An eerie silence has fallen over the various military headquarters and positions near the Suez Road over the last few weeks and over a well-known military checkpoint known by its position on the map at “four and a half km.”

Beyond this, there were once the frontlines on the west bank of the Suez Canal. Fifty years ago and before the October 1973 War, we all referred to it as the “front” in military terms. We felt that something greater and weightier than we could imagine was about to happen, but we could not grasp what it might be.

A couple of days before the longest day in our contemporary history when the war finally broke out, I was handed a heavy classified envelope that I was instructed to hand over to the secretary of the commander of the Egyptian Armed Forces, Field Marshal Ahmed Ismail. I was told that he was meeting with the top brass of the Egyptian Military at the Ministry of War in the Kobba district of Cairo.

 I was driven in a military jeep to the Ministry of War and met the secretary and handed him the sealed and classified envelope. I returned having no idea of the envelope’s contents.

Saturday 6 October 1973 was a normal day from the standpoint of our daily military routine, but the feeling of an impending happening continued to hang in the air around us. This feeling continued until 1:30 in the afternoon, when the Egyptian Broadcasting Service released a statement to the effect that the Israelis had attacked our positions at Al-Zaafarana on the Red Sea.

We, young officers, as I was at the time, told our commanding officer that it was time to retaliate and that we had to target the Israeli forces deployed on the east bank of the Suez Canal and take forceful military action against their positions.

The commanding officer looked at us calmly, something that took us by surprise, and with a strange look on his face told us to be “patient.” We were dismissed ten minutes later. It was 20 to two in the afternoon of 6 October.

Twenty minutes later the statement came that we had all been waiting and hoping for, namely that the Egyptian Air Force and the field artillery units of the Second and Third Egyptian Armies along the length of the canal had started pounding the Israeli positions in Sinai and the Israeli fortifications along the Bar Lev Line.

On hearing the news, we were happy that at long last we had started retaliating against the Israeli attacks. Up until this moment, we also had not realised that the war had started. But at 2:30, or after 30 minutes of the fierce pounding and bombarding of the Israeli positions and the fortifications and tactical reserve formations deep in Sinai, came the news that we had been waiting for over the last six years since the June 1967 War.

The Egyptian Army had started the storming of the Suez Canal.

No words can describe our joy and elation as we, young officers, realised that at long last we would liberate Sinai from the Israelis and Egypt would take its revenge, as had been promised six years earlier.

 From 2:30 to seven in the evening on that historic day of 6 October, we followed minute by minute the ongoing crossing of the Egyptian forces to the east bank of the Suez Canal. By around eight in the evening, five Egyptian divisions had crossed to the other side of the canal and had successfully and valiantly installed five bridgeheads – almost a miracle given the fortifications of the Bar Lev Line.

When the Israelis were building this in 1968, the then chief of staff of the Israeli Army said that the Line was so strong that not even a nuclear bomb could destroy it.

After the war had broken out, I learned that the highly-classified envelope I had delivered in the Ministry of War was nothing but the war plan of the Egyptian artillery units in both the Second and Third Armies.

At the same time, the Syrian Army was advancing in the Golan Heights. And on the other side of the Atlantic, the Nixon administration was taken by complete surprise. US forces were pinned down in South Vietnam at the time in a losing battle against the North Vietnamese and Vietcong. China and the former Soviet Union were backing North Vietnam, and the US had realised that it could never win the Vietnam War.

The Nixon administration thought that the Israelis would quickly repulse the Egyptian forces and push them back to the west bank of the canal. But when it became obvious after three days of war that this scenario would not materialise, the administration, guided by then US secretary of state and National Security advisor Henry Kissinger, ordered a massive air and sea lift to Israel that began on 9 October.

It continued until 22 October, when the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 338 that decreed a ceasefire and called for negotiations. Meanwhile, the US airlift to Israel was estimated to be worth some $55 billion.

After the war had ended, Kissinger told former Egyptian president Anwar Al-Sadat that Washington would not tolerate Soviet armaments defeating US weapons. The implication was that US strategic interests in the Middle East meant that Israel would not be defeated on the battlefield.

For this reason, the Americans passed on reconnaissance photographs of our military positions on the west bank of the canal that showed that Egypt had ordered its strategic reserve forces to cross to the east. That moment marked the turning point in the war and enabled Israeli forces to cross to the west bank and ultimately encircle the Egyptian Third Army.

The US, at the height of the Cold War and facing a near military defeat in Vietnam, could not have afforded a clear military victory by the Egyptian and Syrian armies, both of which were equipped with Soviet weapons, in the October War.

This is probably the reason why president Al-Sadat said that he was not willing to “fight America.” He proved to be very wise in this, but it does not absolve him of having given the order to deploy Egypt’s Strategic Reserve Forces to cross to the east bank of the canal during the war and to leave our military positions unprotected and open to the advance of Israeli forces from Ismailia to Suez and to encircle our Third Army.

The October War changed the dynamics of the Middle East and proved that Egypt and Syria could plan and act together militarily. Unfortunately, the two countries later failed to coordinate their political and diplomatic approaches to solving the Arab-Israeli conflict, or the Palestinian question for that matter.

Had they moved in concert, the Arab countries would have been in a much better position today with regard to the balance of power with Israel, and they would have succeeded in translating the initial military victories in the October War into diplomatic and political breakthroughs in the Middle East in their favour.

The October War and the memories associated with it, whether in the period preceding it or in the sacrifices that we as Egyptians had to make in order to make it happen, will always fill us with pride until our last breath.

*The writer is former assistant foreign minister.

*He was first lieutenant in the artillery during the October War.

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* A version of this article appears in print in the 5 October, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly