Forty Years Ago - Part 12
Forty Years Ago, October 17, 1973, the Yom Kippur War continued to rage. A Syrian-Iraqi-Jordanian counter attack had been defeated in the north, allowing Israel to still threaten Damascus. In the Sinai, Egypt and Israel remained locked in combat that the Chinese Farm.
Bar Lev had finally committed some of his reserve to the fight. Sharon has protested that his division could accomplish the job of clearing Chinese Farm without any help from the other divisions. However, the Egyptians were just too strong, and more importantly too stubborn, for Sharon's men to defeat. Even though it meant using some of the reserve meant to exploit the bridgehead, Bar Lev needed the roads open for the bridgehead to be usable. So Adan's armored division was ordered into the fight at Chinese Farm. The goal was to clear the Tirtur and Akavash roads that were still being controlled, at least in part, by the Egyptians.
After seeing the kind of fighting that Sharon's men had been engaged in, Adan decided to abandon the "Totality of the Tank" doctrine that guided the IDF. He held his tanks up just short of the enemy lines while infantry units were brought up. Although it would mean waiting until just after midnight on the 17th, he was not willing to committ his armor unsupported in the face of the Sagger armed Egyptian infantry.
(Men of 6 Coy., 890 Parachue Battalion in 1973 during training before the war)
Adan gave the job of clearing the Tirtur road to the 890th Parachute Battlaion under the commander of Col. Itzhak Mordechai. Mordechai and his men would have 5 hours to clear the road of all the Sagger teams. The roller bridge, being towed once more after the quick repair, would arrive then. If the road was not cleared, the bridge and its tanks could not make it through. Adan could provide almost no information about what Ya'ari and his men would face. In fact, Mordechai would be attacking through some of the same ground that Morag's tank battalion had fought through the day before. Even though Morag's charge had temporarily opened a path to the other units, Egyptian infantry were still dug in and waiting for another chance at the Israelis.
Mordechai's battalion, because of the lack of intelligence, began to advance in a series of skirmish lines. There was no artillery preceeding their advance. The paratroopers moved forward, their way partiallylit by Egyptian parachute flares which were being regularly lofted. At about 2:45 a.m, the left of the Israeli advance ran into its first opposition. At first, Mordechai was told that his men there could handle it. However, it quickly became apparent that his troopers were not facing scattered Sagger hunter-killer teams. They had run right into a large formation of Egyptian infantry that was dug in for battle. Still not realizing how bad his position was, Mordechai tried to have his middle companies outflank the Egyptians on his left. They ran into a series of Egyptian positions and were pinned down. What started as an attack bogged down and eventually became a battle to recover their dead and wounded trapped about 50 yards from the Eygptian positions.
As dawn neared, Mordechai's battalion had suffered heavy casualities without any appreciable penetration of the Egyptian lines. An attempt to reinforce the paratroopers with a battalion of tanks failed to break the Egyptian lines.
Even though the paratroopers and tanks had failed to break through the Egyptian defenses in the Chinese Farm, it had pulled the Egyptian focus away from the road. Adan, sensing that there was a chance, ran a rolumn of APCs down the Tirtur road to see whether it was still infested with Sagger teams. The APCs made it through without taking much fire. As dawn broke, he ordered the battalion carrying the pontoon bridge to make the run to the birdgehead. They passed through unscathed.
The paratroopers pinned down in front of the defense at Chinese Farm would be there for most of the rest of the day. Eventually, the last of the linving and wounded woudl be retrieved by APC. However, the 890th had been gutted, with 40 dead and more than 100 wounded. But their sacrifice had allowed the pontoon bridge to pass unharmed.
