Failure on both sides
Allan Mallinson
THE WAR OF ATONEMENT: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE YOM KIPPUR WAR, 1973 by Chaim Herzog Greenhill, £18.99, pp. 320 Chaim Herzog, who died last year, belonged to that increasingly rare species, the politician who can think less meanly of himself for having been a soldier. He had the immense good fortune to learn his mili- tary trade (in the second world war) with that quintessentially British regiment, the Black Watch, whose officers have always been as homicidal in battle as they are hos- pitable in camp. A barrister by profession, he joined the embryonic Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in 1947, rising to the rank of major-general before retiring to a political and diplomatic career that took him to the presidency in 1983.
This account of the Yom Kippur war was first published in 1975 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson and has been reissued, with a foreword by Herzog's son — also a soldier — without revisions. Some will say that this is an opportunity missed, for much material has come to light since, especially in the memoirs of Israeli defence minister Gener- al Moshe Dayan, and the Egyptian chief- of-staff General Saad-A-Din Shazali, as well as those of presidents Meier and Sadat. However, these politicians and soldiers were to a large extent apologists for the strategies that led to failure on both sides, and Herzog's account was (and therefore remains) a relatively impartial look at the war before the sand-drifts of self-justification could take the nasty, sharp edges off the battlefield.
It is perhaps not surprising, since Herzog's final appointment before retiring from the IDF was director of military intel- ligence, that his greatest strictures were on the failure to handle intelligence. This week, 25 years ago, in the light of Syrian and Egyptian troop movements (especially the engineering activity along the Suez Canal), the Israeli general staff were work- ing on Dayan's new directive to prepare for war. Yet when the attacks finally came, over three months later on 6 October, the IDF reserves — crucial to the national defence concept — had not been mobilised, and the country was at prayer.
The book has been a primer for two decades in many staff colleges. The Indian army, especially, prize it for its exposition of the conduct of territorial defence. The war itself was studied carefully in Nato: the combined Arab forces that attacked on 6 October were roughly equivalent in number to Nato's European forces, and were Soviet-equipped. It was of particular interest to the British, and by one of those curious quirks of history the army had an officer uniquely placed to analyse, and then to implement, the lessons. Field-Marshal Sir Nigel Bagnall, chief of the general staff 1985-88, was a brigadier, at the time completing a fellow- ship at Balliol on the fighting quality of the Israeli army. In subsequent appointments, principally as commander of the 1st British Corps in BAOR, he single-mindedly changed the army's notions of armoured warfare, and, indeed, its whole approach to operational doctrine. Arguably, without this the army would have had neither the equipment nor the expertise to fight in the Gulf war.
Perhaps, however, the book's power today lies in its description of the physical and emotional intensity of armoured war- fare. Consider this, of the heroic battle by the Israeli 7th Brigade, who had been fight- ing without rest for three days on the Golan Heights:
The Syrians continued desperately and with great determination to push on, fighting against . . . Israeli tanks holding on grimly at ranges of 250-500 yards . . . the heat of the flames from burning tanks could be felt on all sides; the smell of gunpowder and burning cordite pervaded the atmosphere. The 7th Brigade, attacked on all sides, was now fight- ing on a radius of 360 degrees. At this point in battle, control and identification became impossible. Every tank and every small unit fought its own private war: Israeli tanks became mixed up and found themselves in the midst of a bunch of Syrian tanks; Syrian tanks lost their way in Israeli positions. The artillery of both sides pounded this night- mare of a battlefield as the Syrians fought desperately to achieve the breakthrough. The Israelis were by now fighting instinctively and barely consciously, realising only in their sub- conscious the significance of what they were doing.
One wonders what today's advocates of women in the front line of the British army would make of this. The IDF, then and now, have no doubts: women did not, and do not, fight in tanks or the infantry, for the emotional and physical intensity of such combat has not diminished. Ignoring this unpalatable truth does an army's fight- ing power great disservice, and it was the moral component of fighting power, above all else, that saved the Israelis in the Yom Kippur war.
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