Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon by David Landau Page B

military concept could accept.” Far from abandoning the line of strongpoints, Sharon ordered many of them rebuilt and reinforced after the battering they took in the War of Attrition. In time, though, he persuaded Elazar, who succeeded Bar-Lev as IDF chief of staff on January 1, 1972, to let him “thin out” the line by closing some—by the end it was fourteen—of the thirty-two strongpoints.
    In addition, he embarked on a massive building program of eleven underground fortifications in the hills some miles to the rear, where the massed armor and artillery were to be deployed that would ultimately defend Sinai in the face of an Egyptian crossing. He called these fortresses “
ta’ozim,
strongholds, to distinguish them from the
ma’ozim,
strongpoints,” on the canal bank. “Here I put command and long-range surveillance posts, underground bunkers, firing positions, bases for forward reserve units, and emplacements for artillery.” 37
    By mid-April 1970, the Israeli positions were being subjected not only to artillery barrages but also to attacks by Egyptian commando units crossing the canal in fast boats under cover of darkness. Israel responded with commando raids of its own, some deep inside Egypt. In one such raid, on July 28, paratroopers and naval commandos set down on the tiny, heavily defended Green Island, near the southern end of the canal in theGulf of Suez, and destroyed key Egyptian radar and anti-aircraft installations housed there. This gave the air force freer rein to deploy above theCanal Zone as a sort of flying artillery, targeting Egyptian emplacements and armor.
    In September, a force of Israeli infantry and armor was ferried across the Gulf of Suez to the port of Zafarana, from where it attacked and overran Egyptian positions along twenty miles of coastline in eight hours of sustained fighting before re-embarking. In December, just before Sharon took over, heli-borne commandos dismantled and transported back to the Israeli side a state-of-the-art Soviet radar system deployed at Ras Arab, also on the west bank of the gulf. And in January 1970, under the new CO a commando force overran Shadwan Island, 155 miles down the Gulf of Suez, killed or captured all of the hundred-man Egyptian garrison, and again made off with radar units and other military hardware.
    Both sides now made moves that dangerously escalated the War of Attrition. Israel, worn down by the incessant toll of casualties on the canal, embarked on a policy of deep-penetration bombing raids against strategic targets throughout Egypt. President Nasser, acutely conscious of his vulnerability to Israeli airpower, demanded from hisSoviet patrons a drastic upgrading of Egypt’s own air force and its anti-aircraft defenses, along with Soviet pilots and experts to help man the sophisticated new systems he wanted. In the first months of 1970, the Soviet presence in Egypt doubled and tripled, reaching more than twelve thousand men. Israeli pilots, some of them now flying American-supplied Skyhawk and Phantom warplanes, were ordered to back off from dogfights rather than risk downing Soviet airmen.
    Israel’s deep bombing campaign came to a peremptory end in April, when Phantom jets mistakenly bombed an elementary school, killing forty-seven children and injuring another fifty. The focus of the fighting returned to theCanal Zone, where the Egyptians, with Soviet help, were trying under the cover of almost constant artillery exchanges to deploy their SovietSAM anti-aircraft missile batteries right up to the water’s edge. On July 30, the undesired but inevitable dogfight took place and resulted in the downing of four Soviet-pilotedMiGs and the deaths of the four pilots.
    The escalation added urgency to U.S. diplomatic efforts to reach a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, or, failing that, at least an end of the present round of fighting. The Nixon administration had been actively trying to broker a peace deal through Four Power (United