On the West Bank of the Suez, Israeli armor was continuing their rampage. Destroying communication and SAM sites, they were starting to open a a path through which the IAF would be able to finally pass and support the troops on the ground. By now, reports were becoming more clear in Cairo that there was more than a small raiding force on the West Bank. Shazly, the Egyptian Chief of Staff, was conflicted over how to respond. On the one hand, he needed to crush the Israeli force before it could seriously threaten operations on the East Bank of the Suez. If they were to start destroying or capturing bridges, then it would be nearly impossible to supply the Second and Third Armies. On the other hand, he was aware of the Egyptian Army's fragile state. Yes, they had won two victories in the crossing and the repulse of the first Israeli counter attack. But they had also suffered a set back in their attacks deeper into Sinair. Furthermore, there was also the institutional memory that the Egyptian army had been humiliated by the Israelis in 1948, 1956, and 1967. This meant that his favored option, withdrawing a few of the armored brigades from the East Bank might cause the Egyptian morale to break. With his troops fighgint hard in Chinese Farm, he did not want a repeat of 1967 when the withdrawal of one unit had a dominoe like effect on the rest of the army in the Sinai.
Even with this, Shazly seemed to grasp what was actually happening: Israel was invading Egypt, not simply trying to defeate her army. He proposed ordering a tank brigade back to meet the Israelis. This met opposition from the war minister, General Ahmed Ismail, who favored having Third Army send units north to close the gap the Israelis were going through. Shazly argued against that, as the approach to Israeli bridgehead would require any unit to advance up a single road, exposing their flanks to the Israelis, while having nowhere to manuever because fo the swaps of the Great Bitter Lake. Eventually, he elevated his request up to Sadat. Sadat informed him that Shazly's proposal was defeatist and that if he persisted, Shazly would be removed from his post and coutmartialed. Without authority to withdraw any of the armor from the East Bank of the Suez, Shazly did what he could. This meant pulling back some of his anti-tank units that were officially part of units which had not crossed the Suez.
Ismail now ordered the Shazly to carry out his vision of defeating the Israelis. Second Army would attack south towards the Lexicon-Tirtur junction. At the same time, Third Army would attack north, with one of its armor brigades, catching the IDF in a pincer attack, thereby overwhelming and defeating the Israelis. The Third Army commander, Maj. Gen. Abd el Moneim Wassel, tried to protest the order as follow. After his protest was denied, he said, "I will carry out the instructions, but I must advise you that this brigade will be destroyed."
The Egyptians were not the only ones suffering from in-fighting on the morning of October 17. As Sharon and Adan were reorganizing their units, there accusations going back and forth. Sharon was furious at Bar-Lev and Gonen. He believed that they failed to understand dessert warfare and were too concerned with having neat lines on their map. He felt their orders to halt exploiting the bridgehead while Chinese Far was reduced was threating the operation. Gonen, for his part, was furious at Sharon, believing that the hot-head was risking the operation so that Sharon could get a photo-op. At one point, Gonen was telling Southern Command and high command in Tel Aviv that "Sharon has failed us". At the same time, Bar-Lev was becoming more exasperated with Sharon. Adan, for his part, felt that Sharon was trying to steal all the glory. Before relations broke down any further, Elazar personally intervened. There was an Egyptian counter attack coming and he needed his field commanders all fighting the same enemy. He decreed that Adan would exploit the bridgehead, Sharon would finish off the Chinese Farm.
(Maj.Gen. Avraham Adan)
Alerted by radio intercepts that a multi-pronged attack was on the way, the IDF units were not surprised when they started to detect the oncoming Egyptians. Although Ismail's plan was for the pincers to attack simultaneously, that plan was never full realized. Instead, the northern attack, by the Egyptian 16th Infantry and 21st Armored Divisions, hit first. Initially, the Egyptians made some headway as they struck two of Adan's brigades at the Chinese Farm. However, the attack soon bogged down as accurate Israeli tank fire began to take its toll on the Egyptians.
Later in the day, reports started to come in about an advance from the south. Reshef's tankers were the first to spot the approaching Egyptian armored brigade as it made its way along The Great Bitter Lake. With two brigades from Adan's division, Reshef's brigade executed an ambush of the Egyptian armor, just as Shazly and Wassel had feared. 50 of 92 tanks, all them the latest T-62 models from the Soviet Union, were knocked out. The Israelis had lost only 4 in exchange. Since the start of the fighting around Chinese Farm, the Egyptians had lost between 250 and 350 tanks.
