Bar Lev Line - Breach

Breach

During the Yom Kippur War (October 1973 War), the Egyptian army, led by Egyptian Chief of staff, Saad El Shazly, overran the Bar Lev Line in less than 2 hours due to the element of surprise and overwhelming firepower. To deal with the massive earthen ramparts, the Egyptians used water cannons fashioned from hoses attached to dredging pumps in the canal. Other methods involving explosives, artillery, and bulldozers were too costly in time and required nearly ideal working conditions. In 1971, a young Egyptian officer, Baki Zaki Yousef, suggested a small, light, petrol-fueled pump as the answer to the crossing dilemma. The Egyptian military purchased 300 British-made pumps, five of which could blast 1,500 cubic meters of sand in three hours. In 1972, it acquired 150 more powerful German pumps driven by small gas turbines. A combination of two German and three British pumps would cut the breaching time down to two hours. These cannons pumped out powerful jets of water, creating 81 breaches in the line and removing three million cubic metres of packed dirt on the first day of the war.

The Egyptians assaulted the Bar-Lev Line with two field armies and forces from Port Sa'id and the Red Sea Military District. The Second Field Army covered the area from north of Qantara to south of Deversoir, while the Third Field Army was responsible for the area from Bitter Lakes to south of Port Tawfiq.

The Egyptians began their simultaneous air and artillery attacks by flying 250 Egyptian planes, MiG-21s, MiG-19s, and MiG-17s, attacking their assigned targets in the Sinai. Meanwhile, 2,000 artillery pieces opened fire against all the strongpoints along the Bar-Lev Line, a barrage that lasted 53 minutes and dropped 10,500 shells in the first minute alone, or 175 shells per second.

Within the first hour of the war, the Egyptian engineering corps tackled the sand barrier. Seventy engineer groups, each one responsible for opening a single passage, worked from wooden boats. With hoses attached to water pumps, they began attacking the sand obstacle. Many breaches occurred within two to three hours of the onset of operations — according to schedule; however, engineers at several places experienced unexpected problems. The sand from the breached openings in the barrier was reduced to mud, which was one meter deep in some areas. This problem required that the engineers emplace floors of wood, rails, stone, sandbags, steel plates, or metal nets for the passage of heavy vehicles. The Third Army, in particular, had difficulty in its sector. There, the clay proved resistant to high-water pressure and, consequently, the engineers experienced delays in their breaching. Engineers in the Second Army completed the erection of their bridges and ferries within nine hours, whereas the Third Army needed more than sixteen hours.

In his book The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East, historian Abraham Rabinovich posits that the Bar-Lev line was a blunder — too lightly manned to be an effective defensive line and too heavily manned to be an expendable tripwire. Moreover, it can be argued that the concept of the line was counter-intuitive to the strengths of Israeli battle tactics, which, at their core, relied on agile mobile forces moving rapidly through the battlefield rather than utilizing a heavy reliance on fixed defenses.