certainly the Phantoms. A supporting factor in this error was the eagerness of the Phantoms’ squadron commanders to go. They wanted to prove themselves by having the Phantoms do everything.
This eagerness was very praiseworthy, but in this case it was checked neither by the high command, who were supposed to control the situation, nor by the squadron commanders, who were the guardians of their tools. In simple language, we had a command problem.
And another assumption: the process itself led to rapid loss of the psychological capability to attack SAMs by other squadrons. Immediately after January 1970, when the Phantoms took that mission away, the IAF’s groupthink didn’t allow employment of other aircraft against the SAMs. It was just Phantoms, a mission too dangerous for ordinary aircraft. In an odd perversion of logic, dogfights were treated differently. In them we were sent to fly freely everywhere. In this way 85 percent of our air force’s fighters became irrelevant for the most critical missions we had at the time. The protest of Lt. Col. Uri Even Nir, a Mirage squadron commander who stood up and asked, “What makes those fucking SAM sites so different from any other fucking target?” wasn’t even noticed.
And if we allow ourselves an open mind, why shouldn’t we get out of the aircraft box and ask what the IDF at large could have done with all its equipment—artillery and so forth—to help in this critical mission except by sitting on its ass and shaking its head gloomily while the Phantoms were crushed, alone.
THE CARPENTER DIDN’T USE his tools correctly. He had a shop full of machinery, but he put all the hard work on the new, shiny saw he just bought from America. The saw overheated and broke, and the whole shop stopped production. This, in my humble opinion, is the crux of the story of the Phantoms in the War of Attrition.
SOMETIMES I THINK, “Who knows? Had we not been so timid, we might have won that war after all. The rain definitely was falling on both sides; just read the Egyptian reports. And I imagine that after the Egyptian arrogance of August 8, our government stands its ground; the IDF and the air force go out to battle with blood in their eyes, and we hit—all of us, Mirages, Skyhawks, Phantoms, artillery, commando units, and everything else—the SAMs. By then they were close to the Suez Canal and in easy reach, and we chop them up with all the tools at our disposal. We definitely could have done it; all we had to do was exert ourselves just a little more.
Egypt’s president Nasser died on September 28, 1970, just five weeks after we threw in our hand, and Egypt was immersed for some time in other things. Had we done as I indicated above, the War of Attrition would have ended in victory—not a strategic one, but at least a military victory. We would have been spared all the complications dumped on us by that failure.
But then, I remind myself that strategic wars are not won by tactical victories. And the deeper problem—the definition of our national priorities, policy, and strategy—could in no way have been solved by the poor carpenter and all his saws. The deeper problem was the business of the landlord, but unfortunately, the landlord was no better than his carpenter, and didn’t ask himself what was being produced in that shop, and to what end. Even after the cease-fire agreement, and during the three years that led up to the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the strategic question was never raised. We continued playing by ourselves in cloud cuckoo land, and the political and strategic reasons for our failure in the War of Attrition were repressed.
Only the carpenter, the air force, blamed himself. He explained everything in terms of his tactical failure against the SAM missiles, so he bought himself new saws, trained hard with them, and hoped for the best.
16
Clarity
A YEAR PASSED AFTER THE END of the War of Attrition, and in August 1971, I was ordered to leave the Fighting First to establish a new Phantom squadron at Hatzerim Air Base. My departure from the First was not a happy one.
I left feeling that I hadn’t succeeded in my previous assignment the way I had hoped. Although I could take credit for the successful operational performance of the squadron during the last months of the War of Attrition, and few other noteworthy things in the following year, the fact was that I had been pushed out. This was never said openly, but I knew that Col. Rafi Harlev, Hatzor’s base commander after Yak, didn’t believe in me. This was not a pleasant feeling, but I suffered more from how relations developed between the squadron’s pilots and me.
In every squadron there is an “opposition,” but the one that faced me in the First consisted of most of the pilots. I knew they respected the operational leadership I gave the squadron. I had never had any difficulties with discipline. But my pilots showed no initiative; they just followed like zombies. My life became unpleasant, especially since this was the opposite of my expectations when I took command of the squadron a year before, at the height of the war. But a year later, after we had gone through a difficult war together and done our jobs well, my squadron became alienated from me. People were distant, dragging their feet. It was difficult to work in such an atmosphere.
NOT THAT I INTENDED to give up on this squadron. I thought long and concluded that it all emanated from the cuts in personnel I had made during the war.
“It’s clear,” I said to myself assuredly, “that my pilots have a grudge against me, since I’ve abused their buddies.” Then it was just a social problem, and the solution to such a problem should be found also at the social level, shouldn’t it? I started an active social program, and we had some good parties and great squadron trips. We took some time off, and the entire squadron went traveling around the Sinai. We spent nights among the dunes, around bonfires, singing with guitars. On camels’ backs we climbed the highest granite mountains, and dived on coral reefs in crystal waters. We held lectures, dancing parties; everybody had a great time, all to no avail. The gray atmosphere appeared again the next day. All this activity did wonders for the squadron’s mechanics and me, but it didn’t help with my main problem: the pilots. Except for Menachem Sharon, loyal to a fault, gloomy faces still filled the briefing room, and no spark of initiative flared in the vacant faces before me.
I recalled a lesson Ran Pecker gave us in the BBN leadership course. “Esprit de corps derives from operational success,” he had told us, but somehow this didn’t help either. After the war, when we introduced the Dagger missile and had outstanding results in aerial combat, we continued to maintain the highest operational activity: we took over the reconnaissance mission and equipment from the Bats—who replaced her Mirages and became the third Phantom squadron—and began crisscrossing the Middle East, taking photographs. Wearing pressure suits like astronauts, we soared the heights and watched Egypt from altitudes of more than seventy thousand feet. Then we flew at low level to take pictures in all the countries surrounding Israel. We flew operations almost every day. And if this was not enough, when headquarters decided to disconnect the Mirage’s airborne radar and take us out of night readiness, our Fighting First didn’t give up the right to be operational twenty-four hours a day. After a serious recalibration of radars and pilots, we demanded a nighttime showdown against the new king of the mountain: the Phantoms. In a night of competition using our outdated French Cyrano radar, our Mirages managed to “hit” the same number of “enemy targets” as the American monsters. This was truly operational black magic, and while the other Mirages went to sleep at dusk, we proudly remained night fighters.
All along we did a lot of training. We initiated and organized “war days” and “activity nights,” where we
