Case Studies in the Achievement of Air Superiority - Air Force ...

AIR SUPERIORITY
magisterial secondary studies as Trevor N. Dupuy’s Elusive Victory: The Arab-
Israeli Wars, 1947-1974 (New York: Harper & Row, 1978).
Dupuy’s book is as near as one can get to an official history of the Arab-Israeli
wars. There are no truly official histories, either in Hebrew or English (or in Arabic,
for that matter), not even of the War of Independence which was fought nearly 40
years ago with Second World War materiel and tactics. The closest that the Israelis
have come to such a publication is a 120-page public relations piece put out by
Israeli Air Force Headquarters in February 1975 and entitled The Air Force in the
“Yom Kippur War” (Israeli Ministry of Defence Publishing House), which is no
more than a compendium of daily communiques.
Consequently, taped interviews and correspondence with three former commanders
of the IAF-Dan Tolkovsky, Mordechai Hod, and Benjamin Peled-formed
the basis of the study, and are deposited in the U.S. Air Force Historical Research
Center, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. A fourth former commander, Ezer Weizman,
has published his memoirs; however, the flamboyant Weizman, a flyer to his
fingertips, did not serve with the Air Force after he became chief of the Operations
Branch of the Israeli General Staff in 1958. His On Eagle’s Wings (London: Weidenfeld
and Nicholson, 1976) is most valuable when he writes about the training of his
pilots and the ethos he inculcated into them.
There are a number of other published first person accounts, beginning with
then Maj. Gen. Moshe Dayan’s Diary ofthe Sinai Campaign (New York: Harper &
Row, 1965). Dayan, of course, was not an airman either, but as the Israeli Defense
Forces Chief of Staff in 1956, the IAF came under his command, and he has much to
say about its performance. He has also commented on air aspects of the 1967 and
1973 campaigns in Moshe Dayan: Story ofMy Life (New York: William Morrow and
Company, Inc., 1976), but, understandably, there is little tactical detail. Nor is there
much to be learned about air matters from Yitzhak Rabin’s The Rabin Memoirs
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979), although Rabin was the Chief of Staff
during the 1967 war.
Maj. Gen. Avraham “Bren” Adan has given us his account of the 1973 campaign
in On The Banks of The Suez (San Rafael, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1980). The emphasis
is on his differences with the southern front commander, Lt. Gen. Shmuel
Gonen, and with fellow divisional command Ariel Sharon, but because Adan’s concern
with applied airpower is peripheral to his main thesis his book is all the more
valuable. It goes far towards clarifying the part played-and not played-by Chel
Ha’Avir in breaching the Egyptian missile screen. In the same vein, Hanoch Bartov’s
biography of the late General David Elazar, Dado: 48 Years and 20 Days (Tel
Aviv: Ma’ariv Book Guild, 1981) also looks at Chel Ha’Avir from an external perspective,
illustrating almost in passing some of its warts as well as its beauty spots.
At a lower level, there are a number of first-person combat accounts in R.
Bondy, 0. Zmora and R. Bashan, eds., Mission Survival (New York: Sabra Books,
1968), a popular, public relations-oriented anthology which nevertheless has value.
On the “other side of the hill” we have nothing at all from the Syrians, but Lt.
Gen. Saad el Shazly, who was the Egyptian Chief of Staff in 1973, has painted a
painfully frank picture of his forces’ problems prior to, and during, the Yom Kippur
War in his The Crossing of the Suez (San Francisco: American Mideast Research,
1980). His criticisms of the Egyptian Air Force are harsh but can readily be reconciled
with events. The same cannot be said of Maj. Gen. Hassan el Badri, Taha el
Magdoub, and Mohammed Zia el Din Zohdy in, The Ramadan War, 1973 (Dunn
Loring, Va.: T. N. Dupuy Associates, Inc., 1974), who carefully ignore facts that do
not suit their theories and very often expound too much traditional Arab propaganda
to be convincing. All three Egyptian authors are soldiers, not airmen.
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