for opening the roads was 161 dead and hundreds of wounded. But the roads were open and the crossing tipped the scales of the Yom Kippur War.

   
YITZHAK MORDECHAI, DECORATED WITH THE MEDAL OF COURAGE

          
“One of the hardest moments I've had was when dawn broke and I had to face the fact that the battalion's entire chain of command had been hit. During the nighttime battle, I had sent in new commanders to replace the officers who had been killed, to rescue fighters from burned-out tanks and to continue maintaining position, no matter the price, on the exposed dunes.

              
“Another difficult moment was when mortar and artillery barrages were being fired toward my position, and I say to the soldier standing to my left, ‘Why aren't you shooting?' And then I raise my head and see that he has taken a bullet to the head and has been killed.

              
“These were seventeen of the hardest, most complicated hours of fighting that the paratroopers battalion could have come up against. We were required to stand against large enemy forces and lethal fire, to rescue the wounded, to stabilize our line of combat, and, in this way, to prevent the enemy from reaching the roads and blocking them.”

In the north, the Syrians advance on the Golan Heights, and a handful of Israelis are trying to stop them and save northern Israel from an invasion.

A
t a meeting of the IDF general staff at 4:45 on the morning of the third day of the Yom Kippur War, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan issued an unprecedented directive: “There will be no retreat—not even a centimeter—on the Golan Heights. Even if we lose the entire Armored Corps, we have to come to a decisive conclusion in the north. The Golan Heights is our home, and if the front collapses there, they”—the Syrians—“will be in the Jordan Valley. We need to consider every necessary action, including bombing Damascus.”

In September 1973, the Syrians had begun building up their forces on the Golan Heights. By the start of the war, in October, their numbers had grown from 550 tanks to 900, in addition to a concentration of 140 artillery batteries located less than two miles from the border.

These were dark omens. It was obvious that the Syrians were planning to attack, but the scale of the assault was unknown. Syrian documents published after the war revealed that the Syrian chief of staff had planned to seize the Golan within twenty-four hours. It can now be said that they came very close but were halted in battles drenched in blood.

On October 6, General Yitzhak (“Haka”) Hofi, the commander of the Northern District, summoned his senior staff and announced that war would erupt that evening. The 7th Armored Brigade had already been deployed as a reserve force. Hofi ordered that Israeli settlements on the Golan be evacuated, but many of the residents of moshav Ramat Magshimim refused to leave until that afternoon. Hofi reviewed the plans for the Golan's defense along with General Rafael Eitan, who had assumed the command of a division in the north. There was speculation that the Syrians would break through the border with an immense force from the north, coming by way of Quneitra, a town that Israel had occupied during the Six Day War. The Syrians would come that way, the IDF experts said, in part because, for the Syrians, Quneitra had become a symbol and a goal for liberation, and because this route led to the strategically valuable Daughters of Jacob Bridge, spanning the Jordan River. A secondary force would probably enter from the south by way of the Rafid Gap.

With the outbreak of war, the 7th Armored Brigade, under the command of Yanosh Ben-Gal, was rushed to the Golan's northern sector and Yitzhak Ben-Shoham's 188th, the Barak (“Lightning”) Brigade, was sent south. Syria's 51st Brigade crossed the border and advanced in a three-prong offensive, passing Hushaniya, in the back of the Golan, and progressing in the direction of Camp Nafach and the Oil Road. Yitzhak Ben-Shoham took positions south of Hushaniya, spreading his tanks along a large front. At 9:30
P.M
., an officer from the Northern Command's operations department, Uri Simchoni, got on the radio and informed Colonel Ben-Shoham, “This is the operations officer speaking. The Syrians keep reporting that they're behind you, that Hushaniya is in their hands, and that they're already at the junction past Hushaniya.”

Ben-Shoham replied, “Negative. They intend to get there, but they seem to have gotten mixed up at the junction. . . . I'm firing at them right now and engaging them from the north.”

Ben-Shoham was killed a few hours later, during the battle for Nafach, along with his deputy. The Barak Brigade was almost entirely wiped out and ceased functioning. Contrary to the IDF assessments, the Syrians had actually decided to attack through the Golan's vast, flat
southern sector. They realized that, from there, it would be possible to launch a tank assault on a large front, unlike in the mountainous northern area, where the invader would be compelled to advance in a single tank column, thus giving the advantage to the defenders. The Barak Brigade, indeed, paid a dire price for this mistaken assessment.

