I cleared the smoke out to the sunny, clear air. On my way around I could see the bonfire I had started. My tree of black smoke was still young and slim and black, but it was definitely a healthy plant. It grew fast and surely would continue to grow and become a respectable tree for President Nasser to see, no less so than the others in the area. Ignoring streams of ack-ack sent in my direction by a brave antiaircraft gun position, I passed through them untouched and proudly added another smoke tree to the growing garden.
All along the way through the Nile delta, we cruised among tall towers of smoke. From Inshas and Abu-Zweir in the delta, from Kabrit on the Suez Canal, and from other, more distant military airfields. We rejoiced. Israel was no longer under threat by long-range Soviet bombers.
ON THE WAY HOME, FROM ALTITUDE, I could see dust rising on the border between the Sinai and the Negev. That meant that ground battle had begun, too.
On my landing approach to Hatzor, the base looked odd: two Super Mysteres were stuck with their noses in the mud on both sides of the runway, and one Ouragan was lying near the control tower in a pile of dirt, blocking the last section of runway. I understood: not everyone got home untouched.
“Request clearance for the other runway, please.”
“The other one is even worse, Desk. You are clear to land.”
“What a Zikago,” I mumbled to myself, deploying my braking parachute just off the ground, braking hard, and making it to a stop just before the pile of dirt, clearing the runway at the halfway point.
When I shut my engine off in the hangar, the mechanics pulled me out of the cockpit, going nuts: “Where were you? What did you do? Speak up, man!”
“It was all right,” I answered them, knowing very little. For the past hour I had been caged in my cockpit, seeing only details without the big picture. The mechanics, on the other hand, were full of confusing information. The radio transmitted news. It seems that things were going well with Egypt, but there were rumors of casualties, especially in the Scorpions. On the squadron balcony I saw Ilan Gonen’s face go pale: he already heard names of friends. Someone waved to advise that Yak shot down a MiG. I was amazed: I didn’t know the old wolf was back from his year of studies in America.
THAT WAS HOW THE NOOSE around our neck was removed. The continuation of the war went like a dream. In the following days our enemies around us crumbled one after another. The radio reporter went nuts when East Jerusalem was taken. I shed real tears, together with all the mechanics around me, when the hangar loudspeakers trumpeted the voice of the paratroopers’ brigade commander, Col. Motta Gur: “the Western Wall is in our hands.”
OPERATION FOCUS, THE DEMOLISHING of enemy airfields that had opened the Six-Day War and determined its military outcome, was extraordinary in military history because it was a tactical operation that had strategic significance.
Focus had a tactical goal: to abolish the aerial threat to Israel and secure air superiority for the continuation of the war on the ground. But unintentionally, Focus had achieved a strategic result: victory in the war.
Why did this happen? Because Focus struck directly through the pupil of the eye of the enemy, right at the symbols of his power. The enormous bonfires that flared all over Egypt were seen in Cairo, the Suez Canal, and in the fields of Sinai. They gave each Egyptian soldier and citizen an astounding answer, sharp and merciless, to the bombastic boasting of their leaders. The successful neutralizing of the Arab air forces was much less important to the results of the 1967 war than the theatrical effect the lighting of these fires achieved. Into the arrogant, inflated show President Nasser staged, the Israeli Air Force broke in, kicked ass, flattened the set, and deflated the balloon.
To be sure, one must not fake such a performance. The drama is in danger of becoming a comedy (or a tragedy, depending on the viewer). And the greatness of the genius scriptwriter Yak and the outstanding directors Maj. Gen. Moti Hod and Cols. Rafi Sivron and Rafi Harlev and their assistants, came through here: the lightning flashed at the right place and the thunder roared on cue, and all the lines were recited correctly by us actors. Within three hours the Middle East was on fire, and the audience was left open-mouthed in their chairs.
Yak and his men never imagined that they were producing theater. But it was the theatrical effect that dismantled the Egyptian government and its army, led to Nasser’s resignation, and sent General Shazli’s division running home without shoes, even before it bumped into Israel’s ground forces. True, our armor and infantry had much pounding and crushing left to do, but they fought against an enemy who already lost his spirit, and his command and control systems were disintegrating at all levels. The fall of Egypt led to the crumbling of Syria and Jordan, which were hit less severely.
And this strategic performance—taking an enemy state and army and taking it apart in one aerial strike— wasn’t planned at all. The possibility wasn’t even in the minds of the planners and commanders. The greatest achievement of Focus came completely by accident.
Like Saul, the first king of Israel, we searched for donkeys and found the throne.
THE COST OF FOCUS WAS NOT CHEAP. In the 490 sorties of this operation, we lost twenty aircraft. This was a casualty rate of more than 4 percent per sortie, a price four times higher than what the military world sees as acceptable. And indeed this number was put on the table in full knowledge that there was only one chance. The windlass of fate turned, and when it stopped, the gamble was successful: twenty pilots dead; one country saved.
And it should be clear that in this case it was really a gamble. The success of Operation Focus depended totally on fair weather, absolute surprise, and perfect data. The existence of all three conditions was far from certain. In fact, the launch of Focus was a challenge to fate.
Suppose, for instance, that we had chosen to attack at an earlier hour in the morning. There were officers who argued that we should attack the Egyptians at dawn, a more conventional hour, instead of 0745, as was actually done. Then the plan would have failed totally. When our first attacking formations arrived over their objectives, several airfields in the Nile delta had been partly hidden by low clouds, and the targets were almost completely concealed from above. Some of the first leaders had had difficulty finding their targets, and others in attacking them. But as things happen in the Middle East, the skies cleared fast, and the following waves of attackers had no difficulty getting the job done.
Another bet, no less dangerous, was on absolute surprise. The last week before the war the enemy was at peak readiness. Had he learned of our coming—or just had he raised the alert level—the MiGs would have been in the air in time. In this case, each of us would have had to fight his way in. Had this been the case, the results would have been totally different, and surely the demolition of our opponent’s air force wouldn’t have ended in three hours, if anytime at all. The war would have proceeded very differently.
And the greatest gamble of all was certainly the reliance on intelligence. Our maps showed us, the attacking pilots, where each enemy aircraft was parked. When we got there, we found them all in place. All was frozen; the intelligence map was static, a “dead” map. If, on the other hand, the Egyptians had kept moving their bombers among distant airfields, and kept a considerable part of their fighter force in the air, patrolling, then we would have found the airfields empty of targets (an ugly experience that awaited me in the next war—more on that later).
None of this actually happened. The Egyptians thought of their deployment as if it were a chess game. They set up their pawns for the big attack and waited. Our knight, in turn, jumped and struck. And as fate would have it, the move we had been planning for years beforehand, Focus, worked out better than all expectations. To the amazement of all, the king himself was on the square where our knight landed.
OUR AIR FORCE COULDN’T DO much more than that. After this amazing solo display, Focus, the enemy had no way to tell that this was the last show in our air force’s repertoire. But the fact was we had no other convincing acts up our sleeve.
And on second thought, perhaps every addition Israel made to Focus was superfluous.
