Military Agility. Meir Finkel
of Southern Command Headquarters
The proposal to eliminate Southern Command and save 400 manpower positions was broached in September 1954. Two months later, Central Command assumed responsibility for the southern half of the country and all the units attached to Southern Command. In place of Southern Command, a newly formed Negev Headquarters was established in Beer Sheva to deal with routine security matters. A few months after this major shift, however, second thoughts were expressed, and there was talk of reestablishing Southern Command due to Central Command’s need to deal with the rising Egyptian threat owing to the escalation of incidents on the Gaza border.61
“In November 1954 Moshe Dayan dismantled Southern Command and subordinated it to Central Command in order to cut expenses…. [The following summer] he realized that his decision had been a gross mistake.”62 On the eve of the Khan Yunis operation (August 31, 1955), a heightened state of alert was declared, and Southern Command was reinstated.63 “Southern Command’s headquarters was hastily restored to the former framework of 1954, although at this stage it was still called the ‘Negev Headquarters’ within Central Command. The headquarters’ commander was Colonel Meir Amit, who had headed General Staff Directorate until then. His first task was to evaluate the likelihood of war.”64
According to Amit, he reestablished Southern Command in stages, first as the head of a setup team composed of people he knew and trusted. On October 28, 1955, Amit was formally appointed commander of Southern Command. “The first thing we did was build the command from scratch,” he wrote.65 Simultaneously, they had to cope with attacks by fedayeen (Arab infiltrators) and reinforce the regional defense layout. Amit recalled that Southern Command focused its war preparations on the offensive: “We carried out frequent maneuvers and prepared intelligence files on vast areas in Sinai for the units.”66 “Because Southern Command had been mothballed, the team that was supposed to keep close tabs on the Egyptian forces consisted of only one officer and two soldiers who were reinforced with three reservists at the start of tension.”67 On August 5, 1956, Amit was replaced by Colonel Asaf Simchoni, whose first assignment was to transfer the command from Kastina to Beer Sheva.68
The Air Force
In aerial combat, the more complex the weapons, the more difficult their assimilation. In the months preceding the war, the IAF was transitioning from World War II piston-driven aircraft to jet aircraft. The head of the IAF’s history branch, Motti Habakuk, notes that the IAF was in the midst of assimilating advanced jet aircraft—the Ouragan and Mystère IV—while it was also scrupulously preparing for war. Thus, the number of pilots qualified to fly the new aircraft was insufficient, and the use of these planes was minimal. On October 29, 1956, the day the war broke out, of the sixty Mystères in the country, only fourteen were operable, and even they were limited by their imprecise gun-firing capability.69
Weapons
As noted earlier, the main difficulty in risk management is deciding whether to replenish troops with readily available weapons (as war approaches) or wait for more advanced weapons that are expected to become available. General Ezer Weizman describes how the French army urged the IDF to procure the Mystère II, a fighter plane that could not be converted into an attack aircraft. Although the Mystère II was available for immediate delivery, it was plagued by sundry problems.70 The Mystère IV, a more advanced model with multipurpose capability as both a fighter and an attack plane, would be available in a few months. According to Weizman, despite pressure from Dayan, Peres, and many others who insisted that the Mystère II should be purchased, IAF commander Dan Tolkowsky “displayed obstinacy in the face of all the counter-arguments that stood between the IAF and the Mystère II procurement.”71 Eleven years later in the Six-Day War, the Mystère IV proved invaluable in Operation Moked. Though planned to be utilized until 1973, it was taken out of service in 1970.72 The decision to back down on the Mystère II and wait for the Mystère IV apparently came at the price of readiness for the Sinai War. In his book There Will Be War in the Summer, Motti Golani describes a conversation in early July 1956 between Prime Minister–Defense Minister Ben-Gurion and Tolkowsky about a Mystère squadron with twelve pilots: “six who can fly and six who are still learning.” Later, in answer to Ben-Gurion’s question about how much time it would take for sixty pilots to be ready for war, Tolkowsky replied, “A year, at the very least.”73
Some of the Ouragan pilots, too, were inexperienced; six of the eighteen pilots had spent only eight hours flying the aircraft.74 Weizman describes how he piloted the Ouragan in the war after only ten hours of training and learned some of the aircraft’s capabilities while in flight.75 “Even though Israel had enough Mystères for three squadrons, only one was operational—Squadron 101 [under the command of Major Benny Peled]—and this too was achieved at the cost of the Meteor and Ouragan squadrons that had been reduced to only a dozen pilots each.”76 The IDF was fortunate that the rest of the new Mystères were flown by French pilots in the Sinai War.77 French assistance proved priceless in carrying out air reconnaissance; this freed the Israeli squadrons for offensive missions, such as attacking the retreating Egyptian convoys.78
The Mystères’ 30mm cannon ammunition arrived from France in limited supply just one or two days before the war. The “Mystères’ bombs were unavailable and only a handful of 68 mm rockets had arrived. The newest plane in our arsenal had not been installed [with the necessary equipment] to drop bombs.”79
Lieutenant Ran Ronen (Pekker) describes his first combat mission in a Mystère squadron in the Sinai War, which he carried out with insufficient knowledge of the aircraft he was flying: “Only after we crossed the Israeli-Egyptian border east to Gaza did I realize that we were actually headed for war! I found myself seated in a new plane that I’d accumulated only 15 hours in the air with and was just beginning to learn its maneuverability in aerial combat or in attacking ground targets. I’d never operated its weapons systems…. This was a lethal combination of flying too low for strafing, uncontrolled deviation of the new and unfamiliar aircraft, and precarious terrain.”80
The ground crew also had problems with the new aircraft: “‘Jettisoning drop tanks!’ I looked at the wings and was horrified to see the detachable fuel tanks were still locked in place and what was plunging to the ground were the rocket pods…. The munitions crew definitely got it wrong when they connected the jettison system which they were obviously uninstructed in…. The series of foulups in the aircraft was quite large. The technicians had lots to learn yet about the new plane…. The Mystère had just been assimilated and was already engaged in actual combat.”81
Lieutenant Yosef Tzuk, a young Mystère pilot, recalled: “We received our first air-to-surface training at a firing range only on the Saturday before the war. We didn’t have a clue what to do. The rockets were put into regular (and unfitted) launching pipes and some of them fell out in the flight to the range.”82
The IAF’s control and monitoring system was being remodeled while the air force was undergoing a force buildup and switching to jet planes. The air force’s communications services, which were based on line links, were also in the midst of being upgraded. Work on the infrastructure of underground communications cables had begun in 1955, but the section between Tel Aviv and Haifa was halted in the final stage when hostilities broke out. Therefore, the IAF’s main control station suffered from excessive communications breakdowns and even cutoffs during the fighting.83
Organization and Training
According to the Absalom training plan, which went into effect on September 25, 1956, and raised the level of alert, the propeller squadrons that had been mothballed in the Bedek storage facility in Lod in June–July 1956—the 69th (B-17s), 105th (Mustangs), and 110th (Mosquitoes)—were prepared for active flight. The ten days planned for training were shortened to just three.84 To man the jet planes and prepare the best pilots to fly the newest aircraft, pilot training on the propeller-driven planes was minimized, operational training on the Mustangs was canceled, and flight-school graduates went directly from piston-driven Harvards to Meteors. One Ouragan squadron was fully designated for instruction.85