The Great War for Civilisation (187 page)

“Clark worked in unison with
The Times
,” Tony Shaw recalled in his brilliant and sometimes outrageously funny history of the crisis. Clark's job—and here there is a deeply uncomfortable parallel with George Bush and the UN—was “to prepare the ground for the government's brief referral of the dispute to the United Nations . . . This required a certain amount of ingenuity since Eden and the paper had hitherto dismissed the organisation as unwieldy and incapable of producing swift results.” Eden had told Haley that he wanted to use the UN as an instrument solely to prove Nasser's guilt and justify force—which is pretty much what George W. Bush wanted the UN arms inspectors to do in Iraq in 2002.

And there was another 1956
Times
editorial that could have been reprinted in late 2002 with the word “Iraq” substituted for “the canal”:

The objection to the matter being simply referred to the UN and left there has all along been, and remains, that the UN is likely to be dilatory and certain to be ineffective as a means of freeing the canal. But whatever international control is eventually brought about by negotiation or otherwise should certainly be under the aegis of the UN and the sooner the UN is officially informed of what has happened the better.

“Collusion,” according to Kennett Love's monumental study of the Suez War, “was born of a marriage between Eden's anti-Nasser policy and the unwritten anti-Nasser alliance of France and Israel.” Israel was to invade Sinai on 29 October, stating that its forces had attacked Palestinian Fedayeen bases and that their military operations had been necessitated “by the continuous Egyptian military attacks on citizens and on Israeli land and sea communications.” Britain and France would call for a ceasefire between Israeli and Egyptian forces, a truce which—as had already been decided in advance—the Israelis would accept. Nasser, who had long convinced himself—correctly—that the three powers were conniving on the war, would refuse.

The Egyptian army retreated with some acts of bravery but much chaos across Sinai to the banks of the canal.
¹⁹⁶
On 31 October the British and French air forces commenced their own long-planned operations against Egypt. Reserve Major Mustafa Kamal Murad of the Egyptian army's eastern command drove down the desert road from Cairo that afternoon. “It was a nightmare,” he was to recall for me thirty years later. “There was mile after mile of Egyptian armour on the road and every truck and armoured vehicle was burning after the air attacks. I was terribly shocked. The poor farmers were walking onto the road and screaming at us: ‘You have brought this destruction on our land, you devils.'” Murad found Ismailia calm but milling with frightened and disillusioned troops from Sinai. “Morale was very bad, our soldiers had swollen feet from walking in the desert and were putting fear into the army defenders and our home guard, the ‘National Guard.' All withdrawing armies tell lies to their friends. We had to send them down to Cairo quickly.”

Murad found himself in the old British consulate in Ismailia, which now served as emergency Egyptian military headquarters, an institution, Murad was to remember, “which was a great pleasure to our officers as the British had left behind them crates of whisky, champagne, beer and cognac.” Egyptian troops were looting civilian homes in the city—until their commander, Kamaledin Hussein, ordered all thieves to be shot on sight. Under the strain of command, some Egyptian officers went to pieces. “Colonel Abdul Aziz Selim was told to defend the outskirts of Ismailia and he shouted at Hussein: ‘My battalion will be completely annihilated by the British air force,'” Murad recalled. “I urged Hussein to send him back to Cairo. But in the morning, Selim's batman came to us and said there was blood seeping from beneath the colonel's door. When we opened the door, we found Selim had shot himself on my desk.”

Murad's recollection of the RAF bombing at Ismailia was still so vivid when I met him in 1986 that as he recalled the violence his hand repeatedly swooped through the air to illustrate the raids on the airfields around Ismailia. “I was astonished that they attacked no civilians. They were very accurate. When I got to the airfields after the raids, I found that our young soldiers had disobeyed their orders to retreat to the slit trenches under air attack. Instead, they had stayed at their anti-aircraft guns and kept on firing. The RAF rockets were so accurate that they always hit the guns. The rockets cut our men in half. I would find their legs and the trunks of their bodies on the guns: their top half would be missing.”

