Suez 1956, page 35
I now had twelve hundred men with me, together with a few field guns, the three AMX light tanks, and several new French recoilless rifles that had been airdropped to Raful. With these it would be impossible to fight off an armored brigade. And we were alone, far behind Egyptian lines with no possible relieving forces to call on. Beyond that, the area where Raful’s men had dug in was completely open, a vast tableland that offered no natural defenses against tanks and armoured infantry. The only way I could see to defend ourselves was to move into the pass and take up positions there, where the steep cliffs and narrow defiles would give the oncoming Egyptian tanks no room to maneuver.
Again I asked headquarters for permission to move into the pass. But again it was refused.32
Convinced that the pass was largely unoccupied after a supposedly devastating assault by Israeli air power on the Egyptian positions, Sharon suggested that he prove his point by sending a reconnaissance patrol into the defile. Permission was granted. The subsequent debate on justification for Sharon turned on his interpretation of what it needed in men and weaponry to constitute a patrol. According to Dayan:
The unit that set forth was not a ‘patrol’ but in fact a full combat team, quite capable of capturing the pass. It consisted of two infantry companies on half-tracks, a detachment of three tanks, the brigade reconnaissance unit on trucks, and a troop of heavy mortars in support. Commanding the unit was a battalion commander [Motta Gur]. The deputy commander of the brigade went along too.
As soon as the convoy entered the defile, it was fired on from the hillocks flanking it on both sides. The full combat unit continued through the defile on the assumption that it was held only by light Egyptian forces. As the spearhead of the convoy penetrated deeper into the narrow pass, the firing grew in intensity, and the half-tracks – and the troops they were carrying – were hit. The commander of the unit rushed forward to rescue them, but he, too, found himself trapped, unable to advance or to retire. Nevertheless, the forward portion of the convoy, totalling more than one company, succeeded in breaking through and reaching the western end of the pass, despite the murderous fire poured into the defile. The rest of the force remained pinned down, their casualties mounting under the continuous heavy fire from the heights above.
From one o’clock in the afternoon until eight in the evening, the paratroopers fought a tough and bitter battle until they finally overcame the Egyptian opposition and captured the pass. Not even a veteran combat-hardened unit like this one had ever experienced such a battle. Their casualties, too, were unprecedentedly heavy: 38 killed and 120 wounded.33
Eitan blamed a failure of intelligence, Dayan blamed Sharon. Sharon was unapologetic.
The Battle of Mitla Pass created anger and dissension both within the ranks of the paratroopers and also between myself and General Headquarters, in particular Dayan. The internal criticism was mostly stimulated by Motta Gur, who believed I should have taken personal command of the battle in the pass instead of remaining at the entrance to organize the defense and evacuate the wounded. At the same time, Dayan accused me of disobeying orders by sending a large force into the pass instead of a reconnaissance patrol and of engaging in a battle, although my orders were to avoid any fighting.34
At the subsequent inquiry Sharon refused to make excuses. Ben-Gurion was reluctant to take sides. ‘I don’t feel’, he said, ‘that I’m in a position to judge between two commanders on this issue.’35
Dayan had to swallow his pride. Sharon’s men had proved their valour and were therefore to be applauded. The chief of staff led the congratulations. At the same time he knew, and Sharon came to know, that the capture of the Mitla Pass was a victory without purpose. It might have been different if the Israeli objective had reached as far as Suez. But the grand plan stopped well short of that. ‘For their mistaken judgment and tactical errors, the para-troop unit paid heavily in blood. As for the breach of my orders and my forgiving attitude, the truth is that I regard the problem as serious when a unit fails to fulfil its battle task, not when it goes beyond the bounds of duty and does more than is demanded of it.’36
Whatever plaudits were garnered by Sharon as a bold and daring commander, the truth was that he had made a serious misjudgement. The Israeli air attack had failed to dislodge defenders cocooned in rifle pits dug along the tops of ridges and in caves cut into the steep walls of the pass. For the Egyptians it was like shooting at a fairground target. Faulty strategy was compounded by bad luck.
