Once the crossing was secured, engineers began erecting pontoon bridges to allow tanks and the first of over 200,000 Egyptian troops. The Egyptians also deployed amphibious PT-76 tanks and BTR-50 personnel carriers to ford the Greater Bitter Lake unopposed, and dispatched Mi-8 helicopters on suicidal missions inserting Sa’iqa commandos behind Israeli lines to slow down counterattacks.Įgyptian troops used flamethrowers and rocket-propelled grenades to clear out several of the concrete Israeli outposts, and by 6 PM had secured a two-mile-deep bridgehead. Meanwhile, the first 4,000 Egyptian infantrymen crossed the canal using inflatable boats in a meticulously planned assault codenamed Operation Badr. Overhead, 200 MiG and Sukhoi jets roared over the frontline to plaster Israeli airbases, artillery batteries and command posts. Six hours later, over 2,000 Egyptian howitzers, siege mortars, and rocket launchers unleashed a titanic barrage on the Israeli fortifications of the Bar Lev Line on the east bank of the Suez Canal. The wide-open deserts of the Middle East heavily favored armor and air power, and the IDF’s tank and fighter units had significantly outperformed their adversaries. The war was conceived by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad to recapture the Golan Heights and Sinai, which had been seized by Israeli forces in the humiliating Six Day War. The result was a hi-tech slugging match of unprecedented scale and tempo. The Arab and Israeli armies were lavishly equipped with then state-of-the-art tank, jets, and missiles from the Soviet Union and West respectively, including new types of weapons that would see their first major combat test. However, the most intense mechanized battles since World War II took place in October 1973 when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise assault on the Israeli border fortifications during the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday. The handful of exceptions notably include the 19 Indo-Pakistani conflicts and the Iran-Iraq war. Despite numerous bloody proxy and civil wars, there were few interstate clashes between large mechanized armies. Yet fortunately for humanity, that conflict never took place. (Subscribe to 19FortyFive‘s New YouTube Channel here.) Nuclear War? During the Cold War, the armies of NATO and the Warsaw Pact stood poised to wage devastating, large-scale mechanized warfare using a bewildering arsenal of modern weapons including main battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, helicopter gunships, jet fighters, short-range ballistic missile launchers, supersonic bombers, surface-to-air missile systems, and tactical nuclear artillery.
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