The date was October 6th, 1973, Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year.

Synagogues in Israel were filled with Jews fasting and praying.

Then at precisely 2 p.m. air raid sirens started to Blair. The prayers stopped. In

their place came whispers, rumors of war, but they weren't rumors. In the South

an Egyptian force of 100,000 soldiers backed by 1,300 Soviet-made tanks was crossing the Suez Canal.

They quickly overran a series of fortifications Israel had constructed along the canal

following the 1967 six-day war. Israeli fighter jets scrambled to meet the invading force,

but the Egyptians were ready with the latest generation of

Soviet-designed anti-aircraft batteries. Israeli tanks ran into a deadly barrage of

anti-tank missiles. These were weapons Egypt didn't possess in 1967 and Israel wasn't prepared to deal with them.

The Egyptians inflicted hundreds of casualties, but the Sinai Desert is deep and far from Israel's southern border.

There was no such buffer in the north.

Hundreds of Syrian tanks, outnumbering Israeli tanks 5 to 1, broke through Israeli defenses on the

Golan Heights. That night Israel's legendary defense minister, Mosha

Diane, appeared on Israeli television and broke down in front of the cameras telling viewers that the Jewish state was in danger

of total destruction.

How did this disaster happen?

There's one simple answer.

Complacency. After winning a lightning victory in the Six Day War six years earlier,

Israeli leaders assumed that the Arabs wouldn't dare to launch another war so soon.

It was worse than that. Israeli leaders had credible

intelligence that Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Syrian dictator Hafiz al-Assad

...