Hope Comes knocking : Col(res)Dr. Micky Seiffe 2019

 A personal account of an IDF officer in Egyptian captivity during the Yom Kippur War 

 English version.267pg   26/7/22

This book was lent to me by a friend who worked with the author. Pelusium and Romani were Roman cities once near the Suez Canal.

 His parents were old people and he was 28. He was an only child of Holocaust survivors, who first kid had been born premature and died. In Sept. 1940 his one young cousin was killed when Italian planes bombed Tel Aviv, they were meant to bomb Haifa but were intercepted by the RAF and just dropped the bombs on TA.

 

After the end of the Six Day war in 1967 there was to be 8 UN positions watching on the Israeli side of the canal as peace keepers.

The author was doing a PhD is pharmacology and when he was called into army reserves it was always to be a medic or pharmacist.

There was a shortage of officers who spoke English and so he joined a group that did a 2 day course to be a liaison officer to be posted with UN observers. They have to communicate what is happening on the border and keep the 2 UN officers away from Israeli military secrets.

1973 Oct 6th At 1400 on Yom Kippur day   they were bombarded and saw the Egyptian coming to Israel controlled places en masse. He had time to write a note to go with the UN home, destroyed the army radio and codes and was taken by the Egyptians.  He was taken across the canal on boat but they pulled a rope get there. He was taken blindfolded to an army base near Port Said.

He and other Israelis were blindfolded and their hands were tied behind their back and taken by truck to Cairo but shown on the way to others as spoils of war. The worst thing was the pain in his hand and he was worried he might get gangrene.

Lt. General Ensio Sillasvio from Finland Commanded UNICEF II in Sinai. The Israeli fortifications along the Suez Canal was called the (Haim)Bar Lev line.

At the Abbasiya  prison Cairo the interrogators tried to get information about the Israeli army but all he told them was that he was a pharmacist and reservist and sent as a liaison officer because he spoke English he was consistent in this story. At one time he in his cell Dr. Dan Peleg. 

The were forced to keep their hand tied and have covers over their face and he managed to take this off but had  to slip his hand back into before the jailors entered. Once they were taken to the court yard and forced to get into slimy smelly water trough.

Later a Arab prisoner came around and cut off their beards with a manual clipper. Another time they were taken out to the courtyard and given shaves and haircuts so that they could be photographed, in which he could hardly recognize himself. 

They were moved from cell to cell , one cell was full of lice and he spent time killing them until after 17 days they were given permanent cells according to the units they were in and no longer had to wear the handcuffs.. Now he realized that only 4 of the 8 liaison officers were captured later he met a 5th one. One captured pilot did not know what happened to his mate who parachuted with him. Their were days that the guards just came into the cells to beat them up and Michael was always worried he might loose teeth suffer permanent damage. He always escaped this situation by thought of normal life. They were given paper and told to write a letter home, so he wrote a personal family letter just saying that he was well and healthy. This however was never delivered.

1973 Oct 24th  Egyptian third army had been surrounded by Israeli troops

After 20 days they were given clean prison uniforms soap to wash, was this an indication that the war was changing?   A few days later he was taken to a high class area of Cairo to meet a government official Hussein who wanted to know as much as he could about Israeli society its divisions its education etc.  Israeli prisoners were now valuable bargaining chips.

He was interviewed by a Airforce Colonel and was able to tell what he read in the press about weapons but not any more. A pharmacist was sent to check if he really was a pharmacy Phd. student and the head of the Hebrew dept. at Cairo University took the opportunity to talk to him about Hebrew and its literature a thing they both were well  informed about..

1973Oct 29th  start of Ceasefire talks at Km 101 from Cairo.1973 Nov12 Ceasefire signed.

A Egyptian Minister informed them  that a ceasefire had been signed and they would be going home soon. The next day the Red Cross representative informed them that they would start going home by Red Cross Plane. The guy who had interrogated him at the beginning came and said to him "you were Green"  he now admitted that was his code name as he had been sending signals to the artillery' where to shoot. Someone else had spilled this information.

When they arrived in Israel first they were taken to be interviewed by intelligence officers to find out about missing airmen. For the first time he learned of the great losses it had cost for the victory and would suffer nightmares as a result he would work to very late and sleep very little. After being at home with family were sent by the army to a holiday resort at Mitvachim near Zichron Ya'acov to recover from the trauma.  This program  worked for soldiers after battle or after recovery from wounds but nobody had experience of the traumas suffered by prisoners. He had some therapy from Prof. Morris Kleinhaus who pointed out to him that he coped by having a double character in dealing with his tormentors. Some felt guilty if they had released information that had caused harm to their collogues or the military.

He discovered that he was the last person who just kept on sending information about what was happening on the canal and the chief of staff had heard about this. Oscar was the UN observation post nearest to him and his voice disappeared suddenly, he and the 2 UN people had been murdered shot at close range.

1996 A prisoner released from Syria in 1973 Yoav Ben-David wrote a book "Awake at Night" and it showed the Israeli public the terrible conditions that these prisoners had experienced. He went to Miri  Shalit of the Dept. of Defense and she wanted to know about his childhood. We now discover that his mother was undergoing treatment for Tuberculosis and he was sent to full time day care and boarding school kindergarten when he eventually came home he had neighbors looking after him till has  father came home. Thus as a small child he was always self reliant.  