On 5 November 1956, the Anglo-French force landed around Port Said, many of them carried in a fleet of ageing warships from Cyprus. At Gamil airfield 780 British paratroopers were dropped, and 470 French paratroopers landed at two bridges on the canal at Raswa. In the early hours, Murad was sleeping fitfully on a sofa at his Ismailia headquarters when he was awoken by a tall man standing beside him. “I stood up and was astonished to find it was Gamal Abdel Nasser. He was in a very nicely fitted civilian suit. I said to him: ‘Welcome, Mr. President— but what are you doing here? You should be in Cairo. The roads are very dangerous because the British are bombing them.' He said he was going to Port Said. I said: ‘Forget about it, sir, you must return to Cairo at once because the British paratroopers are expected to land at Port Said in a few hours.' Nasser asked for a room to rest in and I put him in the British consul's bedroom. A few hours later, the British were already in Port Said, fighting for the Gamil airbase.”

Major Murad may thus have prevented Anthony Eden capturing the Egyptian he so hated. Nasser, wearing fresh clothes and smelling of eau de cologne, did return to Cairo—but not before Murad had put an important question to him. “I asked Nasser: ‘Is there an agreement with the Russians for military aid?' He said there was not. I asked: ‘Not even a gentleman's agreement?' He said: ‘No.' I was furious. I thought that this man must be mad in challenging all three forces at once. I said: ‘Sir, we shall do our best but it will be a miracle if we can stand up against the British, the French and Israel.' He just replied: ‘
Rabina ma'ana
'—May God be with us. Then he left.”

Captain Nasr was living in his apartment in Jumhuriya Street in Port Said when the British landed. “We heard the firing—everyone was told to stay in their homes for twenty-four hours. The first thing I saw when I went outside was a neighbour of mine, Adel Mandour, lying dead in the street. He was a member of the National Guard. He had been shot by a British soldier and he was lying face-down in the gutter with his arms spread out. I remember his mother walked out of her house and just silently lifted him up and took him into her home.” At first the dead were buried privately, but dozens of bodies, most of them civilians, were placed in a mass grave near the airfield. The British stormed an Egyptian police station that held out under intense fire and killed almost all the policemen inside. A British general estimated that almost a thousand Egyptians died in the city, a figure at variance with Major Murad's high opinion of RAF bomb-aiming. Several civilians were massacred by French paratroopers, one of whom was to write later that he and his colleagues shot dead a group of innocent fishermen because the French had been ordered to take no prisoners. The paratroopers shot others in the face at point-blank range when they pleaded for mercy in the canal.

“The British were well behaved—they did not steal anything when they billeted men in my apartment,” Captain Nasr said. “But the French behaviour was very different. They treated people very badly. Maybe it was their experience of Algeria but I think they were angry because they thought the canal belonged to them and that they had a right to take it back.” Nasser was publicly supporting the FLN struggle in Algeria.

At Gamil airport, a young Egyptian guerrilla, Mohamed Mahran Othman, was seized by the British, who wanted to know the whereabouts of Egyptian arms stores. He later claimed that his eyes were cut out by British military doctors in Cyprus when he refused to divulge information about arms dumps or broadcast propaganda for the allies from a radio station in Cyprus. There is no independent testimony to this, although in 1997 I met Othman, whose eyes had clearly been taken from their sockets. He claimed then that the British were also taking revenge for the wounding of a military doctor during his descent onto Gamil airfield. A Parachute Regiment doctor, Lieutenant A. J. M. “Sandy” Cavenagh, the 3rd Parachute Regiment battalion medical officer, was hit in the left eye by shrapnel during his descent on Gamil, although he told me forty years later that he knew nothing of the blind Egyptian's claims; ironically, Cavenagh had many years later noticed Othman working as a guide in the Port Said military museum, but did not speak to him. A gentle and kindly man, Cavenagh, who was to write a graphic account of the landings, was praised by his commander for continuing, while seriously wounded, to treat his comrades for five more hours.
¹⁹⁷

The archives contain evidence of the racism that marked the former imperial army. The poorest area of Port Said was marked on British maps as “Wog-Town,” while a note about propaganda from “Allied Forces Headquarters” on 1 December 1956 refers to the “malicious mentality” of Arabs. The British prevented reporters from reaching Port Said until days after the battle, but a week after the ceasefire, reporter Alex Efthyvoulos was to see bodies still unburied in Port Said.

