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results of the air force operation determined to a large extent the fate of the whole war.” 25
    As Sharon and his headquarters team advanced toward Abu Agheila in the afternoon, they saw IAF French-made Fouga Magister training jets swooping down on Egyptian forces giving battle to one of Sharon’s brigades farther to the north. The Fougas had been fitted with machine guns and underwing rocket pods. They were the best the air force could spare for ground support on that first day of the war. Later, with the Sinai skies almost totally clear of enemy planes, the full power of the IAF’s Mirages and Mystères would be brought to bear on the Egyptian divisions.
    The northern brigade, equipped with British-madeCenturion tanks, had run into trouble earlier in the morning from Egyptian artillery and antitank fire. A battalion commander and two other officers were killed and several tanks disabled. The brigadier,Natke Nir, pulled back, regrouped, and attacked again in the afternoon, this time succeeding in overrunning the defensive position north of Abu Agheila itself. Still, the firefight showed how strongly dug in the Egyptians were around and inside the Abu Agheila–Umm Katef complex. Their artillery in particular, some eighty 130- and 122-millimeter Russian guns, would take a heavy toll on the Israeli attackers unless they could be silenced.
    This task was assigned to a brigade of paratroopers underDanny Matt, ferried into position by relays of helicopters after nightfall. Their job was to storm the Egyptian guns from the rear, where they were least expected. The Centurions were to attack from the north, engaging the hundred-odd tanks deployed within the complex. Nir’sbrigade was also to cut off the desert road from the northwest and the southwest, thus blocking reinforcements that might be sent in from deeper in Sinai.
    At the same time—timing was the critical factor in Sharon’s intricate planning—an infantry brigade underKuti Adam would storm the three rows of Egyptian trenches and concrete bunkers facing east, which were the main bulwark of the fortified position. The triple trenches were a textbook Soviet-style defensive deployment with the added advantage of difficult terrain at both ends: “high soft dunes in the north,” Sharon writes, “and in the south jagged ridges and broken foothills.” The infantry would go in from the north. Sharon knew the terrain from surveys he himself conducted after the Sinai War. He knew they could get through. Next, another brigade of tanks underMordechai Zippori would charge forward parallel with the road, clearing a path through the minefields to confront the trenches in a narrow frontal assault.
    As evening fell, the infantry arrived, carried to battle aboard a motley fleet of civilian buses that had been mobilized for war along with the reservists. They drove as far as they could on the old, rutted road, then let off their passengers. “Bus after bus was lined up as far back as I could see,” Sharon writes. “I went down to the road to watch the procession up close. Zippori’s Super Shermans moved up to take positions for their frontal assault. Then Kuti’s infantry, two endless lines along the side of the road, marching into the gritty wind from the dunes. Soon they would leave the road in a wide hook from the north … They saw me in the middle of the road, and it was impossible to miss their expressions of confidence and determination.”
    The division’s third tank brigade, equipped with light French-madeAMXs, was deployed farther to the south, blocking the road from the Egyptian divisional headquarters atKseima, twenty miles to the southeast. There were also units engaged in an elaborate feint that Sharon mounted during the day in the direction of Kseima, in the hope of confusing the enemy as to his intentions. “Abu Agheila was the more formidable position,” he explains in
Warrior
. “The Ismailia road led right through the Abu Agheila defenses. Were I to