Two members of an Egyptian Army Sagger missile team prepare to fire
their missiles from positions in the Sinai Desert, October 1973. Typically, a
Sagger team consisted of two or more commonly three men, one acting as the
guidance-control operator and the others serving to transport and set up the
missiles. This plate shows two 9M14 missiles connected to a single 9S415
joystick control unit, although up to four could be arranged. It was uncommon,
however, to see that many missiles linked up, as after one or two missile shots
it was likely that the Sagger team would have to move position as they
attracted incoming fire from alerted enemy armour and infantry. The operator
here mans a small trench, while a second soldier from the team occupies a slit
trench nearby; once the missiles were set up, other members of the team would
act as observers to identify targets but would also serve to protect the
operator from infantry threats. One of the key challenges for the Sagger teams
was deciding on the locations of their positions on the battlefield. If they
chose highly covered positions, the terrain or other obstructions could prevent
a clear long-distance view through the periscope. Conversely, positions that
were too exposed would be more easily identified by enemy forces, and would
quickly attract small-arms, mortar, tank and artillery fire.
In the tank staging areas along the Artillery Road, company
commanders were giving final briefings when a wailing on the radio net signaled
enemy air penetration. Bombs struck the compounds before the tanks could get
away but none was hit.
Speeding toward the canal, they covered the distance in
twenty to thirty minutes but in most cases lost the race. The sand barriers
behind which they were to take up firing positions—the “fins”—were already
covered by figures in sand-colored uniforms. From observing Dovecote exercises,
the Egyptians knew exactly where the tanks would be heading.
“Infantry to the front,” shouted tank platoon commanders.
“Attack.” It was a drill they had rehearsed repeatedly—racing forward to shoot,
stampede, and literally crush the enemy. The Egyptians, however, had prepared a
scenario of their own. Commandos rising from shallow foxholes with RPGs on
their shoulders hit the lead tanks. Some of the commandos were cut down but
others held their ground. Surprised at the resistance, tank commanders pulled
back beyond effective RPG range, about three hundred yards. It was not far
enough.
A platoon commander saw a red light waft lazily past him and
explode against a nearby tank. The commander of the impacted tank was propelled
from the turret by the pressure, like a cork from a bottle. Other lights
floated in from the Egyptian rampart across the canal. The platoon commander
had no idea what they might be. The answer came over the radio net. “Missiles,”
said the company commander, the first to recognize the Sagger. Their
three-thousand-yard range was ten times that of the RPG and their impact more
deadly.
For the first time since tanks lumbered onto the
battlefields of the First World War, the greatest danger they faced was not
from enemy tanks or antitank guns but from individual infantrymen. Bazookas had
been used by infantrymen in previous wars but never in such quantity as the
RPGs were being used now or with the range and lethality of the Saggers. The
Egyptian troops had been provided antitank weapons in prodigious numbers. At
Shazly’s orders, Saggers were stripped from rear units and transferred to the
spearhead forces. Each of the five attacking divisions had 72 infantrymen armed
with Saggers and 535 with RPGs. In addition, 57 antitank guns and 90 recoilless
weapons added a more conventional but no less deadly tank-killing capability.
This added up to close to 800 antitank weapons per division apart from the 200
tanks attached to each division. Never had such intensive antitank fire been
brought to bear on a battlefield. In addition, Israeli tank commanders, who
rode with their heads out of the turret for better visibility, were vulnerable
to the massive Egyptian artillery fire and to rifle and machine gun fire from
infantrymen all around them. The profusion of fire was stunning. So was the
grit with which the infantrymen defied the charging tanks.
The decision by Israel not to raise the embankment on its
side of the canal to mask the Sinai bank from the Egyptian ramparts severely
aggravated its situation. Tanks, Saggers, and antitank guns on the ramparts
opposite dominated not only the Israeli forts but an area up to two miles
inland from the canal. Israel’s idea of neutralizing the ramparts with
long-range fire from the shelter of the fins had no validity now that Egyptian
RPG teams were dug in all around them.
The air force, on which Elazar had rested his confidence,
was unable to stem the Egyptian tide. Because of the SAMs, the planes could not
circle over the battlefield and choose targets. Where defenses were heavy the
planes resorted to “toss bombing,” in which the aircraft pulled up sharply at a
calculated distance, speed, and angle to release their bombs without overflying
the target itself, which could be as much as four miles away. The IAF carried
out 120 sorties on the Egyptian front this day and lost four planes but the
snap attacks had little impact. The Egyptian infantrymen were more vulnerable
to artillery but the IDF had only a few dozen artillery pieces along the
hundred-mile-long front and these were under heavy counter-battery fire.
