P5

P5 A new type of bomb produced in collaboration with France tore up the airfields where the planes were parked. The bombs descended by parachute until they were  pointed nose down, then  a rocket engine drove them into the  concrete of the runways. When they exploded they shattered the runways right to the foundations and made them useless without time-consuming repairs.

When the first wave returned  to Israel, ground teams  had been trained to refuel the planes and get them back  into the sky in under  ten minutes. So a second wave  followed hard  after the first attack. A third wave of fifty sorties were sent to polish things up.

When this aerial blitzkrieg was over, Egypt had lost 293 planes to Israel's nineteen. President Nasser called King  Hussein of Jordan but told him nothing  of the sudden and inexplicable loss of his entire air force. He told the king it was the Israeli air force, rather, that had been completely destroyed.

Proceeding on the basis of this misinformation the king ordered his troops to cross the border and his planes  to begin bombing targets in Israel. Syria and Iraq attacked at precisely the same time. Within two  hours,  Israeli  warplanes  drove  back  the invading forces and destroyed the bulk of  Syrian and Jordanian air assets with aerial dogfights and ground attacks.

A grand total of four  hundred Arab aircraft were  destroyed in the  first  single  day  of fighting,  leaving  them  with  only a hundred  operational  planes,  but there  remained  very  few operational runways from which to launch them. That fact alone decided the ultimate outcome of the brief war.

On June 6th Nasser made another  phone call to King  Hussein to tell him  American and British  planes had destroyed  his entire air force on the first day. Nasser half-believed it himself. He still had no  idea it  was the  B'nei Elohim  who prepared  the attack. Nasser had no  idea the B'nei  Elohim even  existed. To admit the Israelis had somehow decapitated his entire air force would imply that mere Jews  were militarily superior  to Arabs, which was, of course, utterly unthinkable. So it must have been the Anglos, or so went his thinking.

On the 8th of June the officer commanding Alef Battalion, Third Company, Rav seren Judith Margolies,  lay atop a sand  berm and looked across the Suez Canal at the former  British airfield of Deversoir, or Duweir Suweir as her enemy called it, which lay on the northwestern  shore of  the Great Bitter  Lake at  the place where it narrowed to form the canal once more.