Well, maybe.
When I last visited Benny Peled, a year before his death in 2002, he tried to convince me that this indeed was the case. He even gave me a good show, reading from some document or other (it turned to be a high command protocol from that time) and playing various roles in bass and soprano voices, stopping at times to fix me with his angry lion’s eyes and draw some oxygen into his poor, emphysema-clogged lungs. Indeed, according to Benny’s show, some of the top brass had stepped up to the plate. But I still don’t think this was the whole truth. I don’t believe that the high command assessed the situation coolly, setting priorities for its limited aerial force. I find it hard to believe that only we, down at the squadron level, were confused. No. Mass hysteria had reigned on our side, from the top down.
The military problem was, of course, how to get out of it and make the enemy hysterical, the enemy that was continuing to penetrate the Golan Heights in the North and the Suez Canal in the South. This was not a simple thing, even if you had Phantoms. The enemy had foreseen our reactions, and we were paying a high price in casualties and materiel from all our running around trying to clean up spilled milk. This price was the result of our intellectual laziness during the years since the end of the War of Attrition, and no “but we were surprised” excuses can cover it up.
SO THERE WERE BRIDGES on the canal.
I didn’t know what a “military bridge” was and how it should be attacked. This was something that if somebody had thought about it before the war, we pilots never heard about it. Bridges were at Waterloo, over the Yarkon Brook in Tel Aviv, and over the River Kwai in the movies. If you read about the war in Vietnam, you would know that the Americans were continually bombing the Paul Doumer Bridge in Hanoi and had been unable to knock it down or even stop traffic over it. Rumors had it that the IDF was developing secret bridges to cross into Egypt, but this, of course, was not for pilots to know. My men and I knew nothing about bridges. And headquarters also had nothing clever to add.
But we did have Phantoms and iron bombs. So we loaded our aircraft with as many bombs as we could carry. It was reasonable to expect that bombs, if they hit a bridge, would do some damage. Now, since we didn’t accomplish anything with Operation Defy—that is, we hadn’t taken out the Egyptian SAMs—the Suez Canal was a hot spot for us. We had to enter the heart of the missiles’ killing zones to attack those bridges. Still, this was not the problem. Entering the SAM killing zone in Operations Defy and Model required exactly that. And if this time the target was going to be bridges instead of missile batteries, so what? After all, there always comes a moment in battle when the soldiers have to stand and take fire. My men showed no signs of being upset by this idea.
But the truly serious problem was again location: nobody knew where those bridges were. They could be anywhere along the 150 kilometers of the canal. How many bridges were there? Ten? A hundred? Nobody knew. We were left with the problem of how to enter the zone, search, find, and destroy however many bridges there were. And even their looks and size were not clear. Were they large or small? Yellow or green? Nobody knew anything. There was only one way: go there and find out for yourself.
And even though the problem we faced was similar to that of finding a mobile SAM battery, the Baboons’ hunting solution for SAM-6 arrays was not relevant here. You can’t tempt a bridge to get it to show itself. And anyway, this was in the afternoon. No hunter would hunt birds with the sun in his eyes. But we had to attack those bridges now. There was nobody else to do it but the IAF’s Phantoms.
So we put together as many formations as we could and improvised some attack doctrine. And so, with Roy Manoff in my backseat, off we went to the Suez Canal. We left the rest of our formation to wait outside and came in alone at low level, avoiding radar detection, then pulled up above the band of water with the setting sun in our eyes. We circled over a section of the canal. You had to go over to the other side to see anything. We ignored the black flowers of ack-ack that bloomed around us and the smell of burning cordite that filled the cockpit. And so we scanned kilometer after kilometer but found nothing. We cleared out of the fire zone and flew back over the safe dunes of the Sinai, took a breath, and returned for a second look.
At last Hawkeye Manoff saw a bridge. Believe me, it was hard to see. I was stunned to discover that these bridges were nothing like the Golden Gate Bridge. These were just two steel ramps for vehicles set on submerged pontoons. They were very thin threads, like sewing lines on the black water, almost invisible, especially in the dim light and the hazy air just before dusk. But we found one.
And then we called the rest of our formation waiting outside—ready to replace us if we were shot down, and continue the mission. All three of us went in and bombed that bridge.
And more formations from our squadron acted as we had improvised just an hour before, and attacked nearby. Perhaps we disrupted something or scared the Egyptians down there. There were other formations from our sister squadrons operating in other sections of the canal, but I don’t know how they found their targets and made their attacks.
And this time it was dumb luck that the Orange Tails ended this mission without losses. October 7, the second day of the war, ended with a few night sorties, and some bombs dropped in the dark in the general area of the canal. Perhaps they interfered with the Egyptians resting on their laurels.
After this day ended we gathered in the briefing room to find out what happened to us during this long day. Many eyes were fixed on me, so I tried to move slowly and speak little and in a low, manly voice, so they could all see that everything was okay—just another one of those wars.
I was hiding from them what I knew, that the command structure above us had collapsed.
THE TERRIFYING AND WORRYING thing in those first days of the war from my point of view as the commander of a fighting field unit was neither the enemy nor the missiles. For these I was prepared. Also, the madness didn’t terrify me. I could handle the toilet paper that came rolling out of the teleprinter, and deal with the craziness of “load/unload ordnance” that harassed my mechanics during the long night. And even racing from one front to the other didn’t scare the interceptor pilot in me. Ours was a superb fighter squadron (that day I began to realize how good it was) and was built to handle such things. We knew how to improvise, and when all the rules were thrown in the trashcan and procedures torn up, the Orange Tails found ways to survive in the heart of danger and do our jobs.
The terrible thing was the loss of trust in my superior officers. I couldn’t grasp what had happened to them— they seemed to know nothing, their voices were hysterical, their instructions incoherent. They didn’t listen to feedback from below and made the same mistakes over and over. The ground I stood on was crumbling under my feet, and I didn’t know what tomorrow would bring.
This was like an earthquake for me. I hadn’t the slightest idea of what was going on in Tel Aviv in those days, no notion of the tumult and loss of collegiality that reigned in the high command of the Israeli Air Force. I didn’t know about the hysterical running around in the poisonous atmosphere of cigarette smoke inside an underground bunker, of the pale faces of senior staff when every hour brought news of the collapse of another part of the front— the gains of Syrian armor in the Golan Heights and Egyptian infantry crossing the Suez Canal into the Sinai Desert, about the fall of encircled positions and the collapse of their own plans and expectations. I knew nothing about the shouting and the arguments.
That day had shaken something in me. From that moment until the middle of the war I suffered from a chill up my spine; I felt alone and the entire world around me full of simmering kettles, not all of them enemy-made. I felt alone in battle.
All I had was the Orange Tails.
19
Room for Decision
THE MISSION OF THE ORANGE TAILS in the Yom Kippur War was long and complicated and lasted nineteen days and nights. There were 760 battle sorties. This work was done by a rather small group of pilots (one in five were cadets training on the Phantom) and even fewer navigators, and maintained thanks to a couple of hundred mechanics, most of them reservists.