The Bar-Lev strongpoints proved virtually useless as a
defense line. For the most part, the boats simply crossed between them, out of
view. The Egyptian high command had been prepared for 10,000 dead in the
crossing operation but the number killed, according to the final Egyptian
count, would be 280.
Defense of the Suez front fell in the opening hours on
Colonel Reshef’s 91 tanks, constituting the forward brigade of General
Mendler’s Sinai Division, and the 450 men in the sixteen Bar-Lev forts.
Mendler’s two other brigades were at their base in central Sinai, fifty miles
away, and would not reach the front for three hours.
The four northern forts on the canal were strung along a
causeway between the canal and a lagoon. The northernmost, Orkal, was because
of its remoteness the only one to have tanks permanently assigned—a platoon of
three. With the onset of firing, pairs of tanks were dispatched by the northern
battalion commander, Lt. Col. Yom Tov Tamir, to the three other causeway forts
via a road through the lagoon. The pair rushing to Fort Lachtsanit, just below
Orkal, were ambushed. An RPG hit the lead tank, killing its commander, but the
driver bulled through and reached the entrance to Orkal. There the tank was
ambushed again and another crewman killed. Soldiers came out of the fort and
led in the two surviving crewmen. The second tank reached Lachtsanit but was
destroyed there.
Pairs of tanks managed to reach the two causeway forts south
of Lachtsanit but each pair was ordered in turn to proceed to Lachtsanit, whose
radio had gone silent. All four tanks were ambushed. One crew managed to escape
on the road through the lagoon on foot. The crewmen came across a downed
Israeli pilot with a broken leg who refused to be carried so as not to slow
them down. He was taken prisoner before a rescue vehicle reached him.
Battalion commander Tamir led the rest of his force toward
two forts south of the lagoon. Several tanks bogged down in marshes, difficult
to discern because they were covered by sand. Others were disabled by surface
mines or hit by RPGs or Saggers.
Responding to distress calls from Fort Milano, Tamir
dispatched three tanks to its assistance. Milano lay alongside the ghost town
of East Kantara, abandoned in the Six Day War. Egyptian soldiers, who had now
returned to the town, knocked out two tanks.
As dusk approached, Tamir was ordered to send tanks again to
Lachtsanit. He sent almost all his remaining tanks together with infantrymen on
half-tracks. This force too was ambushed. The war was only four hours old and
Tamir’s battalion was almost entirely wiped out.
The fortunes of Reshef’s two other battalions on the line
were better, but not by much. In the central sector, where most of Egypt’s
Second Army was crossing, Israeli tanks scored some initial successes.
Destruction of four Egyptian tanks on the enemy ramparts sent a surge of
optimism along the radio net. At 4 p.m. Egyptian infantrymen were spotted
already three miles east of the canal. A small armored force stopped them just
before darkness and drove them back.
In the southern sector, where Egypt’s Third Army was
crossing, Lt. Chanoch Sandrov halted his tank company six hundred yards from
Fort Mafzeah and surveyed the terrain. There was no enemy in sight and no sign
of activity on the rampart across the canal. As the company started forward
again, RPG squads rose from the sand and set the lead tank afire. Sagger
missiles erupted from the Egyptian rampart and an artillery barrage descended.
A rescue tank approaching the burning tank was hit by a
Sagger which killed the loader. The tank’s commander was cut down in the turret
by bullets. The gunner rose to take his place and was hit too. The driver
turned back with his three dead or dying comrades.
Sandrov was blinded in an eye by shrapnel and pulled back
briefly to have a crewman apply a bandage. Resuming command, he ordered his
deputy, Lt. Avraham Gur, to comb the area south of the fort with half the tanks
while he swept north with the rest. When Gur passed close to the Israeli
embankment, an Egyptian with an RPG rose on the slope above. Gur, standing in
the open turret, ordered his driver to turn right. As the tank swung, throwing
up a cloud of dust, the RPG shell exploded alongside. “When the dust settles,”
Gur shouted, “fire.” A moment later the gunner said, “I see his face,” and
fired. Gur saw the Egyptian soldier lifted into the air and disintegrate.
