At lunchtime, the bombs began to fall. Explosions thundered and fireballs roared across the Golan Heights – the Levantine region seized by Israel after it was attacked by Syria in 1967 – as hundreds of Syrian MiG airplanes dropped their deadly payloads. Some 1,400 of Damascus’s tanks had massed for the invasion, against just 180 for the Israeli defenders.
To the south-west, across the Suez Canal, a terrifying horde of 600,000 Egyptian soldiers, supported by 550 aircraft and a further