At the very start of the battle the paratroopers’ fuel truck went up in flames, to be followed by the ammunition truck and three other vehicles. The company commander who jumped from his half-track was killed on the spot. The supporting heavy mortars were knocked out of action. Enemy fire also hit and immobilized four half-tracks, a tank, a jeep, and an ambulance. The paratroopers were forced to scramble up to the hillside caves occupied by the Egyptians and in hand-to-hand fighting capture one position after another. They had no other course of action, for it was the only way they could end the battle as victors and extricate the scores of wounded and killed.37
Dayan’s attention switched to Abu Ageila, where the rest of the Egyptian Sinai defences were concentrated. He was not at all happy with the progress made. In particular, he wanted to know why it had not been possible to capture Um Katef, an essential road junction and the only remaining Egyptian position that barred the way to central Sinai. Dayan did not find his meeting with brigade officers at all agreeable. ‘True, they were not a crack formation . . . they were a reservist brigade of insufficiently trained infantrymen of above average age’.38 The problems of a largely volunteer army were beginning to show. A half-hearted attack turned to farce.
The Egyptians were already into a planned withdrawal towards the canal, having destroyed most of their heavy equipment, while the Israeli 7th Brigade kept up the pressure on what they assumed to be a heavily fortified barrier. Early in the morning of 2 November, two Egyptian prisoners were sent into Um Katef to demand a surrender. They were given a captured Egyptian jeep and a large white flag. Unfortunately neither of them could drive. A brief lesson on how to work the gears was all they had before they set off. Since by now Um Katef was clear of Egyptian forces, the two envoys in search of a surrender drove through the fortifications and out the other side before encountering a company of the Israeli 37th Brigade making its approach from the opposite direction.
Unwilling or unable to explain their mission, the Egyptians were made prisoners again while the 37th Brigade tanks rolled on through Um Katef, expecting to make contact with the 7th Brigade at Abu Ageila. They did, but not in the way they had hoped. Seeing the approach of a column of tanks but no flag of truce, Colonel Adan of the 7th assumed a break-out attempt and opened fire. Eight of twelve Israeli tanks were knocked out before the mistake was realised.39
Despite setbacks, there was no longer any doubt that Israeli forces would prevail. Like all successful commanders, Dayan was adept at spotting the weaknesses in the enemy (something the allied forces would patently fail to do). The Egyptian strategy was defective on two counts. First, heavily defended positions such as that at Abu Ageila were of limited value unless they were at the centre of fortified zones. In the absence of huge concentrations of artillery and anti-tank weapons they could be bypassed or bombarded into submission. Second, lack of mobility also made Egyptian forces vulnerable.
Abu Ageila could play a decisive role in the defence of Sinai only if it served as a solid base for mobile forces who could go out and engage an enemy seeking to break through to the Canal. In desert terrain like Sinai there is no alternative to armour, aircraft, paratroopers and motorized infantry. The defending force must be able to meet such attacking units with its own counterpart mobile units. The Egyptians made a fatal assumption in thinking that their fortified defence positions of Abu Ageila, Rafah and El Arish would prevent our penetration into Sinai and would protect the Canal without requiring their armoured and air forces to join in blocking our breakthrough, and without their men having to go out and fight us beyond the perimeter of their posts.40
But assuming for a moment that the Egyptian military had been better prepared to fight a desert war, there was still every reason for Dayan to feel confident of success. For however hard he and Ben-Gurion tried subsequently to minimise the Anglo-French contribution, once the allied forces were engaged there was no way that Egypt could triumph on two fronts. It was Nasser’s conscious decision to allow the Israelis an easier ride than they might otherwise have enjoyed by withdrawing forces from Sinai to meet the threat of an Anglo-French invasion.
