for last. We went through a series of discussions and workshops on battle command and leadership.
The climax came when the old American movie
The squadron sinks into self-pity and accusations against a high command that continues to order more “suicide missions.” The commander finally breaks down, and is unable to continue sending his men into battle. Just then, when the squadron is on the verge of ceasing to be a fighting unit, Gregory Peck appears. The tall, dark, handsome hero takes over and saves the day. His name in the film is appropriately Frank Savage.
Savage volunteers to replace the ailing commander. But first he shakes up his men, putting them through training until under his stinging whip they get back the right order of things, forget the whining and remember the mission, the bombsight, and their profession. As Savage promised them on his arrival, they begin to fear him more than the Messerschmitts. And then Savage goes again into the heart of Germany, leading his men into the lethal ack-ack and Nazi fighters. His personal example and leadership have raised the squadron from the dead and put it back on its feet.
RAN’S EYES SHONE WHEN HE TAUGHT us this subject. From this film he singled out for us all the components of battle: the situation factor and the team factor. He pointed out for us the signs of fear and disintegration, and showed us the tools in the quiver of the good commander to remedy them. And he underlined the key role of the commander’s personality: the leadership factor. Ran Pecker was wonderful and convincing. We gazed starry-eyed into the complicated world he opened for us. Each of us admitted after this lesson that it had been Frank Savage himself talking to us at Tel Nof.
After this lesson I, too, for the first time, wanted to command people and be a leader.
8
Operation Focus
SUNDAY, JUNE 4, 1967. Tomorrow, the six most fateful days of our lives begin.
All through the weeks before, the sword of Damocles hung over us. On the fourth of June, the sword swayed and jangled in the wind and we covered our heads. To the ground and air skirmishes that had occurred along the Syrian border, a Soviet provocation was added: for their own reasons, the Soviets put it about that Israel was preparing to go to war with Syria. The Syrians became frightened, the Egyptians vowed to defend their Arab brothers, and the whole thing started rolling downhill.
On May 17, while I was on a regular training flight, the controller suddenly called for an immediate return to base. The air force’s readiness was raised. Back at the squadron we were told that a large Egyptian force had just moved into the Sinai Peninsula—an area that had been demilitarized since we evacuated it in 1956—and was advancing toward our southwestern border. Soon Jordan joined the Syrian and Egyptian military alliance, and the three were preparing their armies for a coordinated attack on us, from three sides.
Jordan posed the most immediate danger. The Jordanian army threatened to descend from Judea and Samaria, which protruded like a wedge into Israel’s narrow waist, and by advancing to the sea, cut the country in two. The Jordanian Arab Legion was parked just a few kilometers from the sea. And in the North the Syrians also mobilized in their fortifications. They waited in the mountains overlooking the Sea of Galilee.
But the largest and strongest enemy, the engine of the Arab juggernaut, was Egypt. It was a big country and especially important in the Middle East. Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser called back his armed forces from Yemen, where they had been conducting their own colonial war, to take part in the war against Israel. These forces brought back with them their Russian jet bombers. These were not tactical aircraft; they carried heavy bomb loads, and their targets couldn’t be anything but cities such as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. We knew that these bombers had already dropped poison gas on civilian populations. And on the ground, Gen. Saad Shazli’s elite Egyptian division entered the Sinai and plunked itself down on our border.
The secretary of the UN, U Thant, acceded to Nasser’s demands and timidly withdrew his team of observers, which until that time had supervised the partition lines between Egypt and Israel since the 1956 cease-fire. This action removed the last obstacle to an Egyptian attack on Israel. With success, Nasser got even more belligerent and blocked the Strait of Tiran—an international waterway—to Israeli shipping. When Israel turned to the UN and the United States of America and asked them to open the strait in a lawful, peaceful way, it was fobbed off with promises in spite of explicit treaty obligations made after the 1956 war. Our ambassador, Minister of Exterior Abba Eban, ran around begging, but no country was ready to take any form of action on our behalf. The French declared an embargo on arms to the Middle East that actually was against us.
Egypt had special influence and importance, and now its threats stoked the Arab world into orgasmic enthusiasm. Arab radio stations screamed hysterically for the annihilation of Israel. Newspapers showed pictures of columns of tanks rolling down Cairo streets on their way to battle, and battalions of paratroopers marched by on their way to Tel Aviv. The Arabs were aroused; their time to avenge their defeats in 1948 and 1956 had come! Finish off the Jewish state!
CONFRONTED WITH ALL THIS, the government of Israel sputtered and stammered. We seemed to have no answers to the dramatic developments. We, the Israeli people, listened with growing alarm.
In the first days of June, Israel was terrified, trenches were dug everywhere, and it became clear to us in the air force that war was coming. When and how it would start—those were the questions.
We sat for long hours in our cockpits, and occasionally were scrambled against Egyptian MiGs that crossed our southern border at high altitude. We achieved no results. Evenings, we stayed at the squadron until late and went over mission plans, especially for an operation named Focus. We studied intelligence data and maps over and over. I was just a Mirage pilot, captain, leader of a four-ship division, and third in command of the Fighting First, Lt. Col. Amos Lapidot commanding. I was just a junior actor watching uneasily the rapid unfolding of events around me, and sometimes feeling that my government was botching the defense of my country.
PRESIDENT NASSER OF EGYPT appeared before the media on a visit to the military airfield Bir Gafgafa in the Sinai. From there, laughing, he threw down the gauntlet. “If Israel wants war,
I remember that famous photograph of Nasser’s visit to Bir-Gafgafa. In the center Nasser and his chief of staff, General Ammer, were sitting wearing well-decorated military uniforms. Their mouths were open in roaring, exultant laughter. Their pilots surrounded them, squeezing to get close to their leaders. In the center of the picture, close to the generals, a young and very handsome man stood. He was a pilot in a full pressure suit, not just a flight suit. His hands were folded over his rugged chest. His dark face was square and intelligent, his hair short and thick. He smiled slightly at the camera.
When this picture was published in the newspapers, I studied it for long time and tried to imagine the hopes and dreams that hid behind that broad brow. I couldn’t avoid seeing in my mind’s eye my own home and family, and the kibbutzim I grew up in. I gave this man a name: Hassan.
Many times since then I have imagined Hassan’s face in the cockpits of the MiGs that fought against me.
ON THE NIGHT OF THE FOURTH OF JUNE our squadron commander, Amos Lapidot, called me to his office. Outside on the balcony there was no light. The darkness of the moonless night was total. We checked again all the maps and plans. On Amos’s order, I opened a sealed envelope and handed the technical chief the Focus specifications for arming our aircraft. Soon lights lit up in all the underground hangars, and the mechanics, who had lived, eaten, and slept there all the past week, began loading the Mirages with bombs. At midnight, when nothing
