Famous Tank Battles

South of the Israeli bridgehead, the west bank of the canal opened into a different kind of opportunity. North toward Ismailia, Ariel Sharon’s division had found thick fields, canals, villages, and stubborn Egyptian resistance that slowed every mile. Southward, Avraham Adan’s armored forces found a route with a clearer operational prize. The Egyptian Third Army, holding its bridgehead east of the Suez Canal, depended on roads, supply lines, ports, depots, and command links behind it on the western side. If Israeli armor could drive south from Deversoir and cut those connections, the Third Army might remain strong in place yet trapped in practice. The campaign was no longer about simply crossing the canal. It was about turning geography into a tightening noose.

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The direction of the advance matters. Imagine the Israeli crossing site near Deversoir behind Adan’s forces, with the canal to the east and Egypt’s rear areas stretching to the west and south. Ahead lay roads leading toward Suez, the city at the southern end of the canal, and toward the lifelines that fed Egyptian forces east of the water. The Egyptian Third Army had crossed successfully during Operation Badr and still held ground in Sinai, but a force across a canal needs constant nourishment. It needs ammunition, fuel, water, replacement parts, food, medical evacuation, communications, and the ability to move orders and reserves. A tank brigade can look powerful on a map while its supply arteries remain open. Cut those arteries, and power begins to turn into weight.

Adan’s push south therefore carried a different logic from the earlier Israeli attacks in Sinai. In the opening days, Israeli tanks had charged toward Egyptian bridgeheads and bled against prepared infantry, missiles, and artillery. On 14 October, Israeli armor had regained confidence by destroying Egyptian tanks that had moved into the open. Now the mission was neither a blind counterattack nor a pure defensive ambush. It was exploitation after a crossing. Tanks, infantry, engineers, artillery, reconnaissance, and supply units had to move through the enemy’s rear quickly enough to unhinge the canal front, but carefully enough not to outrun the bridges and routes behind them. Every mile south increased the threat to Egypt. Every mile also lengthened Israel’s own lifeline back to Deversoir.

The first targets were not glamorous. Israeli forces attacked surface-to-air missile sites, artillery positions, command locations, and road junctions, the pieces of the Egyptian system that had made the early canal victory so formidable. A missile launcher is not as dramatic as an enemy tank in the sights, but destroying or overrunning it could change the sky. Egyptian air defenses had limited Israeli air power throughout the opening phase of the war. Now, with Israeli armor west of the canal, parts of that shield could be approached from unexpected directions. Crews, radars, support vehicles, and launchers that had been positioned to protect the canal front suddenly had to worry about tanks appearing from behind or from the flank. The umbrella was not collapsing everywhere at once, but it was being torn at its edges.

The ground south of Deversoir gave Israeli armor more room than the northern route toward Ismailia, but it was not empty. There were Egyptian units, rear-area troops, air-defense crews, artillerymen, convoys, and local defenders trying to understand a front that had bent around them. There were also roads whose importance grew with every hour. Roads that had once been simple lines of supply now became avenues of attack, escape, interruption, and encirclement. An armored column moving fast could seize a junction and change the fate of units miles away. An Egyptian convoy delayed at the wrong place could leave troops east of the canal short of what they needed. Mechanized war often turns distance into decision, and in this phase the distances south of Deversoir began to work for Israel.

For Egyptian commanders, the danger was becoming painfully clear. Their opening plan had faced east, toward Sinai, where Israeli armor was expected to counterattack. Their air-defense network, artillery, bridges, and supply arrangements had been built around sustaining the armies across the canal. But Israeli forces were now on the west bank, moving against the machinery behind the front. The Third Army’s soldiers east of the canal could still fight. They were not defeated simply because Israeli tanks were driving south behind them. Yet a force can be tactically intact and operationally endangered at the same time. That distinction is crucial. The Third Army’s problem was not immediate disappearance. It was the growing possibility that its connection to water, fuel, ammunition, and higher command might be severed.

Adan’s armored troops moved with a sense that the war had finally become mobile again. After the shock of Egyptian missiles, after the night fighting around Chinese Farm, after bridges and roads had nearly strangled the countercrossing at birth, Israeli tank crews could now use speed in a way that made operational sense. They were not charging into Egypt’s prepared anti-tank belt on the east bank. They were driving against rear systems, isolated positions, and routes that mattered more than their outward appearance suggested. This is where the tank’s old strengths returned in a modern form. Mobility, firepower, and radios allowed Israeli units to move quickly from one pressure point to another. But those strengths mattered because engineers had bridged the canal and logistics kept enough fuel and ammunition moving behind them.

