JERUSALEM—The Israel Defense Forces has released recordings of conversations in the operations room of the air force as it attempted to help the army cope with a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria that caught Israel with its reserves—two-thirds of the army’s strength—unmobilized.
The voices on the tapes carry the urgency of those first 24 hours of the Yom Kippur War when some of Israel’s leaders feared that the destruction of the state might be imminent.
The release comes ahead of next month’s 40th anniversary of the conflict.
Israeli chief of staff Gen. David Elazar is heard telling the air force commander, Gen. Benny Peled, that the situation on the Golan Heights was deteriorating. "You have to help them," Elazar said. "The situation is not good."
Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, a hero of Israel’s past wars, is quoted by Gen. Peled as saying that the Third Temple is in danger. The Babylonians destroyed the First Temple in Jerusalem in the Sixth Century B.C. The Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 A.D. The Third Temple is a metaphor for the modern state of Israel.
"In the opinion of the defense minister," says Peled, "we are headed for destruction of the Third Temple. I don’t accept that."
Addressing his senior staff, Peled called for a major effort to destroy the pontoon bridges the Egyptians put up on the Suez Canal to bring across their tanks and supplies.
"In order to alleviate the guys’ pessimism we have to destroy all the bridges over the canal," Peled said.
"At all costs. Is that clear? This is critical. If we can announce that there are no bridges on the canal that will cheer them up a little and they will be prepared for a counterstrike. It will cost us a few planes but it must be done. You hear me? I’m leaving you now. Get it done."
The air force succeeded in knocking out a number of bridges but the cost in planes proved too high to sustain.
Gen. Elazar, the chief of staff, can be heard telling Peled that the commander of the Syrian front was very pessimistic: "I told him the air force is going to go in and wrap things up. In short, mates, we are now in the holding stage and are thirsty [for help]."
The air force, which had won the Six Day War in 1967 virtually single handedly by destroying the air forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in a couple of days, was viewed by the defense establishment as the ultimate backup if anything went wrong on the ground.
However, the Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles (SAM) destroyed the Israeli planes if they ventured over the battlefield. Israel lost 102 planes, mostly to missiles.
The recordings released do not include a heated exchange between Peled and his staff in which the air force commander announced that the plan to attack the Egyptian anti-aircraft missiles was being called off. A senior officer would subsequently say that he had almost engaged Peled in a fistfight over the order.
Dayan had visited the Golan command headquarters and was so appalled by the situation that he had himself patched through to Peled and told him to divert the entire air force from the Egyptian front to the Syrian front.
As a result of this pressure, the attack was carried out without basic preparation, including air photos. Most of the attacking planes were shot down and only one battery was destroyed. For most of the war, the air force was unable to provide close ground support for the army, although in dogfights away from the SAM-protected battlefields it shot down 277 planes to a loss of six Israeli planes.
Despite the serious setbacks it suffered in the first days, the Israeli army regained its feet and ended the war within artillery range of Damascus and 60 miles from Cairo. The price it paid was some 2,600 dead, a total three times higher, per capita, in 19 days than the losses suffered by the United States in Vietnam in a decade.