1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (69 page)

On paper, the Egyptian air force mustered about sixty-five fighter aircraft and a dozen bombers, but many were not serviceable, due to a lack of parts and ground and aircrews. The IAF had about two dozen fighters and more than a dozen bombers, as well as several dozen converted civilian aircraft for light bombing and reconnaissance missions.

Operation Horev, Rafiih and Sinai, 22 December 1948-7 January 1949

Rain caused the cancellation of many of the planned air raids and severely hampered the ground assault by Golani's Thirteenth Battalion, which at midnight took Hill 86, overlooking the main Rafah-Gaza road and railway line. Golani units raided other Gaza Strip positions, principally at Abasan. The aim was to confuse the Egyptians and rivet their attention to the Gaza Strip, where they had long feared a cut-off of their forward units.23

The main effort, at Hill 86, was addled from the start. Although the infantrymen took the hill and dug in, the rain and accurate Egyptian shelling prevented a convoy of artillery from arriving during the night. At dawn the Egyptians mounted a series of counterattacks. They were resolute; continued Israeli occupation of the hilltop would have left the Egyptians around Gaza cut off from Rafah and El Arish.

But, from the Israeli perspective, Hill 86 and `Abasan were decoys. Horev was based, in conception, on the indirect approach and was far more ambitious. It aimed to trap the core of the Egyptian army, the two brigades strung out between El Arish and Gaza. Yigal Allon had no intention of ramming his head against the brick wall of Egyptian defenses. The main blow was to fall to the southwest, on the Bir Asluj -Auja al-Hafir line; Israel would threaten the Sinai Peninsula itself. If successful, the IDF was to swing northward from Auja to the Mediterranean coast, cutting off all the Egyptian units between El Arish and Gaza. Horev was to be supplemented by a separate effort against the Faluja Pocket.

The Egyptians sent wave after wave of infantry and armor up the slopes of Hill 86. One of their first casualties that dawn was Mohammed Neguib, OC of the Tenth Infantry Brigade Group (consisting of the Third and Fourth Brigades), effectively the deputy commander of the Egyptian expeditionary force. Neguib had led the counterattack. His tanks-equipped with "car batteries," as he tells it-stalled, and one was caught in an Israeli crossfire. "Feeling responsible ... I left my jeep and driver and the staff officer who was accompanying us and crawled five hundred yards under heavy fire in the hope of pulling [a] wounded [tank man] to safety. As I was lifting him out of the hatch, he was hit in the head and instantly killed by two machinegun bullets, two more of which hit me before I could take cover.... I lay on my back and unbuttoned my overcoat and blouse. Blood was bubbling out of a hole in my chest, and there was a burning pain in my side.... [Eventually aides reached me and] wanted to carry me, but I insisted on walking with my arms around their shoulders in order to conceal from the rest of my troops how badly wounded I really was. It is never good for the morale of soldiers to see their commander being carried off the battlefield." Though initially pronounced dead, Neguib recovered.24

The Egyptians then repeatedly assaulted the hilltop, with armor, flame throwers mounted on tracked vehicles, and infantry. Muslim Brotherhood volunteers played a key role.25 The Israelis had only a diminishing number of PIATs with which to fend off the armor. One armored vehicle crew was overcome with grenades and bayonets. The Egyptian flamethrower troops reportedly were chained to their places inside the vehicles.26 The pouring rain and mud caused the Israeli machine guns to jam, "and we lacked almost any functioning weapon.... Chaos reigned around us." In the end, the Israelis retreated helter-skelter "swept by machine gun and mortar fire."27 Hill 86 was back in Egyptian hands. Thirteen soldiers of Battalion 13 were dead, thirty-five wounded. The Egyptians also took a handful of Israelis prisoner.

But the assault on Hill 86 and the auxiliary raiding around Abasan, however costly to Golani, were a diversion well spent. The Egyptian command was certain that the IDF intended a frontal assault on the Gaza Strip28 and concentrated its forces accordingly. But the main IDF thrust-by the Eighth and Negev Brigades (the latter now mechanized and partly armored)-went in to the south, against the Bir Tamila and Auja al-Hafir positions, which guarded the southern entrance to the Sinai Peninsula (the 'Auja-Abu Ageila road). Because of rain and mud, which caused logistical problems, the attack got off to a late start (on the night of 25-26 instead of 24-25 December), and air cover was inadequate. But the Israelis nonetheless were successful. The thrust southward unfolded like a classic desert operation. It marked the high point of Allon's generalship. The brigades faced a virtually static enemy in a chain of hilltop fortifications: it was tank and half-track against trench works and antitank gun, movement versus immobility. Given the paucity of Egyptian artillery, the result was a forgone conclusion.

