Israel suffered 10,800 casualties (dead and wounded) and lost 100 aircraft and 800 tanks. airlift of military supplies continued for another two weeks. The diplomats stepped in and negotiated a ceasefire on October 28. military to go to DEFCON III, which effectively put our nuclear forces on alert. Seeing their Arab allies reeling in the face of the relentless Israeli offensive, the Soviet Union threatened to intervene directly in the war. Israeli troops now on the offensive threatened Damascus and Cairo. The airlift enabled Israeli forces to turn the tide of the war. The airlift provided Israel with tanks, helicopters, radar systems, anti-tank weapons, and electronic countermeasure equipment that made Israeli planes more survivable. The result was Operation Nickel Grass, which delivered to Israel more than 22,000 tons of cargo in 567 flights utilizing C-5 Galaxys and C-141 Starlifters. “Send everything that can fly,” Nixon said. military to do whatever was necessary to save Israel. It was Nixon who broke the bureaucratic logjam, ordering the U.S. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir asked the United States to provide needed supplies and initially ran into bureaucratic squabbling between Israel’s supporters and those in the Nixon administration that sought to be more evenhanded to placate Arab leaders. During the Yom Kippur War - when Israel’s very survival was at stake - Nixon effectively took his place among “the righteous” by ordering an airlift of supplies to Israel that tipped the scales in its favor and later authorized a nuclear alert that deterred the Soviet Union from directly intervening on the side of its Arab allies. The book tells the dramatic and heroic stories of non-Jews saving Jews from Hitler’s final solution during World War II. But at the start of the war, with Israeli forces suffering military setbacks on both fronts, President Richard Nixon came to the rescue and saved the Jewish state.Īmong the late, great British historian Sir Martin Gilbert’s books is The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (2003). The war lasted three weeks and resulted in an Israeli victory, the beginnings of a peace process that culminated in the Camp David Accords five years later, and the diminution of Soviet influence in the Middle East. October 6 marks the 48th anniversary of the start of the Yom Kippur War, when Israel was attacked by Syrian and Egyptian forces in a coordinated effort supported by nine Arab states and the Soviet Union.
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