Famous Tank Battles

The gap at Deversoir was not impressive to look at. It was not a fortress, not a city, not a mountain pass, and not the kind of place that announces itself as the hinge of a war. It lay near the northern end of the Great Bitter Lake, where the Suez Canal system widened and the Egyptian Second and Third Armies met without quite joining hands. For days, Israeli commanders had been looking for something like it: a seam in the fabric of Egypt’s canal defenses, a place where the missile umbrella, bridgeheads, infantry positions, and armored formations did not overlap perfectly. After the failed Egyptian offensive of 14 October, that seam suddenly mattered. The war that had begun with Egypt crossing eastward might now turn on Israel finding a way to cross westward.

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The name Deversoir belongs to the old canal landscape, a place shaped by water, desert, military roads, and the strange geography of a front that was both narrow and vast. To the north lay the Egyptian Second Army, holding its bridgeheads opposite the northern part of the canal. To the south lay the Third Army, holding the southern sector and the road toward Suez. Between them, near the Great Bitter Lake, the line was not empty in the simple sense. There were Egyptian units, patrols, artillery, and the ever-present danger of discovery. But compared with the dense defended zones elsewhere along the canal, the area contained a weakness. It was a boundary between commands, and boundaries are dangerous places in war. They are where responsibility can blur, where maps look cleaner than reality, and where an enemy with nerve can slip a blade.

For Israel, the discovery of this gap was not merely a piece of good fortune. It was the product of pain, reconnaissance, argument, and the slow abandonment of old assumptions. In the first days of the war, Israeli armor had tried to solve the crisis by driving directly toward the canal and throwing the Egyptians back. That had failed at terrible cost. Egyptian infantry, anti-tank weapons, artillery, and air defenses had made the bridgeheads too strong for a simple frontal answer. Then came 14 October, when Egyptian armor pushed eastward and was badly beaten in more open fighting. That reversal told Israeli commanders two things at once. Egypt was very strong near the canal when its system stayed connected, but that system had limits. The answer was not to attack the shield where it was thickest. The answer was to find where the shield thinned.

Ariel Sharon, commanding an Israeli reserve armored division in Sinai, had been drawn to the Deversoir area for days. Sharon was aggressive, politically controversial even within his own army, and famous for seeing opportunity where others saw unacceptable risk. That did not make him automatically right, and his command style often created friction with superiors and neighboring formations. But the gap suited his instincts. If Israeli troops could reach the canal near Deversoir, cross a small force to the west bank, and then bring bridges forward, they might do something more powerful than rescue lost strongpoints. They might unhinge the entire Egyptian position by appearing in the rear, west of the canal, where Egypt’s air-defense sites, artillery positions, supply routes, and command arrangements were not prepared for a major Israeli armored force.

The idea was audacious because it reversed the emotional direction of the war. Since 6 October, the canal had belonged to Egyptian initiative. Egypt had turned water into a road, sand into a solvable obstacle, and Israeli confidence into confusion. An Israeli crossing would not simply move troops from one bank to the other. It would declare that the shock of Operation Badr had been absorbed and that Israel could now impose its own crisis on Egypt. But crossing a canal is not done by desire. Boats, rafts, ferries, bridging equipment, engineers, infantry, artillery, tanks, and traffic control all have to arrive at the correct place in the correct order. A narrow gap on a map can become useless if the roads leading to it are blocked, if bridge convoys are delayed, or if the enemy realizes what is happening in time.

This is where the gap at Deversoir connects directly to the coming nightmare at Chinese Farm. The crossing site lay westward, but the roads and tracks needed to reach it ran through contested ground east of the canal. Names such as Tirtur, Akavish, and Lexicon would become more than map labels. They were the arteries of the operation. If Israeli tanks could not secure those routes, the bridges could not get through. If the bridges could not get through, the first troops across would remain a fragile lodgment on the west bank. If the lodgment failed, the whole counteroffensive might collapse into a disaster worse than the failed attacks of the opening days. The gap was an opportunity, but it was also a trap for any commander who confused finding a seam with passing through it.

The Egyptian command did not fully appreciate the danger at first, partly because the idea of an Israeli crossing seemed difficult, risky, and perhaps too bold after the punishment Israel had taken. Egyptian attention was also divided by the aftermath of 14 October and by the need to hold its east-bank positions. The boundary between the Second and Third Armies added another layer of danger. When one army holds the north and another holds the south, a threat emerging between them can be misread as someone else’s problem until it is nearly too late. This is not unique to Egypt. Armies throughout history have suffered at seams between formations. Lines of responsibility meant to organize command can become cracks through which the enemy moves, especially when that enemy is desperate and fast.

