The Egyptian buildup was also similar to one that occurred in May that had not led to war. On October 4, a day before learning that Russian civilians were leaving Egypt and Syria, Military Intelligence reported the chances for war were low. The Mossad director, Zvi Zamir , was informed by his aide and planned to meet with his agent in London the next day.
Zamir subsequently learned from Israeli Military Intelligence that Soviet scientists were preparing to leave Syria, which added weight to the report of pending war. Two weeks earlier, Israel learned that Russia was transferring Scud missiles to Egypt; another worrisome sign. According to Zamir's aide, Alfred Eini, Marwan's warning of impending war was not passed on to the Prime Minister immediately because the Mossad thought it would be done by Military Intelligence.
Zamir did not reach someone in the prime minister's office until a day later, hours before the attack. Deputy Chief of Staff General Israel Tal feared war was coming and tried to convince his boss, Chief of Staff General David Elazar to take precautions and strengthen the front line with Egypt and call up reserves. If I am wrong and you are right, he said, we drafted them for nothing, inconvenienced them during the holidays and wasted money.
That would be a shame, but not too bad. On the other hand if I am right and you are mistaken, we will face disaster. It was not until 5 a. He was overruled. A few hours later, a partial call-up of reserves was approved, but Meir still refused to authorize Elazar to take military action. She advised the U. Henry Kissinger , who now was secretary of state, subsequently appealed to Sadat and Syrian president Hafez Assad not to do anything precipitously.
He also cautioned Meir not to shoot first. Meir found herself in a nearly impossible position. The intelligence community had not given her sufficient warning of the impending attack to adequately prepare the nation for war. And, unlike , she did not feel Israel could afford to go it alone. On October 6, — Yom Kippur , the holiest day in the Jewish calendar and during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan — Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated surprise attack against Israel.
On the Golan Heights , approximately Israeli tanks faced an onslaught of 1, Syrian tanks. Along the Suez Canal, fewer than Israeli defenders with only three tanks were attacked by , Egyptian soldiers, backed by 2, tanks and aircraft.
He said Sadat and two other people were the only ones informed of his mission. A few months before the attack, Iraq transferred a squadron of Hunter jets to Egypt. During the war, an Iraqi division of some 18, men and several hundred tanks was deployed in the central Golan and participated in the October 16 attack against Israeli positions.
Besides serving as financial underwriters, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait committed men to battle. A Saudi brigade of approximately 3, troops was dispatched to Syria, where it participated in fighting along the approaches to Damascus. Other North African countries responded to Arab and Soviet calls to aid the front-line states. Algeria sent three aircraft squadrons of fighters and bombers, an armored brigade, and tanks.
Approximately 1, to 2, Tunisian soldiers were positioned in the Nile Delta. Sudan stationed 3, troops in southern Egypt, and Morocco sent three brigades to the front lines, including 2, men to Syria. Lebanese radar units were used by Syrian air defense forces.
Lebanon also allowed Palestinian terrorists to shell Israeli civilian settlements from its territory. Palestinians fought on the Southern Front with the Egyptians and Kuwaitis. In September shamed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak claimed that he personally started the Yom Kippur war during a secret mission during his time as an Egyptian air force commander.
Mubarak stated that six munites before the large attack on Israel commenced including other Arab armies, he attacked an Israeli communications outpost in his fighter jet in the first attack of the war. Still, Arab brotherhood required that Hussein contribute to the cause, so he sent two of his best units to Syria.
Three Jordanian artillery batteries also participated in the assault, carried out by nearly tanks. During the October war, the Arab oil-producing states imposed an embargo on oil exports to the United States , Portugal , and Holland because of their support for Israel.
The impact was to cause a shortage of petroleum in the United States and a quadrupling of gas prices. Americans soon had to contend with long lines at gas stations. Several U. Oil company executives lobbied the Nixon administratio n to offer more support to the Arabs and less to Israel. The oil embargo was lifted in March , but the United States and other Western nations continued to feel its effects for years to come. Thrown onto the defensive during the first two days of fighting, Israel mobilized its reserves and began to counterattack.
