Mitla Pass
Authors: Leon Uris
MITLA PASS
LEON URIS
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“I’ll Be Seeing You” © 1938 Williamson Music Co. (Renewed)
All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
“Just Before the Battle, Mother” © 1961 Glenwood Music Corporation.
All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
“That Old Feeling” Copyright © 1937 renewed 1965 LEO FEIST, INC. All Rights of LEO FEIST, INC. assigned to SBK CATALOGUE PARTNERSHIP. All rights controlled and administered by SBK Feist Catalog, Inc. International copyright secured made in the U.S. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
copyright © 1988 by Leon Uris
cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
978-1-4532-2579-0
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
This book is dedicated
to my beloved sister
ESSIE
Contents
TEL AVIV, October 20, 1956, D DAY MINUS NINE
GIDEON, HERZLIA, ISRAEL, October 29, 1956, D DAY, H HOUR MINUS NINE
VAL, HERZLIA, ISRAEL, October 10, 1956
GIDEON, San Francisco Bay Area, 1953
HERZLIA, ISRAEL, October 11, 1956
GIDEON, MITLA PASS, October 29, 1956, D DAY, H HOUR MINUS 40 MINUTES
NATHAN, Wolkowysk and Kiev, 1911
WHITE RUSSIA, Wolkowysk-Bialystok, 1916-1919
GIDEON, MITLA PASS, October 30, 1956, D DAY PLUS ONE
IRELAND TO AMERICA, Queenstown, the Port of Cork, Ireland, 1887
Part Four: Arise, Ye Prisoners of Starvation
TEL AVIV, IDF HEADQUARTERS, October 30, 1956, NOON, D DAY PLUS ONE
GIDEON, MITLA PASS, October 30, 1956, EVENING, D DAY PLUS ONE
MITLA PASS, October 31, 1956, 0400 HOURS, D DAY PLUS TWO
MITLA PASS, October 31, 1956, 0800 HOURS, D DAY PLUS TWO
Part Five: Just Before the Battle, Mother
MITLA PASS, October 31, 1956, 1100 HOURS, D DAY PLUS TWO
CYPRUS, KYRENIA, November 12, 1956
PART ONE
GERONIMO!
TEL AVIV
October 20, 1956
D DAY MINUS NINE
T
HE
P
RIME
M
INISTER’S COTTAGE
, a remnant of the former German colony, sat unobtrusively in the midst of the outsized defense complex on the northern end of Tel Aviv. Midnight had come and gone. The stream of callers faded to a trickle, then halted.
For the moment David Ben-Gurion sat alone, his first opportunity all day for solitary contemplation. He was behind a desk that looked down a long conference table which was covered with green felt. Dead cigarette butts spilled over their ashtrays. The fruit baskets held spoiling apple and pear cores, grape seeds, banana skins, and peach pits, their fruit devoured. Half-empty soda bottles had lost their fizz and others, tipped over in disarray, appeared like a platoon of soldiers caught in a cross fire.
The cleanup crew of soldiers, two young men and two young women wearing top-security clearance badges, tiptoed in and attacked the mess.
“Can I get you anything—some tea?” one of the girls asked.
Ben-Gurion shook his head. It was a great head that seemed even greater perched on his short dumpling body. It was bald on top with an angry white mane flaring out in every which direction. The cherub face remained deceptively peaceful.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“Morocco,” one of the girls said.
“Romania. I live at Moshav Mikhmoret.”
“South Africa. My family is in Haifa,” the second girl said.
“I am a sabra, Kibbutz Ginnosar.”
“Yigal Allon’s kibbutz,” Ben-Gurion said.
“Yes,” the soldier boy answered proudly.
Ben-Gurion’s head tilted and his eyes blinked. He was a past master at grabbing forty winks, a skill honed at a hundred Zionist conferences. When the crew departed it was nearly two o’clock in the morning.
The Old Man’s eyes fluttered open and became fixed on a single paged document awaiting his signature, the approval of a plan, Operation Kadesh, that would commit his young nation to war. Only eight years earlier he had signed another document, a proud document that declared statehood. Would there even be a ninth birthday, or would it all end in horror like a biblical siege with a final ghastly scene of a national massacre?
