Veteran recounts Israeli battalion actions during the 1973 'Chinese Farm' battle

Early that evening, we were ordered to rejoin Bren’s division to be ready for the crossing. When I reported that three of my soldiers were still missing, I was ordered to inform the commander of the battalion replacing us to find the missing men. The fight for the Chinese Farm was still not over. It would be another 12 hours before, in a co-ordinated push by a strengthened armor and infantry force, Israeli forces finally drove most of the Egyptians out. What tenuous gains we’d made until then had come at an enormous price. Of Yitzhik’s 300 men, nearly 40 were killed, and many others wounded. I’d led around 130 people into battle. More than 35 were injured. Eleven were dead, including Yishai Izhar and Motti Ben-Dror, our medical officer, killed while treating the wounded. One of our missing soldiers was found alive. The other two could only be brought home for burial. As I began to hear the details of the previous days’ fighting, I became more astonished, and angry. Israel’s tactics in the battle for the Chinese Farm had involved a series of piecemeal strikes by units obviously too small, and inadequately supported or co-ordinated, to succeed. The problem wasn’t the choice of units. No one could doubt the record of Battalion 890, or of the men Arik had sent in before Yitzhik arrived. But there was no way they were going to take the area on their own. I couldn’t understand why there wasn’t an attempt to assemble a force that might actually have been strong enough: parachutists, tanks, artillery. I felt I knew at least part of the answer from the two nights I had spent in the Um-Hashiba command post before joining Bren’s division. By dawn on October 16, the first of Arik’s men had crossed the canal. By the afternoon, although the big roller-bridge was still not ready, a smaller pontoon bridge was available. Everyone knew we needed to get control of the Chinese Farm. But all the field commanders were focused the real task, and the real prize: crossing the canal and defeating the Egyptians on the other side. Now, at least, the main crossing was underway. Bren had chanced the fact that, with Yitzhik pinned down at the Chinese Farm and the Egyptians concentrating their fire on his men and mine, he could get the pontoon bridge through. From late afternoon on October 17, his first units began to cross. On the morning of October 18, my battalion joined them. There was still fighting ahead, and we were part of it: taking out the SAM sites, engaging units of the Third Army and, with Sadat now pressing the Americans for a cease-fire and many Egyptian units clearly losing the will to fight on, racing against the clock to encircle and defeat it five days later. 155 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028003