A DIFFERENT WAR - I

 

A DIFFERENT WAR – I

 The Israeli paratrooper battalion was duly dropped at the Mitla Pass, in the Sinai Peninsular of Egypt, as the detonator for an international bombshell - the French and British landings in Suez. That was its sole mission.

As for the Israeli objective, Moshe Dayan, the IDF Chief of Staff, knew that the only way to get the Tiran Straits reopened and free passage guaranteed by the Americans was, if we are holding Sharm el Sheikh. 

So, the children of Israel went marching once more into the Sinai desert as in Bible times - only this time going the other way!

The route to reach Sharm was “man-killing” territory, murder on machines, and seventy miles of it uphill. They knew they had only three days in order to stall the UN from forcing them to withdraw. 

When the brigade had at last struggled over the top of the seventy-mile rise, it was strung far out of sight along the slope, and desperately needed a respite. 

The political situation was deteriorating fast. In the name of Eisenhower,  a teletype sheet was handed to Ben-Gurion from Washington: a total cutoff of American military and economic aid to Israel; prohibition of fund-raising;  sanctions that might include an embargo on vital imports - unless the Israeli “aggression” was at once terminated, and the troops withdrawn to the armistice lines. 

Spurred by urgent messages from headquarters to make  haste, the brigade commander allowed his sleepless troops only two hours of rest and machine maintenance under the stars. At the same time, to the rear, half-tracks and mechanics laboured to extricate vehicles still stuck or disabled. Then the ten-mile line of overtaxed machines and two thousand exhausted men were back on the move, bumping and groaning downhill in the black hours before the dawn, through wadis criss-crossed with jarring crevices. 

The laggard British bombing of the airfields succeeded in eliminating the enemy air force. The two enemies were now the Egyptian soldiers and the clock. 

Israel was close to conquering a peninsula three times the size of the sliver of coast that was all its territory. The brigades to the north had already routed the Egyptians and swept all the way to Suez. There remained only Sharm-el-Sheikh to capture. 

It turned into a strange three-way race: Israeli paratroopers making a run for Sharm down the peninsula’s west coast, rounding the southern tip of Sinai in the dead of night, and an Israeli brigade climbing through the dunes on the east coast, both converging toward the southern point of the Sinai triangle at Sharm el Sheikh. 

The Egyptian troops, which had been pouring into Sinai, were in a headlong rush back to the Canal Zone, enabling the Israeli brigade to continue its way to Sharm – before the UN voted on an American cease-fire resolution, already under debate in the General Assembly. 

So, the Egyptian commander of the fortress in Sharm el Sheikh found himself under heavy attack north and south. After a fight of several hours, he sent an emissary to surrender. When Moshe Dayan arrived in a command car he was greeted with a makeshift blue and while Star of David flag on a pole planted atop a fortress building.