I was not worried; the Orange Tails knew their business.
WHEN DAWN NEARED ON October 7, the second day of the war, air force command finally knew what it wanted to do today. They decided to start with Operation Defy and eliminate the Egyptian array of SAM batteries along the Suez Canal. This was the right thing to do to attain air superiority there and attack the Egyptian army, which was crossing the canal and encircling our positions on the east bank.
Operation Defy required the full involvement of the whole air force for a day or two. We rolled up our sleeves and went out to do our part in the first sortie. At first light I took off, leading twelve Phantoms, and we crossed into Egypt and attacked Beni-Suweif, a fighter airfield south of Cairo. This was part of the necessary preparations before attacking the missiles. The MiGs had to be grounded so they wouldn’t interfere with Defy. We hit the airfield’s runways hard, and the first job of the day was done as planned. Then we went home, ready for a fast turnaround for the real thing, to begin knocking out the SAMs waiting for us at the canal.
As we landed, more madness: Defy was canceled.
“Everybody take off on Operation Model!”
Model was a different operation in the opposite direction—attacking SAMs in Syria. This time there was no preparation, just hysteria.
“Hurry up, hurry up, we have to knock out the Syrian missiles as soon as possible!”
I ADMIT THAT WORDS SUCH AS “madness” and “hysteria,” which I use above to describe the first days of the Yom Kippur War, offend my ears. A lot of time has passed since then, and as it happens after every disaster, we all have internalized some formulation of what happened. The past has rearranged itself by itself; the uncertainty is gone. Today there is a view of the whole situation, and there is an explanation for everything that took place then. True, one still remembers even after thirty years that it was hard, but one is not supposed to exaggerate in words and tone; it’s not proper, not respectable.
Well, believe me that I am not writing hysterically now, just as the sailors from Pearl Harbor and the firemen from the Twin Towers were not hysterical when they were writing their memoirs. But in the war itself, in our squadron’s operations room in Hatzerim, we had no view of the whole. We saw the world through a straw, and it broke on us in a series of surprises. When I landed back from Beni-Suweif on the morning of October 7, no one told me that Gen. Moshe Dayan was saying to the air force commander, “Benny, the Third Temple is falling.” (A reference to the First Temple, destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, and the Second Temple, by the Romans). I didn’t hear the tone, nor understand the reason for Benny’s spontaneous reaction to throw whole the air force at the Golan Heights.
But when I saw how a well-organized operation to attack missiles in Egypt turned into everyone running amock to attack missiles in Syria, I had doubts about the stability of my world.
NOTHING IN THAT FLIGHT resembled anything I had seen before.
The missile attack operazia that I had been so pressed to agree to in its totality was thrown to the winds once it was really needed. What was taking place now was a catch-as-catch-can kind of flight. The clock was ticking, so there was no time for briefing. Everybody grabbed an envelope from the safe and ran to his plane while the mechanics were still arming it, and tore his envelope open to study the procedures and his target while being strapped in the cockpit. And once in the air, the pilots spread the maps on their knees, trying to find their way while maneuvering to avoid other aircraft racing north.
In this way the main battle doctrine of the Israeli Air Force collapsed the moment it started. The IAF broke into the Golan Heights in many formations, helter-skelter, and found itself skimming over Syrian armored columns that had advanced into the heights the night before. Their antiaircraft artillery shot the hell out of us.
WE, THE ORANGE TAILS, had a unique advantage, and not by luck this time. A few months before, when the planning of Operation Model was reaching its completion, we had stubbornly insisted on penetrating our allotted targets in the missiles array from the rear, not by frontal attack, as planned. I preferred a circuitous, indirect approach. My battle experience—even from my Mirage period—taught me to avoid crossing “hot” front lines at low level. Just like my Uncle Aronchik at El-Hamma in 1946, I believed that it was much easier and safer to cross into enemy territory somewhere else.
We argued about that approach, and I was ready to give up the advantages of a direct approach from the front with all the others. And indeed the Orange Tails’ attack routes, unlike everybody else’s, went around the missile arrays and penetrated from the rear.
THE SQUADRON TOOK OFF formation after formation, and I, after some management duty, happened to be the last leader from our squadron to take off, leading a three-ship section; we lacked a fourth ship. We entered the missile array from behind, as planned. As I had anticipated, nobody expected us to come in that way, and everything was quiet. No one shot at us, but we found nothing where our SAM-6 battery was supposed to be. The place was empty. The battery, like most of its kind, had deployed forward with the attacking Syrian Army, in the direction of the Hula Valley in Israel.
All I saw around were columns of armored infantry. I found myself in the heart of the Syrian ground forces. Groups of vehicles were driving west, and antiaircraft farted smoke balls shooting west. I flew over there, and the Syrian soldiers looked up at me; my target was nowhere to be seen, and I felt like an uninvited guest at a party. So I pulled up and made another, higher circle, searching, hoping to find that battery somehow.
This was the moment when the Baboons began paying off on that investment—I was not at a loss. In their trials they had analyzed techniques of tempting missile batteries and threatening them to make them launch a missile and expose themselves. It was totally clear to me that circling around in easy radar range and in the heart of the fire zone, my navigator and I were juicy bait, and I hoped the idea would work. And at last somebody nearby woke up and launched a missile at us. The missile’s fire and trail of smoke exposed his location. But I was not just bait but also a threat, carrying eleven half-ton high-explosive bombs. As soon as the missile took off—Erel saw it first and pointed it out—I rolled down and dived right on its source. My wingmen, who had seen the SAM the same time we did, pulled up from ground level and came in after me. And indeed when I put my gunsight there, I could see a group of vehicles comprising an SAM-6 battery there. They shot another, smaller missile at us. We needed no extra assurance that this was indeed our target. All three aircraft unloaded all our ordnance on the site, blowing it to kingdom come. Then we turned back and went home very satisfied with ourselves.
And only when we landed, overjoyed to see that all our pilots were back safely from the Golan, were we stunned to hear that all was not well. Not only had the air force missed most of the SAM batteries and bombed vacant land, it also had lost seven Phantoms in this operation. The Syrian SAM-6 array—except for the minute part that we probably took out—was essentially untouched. Operation Model, which was planned to deal with the fixed SAM batteries, failed miserably when it met the mobile array.
WELL, I THOUGHT WHEN I understood what had happened, we’ll just refuel and rearm and go back to the Golan Heights and finish the job.” I had seen the Syrian army on their way to the Hula Valley, and I knew firsthand that the Galilee in northern Israel was in real danger. It was already afternoon, very little daylight was left, and we hadn’t accomplished anything yet. But then came the next incredible order: “Fly at top speed—TOP SPEED—to Egypt.”
“Egypt? What about the Golan Heights?”
“Forget the Golan Heights.”
“Do we go back to Operation Defy from the morning?”
No. This time this was not the continuation of Defy. Now it was to attack the bridges that the Egyptians were laying over the Suez Canal to bring armor into the Sinai.
“Bridges? What bridges?”
AND AGAIN, LADIES AND gentlemen, pardon me for the politically incorrect utterances you hear here. I was not in the high command at the time, and I know only second-hand about the pressures they were under. And I heard our leaders arguing later that they had been much firmer than it appeared from down below, and that perhaps we were so whipped only because we were just the knot at the end of the lash.
