This text was published on the occasion of the forty-seventh anniversary of the October 1973 War.
On the practical level, the Six-Day War led the Israeli intelligence community to formulate what was then called “The Concept,” a strategic intelligence assessment based on a simple assumption that Egypt would not go to war before it had strategic bombers and/or long-range ballistic missiles that would enable it to target the Israeli interior and achieve a costly deterrent equation (1) . The Israelis were reassured by their concept and slept soundly until they were awakened by the roar of the Egyptian army’s cannons in Sinai as it opened the war on the afternoon of October 6, 1973.
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The October War was planned from the beginning, specifically on the Egyptian front, as a limited military operation. No practical plan was drawn up to liberate the entire Sinai, nor was achieving this goal within the capabilities of the Egyptian army at the time. It was as if any practical plan had been drawn up to reach the strategic straits in the heart of Sinai, and the Egyptian forces had not actually trained for such missions. The only actual plan drawn up at the time, which was consistent with the real capabilities of the Egyptian army, was the "High Minarets" plan, which called for sending five reinforced infantry divisions to cross the Suez Canal and build bridgeheads 12-15 kilometers deep from the eastern bank of the canal. Sadat believed that achieving this military goal would be sufficient to "stir up" the stalemate in the region after the 1967 defeat and push the concerned parties to launch negotiations for a political solution.
The “limitedness” of the Egyptian offensive on October 6 stemmed from two major operational problems that were organically linked to the existing military balance of power at the time. The first problem was the superiority of the Israeli air force over its Egyptian counterpart, a fact that meant that it was impossible to provide air cover for a ground attack deep inside Sinai. The second problem was the superiority of the Israeli armored corps (2) and its offensive maneuvering capabilities over its Egyptian counterpart, which enabled it to launch large counterattacks and transfer them from one offensive sector to another quickly and flexibly (the terrifying scenario for the Egyptian planners was that Israel would be able to mobilize reserves and launch a large armored counterattack before the Egyptian army could build bridges over the canal and advance armored vehicles and heavy weapons to its eastern bank).
The solution to the first problem was to avoid direct confrontation with the Israeli Air Force as much as possible, and to limit the depth of the Egyptian attack east of the canal to a distance that the Egyptian air defense systems west of the canal could cover. The solution to the second problem was to provide the first waves of attacks that would cross the canal by boat with all possible anti-tank weapons and not waste time attacking the Bar Lev Line fortifications in favor of advancing and entrenching in the sites intended to build the five bridgeheads and confronting the small Israeli armored attacks and then the large counterattacks (in this sense, the Egyptian infantry division was organized to be able on its own to repel an Israeli armored division consisting of three brigades that included a total of 120-150 tanks, and the philosophy of the plan was to force the Israelis to attack head-on instead of attacking by encirclement, which was the tactic they were accustomed to defeating the Arabs).
When we talk about five reinforced infantry divisions, we are talking about more than 150,000 men with their light and medium weapons in addition to heavy weapons such as personnel carriers, armored vehicles, amphibious vehicles and artillery. Transporting this huge human crowd with its various equipment to the east of the canal in wartime conditions and across the most difficult water barriers in the world was a highly complex matter. At this particular juncture, the genius and determination of Lieutenant General Saad El-Din El-Shazly emerged, who, months before the war, wrote a book of several hundred pages entitled “Directive 41: The Infantry Division in Crossing a Water Barrier,” which is a comprehensive “catalog,” in which El-Shazly transformed the broad outlines of the offensive plan into very small and detailed tasks, through which the function of each member of the Egyptian armed forces during the war was defined with clear timings, starting from the commander of the field army down to the smallest recruit. It is not an exaggeration to say that the crossing operation would not have succeeded without this directive, which every Egyptian soldier absorbed as if it were part of his being, and that the directive contributed to raising the morale of the soldiers and their confidence to the sky because the soldiers were surprised that the course of the offensive operation they had undertaken was proceeding exactly and precisely as written in the directive (3) .
The Egyptian forces were able to cross the canal, remove the earthen embankment and destroy the Bar Lev Line fortifications within the time allotted to them and with losses much lower than expected. To complete the rosy picture of the achievement, Israel failed to mobilize reserves in time, which delayed its major counterattack until the morning of October 8 (the attack was carried out by three armored divisions: the 143rd Erich Division, the 162nd Bren Division and the 146th Kalman Division), when the Egyptian forces had completed building the bridgeheads on the eastern bank and were fully prepared to intercept the enemy’s armored vehicles with Sagger (Malyutka) anti-tank missiles, making that day the darkest day in the history of the Israeli military (4) . The balance remained in favor of the Egyptians until October 14, when Sadat intervened in military matters and made his disastrous and unilateral decision to develop the attack to the strategic straits line, disregarding the main principle of the plan, which was to ensure that Egyptian forces would not advance in the desert without air cover. The Egyptian loss that day was not limited to approximately 250 tanks, but the most serious loss was represented by the disruption of the Egyptian defensive structure east of the canal, which later made it easy for Sharon's forces to create a breach at Deversoir and encircle the Third Field Army in the southern sector, which would be the beginning of a series of Israeli extortions against Egypt, extortions that would continue for years and years after the war.
