Various news outlets – News for October 6, 1973 – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
With the current series of horror and uncertainties in the Middle East, many have compared what went on 50 years ago (to the day) with what is currently going on in 2023. Others have said they bear little resemblance, other than the similarity of dates. War is still war and conflict is still conflict and the death of innocents are all the same – grief doesn’t differentiate.
The Yom Kippur War, also known as the Ramadan War, the October War, the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, or the Fourth Arab–Israeli War, was an armed conflict fought from October 6 to 25, 1973, between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria. The majority of combat between the two sides took place in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights—both of which were occupied by Israel in 1967—with some fighting in African Egypt and northern Israel. Egypt’s initial objective in the war was to seize a foothold on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal and subsequently leverage these gains to negotiate the return of the rest of the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula.
The war began on October 6, 1973, when the Arab coalition jointly launched a surprise attack against Israel on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, which had occurred during the 10th day of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan in that year. Following the outbreak of hostilities, both the United States and the Soviet Union initiated massive resupply efforts to their allies (Israel and the Arab states respectively) during the war, which led to a confrontation between the two nuclear-armed superpowers.
To get some sense of how the sounds and deeds of war are largely the same, here is a 20 minute excerpt of the the first day of the conflict as presented by several different radio stations on October 6, 1973.
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