The Air Force planned its weapons and trained its fliers in terms of an exact objective and the capacity of the enemy. On this problem Israel’s Intelligence forces went to work, collecting, piecing together, building up over months and years, by photo reconnaissance and other means, despite the disadvantage of having no military attachés or other representatives in the Arab countries, a complete picture of the enemy. “We knew everything about the Egyptian Air Force,” said Hod, “how they work, what was their training, where, when, and how,” including exactly how long it took them to take to the air after an alert—up to twenty-five minutes on certain bases, in comparison to an Israeli figure which, though he would not disclose it, elicited from Hod his broadest smile.
No commander, he said, has ever been provided with better intelligence. So precise was his planning that he was able to take out the nearer Egyptian fighter bases before the more distant bombers and still reach the latter at the exact moment they were taxiing for the take-off.
The work of the Intelligence Corps is the ground on which the IDF stands, and its chief, General Yariv, a spare, alert man in rolled-up sleeves and eyeglasses, is regarded by many as the key figure of the armed forces. Born in Latvia, he came to Palestine at fourteen, “young enough to be accepted by the Sabras, old enough to know the outside world.” He speaks six languages and is forty-six, but looks ten years younger. To brief a roomful of 150 correspondents, covering the field from Kuwait to the Canal, discoursing on everything from weapons to politics, holding his auditors absorbed for over an hour while telling them nothing security would not permit them to know, fielding questions for another hour, and ending to spontaneous applause, immediately to be converged upon by a crowd eager for more—this was a bravura performance presented with the logic of a teacher and the instincts of an actor.
Israel’s Staff is exceedingly security-conscious, and nothing is to be learned of its intelligence methods. All that Yariv will say is that whatever means exist, “you can be sure we used all of them.” Meanwhile he has created a legend that has crossed the border. The Arab caretaker of an American institute in the Old City assured me that a knife-grinder of Bethany, living for seven years on a few piasters a day and posing as a kind of village jester dressed all in green, who told funny stories while turning his wheel outside the church door, was in reality an Intelligence agent and high officer of the Israeli Army. From this fairy tale he drew the not inappropriate moral, “It shows what they can do, and we have to learn.”
In action the Israeli soldier demonstrated the basic precepts on which the IDF was formed: the ability of the individual commander to see what in a situation could be exploited, and the flexibility to take advantage of the opportunity without referring to higher authority or sending for additional help—“to see and to solve,” as General Rabin puts it. Next, physical leadership by officers and in all ranks the spirit to carry out a given mission no matter what. In the desert a battalion, ordered to break through an Egyptian fortified position protected by a field solid with mines, failed and fell back, was ordered forward again, and with advance guards on hands and knees probing for the mines with steel wires, cleared a path and took the position. In the desperate rush to take the Syrian heights before cease-fire, men of one company flung their bodies on a barrier of barbed wire to let their fellows advance. In the unexpected battle for the heights outside Jerusalem when an artillery commander, lacking the necessary equipment, found himself unable to clear space for a gun emplacement, two reservists of his company who were residents of the city in the construction business offered to bring their own bulldozers and do the job, which they successfully accomplished. In Jerusalem, too, Colonel Motte Gur, commander of the paratroopers, personally led his troops in a charge through St. Stephen’s Gate against a barrier of an overturned Jordanian bus roaring in flames.
In initiative, persistence, and refusal of self-deception the Israeli is the opposite of the Arab. The IDF, it must be remembered, does not exist in a vacuum; it is the obverse of its opponent, and any analysis of its performance must take the opponent into account. Where the Jew questions, the Arab dreams. To quote General Narkis, “The Arabs build castles in the air, and then become prisoners of their castles.” Where the Jew fights facts, the Arabs accept: It is the will of Allah.
Essentially the war was a conflict of societies whose terms can be seen any day on a road between Syria and Israel, literally brown on one side and green on the other. The Jews who made the state belong to the activist West, and through the Zionist experience of return, of colonizing and reviving the neglected land, of making it flourish and capable of supporting a modern nation, they have undergone a mental and emotional revolution. They have become masters of their fate instead of sufferers. Egypt and Syria, despite all the verbal socialism, have made no revolution, none that has reached down into the lives of the people. The Syrian peasant in a hovel on a miserable patch of ground, the Egyptian fellaheen of the delta with seven diseases per capita have no society so precious as to fight and die for.
Militarily the victory of two and a half million against fifty million was one of professionalism. The Egyptian officers, according to the Israelis, are not professionals at their job. They have no conception of precision, thoroughness of preparation, the obligations of leadership, or of the Israelis’ favorite tenet, “execution of mission.” When over a thousand years ago Arab conquerors swept triumphantly across North Africa, they were fighting with their own weapons in their own tradition. Today, lacking the Israelis’ capacity to create their own armed forces, they are trying to operate in others’ terms. An Egyptian manual picked up in the desert still illustrates drill with drawings of flat-faced smiling Occidentals obviously taken from some British manual circa 1930. Jordan’s army is a British creation. Syrian Artillery listened to instructions in Russian. Egyptians were more dazed than aided by their Russian equipment. They fired not one—or possibly only one—missile from the twenty-odd SAM sites provided for them by the Russians. Their fighter pilots flew Migs, but could not successfully fight in them. Their rocket crews lacked the accuracy to fire surface-to-surface missiles lest, aiming at Tel Aviv, they might leave Beirut in ruins. On the whole, as Nasser suspected, they are not yet fully capable of modern warfare. Nevertheless their numbers, combined with Russian alliance, remain overwhelming and dangerous, and the Israeli command knows it can never succumb to the mood that says, “The Arabs have surrounded us again, the poor bastards.”
