Famous Tank Battles

North of the Israeli crossing site, the west bank of the Suez Canal did not open like the desert had promised. It closed in. After the drama of boats in the dark, bridges under fire, and tanks rolling into Egypt proper, Ariel Sharon’s division turned north toward Ismailia with a mission that seemed to fit the logic of armored exploitation. Push up the west bank, widen the bridgehead, threaten the rear of Egypt’s Second Army, and perhaps reach the city that anchored the northern canal sector. But the ground itself began to argue. Fields, canals, villages, embankments, orchards, and narrow roads broke the battlefield into pieces. The war that had seemed to be moving again became slower, denser, and more frustrating. North to Ismailia was where the Israeli countercrossing discovered that not every door opened onto open country.

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Ismailia mattered because it was more than a city on the canal. It sat near the middle of the canal zone, linked by roads and waterways to the Egyptian rear and to the forces holding the northern bridgeheads east of the Suez Canal. If Israeli forces could drive north far enough, they might threaten the Egyptian Second Army from behind, disrupt command and supply, and widen the Deversoir lodgment into something truly dangerous. That was the operational dream. The Israeli crossing had already startled Egypt by placing troops west of the canal. Now Sharon’s northern push sought to convert surprise into paralysis. But the dream depended on speed, and speed depended on ground that tanks could use. Around Ismailia, the ground refused to behave like the bare Sinai expanses where Israeli armor had often shown its greatest strengths.

To follow the movement without a map, imagine the Israeli bridgehead near Deversoir and the Great Bitter Lake. From there, one Israeli thrust under Avraham Adan drove south toward Suez and the supply lines of the Egyptian Third Army. Sharon’s force moved in the opposite direction, northward along and beyond the canal’s western side, toward Ismailia and the rear of the Egyptian Second Army. The two drives had different characters. The southern push eventually found more room for maneuver and clearer operational consequences. The northern drive ran into the cultivated belt, where water shaped everything. The canal was on one side, irrigation channels and the Sweet Water Canal cut through the landscape, and roads did not always lead where tanks needed to go. A division built for movement found itself fighting for passages.

The west bank north of Deversoir was not a clean rear area waiting to collapse. Egyptian forces there included regular troops, commandos, paratroopers, local security elements, artillery, and units pulled into the fight as the danger became clearer. They were defending ground that favored men who could hide, wait, and strike from close terrain. A tank is at its most comfortable when it can see, move, and choose distance. In the agricultural zone, distance was shortened and vision was interrupted. Ditches masked movement. Trees and buildings broke lines of sight. Narrow roads channeled vehicles. A tank column that might dominate an open plain could become cautious when every bend, grove, or village edge might conceal an anti-tank weapon. The Egyptian defenders did not need to defeat Sharon’s division in a sweeping armored duel. They needed to slow it, sting it, and deny it the freedom to unfold.

This made the drive north feel different from the Israeli success against Egyptian armor on 14 October or the defensive battle that saved the bridgehead on 17 October. Those battles had restored confidence in Israeli tank gunnery, positioning, and mobile command. Ismailia demanded another skill: the ability to combine armor with infantry and engineers in close, broken terrain. Tanks could provide firepower and shock, but they could not clear every grove or canal bank alone. Infantry had to move with them, and engineers had to deal with obstacles, bridges, and routes. Artillery had to suppress defenders without destroying the very roads and crossings the attackers needed. The pace slowed because the battle was no longer only about destroying enemy vehicles. It was about making each next mile usable.

Sharon’s temperament made the northern drive both dangerous and compelling. He was one of Israel’s boldest armored commanders, a man drawn to deep maneuvers and decisive strokes. The crossing itself had suited his instinct for risk. But once his forces moved north, boldness encountered a battlefield that rewarded patience as much as aggression. The Egyptian defenders could trade space for time, and time mattered. Every hour that Sharon was delayed gave Egypt a better chance to understand the Israeli bridgehead, reinforce Ismailia, protect the Second Army’s rear, and coordinate countermeasures. A commander seeking operational collapse can become frustrated when the enemy refuses to collapse on schedule. The northern drive became a test not only of firepower, but of whether speed could survive contact with a landscape built of water, mud, and concealed resistance.

Egyptian resistance north of the crossing had a quality that should be treated seriously. It was not merely the residue of a beaten army. Egypt had been surprised by the Israeli crossing, but Egyptian soldiers and commanders adapted. Defensive positions formed around key roads, villages, canals, and approaches. Forces near Ismailia fought to prevent the Israelis from cutting too deeply into the rear of the Second Army. In this kind of fighting, small units could have effects larger than their size. A defended bridge, a blocked road, a canal crossing covered by fire, or a commando position in broken ground could force Israeli armor to halt, deploy, and spend time. For an army trying to exploit quickly, delay is not a minor inconvenience. Delay is the enemy’s way of turning a breakthrough into a battle of attrition.

