Egypt's Two-Week Military Myth
MARSHALL, S.L.A.
AFTER THE CEASE-FIRE—2 Egypt's Two-Week Military Myth BY S.L.A. Marshall Awire-service story from Jerusalem explaining the breakdown of the October 22 Mideast cease-fire stated that the situation...
...This time the expenditure has been prodigal, and though replenishment from the U.S...
...Indeed, profusion more than accuracy accounted for the toll...
...Furthermore, the military problems inherent in holding on to the portions of the west bank that it has carved out are themselves formidable...
...That analysis reflected a not uncommon ignorance of history...
...The annihilation took place at sundown...
...The nation has always calculated that it would have to close out a war in three weeks or less, and stores are stockpiled to that measure...
...Despite its unexpected beginning, the war ran a predictable course...
...It was not plane-against-plane or tank-against-tank fire that cost Israeli forces so dearly, but the sam-2s, -3s and -6s...
...bristling with stout farm houses, outbuildings and walls...
...Marshall, Brigadier General, U.S.A...
...Their plight was due in part to a collapse of morale following heavy combat losses, but more to miserably faulty generalship...
...In addition, Israel's Army must by now be coping with a shortage of supplies, especially ammunition of all kinds...
...No rallying call is likely to work once such a situation develops, and the Israeli High Command must have read the signs: The enemy no longer stood in order of battle...
...Moreover, at best it would have left Israel's forces standing on the same outguard line as before, the ground elements and the Air Force badly battered, holding no stronger cards for the inevitable political aftermath to justify the cost...
...Once the fortifications of the Bar-Lev Line were riven and out-flanked...
...is the author of Sinai Victory and Swift Sword...
...By the third Saturday, the situation had reached the stage where it became self-evident both sides would shortly accept a truce, provided the two superpowers could agree upon a formula...
...Shazli's eventual strike was too late and too perfunctory...
...If they met, the enclosed salient would bite off a large enough slice of Egypt and lessen the concern over exposed flanks...
...The survival of both task forces depended on Israeli command of the air above...
...This marked the one great advance on the Arab side...
...To begin with, the Arab armies were on the brink of another total defeat, which the Soviet Union had to try to avert...
...The canal itself and the ridges to the east provided only partial protection against outflanking movements, and neither they nor the troops positioned on the shoulders of the salient would have been much help if Shazli's Army was still morally fit to fight...
...The missile capable of taking out such targets is not to be found in Israel's arsenal or our own...
...Yet he kept his supply bases on the west bank, a telltale sign that he lacked confidence in his troops' mobility...
...Under his hand, Egypt's Army was torpid, confused and easily demoralized, though its operations were not so reported until after the first week...
...either the Egyptian commanders did not know how to employ armor or their troops were not equal to the task...
...The other swung across the top of the Gulf of Suez, which the Egyptians had left virtually undefended...
...It was merely a means to save Egypt's Army from an imminent rout...
...and most important in this instance, the supply was far, far ahead...
...The intensity of these concentrations, their seeming aimlessness and their failure to strike outward for sensitive points was so altogether unmilitary as to suggest that the Egyptians were becoming semiparalyzed by fear...
...Moscow does not want peace, or anything resembling a quieting arrangement, in the Middle East...
...The great bulk of re-supply was dropped in parachute bundles from carriers while fighter planes drove off interference...
...whereas they were really marking time in a state of hapless dejection...
...The Egyptian failure to advance quickly allowed Israeli guns and some of the tanks to withdraw to a secondary position a few miles to the east...
...and so on...
...ret...
...Double envelopment— one spearhead moving via the coastal road through Mazar, the other via the Mitla Pass—would have been the more orthodox, conventional way of trying for the knockout...
...Thus the delay before the ceasefire took hold on October 24 should have occasioned no more surprise than the outcome of the clash on the battlefield...
...its goal there is simply to extend its influence...
...He needed only to strike immediately against Israel's supporting artillery and one brigade of tanks—both within easy grasp of his armor—and then rush his mobile columns pell-mell for the Mitla and Gide passes, while throwing a third block against the highway from Bir Gifgafa...
