Books: 100 Hours

DIARY OF THE SINAI CAMPAIGN by Major General Moshe Dayan. 236 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

One day, one-eyed Moshe Dayan’s gravestone will read THE HELL YOU SAY. He has more than one man’s share of that tough, nose-thumbing certitude that makes the sabra (native-born Israeli) so exasperating, yet so fascinating. An unorthodox military genius who lost the illusions of childhood at twelve, when he took up a gun against Arab marauders in the Negev, Dayan in this book is thumbing his nose again. Only this time, it is not at the Arab world but at some of his own people.

Poison on the Wounds. In his lean and brisk account of the 1956 war, Dayan discusses tactical errors made by his own army and dissects them so frankly that many Israelis are clamoring for his other eye. Typical is the claim, of former Foreign Minister Golda Meir, that Dayan’s book drips “poison on the open wounds of bereaved parents” by telling them that their sons were often killed because of Israeli mistakes. If anything, such complaints are a disservice to the man who conceived and executed a brilliant military adventure of such power and daring that the memory of it alone acts as a restraint against any major Arab attack on Israel.

The decision to act against Egypt came from Ben-Gurion, who had been informed of the Anglo-French plans to wrest the Suez Canal from Nasser. Responsibility for plans and operations was handed to Major General Dayan, who at 38 had been named Israel’s Army Chief of Staff in 1953. Nasser had the bigger, better equipped force. To achieve surprise, Dayan delayed general mobilization until the last possible moment before his attack. Then, on Oct. 29, he dropped 395 paratroopers from 16 lumbering Dakotas near the Mitla Pass, only 45 miles from Suez. The first 100 hours of the nine-day war were decisive: the Israelis overran most of the Sinai, took thousands of Egyptian prisoners and hundreds of tanks, self-propelled guns and trucks. The cost of the war to Israel: 172 Israeli dead, and one taken prisoner.

Jumpy Gunners. As Dayan points out, the victory was all the more impressive in view of the delays and confusion that resulted from the sudden mobilization. The confusion, moreover, at times resulted in tragedy—the details of which Dayan’s critics would as soon leave undocumented. Israeli tanks, for example, were unmarked, and were fired upon by Israeli gunners. In one murderous engagement, the Israelis knocked out eight of their own tanks in five minutes.

In the end, political events superseded military victory. The same international pressures that ultimately led to the fall of Anthony Eden’s government forced the Israeli withdrawal from Sinai. Nevertheless, Dayan and his fellow Israelis believe that the Sinai escapade convinced Nasser of the “readiness of Israel to take to the sword to secure her rights, and the capacity of her army to defeat” a numerically superior and better armed enemy.