Behind the Scenes of Israel’s Six Day War

 This coming June will be the 54^th anniversary of the Six Day War. In the spring of 1967, Israel found itself surrounded by enemies bent on its imminent destruction. On May 14, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered full mobilization of Egypt’s armed forces. On May 16, he ordered the withdrawal of UN peace-keeping troops from the Sinai desert and advanced his own troops there. On May 22, he announced the closing of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, thus blocking Israeli access to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. There was no doubt of Arab intentions. On May 27, Nasser proclaimed that “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel.”[i] The Arab forces greatly outnumbered the Israeli forces: Arab troops numbered 350,000 versus the Israeli’s 264,000; the Arabs had 2,000 tanks versus 800 for the Israelis, and the Arabs had 700 combat aircraft versus 300 for Israel.[ii]

The combined mechanized forces and aircraft of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan outnumbered the Israeli forces by more than two to one. The media were predicting the imminent destruction of Israel.

On June 5, the Israeli air force launched a surprise attack, destroying most of the Egyptian air force – some 400 combat aircraft – as well as disabling almost all of their airfields. Follow-up attacks quickly destroyed the Syrian and Jordanian air forces as well. With the destruction of Arab airpower, the fate of the Arab armies was sealed. The war lasted only six days and ended with a decisive Israeli victory. Arab losses far exceeded Israeli losses; approximately 1,000 Israeli troops lost their lives, while between 10,000 and 15,000 Egyptian troops were killed. The Jordanians and Syrians lost an additional 8,500 troops. Israel’s victory appeared to be a direct result of a brilliant and well-executed first strike. The rest followed from there.

As is often the case with war stories, things were not so simple. As brilliant as the Israeli air strike was, it should have been detected by the Egyptian air defenses. In that case, the Israeli planes would have been met in the skies, greatly outnumbered by hundreds of Egyptian MIG-21s. Had this happened, the war might have proceeded quite differently. In an amazing decision by the Egyptian military command, they turned off their air defenses because they were afraid that rebel Egyptian forces might shoot down a plane that was carrying Field Marshal Hakim Amer.[iii] How fortunate for the Israelis! Jordanian defense radar did detect the waves of Israeli planes heading for Egypt. The Jordanians warned the Egyptian command, but because of communication problems, the warning never got to the targeted airfields.[iv] 

Remarkable events also occurred in the ground war that helped produce the overwhelming Israeli victory. In a panicked decision, Nasser and Field Marshal Amer withdrew all Egyptian troops from the Sinai. Within 24 hours, the entire Egyptian front collapsed. An Arab commentator wrote, “The decision to pull out troops from Sinai was one of the most bizarre things about this war.” He went on to say that there were over 100,000 troops in the Sinai at the time, and “their orders were to leave their weapons, equipment, ammunition, supplies. and fuel behind and just leave.”[v] The Israelis seemed to have good fortune smiling at them at every turn. Or was it Divine intervention?

Behind the scenes, there were developments that could have resulted in the total destruction of Israel in spite of their victories.[vi] On the morning of June 9, Israel invaded Syria’s Golan Heights. Syria was then a client state of the former Soviet Union, and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev was not pleased. On June 10, he called U.S. President Lyndon Johnson and told him that if Israel did not withdraw from Syria immediately, the Soviet Union would go to war against Israel. Johnson was not to be intimidated; he ordered the U.S. 6^th fleet, which was stationed in the Mediterranean, to advance toward the Middle East. At that time, the fleet was already within air-striking distance of targets there. The message to the Russians was clear; there was a Russian trawler shadowing the fleet and keeping Moscow apprised of every movement.

Brezhnev became cautious but was still determined to enter the war against Israel. He entrusted this task to Air Colonel General Vasily Reshetnikov. Reshetnikov, a decorated war hero, was the commander of the USSR’s long-range strategic bombers, and Brezhnev wanted him to use those bombers to utterly destroy Israel. Reshetnikov had four squadrons of these bombers stationed in the Ukraine, within range of Israel. They would be fully armed and ready to fly within hours. Brezhnev further required that all Soviet identifying information be removed from the attacking aircraft as well as from their crew members and that the Egyptian insignia should be painted on the bombers instead. Thus, should a plane be shot down, the Soviets could claim that they had given the aircraft to the Egyptians, thus avoiding a direct conflict with the Americans.

 The stage was set. Israel was winning the war on all three fronts but was unaware of the overwhelming force that was being prepared to obliterate them. However, one final problem then presented itself to the Soviets. They needed green paint for the stars in the Egyptian insignia, and there was no green paint to be found in the Ukraine![vii] The bombers were never deployed, and the war was over the next day. Thus, for all the Israeli’s ingenuity, meticulous preparation, and brilliant execution of that first air strike, it was the lack of green paint in the Ukraine that saved them from total annihilation! Was this just more “luck,” or was it something more? A careful analysis of other Israeli- Arab wars resolves this question unambiguously, but that story is for another time.

This article is excerpted and adapted from The Cosmic Puzzle by Harold Gans, Feldheim, 20