...a guided AT rocket similar to the American TOW...
...The second beachhead had open water on its rear and a rugged mountain range on its left flank...
...Shazli should have had the game in his hands...
...The penetration in the north was initially in the nature of an exploratory raid, to minimize losses in the event the operation became compromised...
...During the first week, possession of the Mazar-Bir Gifgafa-Mitla line shaped up as a determining factor for the course of the war...
...and occasionally cut by straight running lines of sand ridges...
...As thousands of Israeli troops poured onto the west bank, most correspondents—once again looking at the wrong thing—focused on how near the Israeli vanguard was to Cairo...
...One task force moved through the several-mile-wide gap separating the two main bodies of Shazli's Army and proceeded across the Great Bitter Lake to invade Egypt proper...
...more than 500 of its tanks were knocked out by the close of the second week...
...heading for the Mitla Pass and home...
...When the rout began he turned back toward Egypt, leading his men full tilt into a perfect ambush set by General Ariel Sharon's division, and they suffered the fate of a rabbit springing a wolf trap...
...For one thing, the terrain of the west bank in no way resembles the east bank...
...But it definitely would have been slower, possibly bloodier, and was manifestly the move the Egyptians were set to resist, if anything at all...
...The former is well-developed countryside—ribboned with canals, irrigation ditches, rail and service roads...
...Air control was aided by the destruction of some of the sam sites, accomplished manually with demolitions as troops moved up...
...Nonetheless, Shazli ought not be faulted too much: Troops that cannot read maps, sense directions, or understand orders intelligently are hopeless in war, unless they happen to be facing a force equally ignorant...
...The Israelis decided to seize the initiative by launching a two-pronged offensive...
...Occupying the high ground...
...then the Israeli buildup there would shortly dominate and threaten to destroy the Arab forces on the Suez lowlands...
...Overextension is the bane of generalship, the common cause of most great defeats...
...As in 1967...
...he was so benumbed that the most basic rules of security were being neglected...
...After the first 48 hours, when the Syrians failed to enter the Huleh Valley and the Egyptians remained stagnant along the east bank of the canal, it seemed clear enough that the armed conflict would be relatively brief—notwithstanding the alarms to the contrary from Israel's high command...
...If the Egyptians could not crack it...
...The Arabs' deployable depth in advanced AA and AT weapons was unexpected, and Israel paid an excessive price for its shortage of equivalent weapons...
...All of this affords excellent body cover for a conventional army shifting to furtive and harassing guerrilla-type operations...
...In any event, Shazli's Army stayed tightly bunched on the desert flat along the east bank of the canal, with three of its divisions in an immobile huddle in the north, not far from Ismailia, and the other two in the same posture farther to the south, but still not extending to the Gulf of Suez...
...But then they didn't have much to be inspired by either...
...During the same period of time he managed to concentrate about 70.000 men and 1,000 tanks on the low desert ground of the east bank...
...Since this was pretty thin stuff for the making of a new national hero, it followed naturally that the Shazli of 1973 proved to be a sadder, not wiser, copy of the 1967 model...
...There is literally no other way to do that well...
...Though Secretary of State Henry Kissinger may feel there is no choice but to dissemble that the relationships are otherwise and another peace is at hand if we but look hard enough, that is outright whistling in the dark...
...But it had as yet merely fenced with the Syrian units that had invaded the Huleh Valley, and the truce hung in suspension until the enemy was driven out of the Golan Heights...
...Israeli armor chewed up and drove back the Egyptian spearheads...
...For Israel's Army to have marched on Cairo would have been as foolhardy as to enter Damascus...
...True enough, when the 1967 cease-fire was accepted Israel had completed the mop-up of Egyptian forces along the east bank of Suez...
...There was no new lesson to be learned: The geography of the battle area spoke for itself...
...Instead, Shazli let his forces get bogged down in foreground detail the first two days, mopping up a resistant but already trapped and defeated infantry line...