Gur rejoined Sandrov’s force just as a missile coming off
the Egyptian rampart struck the company commander’s tank. Gur ran to it and
found Sandrov and his loader dead. The lieutenant took the other two crewmen,
both wounded, into his own tank. A tank fifty yards away was struck by a
missile and Gur climbed onto that too. The tank commander was slumped inside.
Gur took his wrist but there was no pulse. Calling for artillery cover, he
began evacuating the wounded.
In late afternoon, the canal-side embankment began to fill
again as Egyptian infantry clambered up from boats. Lt. Col. Emanuel Sakel,
commanding the southern battalion, formed armored personnel carriers into line
with Gur’s remaining tanks and led a charge. The Egyptians broke, many of them
throwing away their weapons. The waterline had been regained in this sector but
only two tanks remained in action, Sakel’s and Gur’s. Sakel told Gur to begin
towing damaged tanks to the rear. The battalion commander’s tank remained near
Mafzeah to cover the fort against infantry attack.
Five miles south, another of Sakel’s companies, commanded by
Capt. David Kotler, broke up an infantry attack on Fort Nissan. But no matter
how many Egyptians were hit, others sprouted in their place. Kotler’s deputy,
Lt. Yisrael Karniel, saw a Sagger wafting toward his tank just as he was shot
in the shoulder. Falling back into the turret, he shouted “hard right” and
passed out. The tank swerved sharply and the missile exploded harmlessly beyond
it. A platoon leader went to Karniel’s aid but his own tank was struck a blow
that brought it to a shuddering halt. A Sagger had hit just above the gun,
where the metal was thickest. It did not penetrate and the driver was able to
restart. Reaching Karniel, the officer tied a stretcher to the hull of his own
tank and strapped him on it. As they started toward nearby Fort Mezakh, the
tank was hit again, this time by an artillery shell. The stretcher was lifted
into the air and slammed back down. The platoon leader was certain that Karniel
was dead until he heard him groan. They reached the fort without further
incident.
Toward evening, the doctor at Mezakh asked for urgent
evacuation of the wounded. The fort, the southernmost on the Bar-Lev Line, was
located on an artificial spit of land projecting into the Gulf of Suez. Kotler
headed there together with Lt. David Cohen. As they approached, Cohen’s tank
hit a mine. The commandos who had placed it rose from foxholes and fired at the
stricken tank. Kotler drove them to ground with machine gun fire and closed up
behind Cohen’s tank. At Kotler’s signal, Cohen and his crew leaped aboard while
Kotler kept the Egyptians’ heads down. At a rear staging area, Cohen took over
a tank whose commander had been wounded. By now, all that remained of the
eleven tanks Kotler had started out with three hours before were his and
Cohen’s.
#
Reshef’s brigade was being relentlessly eroded as it tried
to enforce Elazar’s dictum of “killing them on the canal.” The aim was to deny
the Egyptians territorial gain and thus discourage future attacks. But this was
turning out to be a grievous miscalculation, particularly in view of the
enormous disparity of forces. Instead of demonstrating the power of armor, the
Israeli tanks were engaging in a wild brawl they could not win. They were up
against masses of infantry armed with weapons that could kill a tank as easily
as a tank could kill them.
A report half an hour before sunset of bridge sections being
assembled in the water near Purkan was the first clear indication to Reshef
that the Egyptians were intending to put their army into Sinai. He dispatched a
newly arrived company led by Lt. Moshe Bardash to attack the bridging site. The
setting sun was in Bardash’s eyes as his eight tanks approached the canal.
There was an indistinct vision of infantrymen on the road, then a hail of RPGs.
Several tanks were hit. The tankers fired blindly into the haze. Bardash,
wounded, ordered his tanks to pull back.
At a safe distance, the tanks halted and Reshef’s operations
officer, who had been guiding Bardash’s force to the bridge site, assembled the
tank commanders to explain what they were up against—the copious use of RPGs,
the boldness and overwhelming number of enemy infantry, and, particularly, the
Sagger missile.
Such impromptu lessons were going on all along the front as
new units took the field alongside tank crewmen who had survived the day.
