EPISODE EIGHT

At the start of this account, I outlined the multiple obstacles that the canal and its defenses presented: (1) the concrete banks rising up to three yards above the water level; (2) the enemy's sand rampart towering  as high as 60 feet over the eastern bank; (3) the infantry brigade in the 35 forts of the Bar-Lev line-reinforced, we gave the enemy warning, by two armored brigades pouring fire on our assault forces from prepared positions on top of the rampart; and (4) the Israelis' secret weapon-their capacity to turn the surface of the canal into an inferno. To overcome all this, we had a straightforward technique. We tackled each aspect in turn, breaking it into even smaller components until, piece by piece, we could construct a solution.

The fundamental problem, clearly, was to drive passages through the sand barrier. Without those, we could neither build bridges nor establish ferries. Without bridges and ferries, we could not transfer tanks and heavy weapons to the far bank. Without them our infantry, however successful their own crossing, could not long repel counter-attacks.

By mid-1971, when I took over as Chief of Staff, GHQ had only a rudimentary answer to the problem. Engineers were to cross in rubber dinghies as soon as the first waves of infantry could provide covering fire. With shovels, the engineers would dig holes in the sand barrier and insert the explosive. Retiring 200 yards, they would detonate it. The theory was that the deeper we dug into the sand barrier, and the more explosive we inserted, the more sand each detonation would remove. The reality was that it is almost impossible to dig a deep hole in sand: the sand runs like fluid and erases your work. We knew what width of breach our vehicles would need. Simple arithmetic then told us that for each passage our engineers would have to clear about 1,900 cubic yards of sand, at speed and probably under fire. But with explosives, our best efforts were blowing away no more than 250-400 cubic yards, leaving another 1,500 cubic yards or more to be dug out by hand or by a bulldozer, if we could land one.

In my first weeks as Chief of Staff, through May and June 1971, the Corps of Engineers organized several trial demonstrations by day and night to show me how they could do the task. I was unsatisfied. First, the method was dangerous. How, in the heat of battle, were we to synchronize the explosions of the engineers with the crossing of our infantry so that at the crucial moment, but with no time wasted, our troops would be out of range of each charge? The only way, so far as I could see, would be to postpone detonation until all the infantry had crossed. But that would set back the bridges and ferries by at least four hours-four hours more risk for our infantry as, unsupported, they faced armored counter-attack. Finally, the method was very costly in manpower and materials. To force a single breach by this method appeared to need 60 men, one bulldozer, 500 lbs. of explosives and five or six hours of work uninterrupted by enemy fire-in all, about 1,200 man- hours per passage. But such tight knots of men would be irresistible targets for enemy artillery fire. It was an unrealistic scheme.

Saying as much to the director of our engineer corps, General Gamal `Aliy I asked him to explore new ideas .He at once replied that one of his young engineers had suggested scouring the passages with water cannon. That had been tried in the construction of the Aswan Dam, though with much heavier pumping gear than we could easily handle. What we needed were light pumps floated across the canal in rubber boats. It sounded brilliantly simple. I asked General `Aliy to arrange a demonstration and the first trial was carried out within days, in June 1971, using three British-made water pumps scrounged from here and there.
 

The technique worked. We found that to scour a cubic yard of sand needed only a cubic yard of water; from that it was easy to calculate the best mix of pumps for our purpose; and the British economy promptly got an uncovenanted benefit. We ordered 300 pumps like those on trial. The first batch arrived in late 1971, the rest in early 1972. Our trials found that five of the pumps could blast through 1,500 cubic meters of sand in three hours. Later we bought another 150 German pumps more powerful than the British ones. With two German pumps and three British ones, and without enemy interference, we could now clear a breach in two hours. It was a superb solution, and from July 1971 our chosen technique. I pay tribute to the young engineer who thought of it, and to all his colleagues who labored to perfect it. (When, two months before the war, documents on an Israeli spy we captured showed that the Israeli intelligence service still did not know of the technique, I was relieved-though, in view of the hundreds of experiments we had done, a trifle surprised.)

The inflammable liquid posed the only other fundamental problem, in the sense of inhibiting everything else we had planned. In June 1971, I was shown how our engineers proposed to cope with this, too. Their idea was primitive. Squads in fire-proof suiting, equipped with palm fronds, were to beat out the flames. The idea was that they could disperse the body of fire into scattered islands which could then be beaten out one by one. The only other proposal was the creation of amphibious fire-fighting units with chemical extinguishers. I rejected both as cumbersome and costly. After much study, however, I was driven to conclude that the only  satisfactory solution was to deny the enemy the chance to use this weapon, which was easier than it might seem. The components of the system were: the reservoir (about 200 tons); the pipe and canal outlet; and the control gear.

It was vulnerable in two ways. To cut accidents, each reservoir and outlet were some hundreds of yards from the fort which controlled them. And while the pipes ran underground, the outlets were just visible in the bank at low water and, along most of the Canal, submerged only a couple of feet at high water. Raiding parties could slip across a few hours before the attack and block them. They could also try to lay charges to crack open the reservoir; or we could try artillery fire, so the fuel would seep away into the sand of the rampart.

Almost certainly, we would fail to block all the outlets. But the Canal has a gentle current that would carry the burning oil downstream. Very well, let us locate our crossing points upstream of the nearest outlet. If none of those worked, though, I did not think we could realistically attempt fire-fighting. If for other reasons a crossing point had to be downstream of an outlet we had not blocked, we would simply have to delay that crossing until the fire had slackened. (I was amused when, during the war, the Israelis denied the existence of the system. I could only assume they feared that word of such an ungentlemanly" weapon might tarnish their image.)

(To be continued)
 
 
 

(1), (2), (3)and (4) Detail schematic references can be found  in episode one " Prologue, The Barrier" : Please click on any of the images below or the following URL :