Ben-Gal, a Holocaust survivor, later analyzed the Barak Brigade disaster: “In a routine defense situation, spreading out your forces is a good thing, but during war, that logic is a disaster. They scattered their tanks and became cannon fodder.”

The Barak Brigade had fought for its life to halt the Syrian brigades, which had breached the border, the anti-tank canals and the minefields, and in the darkness were quickly swooping across the Golan. They were stopped only at Camp Nafach, where Eitan and his headquarters had been located and then forced to retreat. The surviving Barak fighters retreated as well.

The situation seemed desperate. On October 7, Israeli antennae intercepted the chilling shouts of a Syrian brigade commander on the radio, as he screamed, ecstatic, “I see the Lake of Tiberias!” His brigade indeed was fewer than ten kilometers from the Sea of Galilee (Kinneret, in Hebrew).

Everything had to be thrown into the battle, to prevent a bloody Syrian invasion of the Galilee and the Jordan Valley. On the second day of the war, Ugda Mussa, a division of reservists led by General Moshe (“Mussa”) Peled was dispatched to the Golan. The performance of this combat-scarred, rugged farmer from moshav Nahalal in the battle for the Golan would deeply impress the experts at the American Armor Museum in Fort Knox, Kentucky, and earn Peled the title “One of the five greatest armor commanders in history,” alongside mythological figures like General George Patton and Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.

The front commanders faced a fateful choice: should they deploy the division to prevent the Syrians from crossing the Jordan River or launch a counterattack? Under Peled's pressure they finally decided that the division would attack in the direction of the Rafid Gap, despite the large numeric advantage held by Syria's tanks.

General Hofi explained, “We opted to attack even though, during an
offensive, you're risking more than during a defensive maneuver. However, you can achieve more . . . On defense, it's possible to cause losses to the enemy, to grind him down, but not to determine the outcome of the battle. . . . If we had left the attack for a later stage, we would have been forced to attack while climbing the mountain, because the Syrians would already have been on the slopes of Lake Kinneret. . . . If the Syrians had advanced a little more, the Jordan Valley and the Kinneret would have been in their hands, and the battle would have become much harder. . . . The speed of the attack was significant because it didn't leave them time to reorganize.”

The Golan Heights hero, Avigdor Kahalani, with Yossi Eldar at the height of the battle. (
Uzi Keren, Bamachane, IDF Archive
)

At dawn on October 8, Peled's division entered the battle, determined to repulse the Syrians from the southern Golan. The battle proved slow and grueling, unfolding in a very narrow area with no room for maneuver or flanking actions. En route, the division liberated Ramat Magshimim, the only settlement to have fallen into Syrian hands. At the end
of the first day of fighting, Peled's men had managed to split the Syrian formations and repel them ten and a half miles back.

The next day they were battling the Syrians on three fronts: from the west, against retreating forces; from the east, against attacking forces; and from the north, against forces that were under attack. The division wiped out the armored brigade it was fighting, closed the Rafid Gap and, eventually, with the capture of Hushaniya, forced the retreating Syrians out of the gap. The next day, the Syrians were pushed out of the area completely, meaning that in less than three days, Peled's division had repelled five Syrian brigades and destroyed the southern pillar of the network of armor positions established by the Syrians in Israeli territory.

Peled's offensive had been coordinated with a reservist division led by General Dan Laner, which had reached the Golan on Saturday night, within hours of the war's eruption, and had launched its attack by Sunday. A kibbutz member, Austrian-born Laner had been parachuted into Yugoslavia during World War II and had fought the Nazis with Tito's partisans. After a brilliant career in the IDF he had been recalled from retirement to lead a division headed for the Golan Heights. His men aided in halting the advance by the Syrian Army and by an Iraqi expeditionary force that had rushed to its help. Simultaneously, Eitan's division had stopped the Syrians in the Quneitra area.

