At two o'clock in the afternoon on 6 October 1973, Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, the sky over the Suez Canal filled with Egyptian jets. More than 200 of them crossed the canal at low level and fanned out across the Sinai, heading for Israeli airfields, missile batteries, radars and command posts. Five minutes later, nearly 2,000 Egyptian guns opened fire.

This was the opening blow of Operation Badr, Egypt's plan to cross the canal and break the Bar Lev Line. Fifty-three years later, the air strike that started it remains one of the most celebrated, and most argued about, moments in Egyptian military history.

The surprise

Egypt and Syria had planned the attack in great secrecy, and the timing was chosen to catch Israel off guard. Israeli intelligence only became convinced that war was coming in the early hours of 6 October. Prime Minister Golda Meir decided against a pre-emptive air strike, partly so that Israel could not be blamed for starting the war. The Israeli Air Force was on alert, but it would not strike first.

The Egyptian plan rested on two pillars. On the ground, infantry with portable anti-tank missiles and engineers with high-pressure water cannons would cross the canal and breach the sand ramparts of the Bar Lev Line. In the air, the Egyptian Air Force would hit the Israeli infrastructure in Sinai hard enough to blunt any immediate response, and then retire behind a dense umbrella of surface-to-air missiles on the west bank.

Kings and Generals' documentary on the Sinai front of the 1973 war, including the opening Egyptian air and artillery strikes.

Two hundred jets at low level

At 14:00, the strike went in. MiG-21, MiG-17 et Su-7 fighter-bombers flew low across the canal towards their targets. According to the account on Wikipedia, which draws on Egyptian and Western histories, they hit three airbases, Hawk surface-to-air missile batteries, three command centres, artillery positions, several radar stations and the Israeli electronic warfare and intelligence centre at Umm Khashib.

Egypt's Tu-16 bombers joined in from a distance. They fired more than a dozen AS-5 Kelt air-to-surface missiles at targets in Sinai. Several were shot down, but at least five reached their targets, including two anti-radiation versions that knocked out Israeli radars.

The claimed results were impressive. Bir Gifgafa and Bir Thamada air bases were reported out of action for 48 hours, Ras Nasrani and Bir Hasanah were damaged, and around ten Hawk batteries were said to have been destroyed. At 14:05, nearly 2,000 artillery pieces began a 53-minute bombardment of the Bar Lev Line, one of the largest artillery preparations in history.

The price

The strike was not free. Egypt lost five aircraft in the initial wave, a figure that rose to around ten by the end of the day. One source puts the losses at 18 and says they were the reason a planned second strike was cancelled. Among the pilots who did not come back was Flight Lieutenant Atef Sadat, the 25-year-old younger half-brother of President Anwar Sadat. He was flying a Su-7 and was shot down attacking the Israeli airfield at Meliz in Sinai. His body was returned to Egypt in March 1974.

There is a grim symmetry in the date. Exactly eight years later, on 6 October 1981, Anwar Sadat was assassinated while watching a military parade marking the anniversary of the war.

Al Jazeera English examines how both Egypt and Israel came to claim victory in the October 1973 war.

Hero or myth?

The commander of the Egyptian Air Force in 1973 was Hosni Mubarak. The opening strike made him a national hero, he was promoted to Air Chief Marshal, and within two years he was Vice President. He became President after Sadat's assassination and ruled Egypt for almost 30 years. In Egypt, the "first air strike" became part of his official legend, with claims that the pilots hit around 90 per cent of their targets.

Not everyone agrees. The influential Egyptian journalist Mohamed Hassanein Heikal took a much cooler view of the air force's contribution to the war.

Shahdan El-Shazly, the daughter of Egypt's wartime chief of staff Saad el-Shazly, went further and accused Mubarak of exaggerating his role and altering documents and photographs to take credit for the early success. The truth probably sits somewhere in between. The strike did not cripple the Israeli Air Force, which was flying in strength within hours. But it hit Sinai's radars and defences at the decisive moment, and the sight of Egyptian jets heading east gave the soldiers waiting on the canal bank an enormous lift.

Either way, the strike set the tone for what followed: an Egyptian army that, for the first few days at least, kept the initiative.

What came next

Within hours, Egyptian troops were across the canal. By the next morning, bridges were in place and armour was rolling into Sinai. The Israeli Air Force, attacking into the dense SAM umbrella, took heavy losses in the first days of the war. The tide turned later in October, with the Israeli crossing of the canal and the encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army. But Egypt had made its point, and the war set in motion the diplomacy that led to the Camp David Accords and the return of Sinai.

For the men who flew that afternoon, the war began with a low-level dash across a canal that had been a wall for six years. Some of them did not come back. All of them flew into history.

AP Archive footage of Egyptian forces crossing the Suez Canal in October 1973.

Sources: Wikipedia (Operation Badr (1973), Hosni Mubarak, Atef Sadat, Yom Kippur War), Kings and Generals, AP Archive, Al Jazeera English