Israel’s incredible swift victory in the 1967 war inevitably led to an overconfident feeling in Israel that the Arabs weren’t ready for another war by 1973. And the Egyptians during that year performed a masterpiece of deception that their massive military buildup was exercises, not preparation for an actual massive Canal crossing. And when Egypt and Syria did launch their Yom Kippur surprise attacks, Israelis had no initial answer for either the unprecedented massing of low and high altitude ground-to-air missile batteries or unprecedented massive deployment at all army levels of anti-tank missiles. Yet, almost overwhelmed on both fronts at the outset, the IDF recovered and won on both fronts. Herzog aptly titled his thorough intense recounting of all this Israel’s War of Atonement.
Ok, Rabinovich is among my favorite Israeli authors, and his The Yom Kippur War is a galvanizing account at both military and political levels. Michael Oren: “Never before has the Israeli experience in the Yom Kippur War been so sensitively and intricately documents…. A seamless, riveting narrative both compelling and intelligent.” If you want to pick just one book on that war that takes you down to the battlefield, Rabinovich’s is a sound choice.
If you set out to pick just one of the many heroes among Israelis fighting the Yom Kippur War as exemplifying the height of courage in combat, and a crucial seesaw battle in which courage was commonplace, you’d pick tank battalion commander Avigdor Kahalani and the battle at the Valley of Tears on the Golan Heights. It’s just part of his book on what for him and his comrades in arms it was like. Unforgettable.
What has a book titled The Boats of Cherbourg to do with the Yom Kippur War? From its inception, Israel was faced with a seemingly unsolvable naval arm problem. A fleet of even destroyers, was beyond reach both in cost and ship manpower required, so it opted for small missile boats with the punch of cruisers. But neither such boats, nor sea-to-sea missiles nor sea anti-missile defenses existed in the West. This gripping book tells how Israel developed all three, won stunning first-ever missile boat battles in the Yom Kippur War, and changed forever how naval battles are fought.
