The Six Day War (Part 2)

BREAKFAST WILL NEVER BE THE SAME

What I mentioned in the previous post has relevance back to the Six Day War on a couple of fronts, and my time in 76 Squadron was what aroused my interest back to that time five and a half years earlier.
Being a fighter squadron, there was the need to be ‘combat ready’, if the situation ever was to arise. To that end the squadron had to keep its hand in and in a high state of readiness, and all this necessitated constant training.
At our home base, we regularly carried out gunnery programs, both air to air and air to ground. Other missions were also carried out and it wasn’t just a case of the pilots being ready for any situation, but the ground crews also had to be ready and proficiently trained in every aspect of aircraft operations, because after all, we were the guys who had to have the planes ready for those pilots to do their jobs. So, we were all regularly rotated onto the flight line, so every man was able to step up to the plate.
Every so often we had exercises at our home base simulating actual situations, and half a dozen times a year we would visit other operational bases and conduct exercises there also, sometimes taking only parts of the Squadron, leaving half at home.
These trips away were always highly sought after, especially to Darwin in the Northern Territory, and once or twice a year the whole Squadron deployed to another base, a large operation in itself. and those times were always well received, except maybe by some of the married guys.
On those exercises away, the squadron gelled together as a tight unit. More often than not, these exercises were run in conjunction with other Air Forces and numerous times we got to join in with members of those other Air Forces, both from the UK and also from the US three or four times.

It was one of the few times the ground based people got to close quarters with the pilots, and usually on Friday afternoons, after a hectic and intensive working week of long days and nights, we would all relax together in our outpost, usually at the far end of the airfield, and beers would be brought in and we’d have a barbecue.
The pilots would have this opportunity to relax and it was also used as a group bonding type of thing. They liked to get information from us regarding technical aspects of the plane, and we just loved to hear their input of what it actually meant to do what they were trained for, to fly in combat.
On one of those occasions, a group of us were talking with one of the older pilots, and he told us that the most they actually learned about combat flying in the Mirage was from information gleaned from Israeli sources during the Six Day War, and this was the first I heard some of the details os those early stages when the Israeli Air Force was called to play their part.

OPERATION MOKED.

At the outset of that war, the Israeli Air Force had Mirages in their tiny Air Force, and these were the same aircraft the RAAF used. The tactics they used during that war provided valuable information that was stored in each of our pilot’s knowledge bank. One of those was strategy that enabled the Israelis to virtually win that War on the very first day.

The total Israeli Air Force amounted to around 180 warplanes, all from two French manufacturers, Dassault being one of them, makers of the Mirage III, that the Israeli’s had as their front line fighter, similar to the Australian Mirage III. They were up against the Egyptian Air Force who had 420 aircraft,  nearly all MiG fighters, the 17,19, and 21, along with some Sukhoi fighters, and bomber aircraft also from Russian manufacturers. Syria had around 100 aircraft. Jordan had 24, and the Iraqi Air Force had a further 100, so that effectively meant the Israelis were up against a total force of 650 combat aircraft, and outnumbered nearly four to one.

The Israelis acted preemptively and launched the first coordinated attack against the Egyptian force first, directed at 11 of their 18 bases, so that the attacking Israeli forces were all ‘on target’ at the same time.

Now here’s the crunch.
The Egyptians were well aware that something of this nature was going to happen, so they were well prepared and ready to take off at a moments notice. Modern jet aircraft are not like in those old war movies from World War 2 when pilots just jumped in their planes and took off. Modern aircraft need time for their systems to run up so from the time the pilot leaves the flight line office to taxi out is usually around fifteen to twenty minutes. So, in times of high readiness, pilots sat in the cockpits with all the systems running, powered by ground units. When they were informed of an imminent attack, all they needed to do was to start the engine, unplug the ground power units and roll out for take off, something we at 76 Squadron trained consistently to achieve in less than one minute from signal to roll out.

What the Israelis did was very clever. Modern strategic thinking had it that any first attack that was going to happen would be just as dawn broke, for best effect. What the Israelis did was to time those attacks upon those 11 bases, coordinated for 7.45 AM, almost two hours after sunrise.

