Rising more than 3,280ft (1,000m) above sea level, the wind-swept plateau controlled by Israel since the Six-Day War in 1967 offered an uninterrupted view of the farmlands below. The Golan Heights also gave its occupier a valuable advantage: push a little farther northeast and the road to Damascus, the Syrian capital, beckoned. It was for this reason that Hafez al-Assad, a former air force officer who'd seized the Syrian presidency in a violent coup d'etat in November 1970, embraced the Soviet Union in a long-standing alliance. With Soviet assistance the battered Syrian military was rebuilt and re-organised. After a year of consultations with Cairo the war plans were settled, and Mossad's moles tried in vain to warn Israel's leadership of the impending attack. A useful bit of context regarding the Cairo-Damascus alliance was their short-lived experiment with the United Arab Republic (UAR). Even if the UAR did not work in bringing together the two countries there was still a consensus in 1973 that a pan-Arab federation was feasible, perhaps after Israel was defeated in a war of revenge. On the agreed date, 6 October, the Syrians shattered the Israeli Purple Line that served as an unofficial border with an intense artillery barrage.
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NAUMACHIA TRUTH BEHIND ROME'S GLADIATOR SEA BATTLES
In their quest for evermore novel and bloody entertainment, the Romans staged enormous naval fights on artificial lakes
OPERATION MANNA
In late April 1945, millions of Dutch civilians were starving as Nazi retribution for the failed Operation Market Garden cut off supplies. eet as In response, Allied bombers launched a risky mission to air-drop food
GASSING HITLER
Just a month before the end of WWI, the future Fuhrer was blinded by a British shell and invalided away from the frontline. Over a century later, has the artillery brigade that launched the fateful attack finally been identified?
SALAMANCA
After years of largely defensive campaigning, Lieutenant General Arthur Wellesley went on the offensive against a French invasion of Andalusia
HUMBERT 'ROCKY'VERSACE
Early in the Vietnam War, a dedicated US Special Forces officer defied his merciless Viet Cong captors and inspired his fellow POWs to survive
LEYTE 1944 SINKING THE RISING SUN
One of the more difficult island campaigns in WWII's Pacific Theatre saw a brutal months-long fight that exhausted Japan’s military strength
MAD DAWN
How technology transformed strategic thinking and military doctrine from the Cold War to the current day
BRUSHES WITH ARMAGEDDON
Humanity came close to self-annihilation with the Cuban Missile Crisis, Broken Arrows’ and other nuclear near misses
THE DEADLY RACE
How the road to peace led to an arms contest between the USA and USSR, with prototypes, proliferation and the world’s biggest bomb
THE MANHATTAN PROJECT
Einstein, Oppenheimer and the race to beat Hitler to the bomb. How a science project in the desert helped win a war
