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take Kseima first, I would still have to deal with Abu Agheila. But if Abu Agheila fell, we would be in control of the roads behind Kseima, and the Egyptians would find the position untenable.”
    Before his infantry and armor moved on their target with almost choreographed precision, Sharon unleashed a massive softening-up bombardment from the six artillery battalions attached to his division. “Let everything tremble,” Sharon ordered the chief artillery officer,Yaacov Vaknin, just after 10:30 p.m. “Tremble it shall,” came the reply, shouted from the artillery command half-track standing alongside Sharon’s own half-track. For the next twenty minutes, shells and mortar bombs rained down on the Egyptian complex untilKuti Adam called a halt to it and his men began to advance on the center trench.
    The paratroopers reached their target close to midnight. “Three batteries of field-guns were silenced in a matter of minutes,”Yael Dayan recorded. The paras next ambushed a convoy of reinforcement trucks and destroyed them. One, however, was loaded with artillery ammunition, and in the explosion three Israelis were killed and many more wounded.
    The two tank brigades also surged forward, from their opposite vectors, at around midnight and began engaging the Egyptian armor in earnest. The whole night and into the morning, Sharon orchestrated the battle by radio.
    While the battle still raged, he received an order from the CO of Southern Command,Shaike Gavish, to enable a brigade of Yoffe’s armor to pass through the complex on their dash west. “There below us on the main road,” Yael Dayan wrote, “as far as I could see, were a thousand headlights advancing rapidly towards us. Arik was standing erect in his command half-track, raising his hand to the horizon as if blessing the sight.” Sharon ordered his own tanks to stop firing, “and we were treated,” he writes, “to the remarkable sight of a brigade of tanks moving unscathed right through the two forces locked in combat.”
    By mid-morning the fighting had died away. The whole complex was in Sharon’s hands. The price: 40 Israeli dead and 140 wounded. A high price, but the reward was high, too. “Our mission had been to open the main axis to our forces in Sinai, and we had now done that,” Sharon writes. He goes on to fault the High Command for procrastinating the whole day before deciding on his division’s next assignment.
    On Wednesday morning, June 7, at any rate, the orders came through: Sharon was to head south forNakhl, which he had taken in his charge across Sinai at the head of the paratroop brigade eleven years before. The assignment was to cut off an Egyptian division that had been deployed atKuntilla on the Negev border and was now heading back west. “If the Egyptians succeeded in getting to the Mitle Pass before we hit them,” Sharon explains, “they could close off our advance to the canal.” Outside Nakhl, which was defended by a full brigade, the lead vehicles hit a minefield, and Sharon decided to defer the attack to Thursday morning.
    They celebrated that night with the rest of the nation over the newsthat the Western Wall had been taken, along with the wholeOld City of Jerusalem, held since 1948 by Jordan. d Mordechai Gur, Sharon’s subordinate who had turned against him after the Mitle in 1956, led the paratroopers who liberated this holiest site in Judaism after a bloody battle outside the city ramparts.
    When the tanks surged intoNakhl at dawn, they found the fortified complex deserted. “Everything was in place,” Sharon writes. “Tents were up, self-propelled guns were ready to move, artillery and mortars dug in and ready to fire. Everything was there except the people. We called it the ‘ghost brigade.’ ”
    The division fromKuntilla, however, was fast approaching, chased by an IDF armored brigade that had been deployed defensively in the Negev at the start of the war but now crossed into Sinai to join the battle.