The Egyptian response had to be improvised under terrible pressure. Some units fought where they stood. Others tried to block roads, protect missile batteries, or keep supply lines functioning. Egyptian aircraft and artillery still posed danger, and Israeli units could not assume that every rear-area position would crumble. But the psychological burden had shifted. In the opening days, Israel had reacted to Egypt’s carefully prepared surprise. Now Egypt had to react to an Israeli move that threatened the structure behind its success. Commanders had to decide whether to defend west-bank positions, reinforce the Third Army, strike the Israeli corridor at Deversoir, or preserve the east-bank bridgeheads that still carried enormous political meaning. The more decisions the Israeli advance forced, the more valuable the advance became.

The drive south also showed how encirclement in modern war is not always a dramatic ring of tanks closing visibly around an enemy. Sometimes it begins with a road cut here, a supply convoy stopped there, an artillery position overrun, a headquarters forced to move, a bridge threatened, and a port brought under pressure. The noose forms from interrupted functions before it appears as a line on a map. The Egyptian Third Army did not have to be surrounded by a perfect wall of Israeli steel to be in grave danger. It had to be denied reliable access to the things that kept it alive. In desert war, water alone could become decisive. Fuel mattered for tanks and trucks, but water mattered for every soldier, wounded man, mechanic, and gun crew.

As Adan’s forces pushed closer to Suez, the city’s name began to acquire a hard edge. Suez was not only a place at the southern mouth of the canal. It was a port, a road hub, and a symbol of control over the southern end of the waterway. To reach toward it was to threaten the Third Army’s rear and the routes connecting the canal front to the rest of Egypt. Yet cities are dangerous promises for armored troops. From a distance, a city can look like the final point that completes an arrow. Up close, it becomes streets, buildings, civilians, alleys, rooftops, ambush sites, and lines of fire that tanks cannot easily dominate. The drive south created the conditions for the next battle, but it did not guarantee that armored momentum would survive inside urban ground.

The men inside the Israeli tanks and half-tracks were moving through a strange mixture of triumph and exposure. They had crossed into Egypt, struck at rear positions, and watched the operational balance shift. But every crew understood, in practical ways, that momentum has needs. Engines overheated, tracks wore down, fuel ran low, ammunition had to be counted, and wounded men had to be moved back through the same bridge system that brought the army forward. A tank force advancing behind enemy lines can seem terrifying to the enemy and fragile to itself at the same time. The farther it drives, the more it depends on discipline behind it. Recovery vehicles, mechanics, fuel trucks, traffic control, and engineers were as essential to the movement south as the guns in the turrets.

For Egyptian soldiers of the Third Army, the tightening danger must have been unevenly understood. Some men on the east bank were still facing Israeli troops across the Sinai battlefield, holding positions won in the first days of the war. They could look at the ground immediately around them and see an army still in place. But behind them, the lines that made their position sustainable were being threatened. This is one of the cruelest experiences an army can face: to be strong where it stands while becoming vulnerable in the spaces it cannot see. The Third Army’s situation would soon become not merely a military problem, but a diplomatic crisis, because a trapped force of that size could draw in governments far beyond the battlefield.

South to Suez matters because it shows Israeli operational recovery at its most consequential. The countercrossing at Deversoir had been audacious, but audacity mattered only because it led to exploitation. Adan’s drive south turned a bridgehead into leverage. By attacking air defenses, artillery, roads, and supply lines, Israeli armor made Egypt’s east-bank success increasingly difficult to sustain. This was not a simple reversal in which one side’s victory became the other side’s victory overnight. Egypt had already achieved the political shock of crossing the canal and breaking the post-1967 deadlock. Israel had now achieved something different: it had regained the battlefield initiative and placed an Egyptian army in jeopardy. Both facts were true, and the tension between them would define the war’s ending.

By the time Israeli forces neared Suez, the campaign had entered its final harsh turn. The canal that had begun the war as Egypt’s bridge into Sinai had become Israel’s bridge into Egypt. The roads south of Deversoir, once part of the rear of the Egyptian front, had become instruments of encirclement. The Third Army was not yet a story of surrender or rescue, but the pressure around it was tightening with every cut route and every Israeli position pushed farther south. Ahead lay Suez City, where armored confidence would meet the brutal limits of urban combat. For now, the meaning of the southern drive was clear enough. Geography had changed sides. The road to Suez was becoming a noose, and the army that had crossed the canal so triumphantly was beginning to feel the canal behind it like a locked door.