In the south, Israeli forces were having little success in stopping the Egyptian onslaught. Still, the Sinai Desert offered a large buffer zone between the fighting and the heart of Israel. Consequently, most reserves meant for the Egyptian front were shifted to the Golan. The replenished Israeli forces stopped the Syrian advance, forced a retreat, and began their own march forward toward Damascus. The Soviets gave their wholehearted political support to the Arab invasion.
Starting as early as October 9, they also began a massive airlift of weapons, which ultimately totaled 8, tons of materiel. The United States had given Israel some ammunition and spare parts, but it resisted Israeli requests for greater assistance. The secretary of state wanted to show the Arabs they could never defeat Israel with the backing of the Soviets.
By sending arms to Israel, the United States could ensure an Israeli victory, hand the Soviets a defeat, and provide Washington with the leverage to influence a postwar settlement.
Cargo planes carrying spare parts, tanks, bombs, and helicopters flew round-the-clock to Israel. While the U. From , the Egyptian and Syrian militaries rebuilt themselves from the ground up.
By October , Anwar Sadat, President of Egypt, was already speaking about attacking Israel in private meetings with his army staff. During those three weeks of war, 2, IDF soldiers lost their lives defending their country. Negotiations in the following years led to disengagement agreements, under the terms of which Israel withdrew from parts of the territories captured by the IDF during the Yom Kippur War.
The Yom Kippur War was the third time in less than three decades since its establishment that Israel was forced to fight a war for its very existence. Share With. Now they were being told that a two-front war was less than six hours away, with the army still unmobilized. She spoke in a monotone that sounded like a judge reading out a sentence. Then she reached the bottom line. In the early hours of this morning, she said, word was received from an unimpeachable source that war would break out at 6 p.
The ministers were stunned. They had not been made privy to the Arab buildup on the borders and there had not been a discussion of the possibility of war for months. Furthermore, they had been told for years that even in a worst-case situation the IDF would have at least 48 hours to call up the reserves before fighting began.
Meir asked Dayan to describe the situation on the two fronts to the cabinet. Despite her depressed look, her voice had been firm. He looked like a man whose certainties had crumbled. Soldiers in the Bar-Lev forts had heard activity across the canal all night and many had not slept. Avigdor Ben-Gal, commander of the 7th Brigade, which had arrived on the Golan piecemeal over the past 10 days, was a commanding presence with a craggy, Lincolnesque face, large shock of unkempt hair, and a tall frame.
Born in Poland in , he lost his family in the Holocaust and arrived in Palestine in with a group of orphaned children via the Soviet Union and Iran. In the absence of a family of his own, he had adopted the army. To his officers and men he radiated authority and professionalism. He had a cutting tongue but some saw his toughness as a mask. Since assuming command of the prestigious brigade the previous year, he had insisted that training exercises emulate war conditions as closely as possible.
He drilled his men intensely in gunnery and held exercises lasting a week or more in which the brigade operated only at night. Ben-Gal was informed of the war alert at 10 a.
Yom Kippur morning. He ordered his battalion and company commanders by radio to meet him immediately in an army camp in the northern Golan.
All present rose when he entered the room and he waved them back to their seats. Avigdor Kahalani. The other two battalion commanders, whose units had arrived during the night, reported that most of their tanks were in place but that some were still moving up from the supply depots at the foot of the Golan.
Gentlemen, war will break out today. After issuing instructions, Ben-Gal told the commanders to return to their units and prepare them for action. The men were to be ordered to break their fast.
The officers would assemble again at 2 p. Tank platoon commander Yoav Yakir at the southernmost end of the line tried to persuade crewmen observing the fast to break it. To encourage them to eat, Yakir and his first sergeant made breakfast for the platoon, a treat to which most of the men succumbed. At Strongpoint in the northern sector, Lieutenant Avraham Elimelekh spent an hour, twice as long as usual, reviewing with his men what each would do in the event of a Syrian attack.
