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Nixon was confronted with the news, listened to the options, then asked whether an airlift would work. He was told the details about the Azores, and the flight path, and about the C5, its range, etc, and ordered it to go ahead. “To what limit?” “You will send everything that will fly.” Nothing wishy-washy about that. And he was supposedly hungover and unshaved. I don’t accept that he was an antisemite though. FDR may have been — during WWII he was meeting with, hmm, I think it was a group of armed services chaplains, and told the highest-ranking rabbi and highest-ranking priest that “The US is a Protestant nation. Roman Catholics and Jews are here by suffrance.” Yeah, that explains that huge Jewish cemetery that was dedicated in Newport, RI in 1677. OTOH, Truman, who probably said more stupid, bigoted, profane, and unbecoming things than any other President, ordered US recognition of the restored nation of Israel (the USSR actually beat the US by ten minutes) and made sure they received a great many things they needed in their first crises. There was actually an odd collaboration between the US and USSR (and Czechoslovakia?) to help create the IAF.

:^) Sharon operated in the Sinai. He and the command didn’t see eye to eye, but Sharon was fighting at the front and had powerful friends who, uh, had his rear. The most famous photo of him, probably of anyone or anything in the 1973 war, was him with the bandage wrapped around his head wound, as I recall in the hatch of his tank. As we would say today, it went viral. It wasn’t just showbiz, he’d really been seriously wounded, but he went back to the battle, because like every Israeli (including a couple that arrived in Nepal for their honeymoon, saw the news story upon their arrival, and immediately booked a flight back home), he knew this was a battle for existence. He wanted the cross-canal counterattack, and wanted to lead it, but didn’t get to do that (if memory serves). The Israelis had actually built a heavily-armored pontoon bridge for just such a contingency, and stashed it on top of a hill overlooking the canal, with a roadway right down to the water’s edge. A modified tank was used to push it down and deploy it; it was stiff enough to make the crossing as straight as a spear. Cutting one or more of the Egyptian pontoons to cut off supplies and reinforcements (and avenue of retreat) began the strategy; more forces were becoming available for the Sinai front, and that allowed for a more formidable attack on the Egyptian expeditionary forces.

This isn’t the famous shot, but it shows him with the bandage. That’s a fine group with him, btw:

http://www.thetower.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Web_F731017yg01.jpg

The Egyptians had used firefighting equipment, that’s probably what you meant. Sadat had bought high-pressure firefighting equipment designed for skyscrapers, despite the fact that the tallest building in Egypt in 1973 was probably still the Great Pyramid. And they bought a lot of it. The tactic used was to spray the hillsides behind and above the Bar Lev line bunkers, and the bunkers themselves. While the spray of water was coming in, the garrisons could do and see nothing, then the waterlogged hillsides gave away and buried them all. At the same time, the pontoon bridges (which had been observed by Israeli scouts, and the presence of those bridges were obviously diagnostic of a canal-crossing campaign; part of the intel failure) were assembled and deployed quickly, and the Egyptian forces swarmed across, rolling quickly to their maximum objectives for the most part, near the eastern edges of the SAM umbrella, I think it was about 10 km penetration. All of that was beautifully coordinated and executed, particularly considering it was the Egyptian army.

The fears about breakouts and breakthroughs in Israel mostly pertained to the northern front, against Syria, not merely because of the proximity — the above article notes how far Syrian forces penetrated. Had they not been getting such a beating despite their massive numerical superiority, they might have pressed it and been over the Jordan River not long after nightfall. They didn’t get a second chance to do that; the thug dictator Assad had the two generals “responsible” for the defeat dragged dead through the streets of Damascus, I guess they started the dragging trip dead, not sure.

Kissinger was trying to simmer everything down, get a ceasefire in place, but the ****ing Soviets didn’t want it, and didn’t want Egypt to accept it, because they were also smart enough to figure out what Sadat was up to (plus, the idea that they didn’t have moles in Egyptian and for that matter US gov’t is ludicrous). Syria’s Assad had pushed everything into the middle of the table at the outset, and claimed to be the one, the only redeemer of Arab dignity (y’know, the dignity that leads Syrian Arabs to murder POWs), got within an nth of a breakout, then saw it all turn to crap as the Israel reservists flooded in, and, using both US-made armor and repurposed tanks captured and/or reconditioned from tanks lost by the Arabs in the 1967 war, comprehensively defeated then annihilated the Syrian tank armada. The 1973 tank battle between Syria and Israel probably remains the largest fought since WWII (I’m not sure it isn’t second overall, after only the Battle of the Kursk Salient). Of the 1400 or so tanks Syria used in attack, a bit more than 300 were not destroyed or captured (captured after abandonment by their crews).

The Israelis weren’t going to accept a ceasefire until they’d regained the Hermon (they’d lost their observation post up there), driven the Syrians back out of Golan, and smashed the Syrian capability so it couldn’t be used a second time. They were also keen to push the Egyptians back over the Canal, but the Sinai was always regarded as an ideal natural barrier to buy time on the southern frontier while attacks nearer to the Israeli population could be repulsed. As the Syrians were being turned, Assad changed his tune and started demanding (just short of begging) Egypt to basically get off its duff and push on. Assad couldn’t figure out why the Egyptian forces had stopped dead when they could have reoccupied the entire Sinai. Had the ceasefire been accepted at that point, a lot of spilled blood would have been saved. But Sadat couldn’t be seen accepting a ceasefire when Syria was teetering on the brink of utter defeat, so he went off plan, contrary to the advice of all his general staff, and ordered a full-force assault. Turns out, without the advantage of surprise, and without a willingness (or plan) to move those SAM batteries across the Canal, having a lot of tank-killer teams didn’t amount to much.

Kissinger was still trying 24-7 to bring about a ceasefire. After the Egyptian assault turned into a rout, and the Israelis crossed the Canal and started destroying the SAM batteries with ground forces, and pushed as far as Ismailia, Sadat was screaming to Kissinger to get Israel to back off. The Russians were threatening world war three (I’ll love when that hell-hole is a smoking ruin), and the Syrians were trying to move their SAM batteries and triple-A to protect Damascus as the IAF began to hit them where they ain’t. As the article notes, the dogfights were costly for Israel, but were also heavily in their favor. Same pertained to the dogfights on the southern front. When the Israelis had recovered the entire Golan and crushed Syria, they agreed.

I take issue with the article’s characterization of Dayan’s approach — pulling the entire IAF into the north was a must, and helped save Israel. The advantage of having an experienced battlefield commander is that decisive and dynamic flexibility. There was only one way to help the initially small ground forces against a tank attack of that magnitude, and it meant the probable loss of aircraft and crews. Peled comes across as a carper and griper — and the use of air power alone doesn’t conquer cities and win battles, that takes ground forces. It’s reminiscent of Chennault’s loony idea that, with enough planes, he would be “retaking Hangkou”. For that matter, had Hitler not peed his cowardly little britches and denied the go-ahead for the Wehrmacht to close the bag, the whole BEF would have been taken at Dunkirk — instead, Goering requested the honor, strafing and bombing with very little impact, the British troops escaped to fight again (in North Africa, for example), and the Germans couldn’t even dream of a cross-channel invasion.