Still, the gap was not a magic door. Egyptian forces around the area were capable of fierce resistance, and the terrain east of the crossing site was more complicated than the image of open desert suggests. Irrigated fields, embankments, ditches, tracks, and prepared positions could break up movement and confuse units at night. The place later called the Chinese Farm was not Chinese and not really a farm in the ordinary village sense familiar to many listeners. It was an Egyptian agricultural research area whose equipment had markings that Israeli soldiers misidentified. Around it, Egyptian infantry occupied trenches and defensive positions that would soon turn the approaches to the crossing into a killing ground. The gap existed at the operational level, but tactically, men still had to fight through earth, fire, and darkness.

For armored warfare, Deversoir reveals a central truth about maneuver. The most important place on a battlefield is not always the strongest position or the place with the most tanks. Sometimes it is the place where a force can change the enemy’s problem. Before Deversoir, Israel’s problem was how to destroy or contain Egyptian bridgeheads east of the canal. If Israel crossed at the gap, Egypt’s problem would become how to protect its rear, its missile batteries, its supply lines, and the western bank of the canal while still holding its troops in Sinai. That change matters more than the physical distance crossed. A successful maneuver does not merely move forces. It changes what the enemy must worry about, and it forces decisions faster than the enemy’s command system can comfortably make them.

The gap also shows why reconnaissance and interpretation are different things. Patrols, aerial observation, radio reports, and local commanders can all provide fragments of truth, but someone has to understand what those fragments mean. A weak spot is not useful if a headquarters dismisses it. An opportunity can vanish if commanders wait for certainty that war never provides. Yet boldness without enough knowledge can be ruinous. Israeli leaders had to judge whether the Deversoir seam was real, whether it could be reached, and whether the cost of the attempt was worth the possible reward. The decision was made under exhaustion, pressure, and the memory of recent failure. That is how many important operational decisions are made: not in calm brilliance, but in the uneasy space between fear of another disaster and fear of missing the one chance that might reverse the war.

On the Egyptian side, the very success of the opening campaign made the gap more dangerous. The bridgeheads had been designed to face east, toward Israeli forces in Sinai. Their infantry positions, anti-tank weapons, and defensive thinking were oriented toward stopping Israeli counterattacks coming from the desert. But an Israeli lodgment on the west bank would threaten the architecture behind the bridgeheads. Surface-to-air missile batteries, so important in protecting Egyptian troops from Israeli aircraft, could be attacked from unexpected directions. Artillery positions and supply routes could be disrupted. The Egyptian armies east of the canal would still be large and dangerous, but their rear would no longer feel secure. The canal, which Egypt had crossed to break a political deadlock, might now be crossed by Israel to break an operational one.

There was a moral and human weight to the decision that should not be lost beneath words like seam and gap. To exploit Deversoir, Israeli commanders would send men into a corridor they did not fully understand, at night, against an enemy still capable of killing them in large numbers. Tank crews would push along roads that might be blocked or mined. Engineers would try to move massive bridging equipment through congestion and fire. Paratroopers and infantry would be asked to clear positions whose strength was often underestimated. Egyptian soldiers in the path of the attack would fight from trenches, fields, and prepared ground, many of them unaware at first that they stood near the hinge of the campaign. Operational opportunity does not reduce human cost. Often it concentrates it.

The gap at Deversoir deserves its place in this story because it marks the moment Israeli recovery became more than survival. After the canal crossing, after the fall of the Bar-Lev Line, after the failed first counterattacks, Israel had been reacting to Egypt’s design. Deversoir offered the chance to design the next crisis. It did not guarantee success, and it would lead directly into some of the most brutal fighting of the war. But it gave Israeli commanders what armored warfare prizes most after shock: a route back to initiative. The battle would no longer be only about whether Egypt could hold its east-bank bridgeheads. It would become about whether Israel could reach the water, cross it, and make the Egyptian command turn around.

By the time the plan began to take shape, the gap had become more than geography. It was a possibility around which men, machines, roads, bridges, and fears began to gather. It promised a way to avoid battering head-on against Egypt’s strongest defenses, but it demanded that Israel thread a narrow passage through confusion and resistance. In the long history of armored warfare, from the first attempts to break trench lines to the fast mechanized thrusts of later wars, commanders have always searched for this kind of opening: not a broad invitation, but a weakness just wide enough for a bold force to enter. At Deversoir, the opening was real. The question was whether Israel could force enough combat power through it before Egypt understood that the hinge of the war had begun to turn.