G reat historical events give birth to great works of history and the Six Day War is no exception. Michael Oren’s Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East is a magisterial survey of the political and diplomatic background leading up to the war and throughout the fighting. Oren draws on all the relevant archives: Hebrew Arabic English and Russian.
Abraham Rabinovich’s The Battle for Jerusalem must rank with the most gripping military histories ever written. In his account of the battle for Ammunition Hill for instance Rabinovich makes clear how large a part heroism continues to play even in an era of highly mechanized armies. The crucial defeat of the Jordanian forces came at a very high price. Among Israeli troops the casualty rate of killed and wounded was 50 percent; among officers over 70 percent.
Junior officers led the men under their command around every bend in the Jordanian trenches and exposed themselves first to Jordanian fire. When they fell others picked up their weapons and carried forward. As Rabinovich writes:
The loss of their leader stunned most of Eliashiv’s men into helplessness. They gathered in the dark trench and debated what to do. From the paucity of their briefing they had no idea of the shape of the defenses or what their objective was. All they knew was that since they had set foot on the hill half their number had been killed or wounded – mostly killed – and that an enemy who knew the ground was waiting for them.
