Israel: A Campaign for the Books

Situation: The enemy commands a steeply rising stretch of rocky hills some 40 miles long, providing clear fields of fire on the plains below. Three separate lines of defense run along the hillsides, one above the other. Each line has its own triple layer of mines, barbed wire and heavy fortifications, for a total of nine miniature Maginot Lines that must be breached to reach the final plateau.

Bunkers of rock and earth and 5-ft. -thick concrete gun turrets dominate each piece of high ground. A labyrinth of thick-walled tunnels connects the whole. Garages have been dug out for tanks and vehicles; 20-ft.-high earth work barricades protect artillery em placements, and the miles of minefields are dotted with tank traps. The enemy is prepared to defend the heights with two armored brigades, one mechanized infantry brigade, one mobile brigade, 18 battalions of artillery, and six in fantry brigades, each with its own tank battalion — a total of some 65,000 men.

The enemy arsenal consists of some 350 tanks, over 290 artillery pieces, ranging from 130-to 85 -mm. guns and 120-mm. mortars to rockets and self-propelled tank destroyers. Some 30 German panzer tanks, relics of World War II, are planted in fixed positions as antitank weapons, and the enemy has 200 antiaircraft guns.

Problem: Attack and neutralize the enemy fortifications in a minimal amount of time, seizing and holding the high ground with a force of only 20,000 men.

Thus posed, the problem might have been designed by an imaginative war-college instructor to baffle his student officers. In fact, the unsettling task was just what confronted the Israeli armed forces last June when they assaulted Syria’s Golan Heights. But after Israel’s swift and decisive campaigns in the Sinai and on the west bank, the bitter, bloody Battle of Golan Heights seemed almost anticlimactic. It got scant attention in news reports already concentrating on Israel’s overall victory. Now, as military censors release the first detailed accounts of the fight for those rugged hilltops, the battle can be recognized as a classic of its kind—a case history of the triumph of tactics and courage over superior force entrenched on all-but-unassailable terrain.

Growling on Up. The Israeli plan of battle was elegant in its simplicity. A single mailed fist of tanks and armor-borne troops would smash straight up into all the defenses in one concentrated attack. Once the fist had punched through, at whatever terrible cost, reinforcements would pour behind it to spill out in back of the enemy and flank him on his own high ground.

That first bold assault began at 11:30 on the morning of June 9. Short hours after tanks and troopers raced north from their victory on the west bank of the Jordan, an Israeli armored brigade was ready to lash out from a point just north of the kibbutz of Kfar Szold (see map) and grind up into the forbidding Syrian hills. So tortuous was the terrain that the lead battalion of 35 Sherman tanks was forced to snake up the cliffside in single file. Despite heavy Israeli air and artillery strikes on the Syrian gun emplacements, Arab 130-and 122-mm. shells rained down on the slender column at the rate of ten tons a minute. Barreling straight into bazookas and antitank guns leveled to fire in flat trajectory, the Israeli tankers hit the first fortification, Gu el Aska, head-on at full speed. They pushed aside the barbed wire, thundered heedlessly through a minefield, smashed into bunkers and overran trenches. Some Syrian soldiers were crushed under the tanks; those that jumped aside fired in astonishment at the speeding tanks already bypassing them to continue growling on up the hillside.

Hand Signals. As the second and third Syrian positions were literally overrun in the same headlong fashion, Colonel Arie,*the column commander, was wounded. Major Rafi, who leaped into the turret of the lead tank to take his place, was killed instantly as the column blasted its way through the final

Syrian position. That was Sir-a-Dib, which stands atop a buried pipeline built to carry crude oil from Saudi Arabian wells to Lebanese ports. It was 3 p.m., and only half the original 35 Sherman tanks that started the assault were still moving.

The depleted force did not hesitate. It rumbled on toward Kallah, which was heavily defended by tanks and Russian SU-100 tank destroyers, machine guns, mortars and bazookas. The only access was through a zigzag of mined concrete traps, and the Israeli tanks, now commanded by Lieut. Naty, could only crawl a few yards forward before having to back up, wheel sideways and inch forward at a fresh angle. They provided tempting targets for the furiously firing Syrians. A shell caromed off Naty’s tank turret, silencing his radio. He raced to another tank and jockeyed it into the spearhead position.

A rifle bullet creased Naty’s scalp. Moments later, his radio went dead again; blood from his wound had short-circuited his chest microphone. Naty led the final phase of the attack standing high in his turret and directing his tanks with hand signals. By the time he reached the center of Kallah, only three Shermans were still operating.

