One of the largest battles in which Micha Oren, a fighter pilot on a Phantom aircraft, took place a month before the Yom Kippur War, when a huge air battle took place between the IDF and Syria, in which no less than 13 Syrian MiGs were shot down by Israeli Air Force forces.
In his flight log, which is being offered for sale these days at the Eretz Zichronot auction house, he attached a newspaper clipping that read "13 MiGs were shot down, some of our pilots shot down two Syrian planes each" and in red he wrote next to the event "shooting down 2 planes".
It was only the trailer for what would happen a month later, in the most difficult war Israel has known to date.
The document offered for sale, Photo: Eretz Zichronot Auction House
Micha Oren enlisted in the Air Force in June 1965 but after falling from a pilot source became an airplane pilot in 1970, at the request of Avihu Ben-Nun, then commander of the Phantom Squadron and later Air Force Commander, he returned to a navigators course and successfully completed it.
Towards the end of the practical retraining course he joined the newly established slingshot squadron, the "Knights of the Orange Tail" squadron along with eight pilots and navigators.
13 abortions in one battle before the war, Photo: Eretz Zichronot auction house
His flight log, now for sale, mentions hundreds of flights and sorties during the Attrition War until the end of the Yom Kippur War, including no less than 34 sorties over 17 days in the war, revealing the heroism of pilots and navigators who repeatedly returned to hell, bombing and defending. The warriors below them, despite the tremendous risk.
Many pilots later recounted how difficult it was to return to the war, because unlike the fighters who were accustomed, so to speak, to the hallucinatory routine, the air crew members would always return to the home front and to security.
Some of the pilots with whom Oren flew became heroes of that war, and all-time Air Force abortion champions.
Phantom planes over Israeli tanks in Sinai, Photo: Camp, courtesy of the IDF Archives at the Ministry of Defense
Oren began the war by defending on the basis of courtyards in Be'er Sheva and then wrote that he had patrolled Ophir, but the dry words in the flight log ignore one of the most important historical battles of the war.
At around 14:00, with the outbreak of the war, two Phantom planes participated in front of no less than 28 Egyptian MiGs.
At the end of the battle, which lasted about six minutes, seven MiGs were shot down.
Capt. Amir Nahumi, later one of the participants in the attack on the nuclear reactor in Iraq, received the Masterpiece Medal for his work in this battle.
Oren apparently did not take part in this battle, but the fact that he was there immediately afterwards shows the heroism of all the pilots at that time - in the location in question.
The beginning of the Yom Kippur War in Oren's diary, Photo: Eretz Zichronot auction house
In the days that followed, he carried out a number of attacks with his pilot on anti-aircraft batteries, a bridge, etc. On October 9, at the heart of the containment battles, he even made a foray into the Golan Heights that was then half occupied by the Syrian army.
On October 12 (the diary was mistakenly written in September), Oren was with Captain Amir Nahumi on a raid to attack an airport in Damascus, when anti-aircraft weapons were used against them.
The plane was hit but they were pressed safely and forced to abandon it in Poria.
It is not mentioned whether they were harmed in any way as a result of the injury or the abandonment, but two days after the incident Oren and another pilot carried out an attack against an anti-aircraft battery in the canal.
Another equally interesting battle took place on October 19, probably also in the Ophir sector (the report is unclear) so an air battle took place between the plane in which he was flying with the pilot Yoram Peled, who broke his shoulder about a week earlier after being hit and forced to abandon.
Oren reports that four Sukhoi planes were shot down in the battle.
It is not clear how many planes took part in the battle.
Later in the war, Oren accompanied the air train, attacking the Suez-Cairo axis, attacking missile and anti-aircraft batteries and reservoirs. We made many attempts to contact Micha Oren to hear about the events behind the diary, but we did not succeed.
The bombing in Damascus - and abandonment after injuries, Photo: Eretz Zichronot auction house
Aharon Lapidot, who served for years as editor of the Air Force magazine, explains that this is a document that reaffirms the fact that Air Force pilots did above and beyond to defeat the Egyptians and Syrians despite the formidable challenge.
"The Air Force entered the Yom Kippur War in the opposite way to the plans, because the corps was not approved for a pre-emptive strike and was transferred from arena to arena - from the canal to the Golan Heights, the air crews managed to overcome the challenges and destroy the enemy.
"Despite the faltering start the Air Force maintained air superiority throughout the war and deterrence against enemy forces, who did not dare to go one meter away from their anti-aircraft missile, and yet were destroyed by the dozens - at a greater rate in the air than in the Six Day War and in greater numbers.
"The war waged by the Air Force began at a low and painful point of inferiority and ended in a resounding victory," says Lapidot.
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