Battle of Latakia, 1973: the first missile boat battle

The battle lasted a single night, but it was the first test in combat of a new kind of war at sea, fought by small fast boats armed with guided missiles and defended by electronic deception.²

Background

In 1967, months after the Six-Day War, Egyptian missile boats off Port Said fired Soviet-made Styx missiles at the Israeli destroyer Eilat and sank her. Forty-seven of her crew were killed. The Styx was a radar-homing missile, and the sinking showed that a small missile boat could destroy a destroyer.³ › The Suez Crisis, 1956

The lesson was repeated in December 1971, when Indian missile boats armed with the same missile raided Karachi and sank a Pakistani destroyer. By then the Egyptian and Syrian navies had Soviet missile boats of their own.⁴

The Israeli Navy had answered with a weapon of its own design, the Gabriel, and with small boats to carry it. The Jewish Virtual Library describes the navy before this as a fifth-rate fleet of hand-me-downs. The boats were built in France, at Cherbourg: twelve were ordered, but after the war of 1967 President Charles de Gaulle imposed an arms embargo on Israel, and only seven had been delivered.⁵

The last five boats, already paid for, stayed in Cherbourg. Adm. Mordecai Limon, the head of Israel's arms purchasing mission in France, organized their departure behind a commercial cover. On Christmas Eve 1969 the five boats slipped out of the harbor. They were identified only as they passed Gibraltar, and they reached Haifa on the last day of the year.⁶

Armies and commanders

On paper the odds were poor. The Styx had about twice the range of the Gabriel, roughly 25 nautical miles against 12, so a Syrian boat could fire long before an Israeli boat could reply. The Gabriel had never been fired in anger, and the Israeli defenses against the Styx, chaff and electronic jammers developed in Israel, had never been tested in a real engagement. If they failed, the boats would be easy prey.⁷

The Syrian navy fielded Soviet-built missile boats of two types, the Osa and the Komar, both armed with the Styx. Against them the Israelis sent Sa'ar-class boats carrying Gabriels and guns. Their tactic, worked out in exercises before the war, was to charge the enemy head on, let him fire at maximum range, defeat his missiles with deception, and strike once within Gabriel range.⁸

Accounts differ on who commanded at sea. The Jewish Virtual Library names Michael Barkai as the officer in charge of the operation. Col. (res.) Udi Erel, then a young operations officer of the missile boat flotilla, told JNS that the flotilla commander was Micha Ram.⁹

The battle in phases

Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on the afternoon of 6 October 1973, the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur. That night the navy sent five missile boats north along the Syrian coast with orders to draw the Syrian navy into battle and destroy its missile boats.¹⁰ › The Yom Kippur War, 1973

The first contact was a Syrian torpedo boat. Its gunfire did little harm, and the Israelis sank it with their guns.¹¹

Heading toward the coast, the boats met a Syrian minesweeper, and the boat Reshef sank it with missiles. The Jewish Virtual Library describes a single Gabriel striking it squarely at about eighteen kilometers; John Schulte, in a study for the US Naval Postgraduate School, counts three Gabriel hits. The Israelis concluded that the torpedo boat and the minesweeper had been pickets or decoys.¹²

Off Latakia three more contacts appeared: one Osa and two Komar missile boats coming out to fight. They opened fire from a range at which the Israelis could not reply.¹³

Turning point

As the Styx missiles closed, the Israeli boats fired chaff rockets and switched on their jammers, which sent false radar signals to the incoming missiles. Every one of them missed: they flew harmlessly overhead or dove into the sea. Schulte, followed by the Center for International Maritime Security, counts eight Styx fired in this phase, all decoyed.¹⁴

Now the Israelis closed at full speed. They fired their Gabriels, and Schulte counts eleven launched in the whole battle, of which six hit. One Komar and the Osa were sunk. The second Komar was driven onto the shore. Abraham Rabinovich, the historian of the Israeli missile boats, writes that its commander beached it so that he and his crew could escape; Schulte records that it was later destroyed by gunfire.¹⁵

The Israelis came home without loss. Five Syrian vessels had been sunk or destroyed, and the first battle in history between missile-armed ships had gone to the side with the shorter-ranged missile.¹⁶

Aftermath

On the night of 8 October the same tactics were repeated off Baltim on the Egyptian coast: the Egyptian Osa boats fired their Styx missiles near maximum range and turned away, the Israelis pursued, and three Egyptian boats were sunk. When Israeli boats returned to Latakia a few nights later, the Syrian boats fired from behind merchant ships lying off the port.¹⁷

After these battles the Syrian and Egyptian navies kept close to their harbors. Not one Styx missile hit an Israeli vessel in the whole war, although the count of missiles fired varies: Schulte gives 47, with reports of as many as 55, the Center for International Maritime Security gives 52, and Rabinovich 54.¹⁸

The war itself was fought out on land and in the air. When the Soviet Union began to resupply Egypt and Syria, the United States opened an emergency supply line to Israel. The Center for International Maritime Security judges that the naval battles played almost no part in the outcome of the war, but that they began a technological and tactical revolution at sea.¹⁹

Legacy and memory

Latakia proved that missiles fired by small boats could be beaten by deception. The Jewish Virtual Library writes that even Arab navies later adopted the countermeasure techniques the Israelis used there, and the Center for International Maritime Security that chaff, jamming and radar-absorbing coatings became necessities for warships.²⁰

For the Israeli Navy the battle became a founding story. The Jewish Virtual Library sees it as the moment the navy proved itself at a time when even the air force and the armored corps could not, and JNS calls it a staple of the navy's heritage.²¹

History returned to the same harbor in December 2024. After the fall of the Assad regime, Israeli Navy missile boats destroyed 15 vessels of the former Syrian navy at the port of Latakia and the nearby bay of Minet el-Beida.²²