Yom Kippur War-Who won?

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Final Historian RE:Yom Kippur War-Who won? 4/19/2004 3:34:53 PM

Me too. I mean, they could argue a tie, if they are really extensive on what that means. But a victory? If that is an Arab victory, then what is an Arab Defeat? Its a matter of honor for them. They got trounced in '67, and for them, even a couple of days of triumphs against Israel were worth it, to remove the stain on their honor. The fact that they got walloped in the end doesn't matter, especially because the US held Israel back in the end.

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Worcester RE:Yom Kippur War-Who won? 4/19/2004 3:58:53 PM

If you visit the Military College Museum in Cairo you'll believe they did win - about half the museum is about the 1973 war. It is very much a matter of pride that they didn't lose and ended up - or so they claim - with more territory than before. This "win" politically allowed Sadat to make peace. The Egyptian sappers used very original high pressure water jets to undercut the Israeli forts in two places at Suez, causing them to collapse and simultaneously forming exit ramps for their armor. Clever idea. Since one of these two failed shortly after H-hour and caused a 6 hour delay in their roll out into Sinai, it is interesting to ponder how far the Egyptians would have got if there had been no hitch - extra 180 miles with twice the armor? The real loser was Moshe Dayan who got fired for not taking our advice that the Egyptians were mobilizing - poor Dayan believed Mossad whose networks in Egypt had been rolled-up and were being fed disinformation maskarovka by the Egyptians and their Russian GRU friends. He wouldn't even believe the NSA data from Cyprus which showed the Egyptian radio net lighting up like a Christmas tree as they rolled out of their barracks. Kudos to Nixon for the SR71 overflights that convince both sides to stop. Not Mossad's finest hour. Good job the Egyptian plan was delayed or the Israelis probably would have had to use a nuke.

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Worcester RE:Yom Kippur War-Who won?-Final 4/19/2004 4:11:05 PM

"especially because the US held Israel back in the end" From using a nuke because the IDF had almost collapsed? Or pushing further across the canal? You should recall (a) the IDF across the canal were extremely stretched logistically and (b) the Soviets would not permit further advances which is why the US pressed for a ceasefire. How easy it is to forget the Cold War!

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Final Historian RE:Yom Kippur War-Who won?-Final 4/19/2004 4:15:58 PM

Oops, forgot to mention why the US held Israel back, thanks for pointing out the Soviet connection Worcester.

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AchtungLagg switebull 4/19/2004 6:45:38 PM

comon switebull and company, i want details.I am especially interested in cases of small israeli units holding off huge arab groups. thanx

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sentinel28a RE:switebull 4/19/2004 6:58:55 PM

Chaim Herzog's "The Arab-Israeli Wars" is your best bet, ALagg. Israel won because it survived. Egypt managed to salvage some of its lost pride after getting torn apart in '67. Syria was the real loser--not only did it fail to regain the Golan, it got defeated by an army it outnumbered 10 to 1 and by the end was relying on Soviet paras to keep the IDF from going to Damascus.

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swhitebull That's MR. swhitebull 4/19/2004 7:11:37 PM

OK Everyone knows my views on the war- from a strictly MILITARY POV, the Israelis won hands down - Egyptian army had been strategically and tactically outmanuevered, no reserves, and, despite the fact that the Israeli logistical tail was stretched, Egypt was in far worse case. HOWEVER - the real question is - did Egypt achieve the political goals that a war with Israel would help achieve? Egypt did NOT set out to conquer and destroy Israel; it DID set out to regain a piece of the Sinai and attrit Israeli forces, like it did in the war of attrition 1969-1972. Would such a war lead to peace and a regaining of the Sinai. I can give this an unequivocal yes - its war with Israel enabled Egypt to achieve its political goals - which is really what war is all about. Limited military goals translated into sweeping political gains. NO question. At the same time, Israel's massive military victory over the Egypt - whose surrounded southern army was on the verge of collapse and surrender - forced the realization upon Egypt that the best the Egyptian military could EVER achieve over the IDF was a limited tactical victory, and that it was better to formalize peace between the 2 nations than continue the mostly cold, but sometimes hot war between the countries. Israel's strategic victory, coupled with the "saving face of the initial Egyptian "victory", despite the spin, lead to Camp David and the Peace Treaties. swhitebull - agreed on Herzog's book- its one of my primary sources for the MILITARY events, but you have to filter the political narrative. I'd would read van Creveld as a companion piece, plus pick up an Egyptian source or two.