Where the Israelis depend on mobility and penetration, the Arabs fight best from fortified positions. Scores of their Soviet heavy tanks were dug in for use as stationary artillery. They were captives of their wealth in manpower and armament. The Soviet-designed system, based on bands of entrenched positions and deep bunkers backed up to a depth of several kilometers, required enormous manpower to construct. “That’s for the rich,” say the Israelis. For all the Arabs’ deep resentment of the intruders in their world, and for all their prewar threats and engineered orgies of hate, their cause against Israel is not for them a matter of life or death, and once they lost air cover they could neither advance nor hold their ground.
The Russians misjudged Arab capabilities—and Israel’s as well—perhaps because they are materialists, disinclined to give weight to imponderables. They ask scornfully, but doubtless in honest bewilderment, “How many divisions has the Pope?” The iron mass of armament they bestowed upon their clients, Migs, tanks, missile sites, rockets, antiaircraft guns, half-tracks, tons and tons of other arms and ammunition, must have seemed to them certain to be decisive. They may have been misled too by customarily thinking of the Jews with contempt as victimized second-class citizens. They failed to recognize that the Israelis indeed possessed a secret weapon—a homeland.
A final component of the IDF’s capacity was the civil population—its other self. The outpouring of help, solicitude, and love in the form of letter-writing, home-baked cakes, sunburn cream, and other ministrations was phenomenal. The Israeli Air Force ma
y have at this moment the finest combat fliers in the world, and the Israeli soldier may be the toughest fighter, but the campaign had its Jewish-mother aspect nevertheless. In Jerusalem a volunteer women’s organization came into being during the “tension,” starting from one soldier’s call home for mosquito repellent for his company. A campaign of collections from pharmacies, drug companies, and private homes, assembled and distributed by volunteers in their own cars, jumping Army bureaucracy, succeeded in getting eight thousand units to the soldiers within five hours.
From that moment there was no stopping them. Gripped by the national danger and a sense of the country facing its ultimate test of existence, everyone wanted to give something. Within three days the Jerusalem women’s group had 450 volunteers registered and card-indexed according to the kind of contribution each was prepared to make. Some served as baby-sitters where a wife was filling an absent husband’s job, some as messengers to take news of casualties to families. Some drove out along the roads to give lifts to soldiers trying to reach home on a twelve-hour leave during the “tension” or to bring them to homes which had offered bathtubs or showers for their use. A mere mention of home-baked cakes brought in eight hundred in one day, and a mention of wine, five hundred bottles.
Schools organized a program to send a letter from each pupil enclosed with small gifts in a parcel from each family. After the war an armored-corps corporal confessed that on the third day in the desert under fire, with the heat and deaths and burning metal, he was finished, shattered, unable to move, not caring whether he lived. One of these parcels was dropped on his bunk. He thought, “Some silly crap,” but caught sight of the letter and read it: “Dear Soldier, I am sending you this chewing gum. I am not afraid of bombs because I know you are out there protecting me and will not let anyone kill me.” He rose at once, the corporal said; “I felt like a lion.”
These lions fought with tears. A recurrent mention in the post-war talk is of weeping. “I was fighting and crying,” a reserve officer of field rank told me, “because I was shooting and killing.” The wife of a commander in the battle for the Old City, whose troops suffered excessive casualties because use of artillery was eschewed, told how he came home unwashed, unharmed, and apparently unchanged, and only after picking up his sleeping child, broke down and silently wept. A soldier in the North, suddenly confronted by a Syrian emerging from a trench six feet away, shot and killed him and then noticed a wedding ring on the dead man’s hand. The thought flooded his mind, “He has a wife and children,” and he felt the tears rise. Not everyone reacted that way. One wife said that while her husband brooded speechless for days after he returned, his brother reported killing as many Arabs as he could and was perfectly pleased with himself. Another who saw his tank crew blown up, leaving him the only survivor, thereafter turned his guns on the Egyptians and blasted his way through with savage satisfaction.
Afterward the amazing victory brought no parades or cheers or the usual celebrations of triumph. The emphasis was on the dead. Jubilation was missing. The old grieved and the young were somber, conscious of contemporaries maimed or killed. Memorial services and black-bordered announcements in the newspapers were almost a daily occurrence. Israel’s concentration on grief would have seemed exaggerated in another country, but the Jews have known many killed over the centuries and the 700 lost in this war could ill be spared. On a per-capita basis, a comparable loss to the United States would have been 60,000. The race against the stopwatch of the impending U.N. cease-fire required taking military risks which added to the casualties. To Israel as a nation, desperately concerned over its future as a Jewish state in a sea of Arabs, a Jewish life is not expendable. Each loss is a tragedy. But the feeling goes deeper than the loss to the state. It comes from an old, inherited high value placed on human life.
