Famous Tank Battles

The 35th Paratroopers entered the Chinese Farm corridor after the battle had already become something worse than a plan. By the night of 16 October, Israeli troops had crossed the Suez Canal in small boats, but the operation still hung by a thread. The routes leading to Deversoir were clogged, contested, and only partly understood. Egyptian positions east of the canal continued to threaten the lifeline that would allow bridges, tanks, and supplies to reach the water. Into that darkness came Israeli paratroopers, men trained for bold action and sudden violence, but now asked to do one of war’s most unforgiving jobs: clear entrenched infantry from broken ground, at night, with too little information and no room for delay.

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Their mission made sense at the level of maps and headquarters. The Israeli countercrossing could not become decisive unless the corridor behind it stayed open. Boats had put the first paratroopers on the west bank, but boats alone could not carry an army. The bridges still had to get through, and the routes named Lexicon, Tirtur, and Akavish still had to function under pressure. Egyptian troops around the Chinese Farm and nearby road network were blocking or threatening that movement. Someone had to go in and break those positions loose. Tanks had tried to force the issue in places, but armor could not see or clear every trench, ditch, and embankment. Infantry would have to enter the dark spaces where machines could not do the whole job.

The 35th Paratroopers were part of Israel’s elite infantry tradition, but elite status does not make a man bulletproof or grant him perfect knowledge of the ground ahead. Paratroopers are often imagined descending from the sky or striking suddenly behind enemy lines. Here, their task was uglier and more direct. They were moving into a battlefield already churned by armor, artillery, dust, and confusion, where the enemy was dug in and waiting. The ground near the agricultural research area was full of features that punished haste: irrigation ditches, low rises, trenches, tracks, and cultivated patches that broke up movement and hid defenders. What looked like a corridor on a map became, at walking pace, a maze of lethal fragments.

The tragedy of urgency was that everyone knew the mission mattered. This was not a pointless order issued for pride or appearance. If the Egyptian positions remained in place, they could interfere with the crossing at Deversoir and possibly strand Israeli troops already west of the canal. If the bridges failed to arrive, the whole counteroffensive could shrink into a dangerous lodgment without enough weight behind it. The paratroopers therefore carried more than rifles, ammunition, stretchers, radios, and fatigue. They carried the pressure of an operation that depended on them doing quickly what the terrain and enemy made painfully slow. In war, urgency can be honest and still be cruel. A necessary mission can still be badly informed, badly coordinated, and terribly costly.

The men moving forward that night did not have the kind of battlefield picture that later readers expect from diagrams. They did not see a neat arrangement of Egyptian trenches with arrows showing where resistance would be strongest. They advanced through darkness, dust, noise, and incomplete reports. Friendly tanks and vehicles were nearby in some places and absent in others. Egyptian fire could come suddenly from ground that had seemed empty a moment before. Units could become separated or misdirected. Officers had to make decisions with only fragments of certainty. For infantry, this kind of confusion is intimate. A tank crew may be blinded by limited vision, but an infantryman feels the ground with his feet, hears fire snapping at body level, and learns one ditch at a time whether the map has lied.

Egyptian defenders around the corridor had advantages that do not always show clearly in summaries of the battle. They were not necessarily stronger in a sweeping operational sense, but they were in positions that made the Israeli infantry pay for every misunderstanding. Trenches and prepared holes gave cover. Anti-tank weapons discouraged armored vehicles from solving the problem alone. Machine guns and rifles made open movement dangerous. Artillery could add sudden chaos behind or among the attackers. Most important, the defenders could remain hard to locate until they fired. In a night attack, the attacker often discovers the enemy by being shot at. That discovery is information, but it is information bought with lives.

The paratroopers’ advance became a fight of short distances and broken coordination. Men moved, halted, dropped, fired, crawled, and tried to understand whether the shapes ahead were friendly troops, Egyptian positions, wreckage, or empty ground. Commands passed along in the dark could be misunderstood or drowned out. Wounded men needed help, but stopping for them could slow the movement, while leaving them exposed was unbearable. Officers and noncommissioned officers had to keep pushing small groups forward when the larger battle had become impossible to see. This is where the heroic image of infantry gives way to something more difficult and more human. Courage was not a shining mood. It was the act of continuing when each step made the next danger clearer.

