HOLDING THE LINE ON THE SUEZ CANALand closely grouped target.^36 The Israeli frogmen’s mother ships indeed encountered
enemy craft outside the harbor, which delayed their rendezvous. Any Soviet ships in
Port Said would have done the same, if they had not done so already to prepare for
their landing operation on the Israeli coast.
The suspiciously “round” dates (especially “31 June”) might indicate a generaliza-
tion from unspecified dates in June—possibly after the war—to the entire month.
Other sources are more precise. Aleksandr Kharchikov was a seaman on a Soviet
destroyer that sailed from the Baltic in late May 1967 but reached a refueling rendez-
vous off Libya only on 11 June. He recalls being told that
Black Sea Fleet ships entered the Suez [Canal] and along with Arab ships took up posi-
tions along the canal from Port Said to Ismailia and Qantara ... there was talk that the
cruiser Dzerzhinsky had put a full stop to the war when, at the entrance to the canal it shot
down an Israeli Skyhawk.^37The Dzerzhinsky had indeed been converted to an anti-aircraft platform, carrying
the naval version of SAM-2s, but the feat attributed to it was obviously magnified in
retrospect. In June 1967, the IAF did not yet have any Skyhawks, which would
become its first US-supplied jets only in December, and regardless of model no Israeli
records of planes shot down on the Eg yptian front match this claim. Also, if any
Soviet warships had sailed up the canal to Ismailia, they would have become stranded
there. Still, the Dzherzhinsky’s mere presence in Port Said could hardly have been
utterly falsified.
The naval historian Aleksandr Rozin specifies that on 10 June the Krymsky
Komsomolets was in Port Said with marines of the 309th on board.^38 This agrees with
a unique but authoritative testimony from an officer of this outfit, which appeared in
2003 in an organ of the Belarussian Defense Ministry, but was then removed after we
inquired for more details. Lt-Col. Viktor Shevchenko related how at least part of
these marines came ashore and attempted to cross the Suez Canal eastward as the
Eg yptian army was fleeing westward from Sinai—that is, between 6 and 8 June. The
unit he commanded was, however, decimated by an Israeli air strike; seventeen
marines were killed and thirty-four injured, including Shevchenko himself, who
thirty-five years later was still nicknamed “the Eg yptian.”^39 His narrative remains the
only testimony to an actual clash of Soviet and Israeli forces in the Six-Day War.
That this engagement took place no later than 9 June is confirmed by the subse-
quently published account of another marine officer who was then based in Baltiisk,
near Kaliningrad. At 4 a.m. on 10 June, then-Lieutenant Valery Mallin relates, his
battalion was ordered into combat readiness, and the next day it sailed for Port
Said—minus one rota (company), presumably Shevchenko’s, which together with a
number of PT-76 amphibious tanks had already been sent there on 26 May on board
its usual operational platform, a BDK. This may have been either the Krymsky or the
Voronezhsky Komsomolets, which had been attached to the Baltic Fleet since its