In the Golan's northern region, the 7th Armored Brigade continued fighting. Avigdor Kahalani, whose fame had preceded him ever since his daring fighting in the Six Day War, led the 77th Battalion to Quneitra and Booster Ridge. Two other units were dispatched to the area, which would later be called the Valley of Tears. With the start of battle, Syria's planes bombed and Israel's air force bled; within hours, Mount Hermon had fallen, becoming an excellent observation point for shooting at Israeli forces. At nightfall, the other units evacuated the Valley of Tears. Kahalani, for his part, discovered that Syrian shooting capabilities also functioned at night; they were using Russian tanks equipped with infrared projectors that could zero in and fire at the Israeli enemy.

“My tank crews are shouting at me that they're unable to stop the
Syrians,” Kahalani recounted. “Israeli tanks that had previously been considered top notch are suddenly being exposed for their weaknesses. Within our force, only the commanders and drivers have infrared goggles, but not the gunner, who needs them. I ask myself, how do we stop the Syrians? I'm the battalion commander, everyone's turning to me, and I feel that I'm not fulfilling expectations. I'm responsible for the area, and they'll accuse me of not being up to the task.”

Kahalani ordered the lighting of flares, and after three went into the air, he discovered that they had been the last ones. The soldiers in the tanks were anxious, unable to see where to aim their cannons or how to advance. Meanwhile, the Syrian Air Force was flashing into view overhead—certainly not the sort of lighting Kahalani had been looking for.

“Turn off the infrared,” he commanded his soldiers. “You can stick your heads slightly out of the tank turrets and navigate forward.” Around them, tanks that were hit or on fire illuminated the area, but it wasn't clear whether they belonged to Israel or the enemy. “Stop and silence your engines,” Kahalani instructed. “Listen for the noise of their chains and you'll be able to locate them.”

The soldiers did as they were told, shutting off their engines, listening for the sound of the enemy's tanks, and shooting. The shells fired into the darkness yielded results; the Syrians were halted. In the dark, it was very difficult to identify enemy tanks until they were within a few meters of Israeli forces. A tank standing sixty-five feet from Kahalani's, with a cannon pointed toward Syria, was revealed to be a Syrian T-55, and only at the last minute did they fire at it, as well as at another Syrian tank to its side. The Syrians had come so close that they had effectively merged with the Israelis, the forces mixing one with the other.

At daybreak, Kahalani's men discovered 130 Syrian tanks one mile from the Israeli positions. The Syrians started advancing, firing two or three shells and then moving forward. Kahalani ordered the fourteen Israeli tanks that remained operable to ascend to their positions. In the following battle, most of the battalion's officers were killed as they stood, exposed, in their tanks' turrets. At the end of combat on Sunday, only seven functioning tanks remained.

On the following morning, Kahalani was ordered to move toward the Valley of Tears. Raful Eitan called him on the radio, “I trust you,” he said. “Wage the battle with deliberation and calm. Don't worry—we'll get them.”

On October 9, two-thirds of the Golan was in Syrian hands. Ben-Gal, the brigade commander, authorized a company fighting the Syrians to withdraw from the Valley of Tears to a line 2.5 miles away. Kahalani was called from Quneitra; during the retreat, Syrian planes circled overhead, searching for tanks to prey upon. Thousands of artillery shells were landing in the area; the earth was shaking. Eight Syrian helicopters carrying commandos landed from behind, closing off the route to kibbutz Gonen, which was serving as a resupply point and evacuation site for those wounded and killed. Kahalani and his team felt that they were trapped.

At this stage, Ben-Gal reached a new decision: he instructed Kahalani to return to the Valley of Tears and try to halt the Syrians. Kahalani sped off alone, with the seven remaining tanks left behind preparing to join him. When Kahalani arrived to his destination, he discovered a troubling picture: Israeli tanks retreating from the firing ramps. He was furious. He tried to report through the brigade's communications network, but it was overwhelmed with calls for rescue and assistance. The situation was very bleak. Only three tanks still had shells, while the Syrians had large numbers of tanks. Israel's line of defense was shrinking every few minutes. Kahalani realized that if the Syrians crossed the line of IDF positions, Israel's strategic advantage would be lost because, in flat territory, the number of Syrian tanks would prove decisive.