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“With a brigade of tanks, a reinforced battalion of half-tracks, and the divisional reconnaissance unit, I set an ambush for the fleeing Egyptians,” Sharon recorded. “The Egyptian Sixth Division entered a terrible killing field … For miles the desert was covered by ruined tanks and burned-out armored personnel carriers. Bodies littered the ground, and here and there across the scene groups of Egyptians were standing with their hands behind their heads … By [evening] the Sixth Division had ceased to exist.” 26 This time, the Centurions and Shermans were supported by frontline jets that swooped down, pouring napalm and cannon fire onto the Egyptian column.
    The desert was teeming with Egyptian soldiers desperate to get back, many of them without water in the blazing summer heat. The orders were to enable—later it became actively to assist and facilitate—the return across the canal of enlisted men, while officers were to be taken prisoner. These—almost five thousand of them—were eventually exchanged for a handful of Israeli POWs and various spies and agents imprisoned in Egypt.
    G eneral Tal’s division had had similarly stunning success along the northern axis. Starting from south ofGaza City on the first day, it swept west along the coast to takeel-Arish. On the second day, as its forward units raced ahead toward central Sinai and the canal, other units swung back to conquer Gaza City and the rest of the Gaza Strip. Some writers attribute Dayan’s turnabout on Gaza to pressure from kibbutzim along the Gaza border that came under fire from insidethe Strip. It is hard, though, to see how Gaza could have remained an unoccupied enclave once Israel was in occupation of the whole of Sinai (and of the entire West Bank). On the third and fourth days, Tal, too, fought major tank battles, on theBir Gafgafa–Ismailia road. His units finally reached the canal at Ismailia and points north—again, contrary to Dayan’s original wishes.
    The last two days of the Six-Day War were fought mainly between Israel and Syria, on theGolan Heights. Here, yet again, Dayan found his original intentions overturned by the pressure of events. The breathtaking speed and relative ease with which the IDF had smashed through the Egyptian divisions gave added weight to the demands of the kibbutzim beneath the Syrian escarpment to put an end to their sporadic shelling from the Syrian positions above. During the first four days of war the bombardment was incessant. Eshkol wavered, but Dayan was set against extending the war to Syria for fear of direct Soviet intervention. On Thursday night, though, he changed his mind. He gave David Elazar, the CO of Northern Command, two days—Soviet pressure for a cease-fire was already mounting—to push the Syrian army back across the escarpment on the top of the Golan Heights. The air force was available now for devastating close support. Armored reinforcements from Central Command were rushed up north to help. The fighting up the steep slopes of the Golan was brutal. But by midday Saturday the IDF was swarming across the plateau and digging in on a line anchored atKuneitra, the main town on the Golan.
    On Saturday, June 10, Sharon was summoned to meet with Gavish, the CO of Southern Command, and a helicopter was sent to pick him up. It developed engine trouble. “As we began to lose altitude,” he recalled, “small groups of [wandering Egyptian soldiers] began shooting at us, and we traded fire with them. Landing on the road, I wondered briefly what was going to happen to us. It was too ironic for words.”
    Yisrael Tal took up the story in an interview years later:
    I received an order to present myself immediately at Jebel Libni for a meeting of divisional commanders with the CO. A helicopter was sent to pick me up from Bir Gafgafa. During the flight I was glued to the window, staring out at the expanses of Sinai beneath us. I saw hundreds of Egyptian soldiers with their personal weapons