Abraham Rabinovich - The Boats of Cherbourg: The Navy That Stole Its Own Boats and Revolutionized Naval Warfare

Abraham Rabinovich

Karen-Benzian

It was two years after the Yom Kippur War that I first heard about the Israeli missile boats. The media had until then reported nothing about the navys activities in the war. With the fate of the country hanging on the fierce tank battles raging in Sinai and on the Golan, and on the air forces desperate attempts to stem the Arab tide, the navy had clearly played a marginal role at best.

I was part of a Jerusalem Post team that covered a symposium on the war in 1975 which was addressed by Israels top military commanders and political leaders. Although it was not part of my assignment, I stopped by to hear a lecture by the navy commander, Admiral Binyamin Telem, out of curiosity about what the navy had in fact done.

His talk was a revelation. There had been battles at sea, which the public was unaware of, and they had been fought for the first time in history not with guns but with missiles which pursued enemy vessels with their own radar. Israel had employed a new kind of warship, missile boats, and so had the Arab navies. The Egyptian and Syrian missile boats, acquired from the Soviet Union, outnumbered the Israeli vessels by more than two to one and their missiles had more than twice the range of the Israeli missiles. Yet the Israeli missile boat flotilla came through the war without losing a boat or a man while sinking almost every Arab vessel it encountered and driving the Arab fleets into harbor. Israel had itself conceived and developed its missile boat and its sea-to-sea missile. No other country in the West had anything similar.

This, then, was not some irrelevant skirmishing of gunboats on the margins of a bloody land war but a turning point in the history of naval warfare. A nation of three million had developed an advanced weapon system that not even the United States possessed and it had proved superior to the only other missile boat system in the world, developed by the Soviet superpower.

Several years later, in an idle moment of reflection triggered by a random remark as I walked down Ben-Yehuda Street in downtown Jerusalem, I thought of Telems talk. Before I reached the corner, I had an epiphany a sudden recollection of the arrival in Haifa on New Years eve 1970 of newly built patrol boats that Israeli sailors had run off with from Cherbourg after the boats were embargoed by the French government. The world had chuckled at the time at Israels audacious theft of vessels which it had ordered and paid for. They had escaped on Christmas eve into the teeth of a Force 9 gale and made it to Haifa after a week-long run. Might those innocent-looking patrol boats, I now wondered, have been the platforms for the missile boats which performed so spectacularly three years later, the ones Telem had talked about? Might that have been the reason that Israel went to such lengths, endangering its relations with France, to get them out of Cherbourg?

Taken together, the two episodes made for a tale greater than its parts, a tale of national will that surpassed conventional bounds.

I wrote to the Israeli Defense Ministry to express my interest in writing a book on the subject and to request access to relevant military sources. The request was kicked up to Defense Minister Ezer Weizman himself who sent me a letter saying that the matter was still too sensitive to be written about, particularly the Cherbourg aspect. When Weizman was replaced by Ariel Sharon I tried again and received a similar reply from his office. In 1983, Sharon stepped down as defense minister and the defense portfolio was temporarily taken over by Prime Minister Menahem Begin. I wrote once more. This time I received a reply from naval headquarters in Tel Aviv inviting me to a meeting. Apparently no one in Begins office knew what to do with my request and it had been passed on to the navy. A friendly captain behind a desk questioned me about my background and about the kind of book I intended to write while a female officer took notes and asked me to send them a copy of a book I had previously written.

A month later I was invited back. Looking solemn this time, the captain informed me that after consideration the navy had decided it could not cooperate. Crestfallen, I was about to take my leave when he added, But we wont stand in your way if you want to interview people on your own. We could even provide telephone numbers of any specific persons you ask for.

But where would I begin? I said. I dont know who to ask for.

The officer wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to me. On it were the names of two persons and their telephone numbers. He did not tell me who they were.

I left the office uncertain whether to be depressed or elated. It took me a while to understand what was happening. The navy did not want to get involved in the project officially but it was interested in seeing the book written. The captain had mentioned that after seeing a recent movie about Israels naval commandos the naval command had regretted cooperating with the film company that made it. On the other hand, evidently, it wanted to have the story of its missile boat exploits told exploits unknown even to the Israeli public. The navy would help me with my project, but from a discreet distance.

The names on the slip of paper given me by the captain were Hadar Kimche and Moshe Tabak. I called Kimche first and traveled to his home on Mount Carmel in Haifa on a stormy winter evening without knowing what edge of the story I was about to touch. It was only after we began talking that I realized that I was not at the edge of the story but at its very center. Kimche had commanded the Cherbourg breakout and was the first commander of the missile boat flotilla. When I left his home after four hours the piece of string the captain in naval headquarters had handed me had become a web leading in a dozen different directions. From Tabak, who had been Kimches deputy, I received an expanded picture and the names of still more people.