Saggers, the “veterans” explained, were a formidable danger
but not an ultimate weapon. They could not be used close-up since they required
several hundred yards of flight before they “acquired” their target. They could
be seen in flight and were slow enough to dodge. It took about ten seconds for
a missile to complete its flight—at extreme range it could be twice that—during
which time the Sagger operator had to keep the target in his sights as he
guided the missile by the bright red flare on its tail. From the side it was
easy for the tankers to see the flare. As soon as anyone shouted “Missile” on
the radio net all tanks would move back and forth in order not to present a
stationary target. The movement would also throw up dust that would cloud the
Sagger operator’s view. Simultaneously, the tanks would fire in the operator’s
presumed direction, which in itself could be sufficient to throw him off his
aim.
The RPG would prove deadlier this day than the Sagger. As
long as the Israelis were fighting near the water’s edge, the Saggers were
fired during daylight from the Egyptian rampart. But RPG teams lying in shallow
foxholes were a close-up threat day and night as the tanks attempted to reach
the canal-side forts. The profusion of RPGs took the Israelis aback. Tank
commanders learned to examine the terrain for possible ambushers before moving
forward. There could be no such precaution at night.
#
Even before the sun set on Yom Kippur day, it was clear to
the tank crews on the front line that something revolutionary was happening—as
revolutionary, it seemed, as the introduction of the machine gun or the demise
of the horse cavalry. Tanks, which had stalked the world’s battlefields since
the First World War like antediluvian beasts, were now being felled with ease
by ordinary foot soldiers. It would take time before the implications of this
extraordinary development were grasped by higher command. Meanwhile, the tankers
were figuring out for themselves how to survive.
#
Emerging from a rabbit hole when the shelling lifted, Sgt.
Shlomo Shechori saw soldiers trying to get through the barbed wire surrounding
his outpost near Fort Lituf. He thought they were reinforcements from the main
fort until he noticed the sand-colored uniforms and heard shouts in Arabic.
When the Egyptian squad was ten yards away in the winding trench, he rose and
emptied his magazine at them before slipping through a hole in the fence.
Halfway to the main fort, he dropped to the ground. Lituf was surrounded by an
Egyptian company pouring fire into it.
Shechori made his way to the nearby road and saw three
Israeli tanks racing toward the fort, firing as they came. His dark uniform
identified him as Israeli and the lead tank stopped alongside. Capt. Boaz Amir
beckoned Shechori aboard. The officer, who commanded the northernmost of
Sakel’s three companies, posted the sergeant in the turret alongside him.
Shechori tried to hug him but the officer stopped him. “Save the kisses till
this is over,” he said, handing the sergeant a grenade. Other grenades were
stashed within reach. “Anyone you see is Egyptian,” said the officer. “Throw
grenades and use your Uzi.”
The tanks swept through the fort compound, spewing fire and
running over enemy soldiers who tried to hit them with RPGs. Within minutes,
the surviving Egyptians had pulled back. Amir decided that he too would have to
withdraw because of fire from the Egyptian rampart.
As he left the compound, he saw three Soviet-make APCs.
Soldiers aboard them waved in greeting. The IDF had units made up of Soviet
vehicles captured in the Six Day War but these vehicles were the sand color of
the Egyptian army. On the other hand, the Egyptians could not have put up bridges
across the canal this quickly. Captain Amir radioed headquarters and reported
what he saw. Is there any Israeli unit with Soviet-made APCs in the vicinity?
he asked. “No,” came the reply. A moment later the three APCs were smoking
hulks.
Lifting his gaze, the company commander saw a mass of APCs
and tanks approaching. They constituted the southern wing of the amphibious
brigade which had crossed the Bitter Lake. Amir was moving his tanks into
firing positions when Lituf called again for assistance. He sent two tanks to
the fort and with the four remaining opened fire. In the ensuing exchange,
twenty-six Egyptian vehicles, mostly APCs, were set aflame, with the loss of
one Israeli tank.
The Egyptian infantrymen who escaped the APCs deployed with
Saggers and RPGs. His ammunition depleted, Amir ordered the three remaining
tanks to fire short machine gun bursts to keep the infantrymen at bay until
reinforcements arrived.
The Israeli command would conclude that the amphibious force
was intended to link up with commandos landing at the Gidi Pass in order to
block Israeli reserve forces on their way to the front. The large number of
personnel carriers may have been intended to bring the commandos back after
completing their mission. But most of the helicopters had been shot down.