He and his friend are always ready to volunteer help other who need to talk about CSR (Shell Shock)  or PTSD

Every therapist who deals with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder should read this book.

Get Rommel by Michael Asher 2004 320pg

This is about the secret service mission to kill Hitlers greatest General in Operation Flipper.    1/7/22

The object of this was to disrupt communication behind the enemy and get Rommel.

Soon after this Operation Crusader followed it was a push by Sir Alan Cunningham (later last governor of Palestine 1945 to 1948) to push into Cyrenaica..

The commando concept came about soon after Dunkirk when Chirchill wanted to go onto the offensive. Colonel Dudley Clerk born in South Africa and was in Palestine to deal with the Arab rebellion of 1939. Denys Reits's book "Kommando" on the Boer War gave the concept. Volunteers with individual initiative were needed. British officers came from the upper class while German served in the ranks before becoming officers. Thus the British officers were not the most ideal.

This was to stop the German blitzkrieg across North Africa. Training was done on the Isle of Arran in the Clyde in Scotland.

Evelyn Waugh wrote about this in the novel "Officer and Gentleman "

1941 February Mussilini's 10th army surrendered  to General O'Connor, and so Lieut General Alan Cunningham had restored Haile Salassi to his throne of Ethiopia at the same time Rommel 's Afrika Korps landed to help the Itlaians.

Germany was also moving into Russia, Vichy territory gave Germany help and provided the Luftwaffe with airfields, Iraq was having a German supported revolution and the Germans appeared to be moving towards the oil fields of the gulf. Crete was taken by German paratroopers where 600 of the 800 British commando troops were killed or captured only 156men escaped of them 23 were officers this was a scandal.

1941 April landing on the Litani River in Lebanon was a failure but the commando troops got training from that.

1941 June Rommel defeated Operation Battleaxe, Wavelle and put 2/3 of his troops out of action. British Matilda tanks were no match for the Panzers. Where Rommel was there was the front, Rommel shared Hitlers contempt for the land owning aristocrats of WW1. Rommel admired Hitler, and Rommel seen invincibility was affecting British morale.

1941 July Churchill replaced  Wavelle with Achinleck. Rommel was obsessed with Tubruk and dismissed reports of the British planning an offensive. Captured S. African command vehicles indicated that British troops, if attacked must retreat.

SAS was made up of volunteers with subgroups of about 5 each with a specialized skill, medic , navigator, mechanic , explosives. No frontal attacks. John Haselden had been raised in Egypt and spoke Arabic dialects, French and Italian. You had a lot of European expatriates living in Egypt before the war who could be recruited with their Arabic skills.

1912 The Italian annexed Libya  and between 1922 and 1931 the Italians were determined to break the Senussian power. Italian General Rudolfo Graziani by bombarding and rounding up in concentration camps where many died of starvation and illnes till they caught the rebel leader Omar el Muktar and hanged him in front of a crowd of 20 thousand. In Alexander the Senussi leader in exile was Sayid Idress who later on became \king of Libya in 1951 till he was deposed by Muhammad Gadaffi in 1969.

Beside Rommel headquarters there was the Italian Intelligence centre at Apollonia and the Cyrene crossroads carried the phone and telegraph for the whole region. They wanted to attack the German airfields at Gazala and Timimi.

  One group  landed in stormy weather and were dragged along the ground by their parachutes, most of their supplies had blown away completely. Today each soldier has  all their supplies connected by a rope to their para harness. The torrential rainstorm turned the waddis into rivers. This weather ruined their operation but it also meant that German planes could not take off. It was the worst rain that Cyrenica had seen in 40 years.

Commando 11 had Avisholem Drori and Palestinian Jew who spoke Arabic and Italian. They landed by submarine on the coast with rubber dinghies.

British correspondent, explorer and writer Alan Moorhead travelled with British mobile columns.

1941 17 Nov.They attacked Rommel headquarters and killed a group of German officers and men who in fact were the people in charge of the German quartermaster stores. Rommel would be returning on 18th Nov. he had been on holiday in Rome with his wife for 3 weeks and celebrated his 50th Birthday on 15Nov.  This was information that Bleckley Park had from Ultra, who knew that Rommel was not in Africa before this unit  Ultra also knew that Rommel was to attack Tobruck on 21 Nov. so Cunningham  had scheduled Operation Crusader for 18th Nov. When Rommel heard about the attempt to get him he was indignant that the British thought he had his operation headquarters 250 miles behind the front lines.

They attacked the crossroads cable mast that joined Derna ,Slonta Bardia,  and Benghazi, surprisingly it had no guard but their explosives were very poor and the damage they did was easy to repair in a few days.

When patrols got back to the beach they could not find the rubber dinghies and Laycock had a poor grasp of morse code and the messages were misunderstood. The next night when the submarine came to search for them they were not there. Except for 3 men the rest were captured. Those 3 hid and waited for the British invasion to arrive a few weeks later.

The Rommel raid was one man's ambition to gain glory and ordinary enlisted men who had no part in the planning played their parts in this fiasco.

Later 3 men patrols were taken at night to sabotage and later met a prearranged position where the vehicle was,  these were well trained SAS patrols who learned from the previous fiascos.

This book give details of the background of every one of the individuals involved.