Sometimes quite an unremarkable person may have a splendid
idea. Occasionally he or she may understand the significance
of his or her notion and pursue it. Even more rarely it may
fall on fertile ground. And when this happens, it might have
staggering results.

On October 6, 1973, the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest day
of the Jewish calendar, when the whole country comes to a
complete stand-still and thus no real call-up is possible,
the Syrian and Egyptian armies launched a concerted attack
against Israel. They achieved complete surprise and overran
the Israeli forward positions. In Sinai the Israelis
predictably counter-attacked with their much vaunted
tank-columns, unaware that the Soviets had thought- fully
supplied the enemy with masses of their latest secret
weapon: scattered among the dunes, Egyptian soldiers
equipped with hand- held anti-tank rockets took a dreadful
toll of our armour.

Although less than three weeks later the Syrians and
Egyptians had been well and truly beaten once again, I
considered the idea that a single enemy soldier could
demolish a heavy tank worrisome indeed, for it meant a
drastic reduction of the qualitative edge against our much
more numerous foes.

Let me here confess that I know very little about tanks. I
have never even ridden in a moving one and the nearest thing
I was familiar with was a Bren gun carrier, an open tracked
vehicle the British army actually used in battle -an easy
way out for a Tommy who was weary of living. Yet, there were
two facts I did know about tanks:

A. There is no such thing as a perfect tank: the weight of
the armour plating, the gun and its ammunition has to be
compensated for by reduced speed and vice versa. So a
thicker armour was not the answer to the problem. A larger
or faster rocket or shell would be produced in due course in
the ding-dong contest between attack and defence that has
been going on for centuries.

B. I had also learned that a rocket does not normally
actually explode inside the tank but makes a smallish hole
in the armour through which the entire explosive force and
heat enters the tank. This is where the answer must be.

I kept worrying that germinating idea as a dog may worry a
bone until one day "eureca" (I found it) -though unlike
Archimedes I did not run naked through the streets: What if
outside the main armour there was attached somehow a second,
much thinner armour-plate, just thick enough and hard enough
to cause an incoming rocket to make the smallish hole
through which the entire explosive force and heat ...
strikes the main armour of the tank, heating it somewhat. At
the time it did not even occur to me that a shell would
likewise be stopped in the same way. I made a careful
drawing of my concept and in the accompanying letter
explained how the device would probably work but added that
I had neither the expertise to predict nor the possibility
to test crucial details such as the ideal material, the
optimal thickness and the distance to the tank's
armour-plate -one would need a range with a scrap tank
perhaps to find out.

To test their reactions, I then showed the letter to Lili,
Yoram and Gidi. I also told Tina. Then I posted it. I had no
acknowledgement, nor did I expect one. I never told anybody
else for all the decades since. But within a reasonable time
-the mid 1970s, Yoram who was an officer in the regular
army, came home one day and said:
"Dad, they're building your tank".

Its real name is Merkava, which for the ancients denoted a
horse-drawn shield-protected waggon like the one Boadica
rode into battle. For my grandchildren, who know I had
something to do with its design it is "Hatank shel Saba"
(Grandpa's tank). That is nonsense of course. The 60 ton
Merkava Mk III is an excellent tank even without my
contribution and in some respects, like crew safety, one of
the best in the world. According to Jane Intelligence Review
the IDF has 700 Mk III's and that more than 20 billion NIS
has been spent on the Merkava project since the mid 1970s.
"My tank indeed!".

Meanwhile the Soviet Union, in their perennial rivalry with
the U.S. had developed and was mass-producing its own main
battle tank, which went under the prosaic name T 72.
Certainly, it was a formidable foe and in every department
but one it might even have had a slight edge over the
Merkava: In all the trials it had undergone it had proved
its excellence and the Soviets probably considered it "the
best tank in the world". It now became crucial that it be
tested under real battle conditions. What better place than
the Middle East, and with Egypt having signed a peace
agreement- with Israel, that meant Syria, which soon had a
considerable number of T 72s, many of them manned by
selected Russian crews.

In the winter 1981-2 along the road between Beirut and
Damascus the juggernauts clashed. I do not know any details
or numbers of that battle, but it seems that whenever a T 72
suffered a directs hit, it. Came to a sudden standstill, but
when a Merkava sustained a similar deadly blow it, like Ole
Man River, just kept rollin' along. That must have been a
most disheartening experience for the Soviet and Syrian
gunners. The battle turned into a rout and what was left of
the Syrian armour made for home, leaving the Israelis in
control of the battlefield, which means that any Merkava
that was damaged could be recovered as were a number of T72s
that could be repaired.

Now that the cat was out of the bag, I expected some sign
of recognition, the Israel Prize perhaps, or a citation or a
letter of thanks. But nothing...

So far I have been on fairly solid ground as far as truth is
concerned. Or am I? Since I never had any acknowledgement of
my letter, how can I be certain that some fool had not
destroyed it and that someone else had had the very same
idea at the same time? What is more likely is that some
sensible officer had read it, nodded, Murmured:"Hmm, not a
bad idea..." and forthwith made it his own.

Anyway, contrary to the foregoing, what follows is pure
speculation on my part: there have been persistent rumours
that at one time the Soviet Union seriously considered
overrunning Western Europe: secret agents and high-ranking
Russian officers who had gone over to the States are
supposed to have confirmed such reports. That would have
been a blitzkrieg in which Soviet and allied troops (allied
to the Russians, I mean), fairly sure of parity in the air,
would reach the Atlantic before the Americans could
seriously react.

Spearheading that attack would be massive columns of ...T
72s. Nothing, so it was believed, could withstand that
onslaught. Yet that offensive never materialized. Could it
be that the dismal performance of the Soviet tank against
the Merkava had something to do with that? If a military
lightweight (in comparison to a superpower) could develop a
tank superior to their supertank, would the Israelis not
have given its secrets to the U.S.? Had the Israelis perhaps
sent a captured T 72 to America too, as they had done with
the then latest Mig? So the blitzkrieg was delayed and
finally cancelled and the world was spared W.W.III, which
could easily have become a hydrogen bomb war. We may never
know. For even now the Kremlin, like the Vatican, can keep
its secrets wonderfully well. But if it is true, it may have
had other repercussions.

Soon after World War II was over, the population of the West
began to recover from the long years of deprivation:
Christian Dior designed his 'new look', which took over from
the dingy utility dresses. People began to acquire all those
luxuries, like nylon stockings, they had had to forego for
so long. There were more and more cars around. New
one-family homes sprang up almost everywhere.

But not in the Soviet Union and its satellites. The drab
life continued on and on: several families shared a flat,
there were never-ending shortages and little joy about. The
reason was that most of the energy and wealth of the state
continued to be concentrated on the armed forces and the
space race against the States. The best brains, the best
materials were to be found there, too. The Soviet Union was
concentrating all of its considerable might into that
confrontation, which would make it into the sole
superpower.
And then the war was delayed ... and delayed. People who
had lived most or all of their lives under those dismal
conditions became more and more discontented with a state
that had bankrupted itself for a future that never came. On
December 25, 1991, without the necessity for a revolution or
violence, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned and the red flag over
the: Kremlin came down for the last time.

"Oh, come, come. That's a bit far-fetched, isn't it"?

"Most certainly, even outrageously implausible perhaps. But
yet just possible. And remember: Sometimes quite an
unremarkable person may have a splendid idea, which may fall
on fertile ground. And when this happens, it may have
staggering results."


-----------------------------------------------------
a true story, written by my grandpa,
and edited by your loyal cat...