Page 358 - כשהצבא החליף מדיו

Abstract

During the spring and summer of 1949 most units which fought in
the War of Independence were disbanded and their veterans were
demobilized. A handful of men, who joined the newly formed career
service, began to put the pieces together and form the renewed Israel
Defense Forces. Seven years later, on the battlefields of the Sinai
Peninsula a well trained and well equipped force of ten infantry and
three armored brigades gained the IDF an impressive success. It is
customary to assign this victory to the distinguished leadership of
General Moshe Dayan. But Dayan did not lead in a void. He built
this fighting force on the foundations which his three predecessors
had established. This book tell the story of how these generals,
assisted by a small group of officers, raised and renewed the Israel
Defense Forces out of the ashes of war and created the frameworks,
methods, and doctrines upon which the Israeli army operated in the
coming decades.

During the five years under survey the Israeli army was
preoccupied with many urgent issues: solidification of the borders
which were defined by the Armistice Agreements that ended the
war; the struggle against the vast scope of violent Arab infiltration
across these lines; establishment of the military reserve service
system; development of the various corps; and shaping the battle
doctrine. All these and many other aspects will be described and
analyzed in this book. Other skillful historians have already dealt
with some of them and their contributions have been acknowledged
and used here. However, most of the materials on which this book is
based were drawn from thousands of document stored in the IDF’s
archive and testify to the vast activities performed by the diligent
staffs of the various headquarters of the IDF at the time.

The period covered by the book spans the years between the
end of the 1948 war early in 1949 and the resignation of David Ben-