No aspect of the IDF is more striking than its concern for casualties. Every man wounded or dead is brought back regardless of cost, even that of mounting an offensive to recover the missing. In most cases the wounded were in hospitals within an hour, transported directly from the place they fell by helicopter, and the knowledge of this was a strong morale factor. A commanding officer or civilian employer attends the funeral of anyone lost from his outfit and pays the family a visit of condolence. The value of one man was deliberately dramatized when General Hod went to occupied Syria to attend the exchange of 550 Syrian POWs for one Israeli flier and the bodies of two dead.
Yet it is not only for lives that Israel grieves; there is something more. Its people, so long and so often the victims of violence, have had to become, against their ethic, against the hope that brought them back to Zion, users of violence. They had to win the right to nationhood, like the United States, by force of arms, and now by the same means have reconfirmed it. Notwithstanding the pride of the IDF—and even happiness of the Air Force—in a job well done, many people in Israel are profoundly troubled by their new role and their own success in it. From Auschwitz to Sinai and the recovery of Jerusalem has been barely a generation, and the transformation is almost too sudden. In less than a lifetime the Jews have come from persecution to rule over others.
General Rabin, the quiet, thoughtful man who led the IDF in this attainment, was the first to recognize its burden. In his speech on Mount Scopus after the victory, he said, “The Jewish people are not accustomed to conquest, and we receive it with mixed feelings.” What they will make of it and what conquest will make of them is the question that remains.
* * *
The Atlantic, September 1967.
If Mao Had Come to Washington
ONE OF THE GREAT “IFS” and harsh ironies of history hangs on the fact that in January 1945, four and a half years before they achieved national power in China, Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai, in an effort to establish a working relationship with the United States, offered to come to Washington to talk in person with President Roosevelt. What became of the offer has been a mystery until, with the declassification of new material, we now know for the first time that the United States made no response to the overture. Twenty-seven years, two wars, and x million lives later, after immeasurable harm wrought by the mutual suspicion and phobia of two great powers not on speaking terms, an American President, reversing the unmade journey of 1945, has traveled to Peking to treat with the same two Chinese leaders. Might the interim have been otherwise?
The original proposal, transmitted on January 9 by Major Ray Cromley, acting chief of the American Military Observers Mission then in Yenan, to the headquarters of General Wedemeyer in Chungking, stated that Mao and Chou wanted their request to be sent to the “highest United States officials.” The text (published here for the first time) was as follows:
Yenan Government wants [to] dispatch to America an unofficial rpt unofficial group to interpret and explain to American civilians and officials interested the present situation and problems of China. Next is strictly off record suggestion by same: Mao and Chou will be immediately available either singly or together for exploratory conference at Washington should President Roosevelt express desire to receive them at White House as leaders of a primary Chinese party.
Chou requested air travel to the United States if the invitation from Roosevelt were forthcoming. In case it was not, Mao and Chou wanted their request to remain secret in order to protect their relationship with Chiang Kai-shek, which was then in the throes of negotiation.
The message, received in Chungking on January 10, was not forwarded, except as secondary reference in another context, either to the President, the State Department, or the War Department. It was held up in Chungking by Ambassador Patrick J. Hurley with the arm-twisted concurrence of General Wedemeyer.
Before examining the circumstances and reasons for this procedure, let us imagine instead that, following a more normal process, the message had been duly forwarded to the “highest officials” and had received an affirmative response, which is 99 44/100 percent unlikely but not absolutely impossible. If Mao and Chou had then gone to Wa
shington, if they had succeeded in persuading Roosevelt of the real and growing strength of their subgovernment relative to that of the decadent Central Government, and if they had gained what they came for—some supply of arms, a cessation of America’s unqualified commitment to Chiang Kai-shek, and firm American pressure on Chiang to admit the Communists on acceptable terms to a coalition government (a base from which they expected to expand)—what then would have been the consequences?
With prestige and power enhanced by an American connection, the Communists’ rise and the Kuomintang’s demise, both by then inevitable, would have been accelerated. Three years of civil war in a country desperately weary of war and misgovernment might have been, if not entirely averted, certainly curtailed. The United States, guiltless of prolonging the civil war by consistently aiding the certain loser, would not then have aroused the profound antagonism of the ultimate winner. This antagonism would not then have been expressed in the arrest, beating, and in some cases imprisonment and deportation of American consular officials, the seizure of our consulate in Mukden, and other harassments, and these acts in turn might not then have decided us in anger against recognition of the Communist government. If, in the absence of ill-feeling, we had established relations on some level with the People’s Republic, permitting communication in a crisis, and if the Chinese had not been moved by hate and suspicion of us to make common cause with the Soviet Union, it is conceivable that there might have been no Korean War with all its evil consequences. From that war rose the twin specters of an expansionist Chinese communism and an indivisible Sino-Soviet partnership. Without those two concepts to addle statesmen and nourish demagogues, our history, our present, and our future would have been different. We might not have come to Vietnam.