The garrison, normally numbering 12, had been increased to 19 in the past day. Of the 10 strongpoints along the line, was the only one not located on a rise that dominated its immediate surroundings.
It sat on a plain that extended deep into Syria. In his few weeks at , Elimelekh had had intensive sessions with the tank platoon commander, Lt. Shmuel Yakhin, to work out coordination. The two officers chose names for elements of the topography so that each would quickly understand what the other was referring to in a battle situation. They agreed that the tanks would deal with Syrian armor and the strongpoint with infantry. The battalion intelligence officer visited in the morning and told Elimelekh that the Syrians might attempt to capture a strongpoint in the coming battle and take its garrison prisoner.
A likely target was Strongpoint , said the officer, making a snatching movement with his hand. At noon, Col. Ben-Gal drove to the front where he scanned the Syrian lines through binoculars. There was a large army out there but he could see nothing stirring. At the sound of chirping he lifted his head and saw birds on a nearby tree.
It was odd that he could hear them. The unnatural stillness seemed final confirmation that war was imminent. At p. The canalside forts on the Bar-Lev line were ordered to call back men from outlying observation posts and prepare for heavy shelling.
A sergeant at an outpost started towards the halftrack sent to fetch his squad when he saw an Egyptian soldier across the canal trying to catch his eye. At , Military Intelligence issued an updated bulletin noting extensive military preparations in Egypt and Syria and acknowledging reports that war was imminent. Zeira misunderstood it. For Jerusalemites, it was the sound of a plane that offered the first intimation of unusual developments.
Early worshippers at the Western Wall on Yom Kippur morning were startled by the sudden roar of a single Phantom low overhead, as if the air force was depositing a prayer. As the morning progressed, the awesome silence of the holy day was increasingly broken by the burr of tires as military vehicles turned into residential neighborhoods. Couriers carrying mobilization orders stepped out to scan house numbers. Generally, they were directed by neighbors to one of the local synagogues.
His father, seated next to him, embraced him and refused to let go. Services were halted to permit the courier or a synagogue official to read out names of reservists from the podium. It was apparent to all that if mobilization was being carried out on Yom Kippur it must be because of a surprise Arab attack. In the Bait Hakerem quarter, a courier consulted with a sexton. Mounting the podium, the sexton called on the congregation for silence and then read out the names given him, pausing almost imperceptibly as he reached the name of his own son.
Rabbis told their congregations that it was permissible for all those mobilized to break their fast and drive a car, something strictly forbidden on Yom Kippur except in life-or-death situations. Throughout the country, men wearing skullcaps and prayer shawls could be seen incongruously driving cars, something they had never done in their lives on Yom Kippur, or trying to hitchhike to assembly points.
Many family men drove their wives and children to relatives before heading to their units. More than , civilians would be transformed into soldiers this day.
The process had been set in motion shortly after 9 a. Designated couriers from each brigade were summoned by telephone to receive the call-up orders which they would distribute. Most of the civilian bus fleet had been mobilized to carry reservists from local assembly points to bases around the country which some reached by early afternoon.
Others, living in parts of the country where the buses had to stop at many rural settlements, did not arrive until after midnight. Some men who had not received a call-up notice came to their base on their own, sometimes even by taxi. Veteran war horses long since mustered out of service showed up at their old units and asked to sign in, a request usually granted. Officers of the Supreme Command sat on a low dais overlooking the operations room where the leaders of each branch of the armed forces and senior staff sat by communication consoles.
The room was dominated by situation maps projected onto a large screen. Clerics ruled it permissible also to smoke. Sadat could see no one in the command center doing either. He ordered tea and lit up his pipe and soon others were doing the same. All eyes now were on the clock. In the underground Syrian army command center beneath an orchard outside Damascus. Syrian President Hafez al-Assad emerged from the room where he would bed-down during the war to exhort his generals before they launched their attack on the Golan.