The past three weeks had been nightmarish in the speed and intensity of events: the secret meetings in Paris with the French and later the British and the clandestine agreement to go to war together ... the return of Israeli officers who had been training in military academies and army specialty schools around the world ... the call-up of reserves ... the near-disastrous raid on Kalkilia to make the world believe that Jordan, not Egypt, was the enemy of record ... French equipment arriving without spare parts ... pressure from Eisenhower and the Americans mounting daily ... dire threats from the Russians ...
Operation Kadesh. How esoteric, Ben-Gurion thought. The biblical site in the Sinai where the Jews dwelled for a time during their wanderings with Moses.
Operation Kadesh needed a series of miracles to succeed. Every assessment was frightfully the same:
Israel must win the war in the first four days. A prolonged conflict in which every Arab nation would join would be disastrous.
No small country goes to war without the support of a major power, yet David Ben-Gurion felt, in the depths of his being, that Israel’s partners, England and France, would falter, leaving her alone, outmanned and outgunned.
Israel must win the war in the first four days!
All sorts of things were going wrong as D day approached. The ordinance reports all but crushed the spirit: no spare steel matting to roll vehicles over the sucking sands of the desert ... aged tanks being cannibalized, further reducing their already inferior armored force ... rifles from Belgium not up to spec ... no filters for the tracked vehicles to keep them from choking in the desert ... a shortage of tank tracks, chains, pulleys, winches, flatbeds, four-wheel-drive trucks, repair stations, batteries, belts ... an obsolete air force of World War II piston planes to face double the number of the latest MiGs owned by the Egyptians ... no aircraft batteries to defend the cities against Egyptian bombers flown by “volunteers” from Poland and Czechoslovakia.
The orders to the brigade commanders were desperately simple. They said, in effect, “You have an objective. You must reach the Suez Canal in three days despite the resistance. You will not ask for reinforcements or further supplies for there are none available.”
Worse was the constant gnawing conviction that the British and French would quit. This would release divisions of fresh Egyptian troops to reinforce the Sinai. If France and England failed to bomb out the Egyptian airfields, Nasser could put his Russian-made bombers to work on Israel’s cities.
We must win the war in four days!
Two of the brigades must traverse over a hundred miles of semi-charted wilderness ...
... and the 7th Battalion, the Lion’s Battalion, must be dropped deep into the Sinai behind enemy lines, exposed to a disaster, a sacrificial force. The Old Man had argued for hours with the Defense Chief of Staff, Moshe Dayan, to try to dissuade him from parachuting the Lion’s Battalion near Mitla Pass. Dayan was adamant. It was the linchpin of the entire operation, a maneuver to initially confuse the enemy, then stop Egyptian reinforcements. When the brigade linked up with the battalion, the combined force would wheel south to free the blockaded passage to the Red Sea. Yes, there was great risk—but try to engage in a war without risk.
Jacob Herzog, B.G.’s confidant and closest adviser on the campaign, entered the room with Natasha Solomon. Herzog was pale, in a scholarly way; an Irish Jew, the son of the chief Ashkenazi rabbi, with a magnificent religious and legal mind. He put all the late communications and a day’s summary before the Old Man.
Natasha Solomon set a batch of papers on the desk, translations of messages from the French. Even at this hour Natasha was a warming sight. She was one of those women who gained an extra dimension of beauty through weariness, a certain sensuality in the black rings of fatigue forming beneath her eyes, as if from exhaustion at the end of a day of lovemaking. She was softness itself, different from many of the roughhewn sabra and kibbutz women, groomed in a Middle European way that made the silk of her blouse float over her terrain and shout “female!” even at two in the morning. An all but forgotten memory flitted through the Old Man’s mind ... a girl, long ago. Such a thing to remember at a time like this.
Ben-Gurion picked up the summary but his eyes were fatigued. He handed the papers to Natasha and waved her into a seat, then took up a pad and pen to jot notes as she read.
The British were being very cautious, very cagey, deepening B.G.’s distrust. Herzog tried to tidy up the day’s events, but new events were already overtaking them.
Both the Soviet Union and America were bogged down in their own problems. An American presidential election was to take place in a few days, and traditionally it was a good time to catch Washington off guard.