For the first ten days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Egyptians held the clear advantage in the Sinai having crossed the Suez Canal on the first day of the war on October 6. The massed Egyptian formations that were firmly established on the east bank of the Suez Canal were protected from attack by Israeli warplanes by a dense network of SA-2 "Guideline" SAM sites on the Egyptian side of the canal. Combined with an overwhelming advantage in tanks and soldiers armed with anti-tank weapons, it was not until the Syrian offensive into the Golan Heights had been repulsed and pushed back into Syria that the tide began to turn in favor of the Israelis.

In the middle of the night on October 16, an Israeli paratroop brigade under the command of Colonel Danny Matt crossed on the west bank of the Suez, establishing a bridgehead for follow on Israeli forces to push into the Egyptian rear. Already two Egyptian armored divisions had crossed the canal to supplement the large forces established nearly along the entire length of the east bank of the Suez. Prepared to engage Egyptian armored units, Matt's brigade carried over 300 LAW missiles as well as bazookas and recoiless rifles until sufficient Israeli tanks could cross the canal to provide support. Through the night, however, Gilowa wheeled ferries were used to carry Major Giora Lev and his fourteen Centurion tanks to the Egyptian bank of the Suez along with a company of infantry M113 armored personnel carriers.

After an initial raid led by Major Lev against an Egyptian supply depot housed in a former airfield, he was contacted by General Haim Bar-Lev, commander of the southern front in the war. Bar-Lev gave him a most unusual order:

"I'm putting you under the command of the air force commander." Tanks? Under command of the Israeli Air Force? The chief of the Heyl Ha'Avir, (Israeli Air Force), General Benny Peled, then came over the radio with an even more unusual order:

"Do you see the flowers on your map?"
"What flowers?"
"Do you see numbers in red?" Next to each was what Major Lev thought looked like a daisy.
"Yes, I see them."
"Destroy all those in your area. Out."

Lev assigned his brigade commander, Haim Erez, to take a force of 21 tanks to destroy the "flowers". Erez was just as mystified as Lev as the significance of the flower markings on their maps. Destroying several small Egyptian units, missile transporters and supply columns on the way, Erez's tanks came upon the first site which turned out to be an SA-2 missile site, one of several in his sector that provided a protective umbrella over the Egyptian bridgeheads in the Sinai. A reservist with Erez was an engineering student and explained that the "flowers" were the distinctive six-pointed layouts of the SA-2 launchers with the control equipment and radars in the center. On a sixty-mile run from Colonel Matt's bridgehead that brought Erez's force within 30 miles of Cairo and back, they had destroyed enough SA-2 sites to create a hole in the SAM umbrella that would soon be fully exploited to turn the tide of the war in Israel's favor.

It marks the only time thus far in military aviation history that tanks were used in the role of the suppression and destruction of enemy air defenses, a role traditionally carried out by specialized aircraft (like the USAF's Wild Weasels) or specialized missiles (like the Shrike or the Standard ARM).

Source: The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East by Abraham Rabinovich. Schoken Books/Random House, 2004, p386-391.

The CIM-10/IM-99 Bomarc was one of the first very long range surface to air missiles to go into service, becoming operational with NORAD for the air defense of North America in 1959. Housed in a rectangular semi-hardened shelter, on receiving the launch order the shelter's roof would slide open and the Bomarc would be raised into the vertical launch position. An Aerojet General LR59 liquid-fueled booster rocket would accelerate the Bomarc to over Mach 2.5 and 60,000 feet when the twin Marquardt RJ43 ramjets took over to propel the missile to over 200 miles out from launch where its 10-kiloton W40 nuclear warhead would destroy the target bombers.

The booster rocket of the missile used hypergolic fuels- red fuming nitric acid as an oxidant and aniline fuel that would spontaneously ignite when mixed. The fuels were stored on the missile for 90 days at a time. When a launch order was received, a helium tank on the missile would be pressurized to provide propellant tank pressurization for the booster rocket. It would take 15 seconds to pressurize the tank, during which time the Bomarc was raised to the vertical position for launch. At the end of each 90 day period, the missile would have to be defueled, decontaminated and then refueled. Pressurized helium would be used to empty the tanks to defuel them as well as in the refueling procedure.

On 7 June 1960 the firefighting department of Fort Dix and McGuire AFB, New Jersey received an emergency call that a fire had broken out in Bomarc Shelter #204. The missile in that shelter was nuclear tipped and the failure of a helium tank set up a pressure shockwave that ruptured the booster rocket propellant tanks, spilling the hypergolic fuels and starting a fire. The fire then heated the remaining fuel in the missile, causing an explosion. Fortunately the shelter roof doors were closed and took the brunt of the propellant explosion, but the steel roof and blast doors were still blown off the shelter and the fierce fire burned for 45 minutes. The missile and launch equipment were destroyed and the fire was so intense the steel structural beams of the launch shelter sagged from partially melting.

Fortunately the hardened shelter design contained most of the explosion and debris and the adjoining launch shelters were undamaged. Water had to be pumped on the remains of the shelter and missile through the night before it cooled down enough for radiation safety teams from the Atomic Energy Commission and the USAF to survey the damage. As the fire had to burned, the structure of the missile melted and the nuclear warhead fell right into the fire and was itself partially melted. Careful study of the remains of the warhead showed that between 2 to 11 oz of plutonium were lost but the tritium tank that held the heavy hydrogen isotope to trigger the nuclear reaction was intact.

The plutonium caused radiation counts inside the remains of the shelter to soar to 2 million counts per minute as the salvage teams had to wear protective gear. What was left of the floor and shelter were sprayed with a special thick paint that absorbed the radiation (thankfully there was no high energy gamma radiation from detonation of the warhead) and four inches of concrete were poured on the surrounding area until detected radiation counts were zero. The site remained fenced off until the Bomarc missiles were decommissioned in 1972. In 2004 the USAF had the site demolished and had 20 feet of soil surrounding the shelter excavated. The soil and the debris were shipped out to a nuclear waste repository in Utah.

Source: Airpower, September 2004, Volume 34, No. 9. "Nuclear Nightmare Almost" by Dr. Richard V. Porcelli, p13.

In 1955 the US Air Force evaluated ground-launched version of the Navy's RIM-8 Talos shipboard air defense missile to provide Strategic Air Command bases and Atomic Energy Commission sites with a capable point-defense system from Soviet air strikes. The evaluation stemmed from a USAF concern with relying on the Army's Nike-Ajax system for protection of its installations. The following year, the USAF had requested Defense Department funding for site surveys for Talos installations and had survey teams ready to go once funding was secured; instead the DoD had the evaluation program transferred to the Army's Air Defense Command (ARADCOM) and after a period of testing, it was decided to proceed with the Nike-Hercules missile instead.

The Talos, however, served successfully with the Navy until 1979.

Source: Rings of Supersonic Steel- Air Defenses of the United States Army 1950-1979 by Mark L. Morgan and Mark A. Berhow. Fort MacArthur Press, 2002 (Second Edition), p28.