Reply #40: Here, I can't find the guy I was thinking of, but this is a heck of an interesting read:

[bemildred]

Eyewitness to the Six-Day War

By Group Captain Kapil Bhargava VM

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Jacob "Yak" Nevo was a very methodical and energetic young pilot in the Israeli Air Force. He had worked out a new manoeuvre for dogfights. He would let the opponent get onto his tail and then suddenly drop his speed so sharply that the attacker would shoot past him. He would barrel roll and end up behind him ready to gun him down with a receding shot. Once he saw three Egyptian MiG-17s over the Sinai Desert. He told his number two to keep off and took them on by himself to test his theory. For over five minutes he used his slowing down manoeuvre and succeeded each time in getting behind the attacking MiG. No shots were fired by either side. Nevo must have been lucky that the Egyptians never co-ordinated their attack. An aircraft, which drops its speed, can be a sitting duck for someone coming down on it from above. He ended up writing a manual on air combat, which had everything an Israeli pilot needed to know about it. This became the official dog-fighting manual of the Israeli Air Force. He even demonstrated his slowing manoeuvre to Mordechai (Moti) Hod, nearly putting him in a spin in his Super Mystere. This may have helped General Moti Hod, as the Air Force Commander at the time of the 1967 war, to implicitly trust Nevo's ability for operational planning.

The main element of Nevo's plan was to carry out a massive, simultaneous attack with Israeli front-line aircraft against all Egyptian air bases - the most powerful and well-equipped Arab air force. This required exact and detailed planning of departure times and approaches of each of the attacking forces, in order to ensure the element of surprise on every target. On the morning of June 5, aircraft of the Israeli Air Force took off from their bases and attacked eleven Egyptian air force bases in Sinai and Egypt in the first wave.

A report in 1997 in The Daily Telegraph quoted Major General Shlomo Gazit as having told the newspaper Yediot Aharonot that the Six-Day War was foretold by a Czech astrologer. The unnamed astrologer had predicted the war and a "stunning victory" for Israel. Major General Shlomo Gazit was the head of the research wing of Israeli military intelligence. He claimed (tongue in cheek) that Israel had this "one source of information". In view of the open challenge from Nasser, and the extremely poor record of the Arabs in fighting Israel in the past, this was not much of a forecast. In fact, the Israeli Air Force had prepared for the war in an extremely single-minded manner.

Nevo was the single-minded person of the moment. He argued that the main job of the Israeli Air Force was not simply to defend the country's air space. It was to help the army gain and hold ground. For this, air superiority was essential. Dogfights were an inefficient way of gaining air superiority. The Israeli Air Force was poorly equipped compared to the Arabs. Its one chance was surprise. He decided that the enemy planes had to be caught on the ground.

He recruited Rafi Sivron, a navigator and helicopter co-pilot, to help him. The two made plans for surprise attacks on Arab airfields. Initially this was an intellectual exercise. He obtained access to the intelligence gathered by the highly efficient Israeli agents. His detailed plans for pre-emptive air strikes specified units to be tasked with each job, routes and heights to fly, allotted targets, and the actual weapons to be used. These plans called for operations to begin at 07:45 hours when Arab dawn patrols would be back for refuelling, and the mandatory breakfast for their pilots. The strikes had to be made without any warning of any kind to the enemy. The Israeli Air Force definitely needed to destroy the Arab Air Forces, especially Egyptian. For the Six-Day War this was called Operation Moked (Focus). It was about three years in planning.