Famous Tank Battles

The crisis in Sinai did not arrive at Israeli Southern Command as one clean piece of bad news. It came in fragments, like shrapnel: a strongpoint surrounded, a tank battalion hit, a counterattack stalled, a road no longer safe, a commander asking for orders from a front that seemed to be changing faster than anyone could describe it. The command post was supposed to turn reports into decisions, and decisions into movement. But in the first days of the October War, the machinery of command itself began to strain. Egypt had crossed the Suez Canal, the Bar-Lev Line was failing, and the old Israeli confidence in quick armored recovery had been struck at its root. Southern Command now had to do something harder than issue orders. It had to understand a war that no longer matched the one it had expected.

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The man at the center of that pressure was Major General Shmuel Gonen, known widely by his nickname, Gorodish, the commander of Israel’s Southern Command. He had a reputation formed in earlier armored fighting, and like many Israeli officers of his generation, he belonged to an army that prized aggression, speed, and battlefield nerve. Those qualities had served Israel well. But command at the operational level is different from courage in a tank or boldness in a brigade. It requires the ability to absorb confusion, decide what matters, and resist the temptation to solve every problem by pushing harder in the same direction. In the opening days in Sinai, Gonen faced a front that seemed to punish action and inaction alike. Move too slowly, and Egyptian bridgeheads grew stronger. Move too quickly, and Israeli armor ran into missiles and prepared infantry.

The geography of the crisis made it worse. The Sinai front was enormous, and the canal line stretched north to south like a long wound. Reports from one sector did not automatically explain what was happening in another. An Israeli strongpoint might still be fighting near the water while, a short distance away, Egyptian infantry and engineers had already made the crossing secure. Roads that mattered on maps became clogged, shelled, or uncertain. Commanders trying to reach the canal had to move through a desert that looked open but was now shaped by invisible boundaries: missile envelopes, anti-tank positions, artillery zones, and Egyptian bridgeheads whose edges were not always clear. Without reliable reconnaissance, the desert became deceptive. It offered the illusion of room while hiding the fact that the enemy had already chosen many of the killing grounds.

Inside Southern Command, the first need was clarity, and clarity was exactly what the battlefield withheld. Radio traffic carried urgency but not always understanding. Frontline commanders saw only their own slice of the fight. Higher headquarters had to assemble a picture from incomplete reports, some delayed, some mistaken, some overtaken by events before they arrived. This is one of the least glamorous but most important truths about armored warfare. Tanks can move fast, but command understanding often moves slowly, especially when formations are scattered, communications are overloaded, and the enemy’s plan has succeeded in creating shock. The map at headquarters may show arrows, unit symbols, and neat boundaries. The men outside see smoke, burning vehicles, unfamiliar resistance, and a front that refuses to stay where the map says it should be.

The failed counterattack of 8 October deepened the command crisis because it damaged more than vehicles. It damaged trust in the familiar method. Israeli armor had gone forward expecting, or at least hoping, to regain the initiative by force of movement and gunnery. Instead, Egyptian infantry, anti-tank missiles, artillery, and the missile umbrella made the canal approaches deadly. When the attack failed to collapse the Egyptian bridgeheads, Southern Command faced a brutal question. Was the answer to try again with greater force, or to stop, think, and find a different seam in the Egyptian system? In war, pausing can feel like surrender, especially when comrades are isolated and the nation is in danger. Yet repeating an attack into prepared defenses can turn urgency into waste. That was the trap now tightening around the command.

The crisis was also personal. Israeli command culture encouraged strong personalities, independent thinking, and fierce argument, and in Sinai those traits became both assets and liabilities. Reserve divisions arriving at the front were led by commanders with their own reputations and instincts. Ariel Sharon, a former Southern Command chief and one of Israel’s most aggressive armored leaders, commanded one reserve division. Avraham Adan, another experienced armored commander, led another. These men were not passive instruments waiting quietly for instructions. They pushed, argued, interpreted, and sometimes saw the battlefield differently from headquarters. In a fluid battle, such independence can save an army. In a confused battle, it can also fracture the effort. Southern Command needed initiative, but it also needed coherence, and the two were not always easy to hold together.

Above Gonen stood the national command in Tel Aviv, where Chief of Staff David Elazar and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan were wrestling with a war on two fronts. The Syrian attack on the Golan Heights threatened northern Israel with terrifying immediacy, while Egypt’s success in Sinai challenged the entire post-1967 order. Decisions about reserves, air support, priorities, and risk could not be made for Sinai alone. Every tank, aircraft, and formation had to be weighed against the danger in the north. This mattered deeply to Southern Command. A commander at the canal might see only the need to strike now, relieve a position, or hold a road. The high command had to ask whether the entire state was more endangered in the north or the south at that hour. The battlefield was local. The crisis was national.

