Post by mrsonde on Jun 29, 2018 7:12:29 GMT 1
Well, LBJ’s assertion wasn’t! As usual, he was talking complete blatant bullshit. The Gulf of Aqaba was the least of Israel’s worries!but it has been asserted that the closure of the Straits was used as by Isreal an excuse for starting the war, not the reason.
Hmmm. I must say I’ve never heard any Israeli make such a patently irrelevant excuse! Not at the time, I’m quite sure. It's one of those when did you stop beating your wife? arguments, it seems to me.
Far more pertinent to Israel stating that war was the supposed aggressive stance of Egypt- later Israeli Generals stated they considered the Egyptian forces not a serious threat.
What on earth can you possibly mean, Nay? “Supposed aggressive stance”?! Nasser was fully mobilised, every shop and factory shut, every truck requisitioned, every man between 18 and 55 called up for action, his army amassing on the Israeli border. He was on national telly - seen by every Israeli, there not being any Israeli TV at that time - stating he was going to exterminate Israel within a week. Radio Cairo broadcast across the whole Middle East that every Jew was going to be tortured and burned to death. The parks in every Israeli town were being consecrated as mass burial grounds!
Dear oh dear.
As for the assessment at the time of the Egyptian forces capabilities – admittedly, that’s a complicated issue. On their own, perhaps they weren’t considered all that a “serious threat” – provided they could be neutralised with a successful pre-emptive strike, that is (which as a matter of fact - as it indeed turned out - was never better than a highly risky proposition.) But they weren’t on their own, and all the indications were that the time left for a pre-emptive strike was rapidly running out.
The closure of the Straits would soon have stopped ahd Israel acted by bombing those ports that stopped Israeli shipping and sinking a few Egyptian warships.
I don’t think you’ve thought that one through, Nay, surely. If Israel had bombed Sharm El-Sheikh or bombed any airfield or sunk any ship – well, bang, that’s war. On three or four fronts, with the full might of the fully intact Arab forces pouring into Israel the next day – all the necessary counter-balancing initiative of a pre-emptive strike completely lost. And they would still be paintable as the aggressor! So what om earth would be the point of that? I repeat – opening up Eliat was the least of the worries.
Here is the Israeli Chief of Staff:
Yitzhak Rabin, who was then the Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, "We did not think that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to Sinai on May 14 would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it."
Yitzhak Rabin, who was then the Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, "We did not think that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to Sinai on May 14 would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it."
That’s a very strange quote – can you tell us where it comes from? Without knowing the context, about what he could possibly mean by it, as it stands, on the face of it, it looks like a deliberate attempt at deception, or perhaps an indication of serious senility. Either is possible with Rabin, mind you - he was always a highly unstable character. In later years, from whence this oddity comes I would guess, he beacme with his wife the arch-Dove - but at the time he was one of the loudest voices pressurising Eshkol into a first strike before it was too late. Along with every single one of Israel's generals, incidentally. The lone cautioning dissenting voice, as far as I can recall from the histories, was Ben Gurion - maybe his advisor Peres too, I'd need to look that up. When Rabin went to the old man for his advice he received a thorough dressing down - for some reason that's never been explained, to my knowledge. It's not as if Ben Gurion was ever much of a Dove - but at that point he was pretty old, and long retired into his agrarian not to say arcadian idyll. (Presumably - and we only have Rabin's later rose-coloured account of this meeting - he was referring to Rabin's response to the Syrian attempts in the previous few years to cut off Israel from its main water supply, the Sea of Galilee, by diverting the Jordan and its feeding streams by building a canal, prompting various minor air battles, including the shooting down of six MIGs over Damascus in 65. Most historians trace this move by Syria as the start of the countdown to the 67 war - or at least they used to, before Brezhnev and the KGB's seminal role became known.)
