WHAT TRIGGERED KAVKAZ? REFUTING HEIKAL’S VERSIONshowed that every Eg yptian infantry platoon had rehearsed the crossing about fifteen
times, with four to five of these exercises conducted at division level.^38
If this activity was spotted by Israeli pilots during the subsequent “depth bomb-
ings,” it might explain Israel’s retrospective claim that these raids disrupted prepara-
tions for a major Eg yptian land offensive in the summer of 1970. After the depth
raids went wrong and were halted, an Israeli colonel claimed that they “effectively
frustrated the Eg yptian preparations for an all-out attack ... a possible war was pre-
vented—or at least delayed.”^39 But the scope of “depth bombings” could hardly have
achieved such a result, and Wadi Natrun is not recorded as one of their targets. A
senior Soviet interpreter confirms that already in the summer of 1969, it was Israeli
air raids on the Eg yptian II and III Army Corps in the canal zone that “disrupted
their training exercises in preparation for liberating the occupied territories.”^40
So in military terms as distinct from morale and politics, the entire depth-
bombing series—and certainly the raids before 22 January—was marginally signifi-
cant compared to the main theater of war in the summer and autumn of 1969. On
21 July, the day after the “flying artillery” campaign commenced, Karpov, the Soviet
artillery adviser posted near Ismailia, noted that in his sector alone, Israeli napalm
bombs had destroyed an artillery battery and a SAM-2 divizyon. By 1 August, he
recorded that two more SAM divizyons had been lost and the Eg yptians had moved
all available AA guns up to the front line to protect the remaining missiles.^41
Serkov, with a neighboring outfit, had already counted five divizyons knocked out
on 24 July, out of seven then guarding the whole canal. “In effect, the country’s
entire front-line air defense” was eliminated in a “sudden, daring” IAF operation
without losing any planes.^42 The Eg yptians counted 15 tons of bombs dropped by
Skyhawks in one raid on a single SAM battery, four times the quantity that they
reckoned would have sufficed to take it out. The official Eg yptian history of the
1973 war states that it was the “flying artillery” campaign (rather than the depth
bombings) that led to a decision to remove the remaining SAM-2s from the front
“temporarily” until SAM-3s could be procured from the USSR and Eg yptian crews
for them trained there.^43 Heikal himself puts the bulk of Eg yptian civilian losses,
which led to Nasser’s request for Soviet intervention, among the laborers who were
employed in 1969 to set up SAM-2 sites “in a 30-km strip west of the Suez
Canal”—not at the heartland targets of the depth bombings.^44
D. The Soviets respond: the Strela-2 as the vanguard of Kavkaz
Although the Eg yptians claimed to have inflicted similarly heavy losses in air coun-
terattacks on the Israeli side of the canal, the need for a quick fix had become even
more pressing. The Israelis, Karpov wrote on 15 August 1969, “had convinced Nasser
and his high command that the Air Force and Air Defense were very weak and it was
too early to start a war.” A writer more sympathetic than Malashenko toward