The presence of water shaped the fight at every scale. The Suez Canal had dominated the war from the beginning, but north of Deversoir the smaller waterways were just as important. Irrigation canals and drainage ditches were obstacles, landmarks, hiding places, and defensive lines. They made movement predictable by forcing vehicles toward bridges, culverts, and narrow crossings. They also complicated communication, because units separated by only a short distance might be divided by water or by terrain that made lateral movement slow. In open desert, a commander can sometimes correct a mistake by swinging a formation across space. In the canal belt, one wrong route could trap vehicles in a lane where turning around was difficult and advancing was deadly. The battlefield punished impatience with mud, fire, and confusion.

For Israeli tank crews, the move north carried a strange mixture of momentum and confinement. They had crossed into Egypt, which only days earlier would have seemed almost unimaginable after the shock of Operation Badr. They were now threatening the rear of the army that had crossed the canal first. Yet each push forward could feel less like liberation into open maneuver and more like entering a narrowing tunnel. Crews scanned for flashes among trees, watched road edges, and depended heavily on infantry and reconnaissance to reveal threats before the tanks rolled into them. Mechanical wear, fuel consumption, and ammunition supply remained constant concerns, because every vehicle north of the crossing depended on the bridges and routes behind it. The farther Sharon pushed, the longer and more delicate the lifeline became.

The Egyptian Second Army’s position east of the canal remained strong enough that Israel could not simply ignore it. That is a crucial part of the story. Sharon’s drive north was meant to threaten the Second Army from behind, but the Egyptian troops east of the canal did not melt away because Israeli tanks appeared west of them. They still held bridgeheads. They still possessed artillery, infantry, and anti-tank weapons. They still controlled ground that had been won at high cost on 6 October. The Israeli maneuver threatened their rear, but threat and destruction are not the same thing. To turn threat into decisive effect, the Israelis had to move quickly enough and deeply enough to sever the Second Army’s connections. Around Ismailia, Egyptian resistance kept that from becoming easy.

The fight north also revealed the limits of armored exploitation after a brilliant crossing. A crossing can create surprise, but surprise fades. A bridgehead can open a flank, but the flank must be widened. Tanks can move into the enemy’s rear, but rear areas contain terrain, troops, and infrastructure that can slow them down. The history of armored warfare is full of moments when commanders believe a breakthrough has solved the problem, only to discover that the exploitation phase has its own demands. Fuel, bridges, engineers, infantry, air support, recovery, and route security become more important with every mile. North to Ismailia teaches that maneuver does not end friction. It relocates friction to the roads, canals, and villages through which the maneuver must pass.

The northern drive’s frustration should not be mistaken for failure without effect. Sharon’s forces widened the Israeli presence on the west bank, threatened Egyptian rear systems, forced Egyptian commanders to divert attention and resources, and added to the pressure spreading through the canal zone. The very fact that Egypt had to defend Ismailia from the west bank showed how dramatically the war had turned since 6 October. Yet the drive did not produce the clean collapse that bold maneuver sometimes promises. Ismailia did not simply fall open. The Second Army was not neatly severed and destroyed from behind. The west bank became a contested landscape, not a highway to decision. In that unresolved space lies much of the truth of the campaign: both sides had achieved something real, and neither could make the other’s achievement disappear.

The human experience of this fighting was hard and close. Egyptian defenders held positions under tank fire, artillery, and the pressure of an enemy trying to break into the rear of their army. Israeli crews and infantry advanced through ground that constantly reduced visibility and raised the chance of ambush. Civilians and the physical world of the canal zone, fields, roads, waterworks, and settlements, stood near the path of military movement. This was not the clean desert war of imagination. It was a battle fought among the structures of lived land. Armored vehicles moved beside irrigation works meant for crops, through roads meant for ordinary travel, and toward cities with names that meant more than coordinates. The closer mechanized war comes to inhabited and cultivated ground, the less it resembles the sleek arrows drawn afterward.

North to Ismailia matters because it complicates the story of Israeli recovery. The countercrossing at Deversoir was audacious, the survival of the bridgehead was dramatic, and the move into Egypt was a genuine operational reversal. But Sharon’s drive north shows that initiative does not automatically become decision. Terrain, local resistance, command friction, and logistics can slow even a bold armored force after it has crossed into the enemy rear. In the larger arc of armored warfare, this episode sits between breakthrough and disappointment. It reminds us that tanks can open possibilities without guaranteeing outcomes, and that combined arms skill must adjust every time the ground changes. Near Ismailia, the west bank did not give Israel the sweeping collapse it sought. It gave both armies a grinding contest over canals, roads, and time, and time was now the one resource every commander feared losing.