At 7.30 AM the Egyptians thought that being well past dawn, then nothing was going to happen, so the pilots all got out of their planes and went off to breakfast, and everything was shut down from readiness. Israeli intelligence had informed them that this was the case every morning, the time when the pilots went off to breakfast. So, while they were all in their messes, the Israeli’s struck at those 11 bases and virtually destroyed the bulk of the Egyptian Air Force. In that first coordinated raid, virtually half the Egyptian Air Force was destroyed on the ground. Only 4 MiG 21’s got off the ground, and they shot down one Israeli Bomber before the accompanying Mirages shot down 3 of the MiG’s. All up the Israelis lost only 8 aircraft, mostly to ground fire.

The Israelis then returned to base, were immediately turned around, something practiced to perfection, and they all then returned to the other air bases in Egypt, command centres, radar bases, and electronic warfare equipment centres, all subsequently destroyed. All up, on that first morning, three times the Israelis launched waves against Egypt and then after that, onto those other Countries Air Bases.

Consider this, and compare it against the next time you pull into a gas station to put fuel in the tank and check the oil and the tyres.

The Israeli aircraft would return from their raid, and then the aircraft had to be turned around and readied for the next raid. The pilot would taxi in and shut down the engine. A semi trailer would be rolled up behind the aircraft and men would refuel the empty tanks, sometimes as much as 1,000 gallons. During this task, other ground crew would replenish all the arms on the aircraft, new bombs and missiles and a complete new fully loaded gun assembly. Also at the same time each of the aircraft trades would do a pre flight check in their field of expertise, and there were usually the six main trades and some ancillary checks as well from other tradesmen.

When you pull up at the gas station, it takes some time to put the fuel in and do those checks. The israeli Air Force did all they had to do for each of those aircraft, and they did it all in under ten minutes. That’s from engine wind down to engine restart ready for the pilot to take off on the next raid. The average turn around time was just a tick under 8 minutes.

The first the Egyptians knew was when the raids began. On each of those early raids, the Israelis flew at 30 feet the whole way there at cruise speed of around 600MPH. That’s at 30 feet above the ground. This was well below the radar, and well below the SAM’s. They would then pop up on target, crater the runway first, and then strafe and bomb the aircraft on the ground.
During the chaos the Egyptians got word off to their friends in the other Countries, but the Israelis again turned around the returning aircraft, and took out the air forces of Syria and then of Jordan, these attacks coordinated for lunch time, and then some elements of the Iraqi Air Force during evening meal time. All opposing Air Forces were all but totally wiped out on the ground and the Israelis were thus guaranteed air superiority for the remaining five days, something the Arab forces never recovered from. For the rest of this exceedingly short war, the Israeli Air Force carried out ground attack roles, assisting the ground forces, totally unopposed from any other plane in the sky.

How all this came about has now gone into legend, and it always sounds so unbelievable every time you hear it, and some would like to pretend that it is just that. A made up fairy tale that never really happened at all.

This is a link to a website that shows and details some of the things that happened on that first morning.

These strategically micromanaged tactics would only ever work this one time, because from the time of that first attack wave, combat readiness tactics were rewritten for every Air Force on the Planet. Now, combat readiness doesn’t take time out any more so pilots can go have some breakfast, or lunch, or dinner.

This was an absolute master stroke on the part of Israeli Air Force Commanders, and lessons learned on the morning of that day, the 5th June 1967 are now part of the knowledge base not only of pilots, but for ground crews as well.

Effectively, the Six Day War was won in a hectic 15 minutes on that first morning. Israel committed all it had on this one task, so it just had to be made to work. While the aligned Arab States whipped up their people into a frenzy of hatred, the Israeli Air Force, trained and trained and trained until they got it down pat. Then they just went out and did it. The only aircraft left behind that morning to defend the whole of Israel were 12 Mirages.

Because our Air Force also had a similar version of this same Mirage aircraft, our pilots paid very close attention, and believe me, from the time we were told by that pilot at the barbecue on that Friday afternoon in the hot January Summer of 1973, we knew then just why that during those airfield defence exercises at far away bases, breakfast was always delivered, and we ate it between tasks.

Following the War, there were some unintended consequences for the Israeli Air Force, and I’ll go into them in the next post.