The Worst Moment. To keep going against the impossible odds, the Israelis needed more than mere military esprit and discipline. There was a vital extra element in their armament. Of all the Arabs, the Syrians had given the Israelis the most cause to hate—and retaliate. For nearly two decades from the safety of Golan Heights, Syrian artillery had been carrying on a random bombardment of Israeli kibbutzim in the Galilee valley below. Snipers often fired on Israeli farmers in border fields; terrorists crept down at night to mine Israeli roads. Hostile incidents averaged some 500 a year. Moreover, as Israeli Chief of Staff Major General Itzhak Rabin* observed, “Many of us felt that the Syrians were the people who brought about the whole war. They provoked it with years of subversive activities, and they dragged Nasser after them. If one country alone can be blamed for the war, that country is Syria.”

To make matters worse, Syria nearly escaped Israeli punishment this time, just as it had in the wars of 1948 and 1956. Of necessity, Israel had to cope first with Nasser’s large, aggressive force in Sinai. After that, Jordan, a reluctant latecomer to the battle, had to be dealt with. And then, just as Israel gathered its armor to scale the Golan Heights, Syria prudently announced that it had agreed to the U.N. ceasefire. The poised Israeli army was fighting mad. “That night, when I was told not to attack because of the cease-fire,” remembers Brigadier General David Eleazar, “was the worst moment of my life.” But the Syrians continued to fire on the kibbutzim, and Israel found excuse enough to go ahead with the attack.

A Bridge of Bodies. A second and third armored battalion followed Colo nel Arie’s slash into the Syrian line and split off to seize the towns of Zaoura and Quassett. The armor, in turn, was followed across the border by the elite Golani Infantry Brigade in armed halftrack personnel carriers. The Golani mission was to swing north and fan out into an assault on three key fortified Syrian razorbacks, take them to widen the corridor of the main Israeli attack, then push on to capture the fortified village of Baniyas. It was a task that produced the bloodiest fighting in the battle for the Heights.

The first strong point was Tel Aza-ziyat, a massively defended hill that fearful Israeli farmers in the valley below had long called “the Monster.” The assault fell to Lieut. Colonel Benny’s battalion, which took such murderous fire on the approach that only Benny’s halftrack made it to the Monster’s lip. With five soldiers aboard, it crashed through the barbed-wire perimeter. Other troopers sprinted behind, firing into the trenches, tossing hand grenades into the bunkers, carrying the hand-to-hand fighting down a maze of dark passages.

Finally, after two hours of furious combat, the Syrian commander surfaced from a deep bunker and surrendered the fort. An Israeli shinnied up a gnarled olive tree and joyously unfurled a Star of David flag above the Monster.

At the next strong point—Tel Faqr —the Barak (Lightning) Battalion also lost most of its halftracks and was pinned down by fire. Groups of five and ten Israelis charged up the hill. The torpedo charges for breaching the barbed wire had been lost with the half tracks, and the first troopers threw themselves onto the wire so that their comrades could cross on their bodies. Losses were heavy from mines and machine guns: at least one in ten was killed before the Israelis who made it to the summit plunged into the tunnels to hunt down the defenders. At one point, an Israeli and a Syrian officer came face to face. The Israeli pulled the trigger of his Uzzi submachine gun. It was empty. The Syrian jerked the trigger on his Soviet assault rifle. It, too, was empty. With that, the Israeli clubbed the Syrian down with his Uzzi.

By early evening the Golani troopers, aided by tanks, had taken their final goal, Baniyas. Located at the headwaters of the Jordan River, Baniyas is dominated by a Crusader’s castle that the great Moslem commander Saladin failed to capture during another battle on the Heights—in 1188.

Masters on the Heights. Israeli military planners had reckoned that if their forces won the high ground on the first day, the rest of the campaign would be easy. It was. The next morning the Golani infantrymen met only token resistance as they pushed on to the Lebanese border. From its behind-the-lines stronghold at Kallah, tanks raced along undefended roads toward the Syrian headquarters at El Quneitra. In the central sector, the diversionary probes of the previous day expanded into a full-scale pincer movement that took Aalleiga, a pivotal point in the Syrian second line of defense, and then split into flying columns that sped north to El Quneitra and south to Boutmiye. In the south, airborne troopers leapfrogged in helicopters, quickly seizing one unsuspecting village after another, while an armored column thrust up the road to consolidate their gains.

Ironically, the Syrians themselves hastened the Israeli victory. In an effort to pressure the United Nations into enforcing a ceasefire, Damascus Radio undercut its own army by broadcasting the fall of the city of El Quneitra three hours before it actually capitulated. That premature report of the surrender of their headquarters destroyed the morale of the Syrian troops left in the Golan area. Within only 27 hours, at a cost of 115 killed and 322 wounded, v. 1,000 Syrian dead, countless wounded and 600 captured, the Israelis were masters of Golan Heights. And they had added an instructive new chapter to military history.

*The Israeli Defense Ministry does not release the last names of combat commanders.*Who is reported to be Jerusalem’s choice for Ambassador to the U.S. when his mandatory retirement as chief of staff becomes effective Jan. 1.