Pacifica Military History Free Sample Chapters.pmd

266 Pacifica Military History
The southern anchor of Eitan’s new line was manned by Lieutenant
Colonel Yair Yaron’s 50th Parachute Battalion, which still could field
several APC-borne infantry squads in the vicinity of Ramat Magshimim
and Tel Saki.
In addition, Yaron unknowingly and quite temporarily received some
assistance in the form of several jeeps and APCs manned by Is-raeli
border patrolmen. Without bothering to inform their own headquarters,
much less Yaron’s, the inquisitive patrolmen had simply gravitated
toward the sound of the guns. In time, they bumped into Syrian tanks.
Amid the heated exchange of gunfire and crude Arabic epithets on the
El Al Ridge, the border patrolmen did the sensible thing and fled.
Slightly to the north of Yaron, on a dirt trail known as the Waterfall
Route, was Colonel Ben Shoham, with his command tank and
communications half-track. Nearby, at Tel Bazak, artillerymen who had
been forced to give way earlier were at work on a new batterysite. To
Ben Shoham’s northwest was the Arik Bridge, the southernmost Jor-dan
crossing in the Golan sector. The route from the bridge was the most
direct from the Jordan Valley to the Hushniya area, so Eitan used it to
dispatch Major Gideon Weiler’s force of Centurions from the Armor
School Tank Battalion to establish a blocking position domi-nating the
Tel Zohar–Kuzabia crossroads. Northeast of Weiler’s position was
Baruch Force, fourteen Northern Command Tank Bat-talion Centurions
deployed to cover the two roads leading from Hushniya.
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Paralleling Ben Shoham’s and Eitan’s concerns for time and move-ment,
Colonel Hassan Tourkmani’s 9th Infantry Division sought to exploit the
Hushniya breakthrough. Checked to the north and west by the Northern
Command Tank Battalion, Tourkmani ordered the 43rd Mechanized
Brigade tank battalion to advance up the Rafid-Kuneitra Road.
This movement was spotted by Israelis manning a nearby outpost,
and a highly accurate report claiming an attack by forty Syrian tanks
was flashed to General Eitan. Tourkmani had managed to find the one
approach that the Israelis had not covered.
Eitan wrestled with finding a way to block this new threat. The
Reservists were too far to the west to be of any use in countering