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AchtungLagg soviet paras 4/19/2004 7:15:00 PM

i for one think the idf would maul the ruskies...without nukes and overwhelming mass that army was pathetic. little had changed since WWII human wave, sad to say. My dad served in the soviet navy and although was never in the US navy he worked with it for various (buisiness mostly) and always said the US navy was far more disciplined and professional.

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AchtungLagg Soviet training 4/19/2004 7:18:42 PM

Another interesting story. My family lived on the border between ukraine and hungary(we were jews) and they had a soviet artillery specialist friend who was sent to train the egyptians. When he came back, he told my worried grandparents "Guys, you have NOTHING to worry about" Aparently the egyptian conscripts were very poorly skilled, by soviet standards.

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swhitebull RE:soviet paras 4/19/2004 7:23:09 PM

..My dad served in the soviet navy ... From my book on Russian Naval Slang: Sui hui cha! and Schtoy ya delal? nasral vborscht iley veshchi? swhitebull ||Grin||

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bsl RE:Yom Kippur War-Who won?-Final 4/19/2004 8:40:19 PM

"From using a nuke because the IDF had almost collapsed?" Nice try. Didn't happen. There was a severe threat from the Syrian, in the early days, because of the proximity of Golan to Galilee. The Egyptians never got far and weren't in shape to go far. The whole point of holding Sinai was strategic depth and it was effective. What was the Syrian threat? More interesting question. "Or pushing further across the canal? You should recall (a) the IDF across the canal were extremely stretched logistically" This neatly avoids the point that Sharon had the Egyptian 3rd Army surrounded and on the verge of annihilation. There was no logistical issue, here. As for the rest? Tsk, tsk. Review the history of the British North Africa Campaign up to El Alamein for a primer in how these things work. Israel had enough to put an army right up to the suburbs of Cairo. It was, essentially, a matter of what Egypt could do to stop them. And, at the moment of the armistice, the Egyptian military was mostly either a smoking hole in the ground, surrounded, or hysterical. Do you really propose that Egypt would suddenly have come up with a mobile armored force capable of fighting a battle of manuever with the IDF? Not in the best of circumstances, let alone in context of the grand attack having failed, the forces involved having been not just defeated, but destroyed as effective military units, and the Canal having been crossed with the main Egyptian force in the area put on the verge of destruction. "and (b) the Soviets would not permit further advances which is why the US pressed for a ceasefire." The Soviets had a credible nuclear capability. They had no credible conventional military ability to fight Israel on the ground in time to help Egypt or Syria. They really didn't even have a credible ability to move air forces capable of stopping the Israelis to the peripheral region, close enough to fight effectively. No, I'm not saying Israel could have defeated the Soviets in a general war. Obviously not, one on one. I'm saying the Soviets could not have stopped the Israelis from conquering both Egypt and Syria without using nukes. They lacked the capacity to project conventional forces in that context in short order. Now, the *really* interesting question - which I'm not suggesting we would have been better off having answered - is who was bluffing harder: the USSR, the US, or Israel? The Soviets could have wiped Israel off the face of the earth. Odds are fair the Israelis had a retaliation plan. Sampson in the Temple, as the game theory crowd would have it. Israel had nukes. Israel had contacts in the USSR. And, Israel knew that the USSR was a real, potential enemy. And, when Nixon came through with a direct, counter-threat to Moscow...well...a really cold blooded geopolitician would ask if the Soviets would have risked that kind of escalation to help allies who were never reliable in an area of only peripheral interest to them? Just talk. I have a background in geopolitics and strategic warfare, academically, and this is an episode much studied and much discussed over the years....