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For many years, a feeling of disdain and incomprehension governed my view of the October War. Today, I can say that this feeling was generated by four factors. The first is the inconclusive outcome of the war in the military sense (half defeat and half victory), an outcome that became decisive with the complete political defeat that the Camp David Accords later inflicted on Egypt. The second is the enormous exaggeration that the regimes in Syria and Egypt bestowed on the achievements of the two Arab armies during the battles and the mobilization of all possible propaganda arsenals to exploit the memory of the war to legitimize their policies internally and externally, including policies of concession and surrender (and as is the case in most stages of modern Arab history, the pathological tendency to highlight and exaggerate heroism, especially individual heroism, eliminated the possibility of reading the collective experience objectively and drawing lessons and morals from it). The third is the heavy influence of the cultural defeatist current on the thinking of successive Arab generations, an influence that entailed a tendency not to believe in the possibility of Israel being defeated by the Arabs and to belittle every Arab combat initiative against Israel. The fourth is the complete ignorance of military sciences and everything related to matters related to weapons, tactics and strategy.
Once these factors were put aside as a result of reading and research, a new picture of the war emerged before my eyes, and I became more able to understand what happened during it in a more objective manner, and to place the course of its events in contexts closer to truth and reality, and farther from canned and easy conclusions or those influenced by the whims of emotion or feelings of discouragement. After all this, I see that honesty requires saying that despite the field results that the battle ended with, the operation to cross the Suez Canal, remove the earthen barrier and destroy the Bar Lev Line fortifications was a unique military operation in which the spirit of will and determination was combined with high discipline and the use of reason, and that the Arab has the right to feel proud of the wonderful work of the officers and soldiers of the Egyptian army in it. Talking about the October War today, in light of the end of the era of classical wars and the bitter reality of Arab decline, seems like dusting off an old antique piece. But how can you revive the spirit of confrontation without dusting off all the old antiques in your history museum? Reviving memory against the forms of forgetfulness and ignorance is an act of confrontation and another way of saying that the availability of political will with sound scientific planning can achieve miracles and that removing Egypt from the equation of military conflict with Israel is against the logic of things and history and that hope will remain in the descendants of those who crossed the canal on this afternoon forty-seven years ago. ( 1) The Agranat Commission, which was formed in Israel to investigate the results of the Yom Kippur War, placed responsibility for the failure during the war - along with other officers - on Major General Eli Zeira, head of the Military Intelligence Directorate (Aman) for failing to predict the Egyptian-Syrian attack. Zeira left the military and intelligence establishment irrevocably and has harbored enormous resentment toward it ever since. After a bitter struggle with the military censors, Zeira published a book in the 1990s in which he defended himself and held the military and political leadership, represented by Moses Dayan and Golda Meir, responsible for the failure to predict the war and for Israel’s poor performance during it. Zeira is arguably Israel’s least popular general, and he has drawn the enmity of the military and security establishments for being the first to leak the true identity of the agent “the angel” Ashraf Marwan, even though Zeira was one of the few Israelis who argued that Marwan was a double agent and played a role in misleading Israel about the timing of the war.
(2) During the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, there was a constant debate within the Israeli military establishment about what kind of offensive striking force the IDF should rely on, and this debate was ultimately decided in favor of the armored supporters over the infantry supporters. The consequences of the drunkenness that followed the June 1967 war, in which Israel relied on the operational model known as the “Blitzkrieg,” were to deepen the Israeli belief in the tank as a striking force in war. General Israel Tal was the main designer of the Israeli armor doctrine and the greatest advocate of the tank and its role in the offensive. In the late 1970s, Tal developed the project to build the “Merkava” tank, which would become the first battle tank in the Israeli army.
(3) The Egyptians fought Israel in 1973 based on Soviet military doctrine. After the outbreak of the Great Socialist Revolution in Russia in 1917 and the outbreak of the civil war, the political and military leadership of the Red Army engaged in discussions about the nature of the Soviet war doctrine in light of the challenges imposed by the counter-revolutionary forces at that time. From those old discussions, the Soviet doctrine began to crystallize, which considered military affairs a technical branch of knowledge and that approaching war in its first offensive phase required very detailed planning for every step and tactic, defining the tasks of every military individual, and finding a scientific solution to every expected tactical or operational problem. Directive 41 can be considered a practical example of this doctrine, as the reader of its pages will feel bored by the enormous amount of detail it contains and by the detailed way in which large operational tasks were divided into small steps and tasks. When Field Marshal Saad El Shazly moved to the eastern bank of the canal on October 8, the joyful soldiers embraced him madly, chanting: Long live Directive 41.
(4) The October War was the first confrontation in modern military history in which Soviet anti-tank weapons were used on a large and intensive scale. Soviet technical creativity combined with Egyptian skill was evident in the performance of the Malyutka crews on the Sinai front in particular. The Israeli armored crews who began their counterattacks immediately after the Egyptian attack began thought they were going on a journey similar to the one that took place in 1967, but they were surprised by a dense forest of Malyutka missiles facing them, forcing them to flee from their burning tanks or be captured. To understand the qualitative role played by anti-tank weapons in the war, it is sufficient to mention that about half of the Israeli army's dead and wounded during it were from the armored corps.
