The War of Atonement by Chaim Herzog

Author:Chaim Herzog
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / General
Publisher: Frontline Books
Published: 2018-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

11

The Onslaught (South)

On 15 July 1973 Maj.-Gen. Shmuel Gonen was appointed GOC Southern Command, replacing Maj.-Gen. Ariel Sharon who had retired from the army to go into farming and politics. A tough, abrasive sabra, born in Jerusalem, he had spent the early years of his life in an ultra-orthodox theological seminary, a yeshiva. In the Six Day War he commanded the 7th Brigade in a series of battles across the Sinai Desert, which marked him out as one of the outstanding commanders in the Israeli forces. Wounded several times, an avid marksman with a large collection of weapons of war, he was known as a strict disciplinarian who could behave at times in an impossible manner towards his officers and yet who inspired in his men a confidence which led them to follow him in battle. ‘Gorodisch’, as he continued to be known in the army by his original name, was regarded with a mixture of respect and dislike. He was a stickler for the little matters that make up discipline and went out of his way to combat the negligence that had begun to affect the Israel Defence Forces. He had had many close brushes with death and was known to be fearless under fire.

Southern Command was responsible for the whole of the southern part of Israel – the Negev and Sinai. The Negev is in the main a sandy desert with a number of areas of settlement, particularly around Beersheba and at the port of Eilat on the Red Sea. The Sinai Peninsula – some 37,200 square miles in extent – is a large triangular wedge between the Gulf of Akaba in the east and the Gulf of Suez in the west, bridging the continents of Africa and Asia on the one hand and the Mediterranean and the Red Sea on the other. It is divided into three distinct regions: in the north the sandy coastal Mediterranean plateau with its low hills and deep not always passable sand dunes (some of them 75–100 feet high) dotted here and there with brackish wells and oases; the centre – a gaunt and formidable largely limestone escarpment known as the E-Tih Desert, and finally the spectacular southern Sinai with its deep wadis and high pinnacles.

The north-western side of the triangle is bordered by the Suez Canal for a distance of 110 miles. The Canal itself (180–240 yards wide, 50–60 feet deep) constitutes what Gen. Dayan described as ‘one of the best anti-tank ditches available’. The east bank is a wind-swept desert, while the west bank, along which a sweet-water canal runs, has a cultivated belt running parallel to it. The banks are steep and concrete-reinforced, the highest level of the water being 6 feet below the bank. Earth and soil (removed both by the digging of the Canal and by dredging operations) was concentrated along the east bank in the form of a dyke some 18–30 feet high (Israeli engineers had raised this rampart at the critical areas to a height of 75 feet.

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