That threat became real at dusk on the evening of 31 October. It was then that 200 Canberras, Venoms and Valiants with forty French Thunderstreaks, operating from aircraft carriers and from Malta and Cyprus, swept in over Egyptian airfields and ports. Just before the bombs fell an American U-2 spy plane passed over Cairo military airfield. All was calm and quiet. Ten minutes later, the U-2 made a second sweep. This time there were craters, smashed buildings and burning planes Eisenhower remembered the two sets of photographs as the most dramatic visual intelligence ever put before him.41 They came with his breakfast on the morning of 1 November. ‘Bombs, by God!’ he declared. ‘What does Anthony think he’s doing?’ With confusion all around him Anthony may himself have wondered what he was doing. The only thing he did know was that on the afternoon of the 31st he had pressed the red button. Operation Musketeer was on.
19
In what was to become standard practice throughout the shortlived Suez campaign, Eden had no sooner made his decision than he had a change of mind. British and French bombers were already in the air when Eden had word from the embassy in Cairo that 1,300 US nationals were being evacuated to Alexandria along the Desert Road next to Cairo West airfield, one of the top Anglo-French targets.1 A frantic appeal went off to Keightley to call back the planes. It was too late for that, but he was successful in ordering a reprieve for Cairo West.
The air assault achieved its prime objective – to remove the Egyptian air force from the military reckoning. Upwards of one hundred aircraft were destroyed on the ground. There was little opposition. In many cases the bombers were guided in by lights blazing on the runways. The surprise, which was total, derived from a genuine disbelief that this could really be happening. Alone of the Egyptian high command, Nasser took the threat of an Anglo-French invasion seriously, and then only after forcing himself to accept what seemed a ludicrous proposition, that France and Britain, but Britain in particular, were ready to sacrifice their remaining Arab friends for the sake of a strip of water.
The damage caused by the air strikes was played down by Egyptian propaganda. Cairo Radio put out the reassuring message that the airfields could be easily repaired (true) and that the attackers had been fooled by decoys (not true) after the pride of the Egyptian air force had long since departed to havens in Syria and Saudi Arabia (party true), though what they were supposed to do from their refuge to protect the homeland was never explained. Ironically, the illusion of triumph in the midst of devastation was supported by allied warnings to civilians to keep away from military installations, thus ensuring that the evidence of destruction had few witnesses.
The British aim of minimising civilian casualties was commendable and largely effective. Unfortunately, this claim was about the only success that could be marked down to the information and propaganda division. At the start, expectations were pitched at an unrealistic level. As Frank Cooper at the air ministry put it, ‘There was a popular theory that if you bombed something and coupled it with propaganda everyone would pack in and give up.’2 It was not to be. As Brigadier Bernard Fergusson, who was in charge of this side of operations, cheerfully acknowledged, ‘if anyone likes to say that the performance of my Psychological Warfare Branch was ludicrously bad, they will find nobody agreeing more fervently than I’.3 Ill fortune combined with poor management to defeat the best intentions, the poor management starting with the failure to bow to French army experience in Algeria, where indoctrination had been raised to a fine art.
The centrepiece of Fergusson’s propaganda empire was Sharq al-Adna, the radio station transmitting from Cyprus. Remembering the director, Ralph Poston, from pre-war days in Palestine, Fergusson did not anticipate any objection to intensifying the station’s anti-Nasser output. In the event, there were very serious objections, not least on the argument that a frontal attack on one Arab leader was likely to bring all other Arabs rushing to his defence. More, it turned out that the 150 or so Arab staff of Sharq al-Adna were not at all ill disposed towards Nasser, who they thought was rather good news. They were certainly in no mood to attack him over the airwaves. Poston was at one with his staff, denouncing Eden’s Suez policy and the ‘disastrous situation’ it had caused. He then went on air to warn listeners against British plots, at which point Fergusson had him arrested and sent back to Britain.4 Most of his colleagues resigned in sympathy. Desperate to recruit malleable Arabic speakers, Fergusson went first to known enemies of Nasser, none of whom were ready to take the risk of reprisals against their families. He ended up with ‘a scratch lot . . . not one of whom was Egyptian. Their accents were recognisably Palestinian or Algerian, and I learned afterwards that their Egyptian audiences had decided they must be Jews – which was hardly calculated to “win friends and influence people.” ’5
It was the same problem with the British-subsidised Arab News Agency, where, recovering from the spy scandal of the previous August, staff were keen to prove that they could still offer a reasonably balanced version of the news. Tom Little, who headed the ANA Cairo team, was convinced that Eden had got it wrong on Nasser. Pro-government reports from the London office were frequently spiked, and Little remained on friendly terms with Nasser, who fed him the occasional exclusive.
