The Yom Kippur War, 1973: twenty days that shook the Middle East

Few wars are remembered so differently by the two sides. For Israelis it is the war of the surprise attack on the holiest day of the year, of the fallen strongpoints on the canal and of the failure of intelligence that a state inquiry later laid bare. For Egyptians it is the war of the crossing, when their army stormed the Israeli fortifications on the Suez Canal and, as a Library of Congress study puts it, the effect on the armed forces was as exhilarating as the defeat of 1967 had been debilitating. Both memories are true, and the war cannot be understood without both.²

Background: the road to war

In the Six-Day War of 1967 Israel had taken the Sinai from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria. For Israel the conquests meant strategic depth and, as George W. Gawrych of the U.S. Army's Combat Studies Institute writes, more defensible borders that made Israelis feel confident about their security. For Egypt and Syria they were occupied land that had to be recovered. A CIA analysis of 1975 notes that from 1967 on the Egyptians and Syrians were preparing constantly for a war to recoup lost territories and self-esteem.³

Diplomacy went nowhere. The State Department's Office of the Historian records that the American Rogers Plan of 1969, calling for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines, was rejected by Egypt, Israel and the Soviet Union alike, and that Israel opposed efforts to build on Anwar Sadat's offer of 1971 to reopen the Suez Canal if Israeli forces pulled back from its east bank. Britannica sums up the deadlock: Sadat offered a settlement if Israel returned the territories under UN Resolution 242, and Israel rejected those terms. In July 1972 Sadat expelled most of the Soviet military advisers from Egypt.⁴ › Suez Crisis, 1956

Sadat's aim was limited and political. Britannica describes the war as launched to persuade a chastened, if still undefeated, Israel to negotiate on terms more favorable to the Arabs. Gawrych shows Sadat telling his generals and Soviet advisers that land mattered less than wearing down the enemy, and that even ten centimeters east of Suez would draw the world's attention to the conflict. The CIA concluded that Syria, by contrast, wanted to liberate the Golan Heights in one stroke.⁵

Armies and commanders

Egypt was led by President Anwar Sadat, Syria by President Hafez al-Assad. Israel's government was headed by Prime Minister Golda Meir, with Moshe Dayan as defense minister and David Elazar as chief of the General Staff. William T. Walker gives Egypt 300,000 troops committed out of an army of 800,000, Syria 150,000 and Iraq 60,000, with smaller contingents from Jordan and other states, against about 415,000 Israelis after mobilization. The Arab armies had more tanks and aircraft; Israel, in Walker's judgment, had the better leadership and organization.⁶

The balance of quality had shifted too. Egypt had built a dense belt of Soviet surface-to-air missiles along the canal to shield its army from the Israeli air force, and its infantry carried large numbers of Soviet antitank missiles. The Israelis, the CIA judged, had changed little since 1967 and still expected tanks and aircraft to win quickly, an expectation that Gawrych calls the albatross of decisive victory.⁷

Surprise on the Day of Atonement

Israel did not believe war was coming. Egypt masked its preparations as a training exercise, and Israeli intelligence assumed that Egypt would not attack until it could match the Israeli air force. Walker writes that King Hussein of Jordan privately warned Golda Meir, but that Israeli leaders judged an attack unlikely during the holy days. Firm word that Egypt and Syria would attack that day reached Meir, Dayan and Elazar only in the early hours of 6 October. Elazar urged a preemptive strike; Meir and Dayan refused it, judging that Israel could afford to absorb the first blow.⁸

Shortly before 2 p.m. on 6 October, Egyptian and Syrian artillery and aircraft struck simultaneously along both ceasefire lines. In the Sinai the Israelis held the canal with a thin line of fortified strongpoints, the Bar-Lev Line, and some 290 tanks; the CIA reports that about half of them were out of action within 36 hours.⁹

The battle in phases

The crossing, 6 to 8 October. The Egyptian assault was prepared for years and carried out, in the CIA's phrase, deliberately, almost calmly. Infantry crossed in hundreds of small boats under a massive barrage, while engineers used high-pressure water pumps to cut gaps through the great sand wall on the Israeli bank, a solution they had perfected in training. By midnight, according to the Library of Congress country study, ten bridges and fifty ferries had carried 80,000 Egyptian troops across; Gawrych counts more than 100,000 men and 1,020 tanks on the east bank within the first days. Britannica notes that they suffered only a fraction of the casualties expected.¹⁰

Israeli armored brigades rushed toward the canal to relieve the strongpoints and ran into infantry armed with Sagger missiles and RPGs. Both Gawrych and the CIA describe the result as costly: tanks attacking without infantry were badly mauled, and on 8 October an armored battalion charged into an Egyptian ambush near the Firdan bridge and was almost destroyed, its commander captured. The Office of the Historian notes that after this failed counterattack Israel asked the United States for arms.¹¹

At sea the war began with an Israeli success. On the first night, Israeli missile boats struck at the Syrian port of Latakia and sank five Syrian warships without loss, in what JNS describes as the first engagement in which both sides fired surface-to-surface missiles. The CIA counted eight Arab missile boats and several smaller craft sunk in the naval war, against no Israeli losses.¹²

