On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel during Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year. Arab forces crossed the cease-fore line and invaded Israel Attacking across the Suez Canal, the Egyptians were successful during the first four days of the war, following which the front settled into a stalemate. After a disastrous Egyptian attempt to renew the offensive, the Israelis counterattacked, striking at the seam between two Egyptian armies. In over a week of heavy fighting, the Israelis crossed the Suez Canal (where the old ceasefire line had been), and eventually cut off elements of the Egyptian Third Army after a United Nations cease-fire had failed. The Syrian attack on the Golan Heights achieved modest gains during the first 24–48 hours, after which momentum began to swing in Israel's favor. By the second week of the war, the Syrians had been pushed out of the heights as the Israelis launched their own counterattack.
More information regarding the combat operations can be found at Wikipedia, from which portions of the above were excerpted.
Precise details of what transpired in Washington during the first week of the Yom Kippur War, launched by Egypt and Syria on October 6, 1973, are hard to come by, in no small measure owing to conflicting accounts given by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger regarding their respective roles.
What is clear, from the preponderance of information provided by those directly involved in the unfolding events, is that President Richard Nixon — overriding inter-administration objections and bureaucratic inertia — implemented a breathtaking transfer of arms, code-named Operation Nickel Grass, that over a four-week period involved hundreds of jumbo U.S. military aircraft delivering more than 22,000 tons of armaments.
This was accomplished, noted Walter J. Boyne in an article in the December 1998 issue of Air Force Magazine, while “Washington was in the throes of not only post-Vietnam moralizing on Capitol Hill but also the agony of Watergate. . . . Four days into the war, Washington was blindsided again by another political disaster -- the forced resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew.”
“Both Kissinger and Nixon wanted to do [the airlift],” said former CIA deputy director Vernon Walters, "but Nixon gave it the greater sense of urgency. He said, ‘You get the stuff to Israel. Now. Now.’”
Boyne, in his book The Two O’Clock War, described a high-level White House meeting on October 9:
As preoccupied as he was with Watergate, Nixon came straight to the point, announcing that Israel must not lose the war. He ordered that the deliveries of supplies, including aircraft, be sped up and that Israel be told that it could freely expend all of its consumables -- ammunition, spare parts, fuel, and so forth -- in the certain knowledge that these would be completely replenished by the United States without any delay.
Source: Commentary Magazine: Thirty-Six Years Ago Today, Nixon Saved Israel, But Got no Credit
Commentary
Members of my family tell me of how they gathered in their respective churches to pray for Israel during the war, that God would deliver the people of Israel, and move upon our leaders to aid them.
I believe that America should always stand with Israel, and it is my personal belief that if America were to become an enemy of Israel, I would consider myself an enemy of the state, and act accordingly.
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