The Negev Brigade had been sent on its way by Ben-Gurion, who arrived at the Ninth Battalion's assembly area at Halutza after adventurously trudging through rain-filled wadis with Yigael Yadin for two hours when their jeep convoy stuck in the mud west of Beersheba.29 A small flying column of the battalion's troops, maintaining radio silence (they used carrier pigeons for communications), infiltrated south of the Egyptian lines and occupied two unoccupied positions at Mashrafa (the site of the Nabatean town of Shivta), midway between Bir Asluj and `Auja. Simultaneously, the bulk of the Ninth and Seventh battalions attacked and took, after a seesaw battle, the cluster of Egyptian positions at Bir Tamila, southwest of Bir Asluj. At one point in the battle, the "French Commando," many of them ex-Foreign Legionnaires and Moroccan Jews, retreated from one of the conquered positions under heavy Egyptian fire, leaving behind, under a railway bridge, a handful of wounded. When they retook the position a half-hour later, they found that all the wounded had been murdered, with their genitals mutilated and their penises stuck in their mouths. Some had been blinded with burning ciga rettes. The troops drew their knives and murdered a number of Egyptian POWs. Southern Front reacted by disbanding the French Commando.-30

Israeli blocking forces halted Egyptian efforts from Auja to aid the embattled companies at Mashrafa-Bir Tamila. By early morning 26 December, all the Bir Tamila positions had fallen. The road from Beersheba to the outskirts of Auja was in Israeli hands.

The way was now clear for the planned Eighth Brigade assault on Auja alHafir itself, the last remaining Egyptian position in the Negev, and to advance into Sinai. Auja was held by Egypt's First Infantry Battalion, reinforced by some border guard units, with a battery of 3.7-inch howitzers and mortars, in a number of hilltop positions around the oasis. The Eighth Brigade, with three battalions, attacked at dawn, z6 December. By noon the following day, after suffering serious losses (six LHI veterans of Battalion 89 were killed and two dozen wounded), the brigade had taken all the Auja positions. Harel's Fifth Battalion and other Eighth Brigade units, deployed as a blocking force on the Rafah-Auja road, beat back two determined Egyptian armored efforts to relieve Auja. The Egyptians lost five armored cars and a deputy battalion OC.31

The original planning had called for the Eighth Brigade, after taking Auja, to press forward into Sinai. But its losses and exhaustion precluded this. Instead, the Negev Brigade, which had advanced westward from Bir Tamila and linked up with the Eighth Brigade at 'Auja, crossed the international frontier at noon, 28 December. The brigade's task, as set by Allon, was to conquer the Abu Ageila crossroads, the key to the Peninsula, and then to raid (or conquer) El Arish to the north and Bir al-Hama to the west. Allon's instructions to the Negev and Eighth Brigades, regarding Abu Ageila and El Arish, were given without receiving the consent of the General Staff. Allon suspected that political impediments might stay Yadin's hand when it came to crossing the frontier or conquering El Arish and cutting off the Gaza Strip. Best that he be informed of Southern Front's actions after the event.

"[We] left behind us hundreds of Egyptian soldiers and officers, dispersed and straying among the hills, looking for the remnants of their units or ready to surrender. We paid them no attention and continued on our way," recalled the Ninth Battalion's deputy OC, Micha Peri.32 An Egyptian chronicler confirms that the retreat from the Bir Asluj-Auja al-Hafir line into Sinai was in fact a "rout," with the Jews shouting, "Forward, to Cairo!" in the wake of the fleeing Egyptians.33