The Egyptian commander of Ismailia, Kamaledin Hussein, was outraged when his opposite number in Port Said, Brigadier General Salahedin Moguy, came through on a surviving telephone line. “He told us he had agreed on a six-hour ceasefire with a British general to collect the dead and wounded,” Murad recalled. “Hussein shouted back: ‘How dare you meet an English general without my orders?' I heard Moguy replying: ‘I am the commanding officer in Port Said and it is my decision.' Then he hung up.”

Early on the morning of 7 November, Murad was plodding gingerly up a narrow canal road north of Ismailia with his sub-machine gun on his back. He had just passed a fishing village called Jisr el-Hind when he saw what he thought were two red poppies moving in the long grass to his right. “Then I could see these two boys, both British paratroopers in red berets, lying in the long grass watching me. They were pointing their guns towards me from about seventy yards away. They pulled out white handkerchiefs and tied them on their bayonets and one of them shouted: ‘Hallo.' I kept my hand away from my gun and said ‘Hallo' back to him. In front of me, I could see British tanks and some soldiers pulling barbed wire across the road . . . These two boys could have shot me so I had this feeling that there must have been a ceasefire. I kept thinking: ‘How stupid the British commander was to have stopped here, only thirty-eight kilometres south of Port Said. There is nothing in front of him—he could be in Cairo in only a few hours.'”

But the British moved no farther. Murad had just stumbled into the very end of the British army's very last imperial adventure. It took him some time to realise that the Americans had intervened and that an era had also come to an end. President Eisenhower had been furious when he learned that Israel's invasion had been set up by the Allies—mainly by the French—and, contrary to the Bush doctrine of 2003, reserved America's right to condemn the whole invasion. Eisenhower's famous remark to Foster Dulles—that his job was to go to London and tell Eden: “Whoa, boy”—showed just how close he was to cutting off all support for Britain. By 28 November, the British foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, was telling the Cabinet that “if we withdrew the Anglo–French troops as rapidly as was practicable, we should regain the sympathy of the U.S. government.”

Questioned by the 1922 Committee about the collusion of Israel, Britain and France, Eden said that “some [half-truths]—and if they existed at all, they were not serious or many in number—were necessary, and always are in this sort of operation which demands extreme secrecy.” On 20 December he lied to the House of Commons. “I want to say this on the question of foreknowledge and to say it quite bluntly to the House, that there was not foreknowledge that Israel would attack Egypt—there was not. But there was something else. There was—we knew it perfectly well—a risk of it, and, in the event of the risk of it, certain discussions and conversations took place, as, I think, was absolutely right, and as, I think, anybody would do.” In the aftermath of the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair could not have bettered that. Eden was a sick man—he had just suffered an operation in which a surgeon had accidentally left a medical instrument inside him— and began, as W. Scott Lucas recalls in his account of the drama, to sound out colleagues about his future. On 9 January 1957 he told Harold Macmillan that his doctors had warned him his health was in danger if he stayed in office and that “there was no way out.” Macmillan was stunned. “I could hardly believe that this was to be the end of the public life of a man so comparatively young, and with so much still to give,” he wrote. “We sat for some little time together. We spoke a few words about the First War, in which we had both served and suffered . . . I can see him now on that sad winter afternoon, still looking so youthful, so gay, so debonair—the representation of all that was best of the youth that had served in the 1914–18 war.”

Eden's resignation marked the end of the last attempt Britain would ever make to establish, as Scott Lucas writes, “that Britain did not require Washington's endorsement to defend her interests.” Henceforth, Britain would be the servant of U.S. policy. It would be American policy to act unilaterally to “defend” the Middle East. The 1957 Eisenhower doctrine led inexorably to the hegemony the United States now exercises over the world. Now Washington might need Britain's endorsement to defend her interests—at least in an invasion of Iraq, although even that was doubtful.