The Golan, 6 to 14 October. On the Golan Heights the Syrians attacked along two axes with masses of armor, broke through between the Israeli strongpoints and, by the CIA's reckoning, penetrated up to about 25 kilometers in the central sector. The small Israeli armored forces there held on, badly damaged, until reserves arrived. By 10 October the Israelis had pushed the Syrians back to the 1967 line, and they then drove along the road from Quneitra toward Damascus. Walker writes that by 14 October Israeli heavy artillery was shelling the outskirts of Damascus. Iraqi and Jordanian forces came to Syria's aid, and their counterattacks, with the Syrians', brought the Israeli advance to a halt.¹³

The Egyptian offensive, 14 October. Sadat had held his armies under their missile umbrella, but Syria was now in trouble. Gawrych describes Assad's envoy arriving in Cairo on 11 October to plead for an attack that would draw Israeli pressure away from the Golan, and Sadat ordering it over the objections of his own commanders. On 14 October Egyptian armored brigades attacked toward the Sinai passes, outside their air defense, and were thrown back with heavy losses. The Library of Congress study calls it the largest tank battle since World War II, and Gawrych calls the attack an unmitigated disaster, as many senior Egyptian officers had expected.¹⁴

Turning point: the crossing into Africa

On the night of 15 to 16 October Israeli forces under General Ariel Sharon crossed the canal at its junction with the Great Bitter Lake, through a gap between the two Egyptian armies, into Egypt proper, which Israeli soldiers called Africa. The crossing was slow and nearly failed. On the east bank, around an abandoned agricultural station the Israelis called the Chinese Farm, both sides fought some of the fiercest tank battles on record to keep the corridor open or to close it. Gawrych quotes Sharon describing Egyptian and Israeli dead lying side by side beside their burned-out tanks.¹⁵

Once across in strength, Israeli divisions drove north toward Ismailia and south toward Suez, destroying the missile sites that had protected the Egyptian armies. Stubborn Egyptian defense saved Ismailia and the city of Suez from capture, but by the end the Egyptian Third Army on the east bank had been cut off. The fighting did not stop when the UN called for a ceasefire on 22 October. The CIA notes that the Israelis claimed Egyptian violations as they pressed on, and that Egyptian Third Army units tried several times to break out; the Office of the Historian records that Israel still refused to stop after a second resolution the next day.¹⁶

Airlifts and a nuclear alert

The war quickly drew in the superpowers. The Soviet Union resupplied Egypt and Syria, and the United States answered with an airlift to Israel, Operation Nickel Grass, launched on 13 October; the first American planes carrying weapons reached Israel on 14 October. Arab oil producers retaliated with an embargo on the United States and other countries that supported Israel, which, Britannica notes, quadrupled oil prices and caused the first global energy crisis.¹⁷

On 22 October the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 338, calling for a ceasefire and peace talks, but the fighting went on. On 24 October the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev proposed that American and Soviet troops go to Egypt together to enforce the ceasefire, and warned that the Soviets might act alone. The United States raised the alert level of its forces worldwide. The Office of the Historian judges that the crisis brought the two powers closer to nuclear confrontation than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis. Under that pressure the fighting stopped by 26 October.¹⁸

The cost

The figures depend on the source. George Gawrych counts more than 2,800 Israelis killed, at least 7,500 wounded and some 500 taken prisoner; William Walker gives more than 2,600 Israeli dead. For the Arab side Walker counts about 8,500 killed, and the Library of Congress study puts Egypt's dead alone at about 8,000, with more than 200 aircraft and 1,100 tanks lost. The CIA found twice as many Arab tank hulks as Israeli ones on the battlefields.¹⁹

Aftermath

In Israel the victory felt like a defeat. Israel's lack of readiness, Britannica writes, stunned the nation, and Gawrych describes a public demand to know what had gone wrong that led to a state commission of inquiry, the Agranat Commission, in November 1973. Under growing protest Golda Meir resigned in April 1974, and Moshe Dayan left the defense ministry with her.²⁰

In Egypt the war was received very differently. The Library of Congress study notes that although Egypt had not recovered Sinai, the crossing had a powerful positive effect on its armed forces and let it negotiate from strength. Walker writes that Egypt gained new respect from the performance of its army in the first days, and the CIA concluded that Egypt's real victory lay in crossing the canal and holding ground, enough to alter the Middle East equation. Militarily, the CIA added, the war ended on an inconclusive note: the Egyptian armies were in a bad position but had not been destroyed.²¹

Legacy and memory

The war opened the door to peace. Disengagement agreements with Egypt on 18 January 1974 and with Syria on 31 May 1974 separated the armies under UN supervision. Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy, the Office of the Historian notes, led step by step to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979. In November 1977 Sadat became the first Arab leader to visit Israel, and at Camp David in 1978 he and Menachem Begin reached agreement with President Jimmy Carter. Under the treaty signed on 26 March 1979 Israel returned the whole of the Sinai to Egypt.²²

Sadat paid for it with his life. Peace with Israel was bitterly opposed at home, and on 6 October 1981, the eighth anniversary of the crossing, he was assassinated by a group of military officers belonging to the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. In Israel the war remains a lesson in what overconfidence costs, the albatross of decisive victory in Gawrych's phrase; in Egypt, 6 October remains the day the army crossed the canal.²³ › 6 October in military history