The Yom Kippur War by Abraham Rabinovich

Author:Abraham Rabinovich
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307429650
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Twenty-four

GOLAN COUNTERATTACK

THE SYRIAN DIVISIONS OCCUPYING A BULGE in the heart of the Golan Monday morning were ideally placed to punch a hole through the thin Israeli cordon around them wherever they chose to concentrate their forces. But the momentum had gone out of the Syrian attack. They had failed to push for the Jordan River Saturday night when only a handful of tanks stood in their way, and they had failed to crack the hastily formed Israeli line on Sunday when the odds were still overwhelmingly in their favor. Those odds would narrow today when Moussa Peled’s division joined the battle.

A quiet night on Sunday had given the Israeli reserve units their first opportunity to organize. Tanks which had been thrown randomly into the battle in desperate bids to plug holes rejoined their organic units, casualties were replaced, and damaged tanks repaired.

Moussa Peled’s division began climbing the heights before first light. It consisted of a single tank brigade commanded by Col. Yossi Peled (no relation), a reconnaissance battalion, and a brigade of infantry in half-tracks. Northern Command doubled the division’s tank strength by attaching to it the brigades of Ben-Porat and Hadar already on the southern heights—each a mixture of Centurions and old Shermans.

On Sunday, while the division was making its way northward from the center of the country, Yossi Peled had driven ahead in a jeep to view the fighting zone. He was afraid the war would be over before he could get to it. This feeling abated when he reached Kibbutz Ein Gev on the eastern shore of Lake Kinneret and saw antitank guns being set up on its perimeter. When his jeep turned up the Gamla Ascent, he was fired on from the heights by Syrian tanks at the edge of the escarpment. A survivor of the Holocaust as a boy in Belgium, the colonel found himself thinking existential thoughts he had believed long behind him.

On Monday morning, when his brigade reached El Al, he was briefed by Colonel Ben-Porat, whose tanks had resumed fighting at first light. Despite the Shermans’ age and their penetrability, their upgraded guns were getting the better of the Soviet-made tanks opposite. Colonel Peled’s brigade passed through Ben-Porat’s formation and began driving the Syrians northward.

The Israelis trapped in the bunker atop Tel Saki deduced from the sound of Syrian tanks pulling back that a counterattack had begun. At noon, an artillery barrage hit the tel and the men heard the voices of two Syrian soldiers who had taken shelter in the outer room. A moment later a grenade exploded in the bunker. Virtually everybody was peppered with shrapnel again but no one made a sound. The Syrians chose not to enter. An hour later the scene was repeated by other Syrian soldiers sheltering from another barrage. This time, two grenades were thrown into the room, but again the Syrians did not enter.

Shortly afterwards, the men heard footsteps, then a cry in Hebrew: “Is anyone alive?” At the response from the bunker, two officers entered.

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