running 332.77 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

A: After the stage in which we fought, while trying to restructure our forces, we switched to an offensive, to a counter-attack, and the plan was that Sharon's division, with all the crossing equipment, would conquer a bridge-head and lay bridges in one night, and my division would remain behind, prepared, and in the morning it would cross the bridges and go directly to Suez to surround the Third Army. What happened was that Sharon's division succeeded immensely: they crossed over, they got a good position, and acted in the enemy's rear; but then the Egyptians discovered them and terrible battles began there, bloody battles at a close range: 30 meters between them. And then in the morning, we had a bridge-head, but Sharon's division was completely worn out; they had terrible losses, they had very few tanks, they had a great number of casualties, and the passageway to the bridge-head was in fact cut off by the Egyptians: it was under Egyptian fire and it was impossible to take equipment across. What was worse was that during the night, Sharon did not manage to bring across the bridge-building equipment. This equipment, I must say, was very awkward: we had rafts, each of which weighed 80 tons, dragged along by tanks. We had a bridge that weighed 250 tons, and it was dragged through the sand dunes. It broke: the rafts got stuck in the convoys way back, dozens of kilometers behind us, and none of the crossing equipment arrived at the bridgehead. In the morning, when we reached the bridge-head, it turned out that it was under Egyptian fire, so, in contrast to our plan of building the bridges and crossing in one night, in fact in the morning we woke up with a bridge-head, a passageway to the bridge-head, but no crossing equipment at all, and it was all stuck in convoys along very, very narrow roads, with sand-dunes on both sides of the roads, and it was clear that in fact the crossing had failed in a certain sense. Now, my division was activated in the morning, because the Egyptians attacked with tanks both east and west of the Canal, and we were brought into the battle in order to push them back and get them away from the bridgehead. My division was supposed to concentrate all the crossing equipment that Sharon had left behind, and we very, very slowly, managed to get all this very heavy equipment up front, not far from the bridge-head; and during an entire day, the 16th of the month, we had battles with Egyptian tanks that were trying to drag us... there were many canals there - it was called "the Chinese farm": it was an agricultural area with canals in which Egyptian soldiers were running around. They tried to use sagger missiles against us; they would attack us and run back, so that we would run after them into the trenches and [then] they would attack us. But in fact we fought them from afar and we did not get dragged into the trenches. So an entire day's fighting went by. In the meantime, we asked for reinforcements of paratroopers, infantry, to clean out these trenches and to get the Egyptians further away and broaden the bridgehead. But in the meantime, we got information that the Third Army was sending an Egyptian brigade to attack from the south. As it was, they were attacking only from the north; now we were told that Egyptian tanks would be arriving from the south to attack us as well. Then I decided that I would put a tank brigade in ambush in the sand dunes; I would camouflage them with nets and they would be there to act against the force coming from the south. And in the morning... no, at night, that night we got paratroopers, and they went out into battle to broaden the passageway to the bridgehead. They arrived quite late; they came from Sharm-al-Sheikh, from a very far-away front, and they arrived in helicopters, very slowly... and we built up a paratrooper battalion, which entered into a very difficult battle.