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AchtungLagg switebull-tiy suka 4/19/2004 8:53:33 PM

u see my family jumps from hungarian and various slavic languages and yiddish in their conversations my russian (which i study in school) is totally screwed up. I think i got what you said, and i can understand someone speaking russian to me, but please oh please end the torture, (i know its legal in israel, hehe) Anyway, if soviet troops fought alongside egyptian ones i think the situation wouldnt have been much different. To top it all off, that wasnt meant as "israel pwnzors" rant, it was meant to outline how bad the soviets were.

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swhitebull RE:switebull-tiy suka 4/19/2004 9:10:06 PM

Achtung- I hope you know I was joking- I grew up in a household that spoke yiddish, russian, polish, rumanian, hebrew and czech. I learned a bit of russian, and had a friend in grad school that was a russian language major, and these were the two choice phrases he taught me - Sui Hui Cha - a Tatar taunt of a chinese overlord across the great wall; since they couldnt cross the wall to attack , they hurled insults instead. This Tatar phrase was similar to the mandarin's names, and roughly translates to "stick your pr**k in a cup of scalding hot tea" The other phrase is said when you get rear-ended in traffic, and the other guy gets out of his car and starts yelling at YOU. You say, What did I do. take a sh*t in the borscht or something? Remember, the Soviet fighter pilots flying air cover in the war of the attrition got their clocks cleaned by the IAF. I agree that having soviets fight alongside egyptians, ONCE the Israelis had gotten over the initial shock and changed their battlefield tactics to true combined arms teams, rather than the pure tank units that got slaughtered, would have made mincemeat of the soviets, as their emphasis on commander initiative at the lower levels, flexibility, and initiative would have gotten inside the soviet decision cycle time, and torn it apart as they did with the egyptians. swhitebull - translation done!

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Condor Legion We Always Win... 4/19/2004 11:31:49 PM

Elusive Victory - Trevor Dupuy. OPINIONS?, CL.

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Worcester RE:Yom Kippur War-Who won?-bsl 4/20/2004 10:29:34 AM

Another partial excerpt but why so snide; and again, the "academic" puffery! I can almost understand how easy it must be academically to compare El Alamein (you don't say which, I presume the final) with the end of Yom Kippur; both were obstacle battles in Egypt amid a lot of sans so they "must be similar". But no, since the ends were quite different - the former would have allowed a wide front break out, the latter would have been on a much narrower and predictable salient even if you wanted to leave an army in the rear. If there is a "lesson" at all, it is that Cairo can be defended. But since the comparison is false this "lesson" is moot. I suggest you visit El Alamein and the west of Suez battlefields for yourself - the Egyptians may even give you a general staff escort if you plan ahead. What Yom Kippur did prove was that the Egyptians were not quite as incompetent as assumed and that Israel is not as invunerable as believed. "the Soviets could have wiped Israel off the face of the earth. Odds are fair the Israelis had a retaliation plan. Sampson in the Temple.." Retaliate against the Soviets? Yeah, right. With what and how exactly if they are "wiped out"? You fall into the common trap of portaying Israel as at once both strikingly vulnerable and invincible. The US would not risk a Soviet engagement simply to allow our client Israel to overrun Egypt; the Soviets did not wish to engage the US over Israel provided their client Egypt was secure. Hence the ceasefire. And the good news is:- (a) it proved the futility of this conflict and allowed Sadat to make a lasting peace so both got to win; (b) it proved that after the 1968 Prague fiasco, the NATO investment in ELINT (especially SIGINT) did work; (c) that western air technology and tactics could defeat Soviet air tactics; and, (d) most important of all, that western armor used by Israel - specifically, British Centurions (the first to carry what had become the NATO standard gun) and the newer Chieftains (the first tank to use laser rangers and gyro stabilized gun platforms) - was still qualitatively superior to Soviet armor. Collectively a big sigh of relief in Brussels where we were still using the kill:loss data from Yom Kippur into the 1980's. Of course this may not be academic enough.

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