Israel’s tiny navy led the Western world into the naval missile age, and it hasn’t lost its capacity to innovate. In time, its saga is sure to embrace more chapters, but as the future has yet to unfold we must end our survey just as we began it—with mere glimpses.
[Read Part I here].
While Israel revamped its fleet, Egypt embarked on the so-called War of Attrition (1969-1970) with the intention of breaking Israeli morale by causing a steady stream of casualties through artillery actions along the Suez Canal. Notwithstanding its new equipment, Israel’s navy fulfilled its role in this conflict not with missile boats but with old-fashioned Palyam-style raids and Navy-IDF combined amphibious operations. Following its subpar performance in the Six Day War, Flotilla 13 had undergone a complete overhaul under the leadership of its new commander, Ze’ev Almog—a converted infantryman who had joined the naval commandos in 1954.1 Later to obtain a Master’s Degree at the U.S. Naval War College (1972) and to serve as Israel’s naval Commander-in-Chief (1979-1985), Almog was famous at this juncture for accosting senior officers, map in hand, with an unsolicited plan for a raid.2 Under his tutelage naval commandos were trained for combined diving activity/ground raiding and outfitted with specialized webbing gear appropriate for action on land and in the water. Thanks to Almog’s persistent lobbying, the new gear was finally put to use on June 21, 1969, when Flotilla 13 commandos swam a third of a mile from rubber dinghies and stormed ashore at Adibiyah, destroying an Egyptian monitoring station and inflicting heavy casualties. The attack, says Almog, “proved [Flotilla 13’s] ability to execute an infantry assault from the sea.”3
In July 1969, Flotilla 13 and the IDF’s special commando unit Sayeret Matkal undertook a combined operation against heavily garrisoned “Green Island” in the Gulf of Suez—a position so “unassailable” that its Egyptian defenders dubbed it the “Rock of Gibraltar.”4 The raid required twenty Flotilla 13 commandos to arrive simultaneously at the landing site after a half-mile swim—something that had never been done. To facilitate the task, the swimmers formed a “human centipede”—ten swimmers (swimming one behind the other) on one side of a central cord paired with ten swimmers on the other side. Each pair of swimmers was attached to the central cord by a contact rope to avoid separation from the group.5 Once ashore the commandos successfully secured the assigned “grip area,” from which the Sayeret Matkal commandos were to press forward to subdue all resistance. As the Sayeret Matkal force had not yet landed, however, the naval commandos pressed ahead with successful attacks on both flanks, with the unfortunate consequence that an Egyptian grenade felled two of their number.6