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The Six Day War 1967: Sinai (Campaign)

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The 1967 Six Day War is usually remembered as a walk-over but Simon Dunstan's two-part history in Osprey's campaign series demonstrates that this was a conflict that deserves serious study by military professionals. This first volume covers the four-day Israeli attack on Egypt. Dunstan writes almost entirely from the Israeli perspective but he does succeed in adding a level of military detail that has not been present in many earlier, politicized accounts, although it compares favorably with Dupuy's Elusive Victory. While the Egyptian military is depicted as stolid but incompetent ciphers, at least they are given credit with putting up a tough fight on the border until betrayed by their supreme commander (who was later executed). The Israeli Ugda (division) commanders, including Ariel Sharon, are pretty much the stars of this account, although the author uses a number of lower-level memoirs to provide tactical vignettes. Indeed, Sharon's remarkable night-time assault on the Egyptian fortified position at Um Katef should rightly be considered a model for the American tactics against Iraqi in Desert Storm in 1991. Dunstan's narrative tends to emphasize the first 24 hours of the war and then skims rather rapidly over the last three days, but overall this is a good volume.

The introductory sections in this volume are a bit thin, with a 1-paragraph background on the conflict (which seems almost devoid of much of the political/diplomatic maneuvering), 2 pages on opposing forces and a few pages on opposing commanders. For readers without much background on this conflict, this is insufficient. The 9-page section on opposing plans fills in some gaps and identifies Egypt's strategy based on rhetoric (although it seems to suggest that the Arab plans to attack Israel were illusory, which is questionable) and Israel's pre-emptive strategy. On the military side, Dunstan notes the weaknesses of the Egyptian officer corps but fails to identify two key weakness - lack of sufficient anti-armor capability for their infantry and lack of forward air defense - which the Egyptians were quick to recognize and rectify after their defeat with loads of Saggers and SA-6 SAMs from the Soviets. It is also clear that the Israelis had not really adopted a combined arms approach to warfare and that they relied too heavily on armor-heavy task forces and close air support, which would come back to bite them in 1973. Indeed, one lesson of this conflict that the author misses is that the defeated Egyptians learned a great deal from the campaign but the victorious Israelis rested on their laurels.

The volume has five 2-D maps (the Middle East in 1967; Arab and Israeli invasion plans; Operation Moked; the Israeli coastal attack to El Arish; the Sinai front) and two 3-D BEV maps (the Battle at Rafah junction; Battle of Abu Ageila/Um Katef), which are quite satisfactory. I particularly liked the map on the Israeli air strikes which not only showed the targets, but also the air routes used. As usual, the three battle scenes by Peter Dennis (Israeli Mirage III jets bombing Cairo West; Israeli air assault against Egyptian artillery batteries at Um Katef; Israeli Centurion tanks race for Mitla Pass) are superb, but all from the Israeli perspective. The author also provides a one-page bibliography, which unfortunately lists no Arab sources.

Dunstan gets into the campaign proper with an 8-page section on Operation Moked, the Israeli air strikes that destroyed Egypt's air force. This section is well written and he notes that even though the Egyptian Air Force was clobbered, the Israeli Air Force still lost a quarter of its front-line strength in the four-day war. The heart of the volume lies in the 47-page section on Operation Red Sheet, the ground phase of the war in Sinai. The author quotes large chunks from Israeli first-person accounts of the fighting - almost one quarter of his ground campaign narrative. At times he's a little too much in the turret and it could be easy for readers to lose track of the big picture, particularly since the map that shows the overview of the whole Sinai is misplaced far in the end of the volume. Nevertheless, the author's dissection of Sharon's impressive attack on Um Katef is thorough and very well done. However, he provides very little information on the Egyptian armored reserves in Sinai (e.g. what was in Task Force Shazli?) or how much escaped across the Suez Canal. The author also avoids any mention of Israeli atrocities in Sinai, even though there have been some credible accounts that Sharon and other commanders may have turned a blind eye to the execution of Egyptian POWs (which was repeated later in Lebanon). Nevertheless, this is a decent if one-sided account and just the right size for military professionals to use as an operational case study.

A good book that explains the sinai campaign, a good source for begineers and students.