Valley of Tears (Golan Heights, 1973)

Background

Israel took the western Golan from Syria in June 1967. The ceasefire line, the ‘Purple Line’, ran along the eastern edge of a basalt plateau studded with volcanic hills (tels), above the Jordan bridges and the Israeli towns of the Hula valley and the Sea of Galilee. Israel fortified it with a line of small outposts and an anti-tank ditch.

Syria's President Hafez al-Assad planned the 1973 war jointly with Egypt's Anwar Sadat, but their aims differed. Patrick Seale, Assad's biographer, describes him seeing it as a war of liberation to recover the Golan, whereas Sadat sought a limited war. Syria's plan was a double envelopment: the 7th Division would break through north of Quneitra near Ahmadiyeh, the 5th Division at Rafid in the south, and the 9th in between at Kudne, after which the 1st and 3rd Armoured Divisions would exploit towards the Israeli headquarters at Nafakh and the Jordan crossings.

Israeli intelligence expected an attack only around 18:00 on 6 October, Yom Kippur. As tension had risen, the 7th Armoured Brigade had been sent up to reinforce the 188th (Barak) Brigade, and by about noon it was concentrated at Nafakh. The Syrian barrage began at about 14:00.

The name ‘Valley of Tears’ properly belongs to the ground between Hermonit and Booster ridge north of Quneitra, where the 7th Brigade fought. This page takes the wider battle that CDB90 groups under that name: the Syrian offensive and its defeat across the whole plateau, northern and southern sectors, from 6 to 10 October. The Israeli advance into Syria from 11 October is a separate operation.

The armies

Syria. The assault was led by three infantry divisions, each strengthened with a tank brigade, with the 1st and 3rd Armoured Divisions in the second echelon. A Moroccan brigade was attached to the 7th Division, and the Assad Republican Guard was committed in the north late in the battle. Estimates of the tanks committed run from about 800 in the first wave to 1,260–1,400 in all, roughly 400 of them T-62s and most of the rest T-54/55s. The Syrians brought bridging tanks to cross the ditch, night-vision equipment that gave them an edge after dark, and a dense surface-to-air missile umbrella that cost the Israeli air force heavily on 6–7 October. Brigadier-General Omar Abrash commanded the 7th Division, Colonel Hassan Tourkmani the 9th.

Israel. Major-General Yitzhak Hofi's Northern Command had two regular armoured brigades on the plateau: Colonel Avigdor Ben-Gal's 7th, about 105 Centurions, and Colonel Yitzhak Ben-Shoham's 188th (Barak), with about 170–180 tanks and 60–70 guns between them. The upgunned Centurions (Sho't) fought from prepared ramps behind the outposts, with long fields of fire across the ditch. Brigadier-General Rafael Eitan's division headquarters controlled the defence. From the night of 7–8 October the reserve divisions of Major-General Dan Laner and Brigadier-General Moshe Peled reached the southern Golan. The defenders were well trained and fought at close range; the attackers had the numbers and, for the first night, the darkness.

The battle

6 October: the assault. The barrage opened at about 14:00. At about 14:45 some 200 Syrian paratroopers of the 82nd Battalion attacked the Israeli observation post on Mount Hermon and had taken it by about 17:00. In the north the 7th Division's assault on the ditch between Booster ridge and Hermonit is CDB90's Ahmadiyeh (586, 6–8 October, a clear Syrian defeat). Its 85th Brigade stalled at the ditch when Israeli fire destroyed most of its bridging tanks; two bridges were laid north of outpost A3, and a company of tanks that crossed was destroyed at dusk. Hofi committed the 7th Brigade that afternoon: Ben-Gal took the sector north of outpost 107, Barak the south. CDB90's Kuneitra (585, 6–8 October, coded a draw) sets the 9th Division against the 7th Brigade around the town.

In the south the 5th Division broke through the Rafid gap, CDB90's Rafid (587, 6–7 October, a clear Syrian success), and the 9th pressed in at Kudne. Barak's thin line collapsed overnight around Hushniya, where the Syrian 51st Brigade overran an Israeli supply compound. On the Tapline road towards Nafakh, Lieutenant Zvika Greengold fought a hit-and-run action from about 21:00 with one or two tanks. In the north Abrash committed his 78th Armoured Brigade at 22:00; Ben-Gal's gunners waited for close range and fired by artillery illumination.

