Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [103]
Tall, slender, and voluble, with a small mustache and English-accented speech, Weizmann moves restlessly, flinging himself back in his chair, twisting his long legs over the arm, leaning forward to make a point, or striding up and down while rapid sentences tumble over each other in a losing race to keep up with his thoughts. He has a gift of distilled phrase. Speaking of the meaning of Jerusalem to a Jewish state, “I could not raise my children on the history of Tel Aviv.” Or on the incompatibility of national character as a factor in Russia’s imperfect success in training the Arabs, “What Ivan has in common with Muhamed, kill me if I know.” Because of the extraordinary record of the Air Force, he says, foreigners think it had some electronic, super-sophisticated secret weapon, “something that whistles and sings the Hatikvah,” but the answer was simpler than that: perfect command of the machine as redesigned and adapted to suit both the short distances of air war in the Middle East and Israel’s narrow means. In negotiating with the French, for instance, for purchase of Mirages in 1958–9, the Israelis insisted on the plane’s having two cannon built into it although it was designed to carry only missiles. The French argued that with new sophisticated developments only missiles were needed in air-to-air combat, but the Israelis had a dual purpose in mind. They wanted to use the planes not only to intercept bombers and fight Mig 21s, which carried missiles plus one cannon, but also to destroy planes on the ground, the essence of their strategy. Weizmann stuck to his guns and got them. “I wouldn’t have bought the planes without them.”
“We were fanatics in the Air Force,” he says. “We knew exactly what we wanted. We meant to rely on our own ideas and not be prisoners of computers.” This was the secret of their ultimate supreme confidence that “we could clobber the enemy,” even though the enemy represented the combined air forces of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. Why? “Because the military world has become a victim of its own sophistication in weaponry, bewildered by the technology of the atom age. It has forgotten that brains, nerve, heart, and imagination are all beyond the capacity of the computer. No computer can go ‘beyond the call of duty,’ but that is what medals are given for.”
The Air Force planned its weapons and trained its fliers in terms of an exact objective and the capacity of the enemy. On this problem Israel’s Intelligence forces went to work, collecting, piecing together, building up over months and years, by photo reconnaissance and other means, despite the disadvantage of having no military attachés or other representatives in the Arab countries, a complete picture of the enemy. “We knew everything about the Egyptian Air Force,” said Hod, “how they work, what was their training, where, when, and how,” including exactly how long it took them to take to the air after an alert—up to twenty-five minutes on certain bases, in comparison to an Israeli figure which, though he would not disclose it, elicited from Hod his broadest smile.
No commander, he said, has ever been provided with better intelligence. So precise was his planning that he was able to take out the nearer Egyptian fighter bases before the more distant bombers and still reach the latter at the exact moment they were taxiing for the take-off.
The work of the Intelligence Corps is the ground on which the IDF stands, and its chief, General Yariv, a spare, alert man in rolled-up sleeves and eyeglasses, is regarded by many as the key figure of the armed forces. Born in Latvia, he came to Palestine at fourteen, “young enough to be accepted by the Sabras, old enough to know the outside world.” He speaks six languages and is forty-six, but looks ten years younger. To brief a roomful of 150 correspondents, covering the field from Kuwait to the Canal, discoursing on