The tanks supporting the fight were powerful but limited. Their guns could smash suspected positions, and their presence could give infantry a sense that heavy force was nearby. But tanks at night in broken terrain are not all-seeing guardians. They can miss enemy soldiers hidden close to the ground. They can mistake locations. They can be vulnerable to anti-tank teams if they move without infantry clearing ahead and along the flanks. The paratroopers needed the tanks, and the tanks needed the paratroopers, but the battlefield did not always allow them to cooperate cleanly. The Chinese Farm corridor exposed combined arms warfare at its hardest. It is easy to praise cooperation between tanks and infantry in doctrine. It is much harder to make that cooperation work when radios fail, dust blinds, and men are dying in the dark.

For the Egyptian soldiers, the night was no abstraction either. They were under attack by determined infantry and armor while the larger Israeli crossing threatened to change the war behind them. Some may have known only that they had to hold their part of the line. Others may have sensed that something larger was happening near Deversoir. Their positions were struck, probed, and assaulted in a battle where staying in place required its own kind of endurance. Prepared defenses protect men, but they also trap them inside the violence directed at that ground. Egyptian infantry had to remain under fire, return fire, and resist the pressure of Israeli forces trying to tear open the corridor. They were not extras in someone else’s counteroffensive. Their resistance helped make the mission so costly.

The cost to the 35th Paratroopers became one of the bitter memories of the canal campaign. Accounts of the exact casualties and the precise sequence of every clash vary, as they often do after night fighting marked by confusion and trauma. What matters is the nature of the loss. Men were killed and wounded in a battle whose importance was real but whose conditions were miserable. Survivors carried memories of disorientation, sudden fire, missing comrades, and the feeling that they had been sent into ground no one fully understood. Military history can make sacrifice sound clean by placing it inside a successful operation. But success does not cleanse the experience of those who paid for it. The corridor was opened only through suffering that no operational arrow can honestly contain.

At headquarters, the battle for the corridor was judged by whether it allowed the countercrossing to continue. That judgment was necessary, because commanders must think in terms of missions, timings, and consequences. Yet it also creates a distance between command language and battlefield reality. A road is reported cleared, a position neutralized, a route secured, and the plan moves on. For the men who fought there, those phrases might contain hours of terror and loss. This gap between operational necessity and human experience runs through the whole Chinese Farm story. Israel needed the corridor. Egypt needed to block it. Both statements are true. But between them lay the paratroopers, Egyptian defenders, tank crews, medics, engineers, and commanders whose lives were caught in the narrow place where two necessities collided.

The 35th Paratroopers also reveal why infantry remained indispensable in an age of tanks, missiles, and aircraft. The October War is often remembered for anti-tank missiles stopping armor, surface-to-air missiles challenging aircraft, and armored formations surging through desert gaps. Yet when the decisive corridor had to be forced open, infantry still had to close with prepared positions. No missile umbrella, no bridge system, no tank formation could substitute entirely for soldiers moving through darkness to take and hold ground. That does not romanticize the task. It makes it more sobering. Modern armored warfare did not eliminate the old infantry burden. It often concentrated that burden at the exact point where the larger machine could not move without men on foot.

By the time the fighting eased enough for the Israeli crossing effort to continue, the paratroopers had helped keep alive an operation larger than themselves. Their attack did not make the corridor safe in any permanent or simple sense. It did not erase Egyptian resistance or solve every problem facing the bridges. But it contributed to the hard and partial opening Israel needed. The west-bank foothold could grow. The crossing system could be pushed forward. Israeli armor would soon move in greater strength across the canal, and the war would widen into Egypt proper. That later movement can make the corridor fight seem like a step on the way to something bigger. It was bigger, but it was also its own ordeal, and it deserves to be remembered at the scale of the men who fought it.

The story of the 35th Paratroopers is a tragedy of urgency because the mission was both necessary and ruinous. It shows how a campaign can turn on a corridor, how a corridor can turn on a trench line, and how a trench line can demand payment from men who know almost nothing of the grand design except that they must move forward. In the long story of armored warfare, this episode stands against any easy belief that maneuver is clean once the right gap is found. Deversoir offered Israel a way to reverse the war, but the road to that reversal ran through darkness, bad information, and infantry combat at close range. The paratroopers went in because bridges and tanks could not pass on hope alone. They paid the price of making movement possible.