At , soldiers on the Bar-Lev Line were ordered to don flak jackets and helmets and to enter bunkers. At Budapest, the northernmost fort, the commander climbed the observation tower. For the first time, the Egyptian lookout towers opposite were empty. On Mount Hermon overlooking the Golan, an artillery observer reported that the Syrians had begun removing camouflage netting from their artillery and tanks. He ordered his tanks to distance themselves from their regular positions.
If the Syrians opened fire they would hit every fixed Israeli position marked on their maps. On the street outside sirens began to wail.
Meir declared the cabinet meeting closed. Zeira was seen walking towards the war room looking pale. Dayan was nearing the end of his briefing to the Cabinet a few minutes before 2 p. The defense minister announced that Egyptian airplanes had begun to attack in Sinai. Meir declared the meeting closed. Listening to his radio net in Sinai, Col. Amnon Reshef heard the undulating signal for enemy air penetration. Emerging from his headquarters, he saw Egyptian planes diving on a nearby encampment from which black smoke was already rising.
The desert floor beneath his feet suddenly began to tremble. Twenty miles to the west, 2, Egyptian guns and heavy mortars had opened up on the Bar-Lev Line. Five Egyptian divisions would soon start to cross the mile-long canal with , men. That dictum was now clearly detached from reality. With the sounding of the sirens in Tel Aviv, Elazar descended to the air force control center to ask Peled if he could attack the Syrian air bases in the roughly three hours of daylight remaining.
Now that war had started there was no issue of preemption. Only an hour before, he controlled the most formidable concentration of power in the Middle East — warplanes loaded for bear and experienced air crews primed to go. However, in anticipation of an attempt by the Arab air forces to swarm Israeli air space as part of the pending surprise attack, Peled had ordered the versatile Phantom fighter-bombers converted to interceptors.
Peled ordered all aircraft not yet stripped of their bombs to take off, drop the bombs in the sea and begin patrolling. There would be no Egyptian attempt to enter Israeli air space this day except for a missile fired from a plane offshore towards Tel Aviv. The Israeli planes would engage in uneventful patrols. While mobilization was going smoothly, the scenes at tank bases were of barely controlled pandemonium. The tanks had been stripped when put into storage and they now had to be equipped and armed from scratch.
Tanks assigned to reserve brigades were used by various units for training and, like borrowed books, they were not always returned in their original condition or to their proper place. Sometimes they were not returned at all.
One brigade commander had to send men to six bases to retrieve his tanks. Police in Beersheba, near which many bases lay, asked storeowners Saturday night to open their shops for the sale of items like binoculars and flashlights. Small but important pieces of equipment were missing almost everywhere.
Entire brigades had to set off for the front without machine guns, which would be more important in Sinai than tank guns in the encounters with infantry that lay ahead.
At the request of the army, police in Beersheba, near which many bases lay, asked storeowners Saturday night to open their shops for the sale of items like binoculars and flashlights. Ariel Sharon, the recently retired head of the Southern Command now called back into active duty with his reserve armored division, telephoned a millionaire friend in the US for binoculars.
A shipment would arrive by air within a few days and rushed directly to Sharon on the Suez front. The reservists worked feverishly into the night to turn the behemoths into fighting machines. Water and battle rations were put aboard and shells, passed from hand to hand, were stored in the turrets and bellies of the tanks.
Officers constantly pressed the men to move faster. Despite the problems, 85 percent of units would reach the front within the time planned. Some would reach it in half the time but lacking pieces of equipment. News from the front was scant but the reservists were aware that the small forces holding the line, including for some of them younger brothers, must be fighting a desperate battle.
In the south the first small tank convoy heading for the Suez front departed at p. The convoys grew longer and slower as the night progressed and more units joined from camps dotting the Negev.
Men drew reassurance from the line of tanks, their commanders upright in the turrets. Others, however, sensed that this war was different. It was the Arabs who had seized the initiative which suggested they were confident of newfound abilities; the results could not be predicted.
The men fell silent as they traveled west, lost in their thoughts. At times, the convoys had to pull over to make way on the narrow roads for vehicles heading back from the front.
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