As losses mounted, a darker uncertainty entered Israeli headquarters. This was not panic in the simple sense of men running from responsibility. It was something more dangerous for a command system: the recognition that its assumptions had led it into danger, without an immediate replacement ready. The Israeli army had believed warning would come earlier, mobilization would restore balance faster, air power would be freer, and armored counterattack would be more decisive. Each of those beliefs contained some truth, but the opening Egyptian success had damaged them all at once. Commanders now had to make decisions while the mental model of the war was still breaking apart. That is a terrible moment in any headquarters. The phones and radios keep ringing, orders must still go out, but the old grammar of decision no longer fits the sentences being spoken.

It was in this atmosphere that Haim Bar-Lev, former chief of staff and the man whose name had become attached to the canal defense line, was brought back into the southern picture as a senior stabilizing presence. His arrival did not magically solve the battlefield, and it did not erase the tensions among commanders. But it signaled that the high command recognized the depth of the problem. Southern Command needed steadier coordination, clearer priorities, and a way to move from shocked reaction toward deliberate recovery. Bar-Lev’s role was less about one dramatic order than about restoring weight to the decision-making process. The war in Sinai could not be won by anger at the enemy’s success or by nostalgia for 1967. It required a colder reading of where Egypt was strong, where it was limited, and where Israel could still strike.

That colder reading began with accepting the strength of the Egyptian bridgeheads near the canal. As long as Egyptian infantry, armor, artillery, and air defenses remained tightly connected, frontal Israeli attacks would be costly. The lesson was painful but necessary. Israel did not need to prove its courage by battering every strong point immediately. It needed to recover operational initiative, and initiative might lie not at the most heavily defended point but at a seam. The Egyptian Second Army in the north and Third Army in the south did not form one perfectly sealed wall. Between them, near the Great Bitter Lake and the Deversoir area, there were spaces, boundaries, and uncertainties. In those spaces lay the first hint of a different answer. Instead of throwing armor straight into the shield, Israel might find a way around part of it.

This shift from reaction to search was one of the most important transformations of the campaign. A shaken army had to stop asking only how to undo the crossing and begin asking how to change the shape of the war. That required reconnaissance, argument, patience, and a willingness to see that Egypt’s system, powerful as it was, had limits. The missile umbrella was strongest near the canal. The bridgeheads were formidable when the parts of the Egyptian plan stayed connected. But no system is seamless forever. Boundaries between armies, gaps in coverage, overextended armored movements, and command friction can all create openings. For armored forces, this is often where the art lies: not in charging the hardest point, but in finding the place where movement can make the enemy’s strength face the wrong direction.

The men in the command posts were not detached from the cost of these decisions, even if they experienced it differently from crews at the front. Every order sent tanks toward danger. Every delay could leave soldiers surrounded. Every argument between commanders used up hours that could not be recovered. It is easy, long afterward, to draw a clean line from crisis to adaptation, as if the Israeli command simply learned and then acted. The real process was messier. Pride had to be swallowed. Reports had to be believed even when they contradicted expectation. Commanders had to decide when to restrain aggressive subordinates and when to unleash them. A headquarters in crisis is not just a room full of maps. It is a place where uncertainty, responsibility, exhaustion, and fear are forced into decisions that other men will carry out in steel.

Southern Command’s crisis matters because it shows that armored warfare is commanded before it is fought, and sometimes miscommanded before it is lost. Tanks, aircraft, missiles, and bridges may dominate the visible battlefield, but the invisible battle inside headquarters decides where those things arrive, whether they arrive together, and whether they serve a coherent purpose. In Sinai, Israel’s first answers failed because they belonged too much to the last war. The recovery began when commanders started to understand that Egypt had not simply crossed the canal; it had built a defensive system around the crossing. To defeat that system, Israel would have to stop trying to rewind the opening hours and instead create a new crisis for Egypt. The road to Deversoir, Chinese Farm, and the countercrossing began in this painful education.

By the time Southern Command regained some of its footing, the war had already changed everyone inside it. The canal line was gone, the first counterattacks had failed, and Israeli confidence had been replaced by something harder and perhaps more useful: urgency stripped of illusion. The crisis did not end because headquarters suddenly became calm or because commanders stopped arguing. It eased only as a new idea emerged from the wreckage of the old one. Egypt’s bridgeheads could not be smashed head-on at acceptable cost, but their system might be stretched, bypassed, and pierced at a vulnerable seam. That realization did not bring comfort. It brought the next ordeal. The command crisis in Sinai was the dark room through which Israel had to pass before it could find the narrow door at Deversoir.