In the push into Sinai, the Negev Brigade's two battalions, the Seventh and Ninth, were accompanied by the Eighth Brigade's Eighty-second armored battalion and artillery units. The units, on trucks, armored cars, jeeps, and half-tracks, with a company of tanks, "sang" as they drove into Egypt. "We were suffused with a sense of Jewish power bursting into Egypt, after a long period of the Egyptian invaders' presence on our soil," recalled one Israeli soldier.34 An Egyptian chronicler relates that a bedouin who witnessed the IDF entry into Sinai related that "as they crossed the border, the Jews halted their vehicles and got down to kiss the Egyptian soil. Many of the Jewish troops cried for joy and hugged one another."35

Both Ben-Gurion and Yadin seem to have been otherwise preoccupied during the crossing into Egypt; Yadin was in bed with the flu, and BenGurion was busy finding accommodation for the newly arrived Soviet representatives to Israel, raising money in the United States, and directing the secret peace talks (see below) with the Jordanians. There is barely a word about the conquest of 'Auja and the advance on Abu Ageila in his diary entries for 27, 28, and 29 December36 (though at Cabinet meetings, biblical as always, Ben-Gurion told his ministers: "There are those who say that the children of Israel there [that is, at Abu Ageila] made the golden calf [egel]."37 Strangely-as with the push into Lebanon in Operation Hiram two months earlier-the Israeli leadership seems initially simply to have ignored the possible political implications and consequences of the cross-border campaign. Perhaps the lack of international reaction in Hiram lowered their guard during Horev.

Just short of Abu Ageila the units were strafed by Israeli aircraft and then shelled by Egyptian antitank gunners. At 4:25 PM Yadin cabled Allon: "[You] are to refrain from advancing to Abu Ageila until you see me. If [your forces] have already moved, you are to carry out a raid only. "38 But Allon was keenly aware of the need for speed in the face of the crumbling Egyptian morale and defenses and possible international intervention. He responded: "The push on Abu Ageila cannot be stopped. After we take the place-we will be free to leave it, if that is what is decided." Allon declined to fly to Tel Aviv to discuss the matter (as Yadin had requested).39 Meanwhile, he hastily organized the assault on the battalion-sized complex of fortifications at Umm Katef-Abu Ageila. Just after midnight 28 -29 December the positions fell to Seventh Battalion assault. Palestinian prisoners held by the Egyptians at a nearby detention center were set free. But hundreds of Egyptians gave themselves up, preferring Israeli imprisonment to wandering in the desert without food or water.40

Abu Ageila was not Allon's real objective, though. He was after bigger game: El Arish. Its fall would close the trap on the bulk of the Egyptian army, in the Gaza Strip, and, no doubt, augur that army's collapse-and Allon wasn't going to allow diplomats or Yadin to stop him. Allon sent his deputy, Yitzhak Rabin, to tell Yadin that what was happening at Abu Ageila was a "raid." Rabin did not mention El Arish. As he later phrased it in his memoirs: "I had neglected to specify our entire plan and confined myself to the capture of Abu Ageila. I had reason to believe that if I were to reveal the whole plan, including the capture of El 'Arish, the General Staff might suspect we had gone mad. "I I

Just after dawn, z9 December, the Eighty-second and Ninth battalions pushed northward on the road to El Arish. That afternoon they took the "last stop" before El Arish, Bir Lahfan. A battalion OC was captured, the highest-ranking Egyptian officer to fall into Israeli hands. But most of the Egyptians fled into the desert. "The many shoes scattered by the roadsides testified to crumbling [Egyptian] companies and platoons that had turned into human dust," wrote one Eighth Brigade chronicler.42 Allon cabled Yadin, hours after the fact: "Our forces are moving on a raid on El 'Arish. We have taken [Bir Lahfan] airfield [twelve miles south of El Arish]." He asked HQ to send pilots to fly out four captured Egyptian aircraft .4-3 Meanwhile, he ordered the Eighty-second Battalion to press on. It encountered an antitank position and took it. The Egyptians fled. By evening, the Eighty-second and elements of the Negev Brigade were about six miles short of El 'Arish. With their airfields in eastern Sinai either lost or on the verge of capture, the Egyptians flew out their remaining planes to the Suez Canal area-leaving the expeditionary force completely without air cover.

Meanwhile, the Seventh and Tenth battalions mounted deep penetration raids into the heart of Sinai, against army camps in Bir al-Hassne and Bir alHama. The first raid netted more than two hundred prisoners.