The sounds of Amir’s battle reached 1st Sgt. Haim Yudelevitz
on the roof of a building in the Mitzvah staging area, several miles to the
rear, where he was keeping lookout. A dozen soldiers, mostly technicians and
medics, sheltered in a bunker from the intermittent shelling. A tank had
returned from the front earlier with its wounded commander. A second tank
arrived now from a maintenance workshop at the rear. It had no machine guns and
no crew except for the driver, Sgt. Moshe Rosman, who joined Yudelevitz on the
roof. Toward evening, the pair saw a cloud of dust heading in their direction.
As it drew closer, the sergeants identified ten Egyptian amphibious vehicles,
including at least one tank.
Sergeant Rosman told the crew of the wounded officer’s tank
that he was taking command. He removed the tank’s two machine guns for use by
the men at Mitzvah to defend the post and set out in the tank with the rest of
the crew to meet the approaching force. Yudelevitz had meanwhile gathered two nonfunctioning
machine guns from a storeroom and, cannibalizing parts from one, made the other
operable. He hauled it up to the roof along with ammunition belts. The Egyptian
APCs halted a mile away. Officers formed the soldiers into line and then
advanced, first slowly and then at a trot. Yudelevitz opened fire at two
hundred yards. Many Egyptians went down, either hit or taking cover. Others
began to edge around to the flank. Yudelevitz descended and deployed the men
along the perimeter fence, ordering them to fire short bursts at random in the
gathering dusk from the machine guns Rosman had provided.
Rosman meanwhile spotted a line of APCs at 1,500 yards. His
gunner hit two. The others dispersed among the dunes. Rosman took up pursuit
and hit two more. Yudelevitz returned to the roof and ranged him in by radio on
a tank a mile away which Rosman’s gunner set aflame.
Darkness now descended. It seemed that the Egyptian force,
what was left of it, had pulled back. Rosman and his crew remained in their
tank seven hundred yards from the compound. After half an hour, Yudelevitz
reported that he could hear vehicles nearby. Rosman turned and saw two armored
personnel carriers at the entrance to the compound. His gunner dispatched them
with two shells. Flames from the burning vehicles briefly lit the area.
Rosman positioned the tank at the compound entrance and
remained there with the engine off, the better to hear. Half an hour later, he
sensed movement to his front. Thirty Egyptian soldiers appeared out of the
darkness, the closest only three yards away. They plainly regarded the silent
tank as incapacitated. In a whisper, Rosman told the driver to start the
engine. As it sprang to life, he tossed grenades and shouted, “Run them down.”
Those Egyptians left alive pulled back into the desert.
Two tank maintenance sergeants, acting on their own
initiative with a pickup team of soldiers, had broken the Egyptian drive in
this sector.
#
Anticipating an Arab air strike well before dusk, Air Force
Commander Peled had ordered patrol planes aloft at 1:30 p.m. His move quickly
paid off. A reservist Mirage pilot patrolling over the Mediterranean shortly
after 2 p.m. saw what seemed a MiG heading toward the coast. It moved
sluggishly and when he fired at it and sent it spinning into the water, it blew
up with a ferocious bang. He had hit a Kelt air-to-ground missile fired from
well offshore by an Egyptian Tupolev bomber which had already turned back to
Egypt. A Kelt fired by a second Tupolev had fallen into the sea. In lieu of
Scuds, the Egyptian command was using the Kelt, homing on a radar in the center
of the country, as a warning that it could retaliate in kind if Israel struck
its hinterland. With the sounding of the sirens, some planes at air force bases
still armed with bombs were ordered to take off immediately and drop their
bombs in the sea so that they could move into their patrol sector.
The most notable air battle this day took place at Sharm
el-Sheikh, the remote southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, where Israel
maintained small military bases. The IAF had allocated only two Phantoms to its
defense. The two pilots and two navigators, all fresh out of flight school,
were in their cockpits on the runway at 2 p.m. when the flight controller
reported numerous aircraft approaching. The Phantoms took off and plunged into
a formation of twenty-six MiGs from opposite ends. Within half an hour, the
rookies had together downed seven planes, far better than any of the numerous
aces in the Israeli Air Force would do this day. Although the runway had been
holed by bombs, the pair managed to land safely. The Egyptians had succeeded in
firing Kelt missiles which destroyed the naval station’s radar and damaged
communications.
