← Back to the front page

The Most Dramatic Aerial Attacks That Changed Military History

Khalid Elhassan January 31, 2023 35 min

Stranding Enemy Planes on Unusable Airfields

Egyptian airplanes destroyed on the ground at the start of the Six Day War. Wall Street Journal

Normal bombs that struck runways simply created a crater that could easily be paved over. The sinkhole caused by the prototype bombs required the complete removal of the damaged pavement, to get at and fill in the sinkhole – a far more laborious and time-consuming process. With the runways destroyed, the airplanes on the ground were stranded, sitting ducks for followup airstrikes.

197 Egyptian airplanes were destroyed in that first raid. Only eight Egyptian airplanes took to the air. After they struck an initial eleven Egyptian airbases in the first few hours of the Six Day War, the Israeli planes returned to base. There, they quickly refueled and rearmed in under eight minutes, then headed back to strike fourteen more Egyptian airbases.

Results of Operation Focus, per Israel’s military. IDF

They returned to Israel to once again speedily refuel and rearm, and flew out in a third wave. This one was divided between attacks against what was left of the Egyptian air force, and strikes at the Syrian and Jordanian air forces. By noon on June 5^th, the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian air forces were largely destroyed.

They had lost more than 400 airplanes, while nearly 20 Egyptian airbases and airfields were seriously damaged. That crippled what was left of the Egyptian Air Force, and kept it out of the conflict. It was one of history’s most successful preemptive strikes, and left the Israeli air force in complete control of the skies for the remainder of the war.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.