Anyway - this vituperative dressing down by his hero prompted an immediate complete nervous breakdown. He was a chain-smoking compulsive nibbling nervous wreck at the best of times, but this bit of extra pressure at this point of existential crisis had him completely prostrate, hallucinating air-raids before he'd even left Ben Gurion's compound. He was comatose for several days, returning to the fray just in time to add his vote in the cabinet decision for the pre-emptive strike the day before the attack (errr - 12-2 I believe it was, the religious leaders the only ones in that cross-party Unity Government to dissent.)
This might or might not be interesting - it very much fascinated me at the time: I wargamed the 6-Day War with my club not long after Yom Kippur, eight of us over four weekends (I had command of the truly remarkable Israeli paras.) I'd like to say I wasn't quite the geeky teen this sounds, but, fair play, I probably was. Anyway, I vividly remember the whole thing (and I've tried to keep up with the evolving history ever since) and believe me we enacted it in complete detail (we had copies of the full Sandhurst analysis and training lectures, as it goes, our president being a retired senior Army officer - not that they were secret or anything) – and three counterfacutal scenarios (two of which Israel inevitably lost, incidentally - on the board at any rate: it's almost impossible to account for the instrumental decisiveness of morale in a wargame.) I assure you that Egypt crossed the Sinai with four divisions – big fat Soviet-style full-strength ones – another in reserve came within a few days, another a few days after that, and another two were in the process of forming up in the Delta when the war started. Thus there were six full divisional or quasi-divisional units in the Sinai when Israel attacked, just over 100,000 troops, either at the border or just behind it, with thousands of state-of-the-art T-34 tanks, with full artillery and armour brigades, and of course the hundreds of its aircraft - on full round-the-clock alert, ready to dominate by its superior numbers and equipment the air war (Egypt had four times as many fighters as Israel, most of them Mig-19s and dozens of the then unparalleled Mig-21s, some of them as we now know flown by Soviet pilots.) But this wasn’t even half of the force arrayed against Israel, on its borders, poised for the order to attack. Israel was outnumbered in soldiers, aircraft, tanks, and equipment by three and four to one - and its standing army was tiny, don't forget: the vast majority of its troops were call-up reserves, at the last minute, with no experience of battle whatsoever.
It’s just possible I suppose that Rabin is rather sloppily referring to the two divisions that were planned to cut off southern Israel by crossing the Negev to meet up with the Jordanian army forces tasked in the battleplan from the east. (Maybe he forgot about the one tasked to head north for Tel Aviv, or the one following between them in reserve.) These two Jordanian units were highly proficient brigade groups (Jordan used the British organisational model, rather than the Russian), now under the direct command of Nasser’s generals (King Hussein had been bullied into giving over command of all his forces to Egypt, on Nasser’s blatant threat of being “disappeared” if he didn’t.) So that’s another traditional division’s worth, at least. Then of course there was the massive Syrian army, amassed just behind the Golan – 12 brigade groups in all, five of the most elite kilometres from the border, who were supposed to take Galilee and meet up with Jordan’s highly respected Arab Legion after, or, if things went slowly, during its victorious conquest of Jerusalem.
In total, Israel was faced with an invasion force itching - they were like a wild stallion straining at its leash, said Field Marshal Amer, or something along those lines - to be released on its borders of more than 250,000 troops, with 300,000 more behind them, armed to the teeth by the Russians, seething to take revenge for 48-49, and 56, and countless further humiliating defeats in skirmishes in Syria and Israel and TransJordan and the Sinai ever since. More like ten divisions, at least. And that would just been the start, assuming that wouldn’t have been enough. There were columns of tanks and thousands of soldiers committed to the battle waiting in Iraq; the promised full military support in war of Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia; and, as everyone was well aware by that point, the Soviet Union, already secretly in the mix and fully prepared to get fully involved should the war turn out unexpectedly sour. Even if by some miracle Israel could have rallied its forces from the initial attacks enough to make a determined stand between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, they had the armies of the whole Arab world to look forward to meeting and, ultimately, the threat of WWIII to ensure their inevitable defeat.