THE TWO O’CLOCK WAR

A brow-moistening tale of nuclear brinksmanship, high-level diplomacy, and an all but forgotten war.

In 1973, on the holiest day of the Jewish year, Syrian and Egyptian forces crossed the Golan Heights and the Sinai Desert in a blinding, surprise assault on Israel on two fronts. Their commanders operated on the premise, formulated by Anwar Sadat, that they could “offset superior Israeli airpower and armor by replying on a superabundance of Soviet-supplied missiles,” and in this they were initially correct; the Israeli forces were repelled everywhere, and military leaders Ariel Sharon and Moshe Dayan feared that Israel would soon have to sue for peace. Deliverance came, writes retired Air Force officer and military historian Boyne (Beyond the Wild Blue, 1997, etc.), in the form of a massive American military airlift called Operation Nickel Grass, using techniques that had been perfected in the 1948 relief of the Soviet blockade of Berlin. The Soviets were none too pleased at the thwarting of their ambitions in the Middle East, especially after the Syrian and Egyptian leadership split on the matter of a cease-fire; that disagreement had the effect, among other things, of drawing Egypt into closer cooperation with America, which would bear fruit a few years later in the Camp David accords. Drawing on newly declassified documents, Boyne shows how close that displeasure, matched with Richard Nixon’s paranoia in those days of Watergate, came to producing the hard rain of nuclear war. More than that, Boyne does a fine job of recounting the Yom Kippur War and of correcting the historical record to acknowledge the important work of the US Military Air Command in bringing it to an end.

Boyne’s skills as a battlefield analyst will make this of interest to military professionals, as well as to students of the Cold War and Middle Eastern affairs.