Blitz in the Desert

The border was only an arbitrary line drawn between two hatreds, and it had been violated for eight years by raiding parties from Egypt or reprisal raiders from Israel. But this was bigger. In the cooling desert dusk, along the 120-mile border separating Israel from Egypt's Sinai peninsula, heavily armored Israeli army units assembled at positions. Tank engines, in World War II U.S. Shermans and light 13-ton French AMXs, coughed, then roared. Behind the armor trailed streams of troop carriers, weapons carriers, artillery pieces. Some 30,000 men in sand-tan battledress rode in the convoys--a force "too big for a reprisal," said an Israeli official, "and too small for a war."

But war it was.

Citizen Army. Where once at least half of Egypt's ill-trained army--perhaps 60,000 soldiers--had ranged the Sinai peninsula, now little more than 30,000 troops remained; Nasser had pulled the rest back to defend the Suez Canal and his capital. The Israeli army, a deadly machine full of disciplined power, had been swiftly mobilized from the citizen soldiers of a soldier state constantly on the alert for invasion from any part of its 600 miles of border with Arab enemies. To achieve maximum secrecy, reservists had been summoned by telephone calls and telegrams. Footsloggers were summoned by a rap on the door ("It's my sergeant," a pajamaed businessman told his sleepy wife. "He tells me, 'Come!'"). Car owners were halted at street corners, given cards designating assembly points. So were farmers with mules. They parked their vehicles or patted their beasts and walked away.

By Friday afternoon, three days before Dday, a fourth of Israel's 1,800,000 people were under arms. At the Israeli airdromes, fighter planes stood ready. A few were World War II U.S. Mustangs, some were F-86 Sabre jets, the rest were French Mystere jets--far more than the mere dozen that France had publicly delivered. Clandestinely, the French had turned over at least another 30 Mysteres to Israel. Israel's air force was smaller than Egypt's (about 130 British Vampire and Meteor jets, 90 to 125 Russian MIG-155, a few newer MIG-17s, 50 Russian 11-28 bombers), but the Israelis knew their equipment better and were better trained.

First Day. Under exemplary military conditions, Israel's three invading columns fanned into a 70-mile-wide arc and ground westward into the Sinai's barren dunes, plateaus and lifeless mountains.

"Units of the Israeli defense forces have penetrated and attacked fedayeen commando bases," the Israeli government announced. "This operation was necessitated by the continuous Egyptian military attacks ... the purpose of which was to . . . deprive the people of Israel of the possibility of peaceful existence."

The northernmost column pushed easily past Quseima (see map) and fishhooked to the northwest. Its mission: to cut off the Gaza Strip, a 26-mile finger that has poked into Israel since 1949.

The southernmost column rode past Elath without resistance, raced toward the heart of the peninsula. Its objective was Nakhl, there to reinforce a paratrooper battalion which had been dropped ahead.

The center column, moving in past Kuntilla, drew blood only a few miles inside Sinai. It encountered Egyptian armor, mostly Soviet T-34 tanks. After 16 hours, it scattered the defenders.

Second Day. By dawn, the Israeli southern column had, in effect, cut off all southern Sinai, and was even turning some of Egypt's T-345 against the defenders. Egypt fought back mostly with windy communiques ("We have annihilated the invasion forces"), a few ineffectual air sorties at Tel Aviv, and a tragicomic attempt by an Egyptian frigate to shell Haifa. The ship was crippled by Israeli aircraft rockets, ran up its white flag. The bemused Egyptian didn't even scuttle his ship, and it was towed into port while Israelis cheered from harbor rooftops.

Third Day. In a stretch of dune country in north-central Sinai, at a vital road junction called Abu Aweigila, the Egyptians threw their one fierce punch. Israeli Shermans and AMXs ran into a strong battalion of Egyptian armor, veered away from it while Israeli infantry moved to the attack. Overhead, Israeli Mysteres spotted a major reinforcing column (it apparently was a full corps of up to 50,000 men) lumbering eastward along the macadam road from Ismailia. Egyptian Vampires and MIGs came in to cover the reinforcements, fell into battle with Israeli fighters. By late in the day, it was still a battle. The Egyptians were fighting with more skill and courage than in the 1948 fiasco. Then came the ultimatum from Britain and France set to expire at 4:30 the next morning. So Egypt had three enemies to contend with instead of one.

At dusk the first Anglo-French bombers hit Egypt's airfields. It was all the help the Israelis at Abu Aweigila needed. With Egypt's air harassment all but eliminated, the vulnerable but speedy French tanks engaged the T-345. Soon the hillsides were smoky with burning tanks, both Egyptian and Israeli, but the AMXs' speed was proving decisive when night fell.

West of Suez. British twin Canberra jets whistled in from Cyprus to strike at airfields. "I must say that the sooner Egypt sees reason and agrees to temporary international control of the Suez, the less lives will be lost," pronounced General Sir Charles Keightley (rhymes with neatly), C-in-C of the joint Anglo-French operation, from his Cyprus GHQ. The political hope in London and Paris was that airstrikes alone, combined with the Israeli sweep across the Sinai, would persuade Egypt to surrender, or to overthrow Nasser. But the basic military intent was to clear the skies for Anglo-French invasion.

Fourth Day. When dawn broke over the tank battlefield of Abu Aweigila, the Israels discovered that in the darkness the Egyptians had pulled out what was left of their armor, to scurry to safety west of the Suez. A considerable remnant got away, but the Egyptians' one big punch had failed.

Over Cairo, the Anglo-French bombing spread from airports to military barracks and munitions depots. With the assurance born of complete control, Keightley's GHQ in Cyprus warned the Egyptians what the Anglo-French airmen were going to do before they did it, with the double purpose of preventing casualties and of spreading despair.

In Tel Aviv the Israeli army spokesman announced proudly: "We have conquered the bulk of Sinai."

Fifth Day. The Anglo-French Canberras, Venom Mark 45 and Corsairs finished the destruction of the Egyptian air force on the ground, then turned to strafing and bombing Egyptian motor convoys and strategic points which might hinder the landing in the Canal Zone. In frustration, the Egyptians sank seven blockships at various points in the Suez Canal (they can later be dynamited out of the way). Bombers picked out the transmitter of the Cairo radio. (A standby transmitter was back on the air in an hour, however.)

Sixth Day. The desert blitz ended. Israeli forces marched triumphantly into the ancient and grubby city of Gaza, where blinded Samson pulled down the pillars and destroyed the temple. They found only a handful of dull-eyed, curious Arabs, the raveled remnants of an Egyptian division, and the unhappy Egyptian Governor General of the Gaza Strip. He put his name to the surrender papers and handed over to Israel some 325 square miles of disputed real estate and the perplexing responsibility for some 250,000 ragged, ill-housed, ill-fated Palestinian refugees.

In less than a week, a third of Egypt's army had been routed; its air force was gone; its terrain east of the Suez was in the hands of its most hated enemies; and its capacity to resist Anglo-French invasion of the canal was sorely crippled.

Israel, its hardy soldiers quickly masters of a peninsula twice the size of their own nation, did not even wait to mop up last Egyptian resistance before switching from Egyptian to Israeli currency in the Gaza Strip. After midnight Tuesday, little more than a week after the operation began, Israeli army GHQ announced: "The campaign in Sinai has ended . . . and there is no more fighting." At that moment, the British-French invasion of the Canal Zone was already under way.

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