Word: tankful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Cairo is only about 80 miles west of the Sinai desert. Yet judging from the outward appearance of the city early last week, the great tank battle being fought on the desert could have been a thousand miles away. Since the war started, the Egyptian capital has carried on with business as usual...
...week ended, the newspapers began reporting the massive tank battles that were raging in Sinai. Red-bannered headlines blared: SAVAGE ARMOUR BATTLES ALL DAY AND NIGHT. Yet neither the government nor the papers had yet admitted the true extent of the Israeli advances on the west bank of the Suez Canal. Apparently oblivious to the Israeli troops less than 60 miles away, Cairenes continued to crowd the cafes of New Street, where men sat sipping thick coffee and intently playing chess and backgammon. Worshipers gathered at the mosque of Zeinab for noon prayers. Peddlers, as always, hawked their roses...
...first visit, it was already clear that the Israeli army had recovered from its initial setback. There was a constant movement of men and equipment along the vast network of roads crisscrossing the central Sinai region. Israeli rear bases were jammed with trucks, tires, earth-moving equipment, ammunition and tank vans. Soldiers were bivouacked along the road, with masses of armored cars, artillery, antiaircraft guns and tanks near by. The Israeli logistics system was obviously working well. The soldiers were eating fresh meat, fruit and vegetables. They even seemed to have enough water vans to provide welcome makeshift showers...
...newest weaponry and tactics of the major powers. In fact, two weeks of warfare between the Israeli and Arab armies has already taught military planners in both the Kremlin and the Pentagon that a classic offensive weapon developed by the Nazis during the Spanish Civil War-the tank onslaught with close aerial support-may be somewhat outmoded. That combination, used brilliantly by the Israelis in 1967 to win the Six-Day War, has proved to be far less effective this time, largely because of the vulnerability of aircraft and tanks to deadly new missiles...
Other Russian weapons have also contributed greatly to the improved Arab showing. Soviet-built Snapper and Sagger antitank rockets knocked out as much as a third of Israel's 1,900 operational tanks in the first ten days of fighting. These solid-fuel rockets are accurate at distances of a mile or more and are directed by a gunner who merely keeps the target tank in his cross hairs. Electronic signals from the gunner's controls are transmitted through hair-thin wires that uncoil from the missile as it closes in for the kill. But the Israelis...