Later we learned President Gamal Abdel Nasser had expected an attack. Yet our planes were lined up on the airfields. They were sitting ducks and destroyed in the first two hours. It was our biggest mistake. Without them, we never had an opportunity to fight. My unit was the last to retreat over the Suez Canal, and after I crossed, our engineers blew the bridges. The Sinai was in Israeli hands.
In 1973 I was chief of staff. I knew that because it was small, Israel couldn’t bear casualties and couldn’t fight a prolonged war. We had re-equipped with new arms since the 1967 humiliation. We crossed the Suez Canal on Oct. 6, the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, and destroyed the supposedly impregnable Bar-Lev line. We had them on the run, as did the Syrians on the Golan Heights. Those first two days were euphoric as we started to erase the pain of 1967. My plan was to go only 15 kilometers past the Suez and then engage the Israelis in a war of attrition. If we had stayed where we were, we would have been in a good position. One or two years of war wouldn’t have mattered to me, but, with 18 percent of its Jewish population mobilized, would have seriously hurt Israel.
But Anwar Sadat, who had little military experience, insisted over my protests that we move forward. He stretched our lines to 50 kilometers, taking our troops and armor out from under protection of air antiaircraft missiles. In addition, we couldn’t move our few mobile missiles, the Soviet-made SAM-6s, because Moscow didn’t want to risk having their latest technology fall into enemy hands. Our Air Force had yet to recover fully from 1967, so once again our troops were exposed to Israeli jets. We suffered heavy losses.
In 1967 there was no real preparation for war. In 1973 our preparations were undermined by Sadat. What is ridiculous today is that all these facts, which are well known to Israel and all over the world, are still not being told to the Egyptian people.
