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Okay, so @damon and I had a pretty serious game of Avalon Hill’s The Arab-Israeli Wars on Sunday. In short, the game recreated part of the historic battle of the Israeli 77th Armored Battalion, 7th Armored Brigade on the Golan Heights at the outset of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
In this battle, about 40 Israeli tanks, under the command of Lt. Colonel Avidgor Kahalani, defended positions called Tel Hermonit and “Booster Ridge” along the so-called “Purple Line.” This was the cease-fire line between Israeli-occupied Golan and Syria. At the beginning of the Yom Kippur War, the Syrian Army hit the Israelis in the Golan very, very hard. Many battalions and brigades were all but annihilated in place, but Kahalani’s 77th Battalion held their positions (more or less) for the better part of four agonizing days in what is recognized as one of the most desperate, white-knuckled, and epic tank battles since the end of World War II.
In all, these 40 Israeli tanks were hit by waves of Syrian armor, sometimes numbers 300+ tanks at a time, plus APCs, troop carriers, mechanized infantry, engineering vehicles, antitank missiles, Syrian air strikes, and massive artillery bombardments. While the idea that this battle “saved the state of Israel” as you sometimes read is a touch dramatic – it definitely played a huge role in saving the Galilee from Syrian invasion and perhaps altering the course of the Yom Kippur War.
Needless to say, to recreate even part of this battle (I say “part” because our game will not recreate the entire four-day defense, only one Syrian assault of several), I wanted to do my homework and so we could do the battle justice.
First step was the map, which wasn’t easy. Reliable maps of the area, dated to 1973 with relevant topographical and tactical details, are not easy to come by. I was forced to cobble together from several sources, convert the map into the TAIW system, and comb Kahalani’s book for references to landmarks and terrain features. The process took most of a day, and even then I’ll admit my map is probably an educated guess.
Meanwhile, the whole game is now on Sitrep Twitch Channel … all 6 hours and 43 minutes of it … if anyone wants the true “battle report.” 😀