Towards the end of the day, the Egyptian positions at the Chinese Farm continued to deteriorate. The Egyptian 16th Infantry Brigade had been the primary unit defending the farm since the start of the fighting. After more than two days of combat, it was now almost completely out of ammunition and had suffered heavy casualties. Its commander radioed to his superior asking for permission to retreat rather than have his entire command destroyed. At about 5:30 p.m., permission was received and the remnants of the brigade fell back to the north to regroup with the rest of Second Army.
Dayan flew out from Tel Aviv as the Israeli forces were reorganizing in the afternoon as the fighting continued. Sharon showed him the bridgehead as the engineers finished the final section of the pontoon bridge. Later, Dayan would say, "I am no novice at war or battle scenes, but I have never seen such a sight, not in reality, or in paintings, or in the worst war movies. Here was a vast field of slaughter stretching as far as the eye could see." Sharon would later write, "It was as if a hand-to-hand battle of armor had taken place... Coming close you could see the Egyptian and Jewish dead lying side-by-side, soldiers who had jumped from their burning tanks and died together. No picture could capture the horror of the scene, none could encompass what had happened there."
(Defense Minister Moshe Dayan visiting the bridgehead and meeting with Maj.Gen. Ariel Sharon)
The Egyptians were starting to shell the bridge occasionally, for the first time, but their fire was inaccurate and failed to damage the construction. Sharon, who had been slightly wounded in the fighting, showed Dayan all that was going as they waited for the pontoon bridge to be complete. Supplies had already been going across for Adan, being ferried by the much maligned Gilowas. Dayan arrived home in the evening to report to Meir what was happening. She was stunned by what the IDF had accomplished.
She was not alone. By the evening of October 17, both Moscow and Washington had satellite photos showing what Sadat was denying: the Israelis had crossed the Suez. The Soviets were getting worried. Their client in Damascus was all but out of the war. Although Syria was still in the field, it was the Soviet's estimate that they did not stand much of a chance of evicting the Israelis from the enclave that they had cut out of Syria. Now that it appeared that Israel was crossing the canal, they were afraid that Egypt too would suffer a humiliating defeat. The Soviet premier, Alexei Kosygin, had broken off an appointment to meet with the Danish government in order to take an emergency flight to Cairo. His goal was to encourage, cajole, or force Sadat into accepting a cease fire before things deteriorated further. Brezhnev and the rest of his advisers, now that it was clear that Egypt would be unable to win alone, did not want situation to get out of hand. He specifically had Kosygin remind Sadat that the Soviets did not want to become involved directly in the fighting.
(Alexei Kosygin)
In Washington, Henry Kissinger saw his opportunity to undo Soviet influence in the region becoming emerging. His plan, his president's backing, and Israeli skill had pushed back the Arabs. Now he needed to open a path for Egypt to abandon the Soviets and agree to move back to the Western, American, camp.
Kosygin was surprised by what he found when he met with Sadat. Sadat would accept a cease-fire, but only if all territory captured by Israel during the 1967 war was returned. He wanted an international guarantee of this before he would agree to ending hostilities. Kosygin pointed out that Egypt had lost nearly 600 tanks in the war so far, and that the USSR could only resupply them with so many. Sadat was unimpressed with the argument. He was determined to succeed where Nasser had failed, even if meant ignoring the mounting evidence. After the meeting, Kosygin met with the military attache. The military attache pointed out that Cairo was essentially defenseless. The only units that remained were under-equipped. All the best units were on the other side of the canal.
As Kosygin was meeting with Sadat, Kissinger was starting to work on his own endgame through the back-channels available to him. He sent a message to Ismail in Cairo. In it, he expressed the United States' understanding about the conditions which existed prior to the war. Kissinger stated that, "The U.S. side will make a major effort as soon as hostilities are terminated to assist in creating a just and lasting peace in the Middle East." Ismail's response was measured, and probably in consultation with Sadat. He invited Kissinger to visit Egypt. The U.S. now had a wedge working its way between Egypt and the Soviet Union.
Kissinger had his opening. However, to bring the result that would benefit the U.S. the most, he needed Sadat's position to be weakend more. . If he was too strong, Sadat could try to play the Americans and Soviets off each other to get Sadat the best deal. The Israelis had to continue their operations longer. Sadat needed to be weakened enough so that he needed the American friendship