...They were of a piece with one American correspondent's story out of Cairo relating how Egyptian troops were inspired by the past feats of its new chief of staff, General Shaad Shazli...
...After the salient on the east bank was sealed off with tanks and other heavy weapons, creating a corridor to the canal, additional units funneled through...
...While only two fighter-bombers had been downed in dog fights, the losses of planes to rocket and missile fire from the ground were bordering on calamity before materiel replacement began to arrive from the United States...
...Marshall Awire-service story from Jerusalem explaining the breakdown of the October 22 Mideast cease-fire stated that the situation was different from 1967, when both sides readily and immediately complied with the order to stop shooting, because then the winning army was standing on secure frontiers...
...Winning forces, though they may jeopardize international goodwill and other political objectives, simply cannot afford to honor a cease-fire until they have tidied up their tactical positions...
...is described as "massive," emergencies are not stemmed by words...
...The Israeli advance into the enemy "nutcracker" was by far the most daring military enterprise of the century...
...The Arab air arm had been outmatched on both fronts, and Egypt's troops resembled a herd of extras bunched together at the back of a Hollywood set...
...To that end it must use the Arabs, and thus it cannot stand idly by, appearing indifferent to another ruination of their military and the humbling of their pride...
...materiel of this kind dribbled in too late to be of much help...
...The latter is bleak, flat, unvegetated desert...
...In no conflict in this century have combat elements halted exactly in place the moment a truce was agreed upon...
...planted with palm and olive groves, tree clusters, hedges and gardens...
...If Soviet technology has not moved ahead of our own, it is certainly apace...
...That Shazli did ultimately attempt to take the passes, incidentally, clearly demonstrates that he was not being held in check by a limited plan that called only for clearing the Suez Zone of Israeli forces, holding it defensively, and awaiting action in the United Nations...
...field...
...The mistlike illusion of early victory seemed to have vanished as soon as it was blown upon, replaced by premonitions of final defeat...
...In the ensuing dark Shazli escaped in his command car...
...an improved hand-launched rocket of the RPG type...
...Finally, there can never be any certainty about how far the Soviet Union will go in forcing Israel off the west bank, as the events of late October demonstrated...
...The fact is that he brought his brigade right up to Israel's border and thereafter did nothing effective with it...
...When the Egyptians belatedly moved to counter the incursion at Suez City, Israel stopped its advance temporarily to fight back, obscuring its overall design—which was a linkup of the two spearheads on converging axes that did not point to Cairo...
...It was started by light forces—about 30 tanks and a few hundred men, including engineers to handle the bridging—but major reinforcements were moving up behind...
...Missiles came at Israeli vehicles in bunches, severely limiting attempts at evasion...
...Egypt had much more ambitious designs but could not achieve them—despite a numerical superiority in men and machines that should have enabled its Army to sweep Sinai clean...
...Accordingly, Soviet acquiescence to a cease-fire had no true global significance...
...According to the article, Shazli was the tough-minded, undersized warrior who harassed the Israeli Army from behind its own lines in Sinai during the Six Day War...
...Given that the Arabs enjoyed the advantage of full surprise, their crossing of the Suez was merely a creditable opening move that must have required long practice drills...
...Aside from the ability to use the new hardware, however, newspaper dispatches about the Arab armies' allegedly vast improvement since 1967 were pure bunkum, soon to ring as hollow as the chant shouted by Egyptian soldiers upon crossing Suez to the effect that Israelis could no longer fight...
...Furthermore, Israel's armor had been grievously hurt on the battleS.L.A...
...At the same time, the Israeli Army was dangerously overextended by the most superb risk-taking ventured in modern times, its one margin of safety being the evaporation of the enemy's will to fight...
...Under Soviet tutelage, the Egyptians in particular had become proficient in the employment of antiaircraft (AA) and antitank (AT) weapons individually operated from the ground...
...It was no different last month...
...The impetus toward more secure ground is always too compellingly urgent...
Vol. 56 • November 1973 • No. 22