7 October: the southern crisis. At dawn about 130 Syrian tanks and many personnel carriers lay wrecked between Hermonit and Booster, and the ground acquired its name. The 78th Brigade attacked again at 08:00 on a 4 km front. In the south the 1st Armoured Division drove north on Nafakh. Ben-Shoham, holding with a handful of tanks, was killed, and Syrian tanks broke into the camp before being stopped; this is CDB90's Nafekh (589), which the database does not tag with this battle. A 5th Division column pushed south-west towards El Al, opening CDB90's Yehuda-El Al (588, 7–9 October), and was halted short of it. Dayan considered a withdrawal to the escarpment above the Jordan. That night the first reserves arrived. In the north the Syrians attacked again at 22:00 with a large tank force including T-62s of the 81st Brigade; the 7th Brigade, with fewer than 40 tanks running, fought at ranges of a few dozen metres.

8–9 October: Hermonit. CDB90's Mount Hermonit (592, 8–10 October) is the last Syrian effort in the north, with the 3rd Armoured Division and the Republican Guard behind the 7th Division. Abrash was killed at dusk on 8 October. At 08:00 on 9 October about 100 tanks came on under heavy artillery; Ben-Gal's crews fell back a few hundred metres off the ramps. Lieutenant-Colonel Avigdor Kahalani's 77th Battalion led a counter-attack back onto them, and in the late afternoon Lieutenant-Colonel Yossi Ben-Hanan arrived with about 11 tanks. The 7th Brigade was reportedly down to about seven tanks when the Syrians broke off and withdrew.

8–10 October: the southern counter-attack. Laner's division came up the Yehudia road and Peled's from the El Al side, boxing in the Syrian armour around Hushniya. CDB90 codes these as Israeli attacks: Tel Farris (590, 8–10 October) for Peled against the 5th Division, and Hushniyah (591, 8–10 October) for Laner against the 9th. The Hushniya camp, turned into a Syrian forward base, became a field of wrecked vehicles. By 10 October the Syrians had been pushed back across the Purple Line, and Peled's brigades were pressing towards Tel Kudne.

Aftermath

Losses for the four days themselves are poorly documented. For the whole Golan front up to the ceasefire, figures in the secondary literature are about 3,500 Syrian dead and about 1,150 Syrian tanks lost, and nearly 800 Israeli dead and 250 tanks; many Israeli tanks were repaired and returned to the fight. The 188th Brigade was nearly destroyed, losing its commander and most of its officers, and had to be rebuilt.

On 11 October Israel attacked into Syria along the Quneitra–Damascus road and created the Bashan salient, within about 35–40 km of Damascus. Iraqi and Jordanian forces joined the Syrian front. The 1974 disengagement agreement returned part of the territory to Syria and placed UN forces between the armies.

In Israel the battle became a story of a few crews holding against numbers: Kahalani received the Medal of Valor, and the valley carries memorials and lent its name to a 2020 television drama. Parts of the story are argued over. Analysts such as Pollack blame the southern failure on Syrian commanders who halted on their objectives instead of exploiting; van Creveld's claim that Israel made a nuclear threat on 8 October is disputed for lack of evidence; and in 2016 a former battalion commander publicly challenged the Greengold story, which Greengold rejected. In Syria the war is remembered as the October (Tishreen) War of Liberation; the October War Panorama in Damascus centres on the fighting for Quneitra.

Wargaming it

This is one of the great tank-on-tank defensive battles and suits company or platoon scale for a single position, or battalion-as-unit for the whole plateau over four days.

The northern fight is a near-ideal ‘hold the ridge’ scenario: a few dozen Centurions on ramps behind an anti-tank ditch, against wave after wave of T-55s and T-62s with bridgelayers, artillery and night vision. The Syrian player needs to get bridges down and across before the ramps are reinforced; the Israeli player must ration tanks, ammunition and repair crews over several days, and decide when to fall back off a ramp and when to retake it. Night rules matter, since the Syrian advantage after dark is one of the few things the sources agree on.

The southern fight is the opposite problem: a broken line, a Syrian breakthrough with open ground to Nafakh and the Jordan bridges, and Israeli reserves arriving piecemeal from the night of 7–8 October. That makes it a timing game. What if the Syrian armour had pressed past El Al and Nafakh on 7 October instead of pausing? What if the reserves had been an hour later? An umpire can usefully hide the exact arrival times from both sides.

Air power is worth abstracting: Israeli ground-attack sorties were costly under the missile umbrella, so they should be valuable but unreliable. Aim for long sight-lines on bare, rocky ground, broken by tels that dominate the plateau.

Maps and pictures