Forty years ago this Christmas eve, five small vessels showing almost no lights slipped out of Cherbourg harbor into the teeth of a Force Nine gale which had sent large freighters scurrying for safety. The craft had been sold by their Cherbourg shipbuilders a few days before to a Norwegian shipping company. But instead of turning north towards Norway as they emerged into the English Channel the boats turned south.
Built for the Israeli navy, ostensibly as patrol boats, the vessels had been embargoed by French President Charles de Gaulle a year before. Their empty berths on Christmas day and the absence of any announcement about the embargo’s termination prompted media inquiries which failed to elicit convincing replies from officials. “Where Are They?” asked a banner headline in a local newspaper. In the news doldrums of the holiday season, the international media began to toy with an outlandish thought: Had Israel stolen back its own boats? A television team flew out over the North Sea to see if the boats were headed for Norway; others flew out over the Mediterranean.
The boats were indeed on the run. Battered by towering waves as they crossed the Bay of Biscay, they dropped anchor in a Portuguese cove alongside an Israeli freighter fitted out as a refueling ship, one of several support vessels deployed along the 3,200-mile escape route. When the boats entered the Mediterranean, British maritime monitors onGibraltar signaled “What ship?” When there was no reply, a Lloyd’s helicopter circled the boats but could detect no identity numbers or flags. The British monitors, guessing the boats’ destination from the media reports, flashed “bon voyage”, a salute to Nelsonian flair.
Stung by Israel’s audacity, French Defense Minister Michel Debre called for the air force to interdict the vessels which had been spotted off the North African coast racing east but Prime Minister Jacques Chalban-Delmas refused. The boats sailed into Haifa harbor on New Year’s eve, 1970, to cheers for a bravado display of high-stakes chutzpa.
For Israel’s navy, however, the flight from Cherbourg was no lighthearted caper but a matter of life-or-death—its own. A decade earlier, the navy had been warned that it faced downsizing to a coast guard because of budget constraints. To remain relevant, the navy command came up with a desperate proposal involving development of a weapons system that did not exist in any navy. It would be based on a guided missile tested by Israel’s fledgling military industries. If it could be adapted for use at sea, the navy command conjectured, it would give inexpensive patrol boats the punch of a cruiser. Furthermore, built-in radar would enable the missile to home directly on its target. Years of round-the-clock development followed.
The Soviet Union beat the Israelis to it, developing its own missile boats and supplying dozens to Arab navies. Their deadliness was demonstrated in October, 1967 when missiles fired by an Egyptian vessel off Port Said homed in on Israel’s flagship, the destroyer Eilat, and sank it.
Israel had ordered construction in Cherbourg of a dozen modified patrol boats to serve as platforms for the Gabriels. Seven of the boats had reached Haifa to be fitted out with the complex missile system but the embargo cut off the last five in Cherbourg. Admiral (ret.) Mordecai Limon, head of Israel’s arms purchasing mission in Paris, pushed for their escape but Prime Minister Golda Meir refused for fear that France might sever relations. Eventually she agreed on condition that the boats’ extraction be carried out “not illegally”. Limon demonstrated that the gap between legal and “not illegal” was wide enough to push through a naval squadron.
Through an intermediary, Limon met with prominent Norwegian shipbuilder Martin Siemm. A resistance leader during World War 11, Siemm had visited Israel and admired its vitality. Limon spelled out the importance of the embargoed boats, which Israel still owned, and proposed their fictional sale to Siemm who would secretly sell them back to Israel. There was nothing in it for Siemm except the possibility of serious legal entanglements but he agreed.
Limon decided that the boats would have to get away before the authorities could closely examine the thin legal cover he was about to create. Christmas eve was chosen for the breakout because the alertness of the port authorities would presumably be dimmed.
On December 22, Limon met in Paris with Siemm and Felix Amiot, owner of the Cherbourg shipyard. Amiot signed a contract with Limon canceling the original sale of the boats to Israel. Amiot then signed a contract with Siemm selling the boats to the Norwegian for the same price. Copies of the contracts were immediately dispatched to the relevant French authorities. The next day, the three men met again to secretly sign contracts undoing everything they had signed the day before.
Meanwhile, 80 Israeli sailors in civilian dress were dispatched in small groups to Cherbourg where they were hidden below decks. The gale on Christmas eve threatened to keep the boats bottled up but at 2 a.m. the BBC reported the wind shifting slightly and the boats cast off.
It would take another three years – with not a day to spare—before the missile boat flotilla was ready. It concluded its first full-scale maneuvers the day before Yom Kippur, 1973. War broke out the next day.
On the first night, five boats sailed north to engage in the first-ever missile battle at sea off the Syrian port of Latakia. Three Syrian missile boats emerged from harbor. Their missiles had a 45-kilometer range compared to the Gabriel’s 20 and they got in the first two salvos. The Israeli squadron activated electronic and other countermeasures developed for this moment and diverted all the incoming missiles into the sea. The Soviet weapons system did not provide a similar umbrella. Closing to Gabriel range, the Israeli vessels sank two of the Syrian boats. The third ran itself onto a beach to escape.
The next night, the story was repeated off the Egyptian coast, with three Egyptian missile boats sunk and no Israeli vessel hit. For the remainder of the war, neither the Syrian nor Egyptian fleets ventured out again, enabling more than 100 freighters carrying vital supplies to safely reach Israel which was in the throes of a brutal, two-front ground war.
In retrospect, the most impressive display of daring was not the Christmas escape from Cherbourg or even the boats’ bold battle performance but the audacity of the naval planners in the 1960s in permitting themselves to think beyond the horizon.
Abraham Rabinovich is author of The Boats of Cherbourg (US Naval Institute Press).
