avid Caspi still remembers the signal phrase 56 years later: “red blanket.” At the time, he could not have known that when he led his tank unit—Division 200—towards the Suez Canal, the conflict would end so decisively and quickly. He also could not have guessed that it would come to be called the Six-Day War.
In wide-ranging interviews—one of which ran two hours in person at the ANU-Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, and the other for an-hour-and-a-half via video chat from his Tel Aviv home a few days ago—Caspi, 84, told JNS that he remembers vividly the tension and fear in the air leading up to the conflict from June 5 to June 10, 1967. (He turns 85 on May 10.)
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He was then a young father of two and vice principal at the Lod high school, where he attended as a kid. Caspi was stationed on a base near the Israeli-Egyptian border, and Division 200, which he commanded—consisting of 12 British-made Centurion tanks that Israel acquired after the 1956 Suez crisis, or the second Arab-Israeli war—was ready to support a preemptive strike.
Support vehicles accompanied the tanks, as Caspi tells it. The vehicles under his command made their way into the Sinai Peninsula. “It was very difficult terrain to traverse,” he told JNS.