If relationships between communicators were bad, the practical arrangements for delivering propaganda were even worse. The first bright idea to fizzle out was that of dropping tons of leaflets over Egyptian cities urging citizens to turn on Nasser. This was to be achieved by means of a clever device sensitive to barometric pressure dropped from cruising height. The propaganda bomb was set to explode at 1,000 feet, scattering the leaflets over a wide area. To reinforce the message a ‘voice aircraft’ would then fly low over the ground, urging surrender before battle commenced.
Fergusson’s nightmare started when the printing press in Nicosia broke down and was declared a write-off. Flying over a replacement from the UK wasted several vital days. He then discovered that the fiendish device for distributing the leaflets had only ever been tested in Britain. The barometric pressure in the Middle East was such that instead of exploding at 1,000 feet, the leaflet container held together until it was about 6 feet above the ground. Fergusson had no trouble in imagining the consequences if innocent Egyptians were wiped out by a bulk consignment of messages of peace. He solved the problem by adding a weight of sand to the container, thereby acquiring the distinction of being the only person ever to dump sand on Egypt. Thereafter, five leaflet drops were cancelled one after the other largely because the transport aircraft had been delegated for other, presumably more important duties.
Before long, leaflets were the least of Fergusson’s problems. Great store had been set on notching up the level of radio propaganda until it drowned out the voices in praise of Nasser. The plan was for Sharq al-Adna, now renamed Voice of Britain, to take over the wavelength of Cairo Radio after the Egyptian transmitters had been put out of action by a few well-placed bombs. But where were the bombers? They were well on their way when an order from London cancelled the raid.6
It was Tom Prickett, whose title was Chief of Staff, Air Task Force, talking with me in the Operations Room somewhere about the third day, who suddenly said: ‘I wonder if they could possibly think that Cairo Radio is actually in Cairo, and are forbidding us to bomb it for fear of civilian casualties?’ I buzzed off a signal at once, and his guess was right.7
It had not occurred to anyone in London that the transmitters for Cairo Radio were out on the edge of the desert, well away from urban centres. Air Chief Marshal Denis Barnett put the blame squarely on the politicians.
Throughout the execution of Phase I there were considerable political restrictions imposed from Whitehall, and attempts to reorganise the programme of this key phase. For example . . . the attack on Cairo Radio at ABU ZABAL, which had been planned to take place at the earliest daylight opportunity in Phase I (i.e. concurrently with the first strikes by the ground attack forces) was cancelled and was not re-inserted until 2nd November . . . When the attack did take place it was only semi-successful and clearly required a repeat attack. But the trend of events had then reached a stage at which further attack was prohibited. Had the attack been delivered in its planned position in the programme there would unquestionably have been time for a decisive re-attack.8
Selective memories of the air campaign rate it a great success because it reduced Egyptian fighting strength and removed the danger of retaliatory raids against Israel. The failure to bring about a collapse in civilian morale is generally forgotten. So too is the failure to achieve another key objective – the protection of the canal.
At first light on 1st November shore-based and carrier-based aircraft attacked Egyptian airfields. The Naval aircraft also attacked the blockship [Akka] lying off Ismalia, but it was not sunk. A re-strike was ordered, but when the aircraft arrived over the target the blockship had been towed by tugs and was almost in position at the entrance to the Canal. The ship was again attacked but not sunk, and the Egyptians succeeded in towing the ship into a position blocking the Canal. The blockship operation cannot therefore be considered a success. Detailed study of the armament required to sink the blockship had showed that 12 Seahawks carrying rockets should succeed, but despite that, half the aircraft were sent off with bombs.9
