Battle of Latakia, 1973: the first missile boat battle

Six years before the battle, Soviet-made SS-N-2 Styx missiles had sunk an Israeli destroyer. The Israeli Navy, which the Jewish Virtual Library describes as a fifth-rate fleet of hand-me-downs until then, had since staked its future on small missile boats armed with a missile of Israeli design, the Gabriel, and on electronic defenses meant to beat the Styx.²

On paper the odds were poor. The Gabriel had never been fired in anger and had only half the range of the Styx, which the Syrian and Egyptian navies carried. The Israeli defenses against the Styx were countermeasures that had never been tested in a real engagement; if they failed, the boats would be easy prey for a radar-homing missile.³ › The Yom Kippur War, 1973

Into the Syrian coast

When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on 6 October 1973, the navy was ordered to draw the Syrian missile boats out of port and destroy them. That night an Israeli task force steamed north towards Latakia, Syria's main port, in two columns, one farther out to sea and one closer to the shore. The Jewish Virtual Library names Michael Barkai as the officer in charge of the operation; Udi Erel, then the operations officer of Flotilla 3, told JNS that the flotilla commander was Micha Ram.⁴

The first contact appeared on the radar due north. The Israelis fired 76 mm shells over its bow and were answered with 40 mm fire. The boat Hanit left the column and sank the Syrian vessel, now identified as a torpedo boat, with her 76 mm gun at extreme range. Not knowing whether it had reported their position, the Israelis hurried on towards the coast.⁵

A second contact, a Syrian minesweeper, ran for the shore. One Gabriel fired at it fell short, but once the range closed the boat Reshef hit it squarely with a Gabriel at about eighteen kilometers.⁶

The missile duel

Near the coast three more contacts appeared: one Osa and two Komar missile boats, coming out to meet the intruders. They fired their Styx missiles from a range at which the Israelis could not reply. As the missiles closed, the Israeli boats fired chaff rockets and switched on jamming systems that sent false radar signals to the incoming missiles. All of this equipment had been developed and produced in Israel, and none of it had been used in combat before.⁷

It worked. The Styx missiles flew harmlessly overhead or dove into the water. The Israelis held to the tactic they had trained for: close in fast, let the enemy fire at maximum range, defeat the missiles with deception, and then strike. The two Komars, their missiles spent, ran for the harbor, while the Osa turned to fight. The Israelis closed at full speed, defeated two more Styx missiles with chaff and jamming, and fired a salvo of Gabriels. The three missile boats were destroyed.⁸

A broom on the mast

In all, five Syrian warships were sunk, and the Israeli boats came home unscathed. It was, as JNS puts it, the first engagement in history in which both sides used surface-to-surface missiles. Udi Erel recalled that in such victories it had once been the custom to hoist a broom to the masthead to show that the sea had been swept clean, but that Micha Ram refused to do so, out of respect for the enemy and because the mission was not yet over.⁹

After Latakia the Syrian navy stayed bottled up in its home ports for the rest of the war. The Jewish Virtual Library sees the battle as the moment the Israeli Navy, long a poor relation of the air force and the armored corps, proved itself, and its countermeasures set a pattern that navies have followed ever since; the Gabriel went on to be exported to several countries.¹⁰

The battle remains a cornerstone of the Israeli Navy's tradition. When Flotilla 3 returned to Latakia in December 2024, after the fall of the Assad regime, to destroy Syrian vessels in the port, an officer told JNS that he had briefed his sailors about the battle of 1973 before the mission.¹¹