The War that Never Was

by Duff Hart-Davis

  The mercenaries were travelling the ancient incense trail, moving at the same pace, and on the same route, as the caravans that had once transported frankincense and myrrh from Oman and the Hadhramaut right through the Yemen towards the Phoenician ports of Tyre and Sidon and the lucrative markets in the north.31 Demand for the oriental aromatics remained strong for centuries: in the time of the Pharaohs, Egyptians burnt incense during religious and sacrificial ceremonies, and used myrrh as medicine and for embalming; but it was the Romans’ passion for the exotically scented resins that brought the Yemen lasting prosperity. Such was the volume of traffic, on foot or by camel, that on some steep slopes broad steps had been cut out of the rock to facilitate progress. In antiquity the land round Marib was very fertile, thanks to irrigation from the colossal dam built on the River Adhanat in the ninth century BC, which survived until the barrage collapsed in about AD 570. Fifteen centuries after that disaster, the area’s prosperity had long since vanished, and now Marib was nothing but one old Turkish fort and a collection of four- and five-storey mud houses surrounded by a high mud wall in the middle of a wind-blown, silty desert, dotted with a few tamarisk trees.

  At the end of a marathon trek Cooper’s little gang reached the Prince’s headquarters outside the village of Gara, only a few miles east of Sana’a, but separated from the capital by ferociously steep mountain country, and 3,000 feet above it. The travellers received a noisy welcome, as the tribesmen loosed off volleys of precious ammunition skywards and the Prince came riding to meet them on a mule at the head of his troops.

  The younger son of the Prime Minister, Abdullah bin Hassan was a serious and gentle young man of twenty-six who spoke some English, having been educated in Beirut and having worked under his father in New York, in the Yemeni delegation to the UN.32 He was described by the journalist Sanche de Gramont as an unlikely-looking guerrilla sheikh, small-boned and delicate, with ‘the aquiline features and large sloe eyes of a Byzantine icon’.33 His temporary home was a cave, but, as de Gramont recorded, he was making the best of things:

  His manservant is always at his side and sleeps at his feet. Every night the manservant inflates a pneumatic mattress for the prince and massages his feet with aromatic oils. In the morning he brings an incense burner laden with sandalwood, and the prince stands over it and lets the fragrant fumes rise through his clothing.34

  Hassan loyally supported the Imam; he had a high reputation for bravery among his own people – and he was far from effete. On the night of the coup he, too, had escaped from the palace in Sana’a, and after an arduous three-week trek through the mountains had reached Harib, picking up tribesmen as he went. Near Marib he managed to ambush an Egyptian convoy of eleven armoured cars and personnel carriers. When the Royalists opened fire with their rifles, the Egyptians panicked, leapt from their vehicles and tried to flee – but, as Hassan later recounted, ‘There was nowhere for them to go, and we shot them all.’35

  Now he had been expecting Johnny Cooper and his companions; he was glad to see them, and agreed that they should start carrying out reconnaissance sorties immediately. These were what Johnny described as only short expeditions: 5- to 10-mile hikes designed to acclimatise themselves to the high altitude. A terrific walker himself, he stretched all his followers to the limit; and he quickly saw that although the Egyptians were well established in the low ground around Sana’a, they were reluctant to venture further afield or to climb the mountains.

  After just two days he sent an enthusiastic report to Johnson and Stirling, entrusting his handwritten letter to a Frenchman who was returning to Aden:

  We cannot get at Sana’a, as a full-blown war is now in the making and the route to our targets almost impossible at present. So they [the tribesmen] are fighting with heavy weapons on selected targets in support. They have been strafed by Yaks, napalmed by Ilyushins, machine-gunned by ground forces. All are excellent and our doc has done wonders. Only an hour ago we were strafed, and he is tending a wounded soldier now . . . The powers that be here are most impressed with our efforts to help, and I believe just our arrival here has made the entire project worthwhile and your added grey hairs honourable.

  Will keep at it, have no worry, but my Arabic has been stretched to the limit, still no interpreter.36 We could all write a book on this place and its people, with a large appendix on Egyptians – Wogs blast ’em . . .37

  My cave is comfortable but come the morn I move – the strafing is getting closer. Thank God they have no pilots of any quality . . . It is a wonderful, hard, exciting and frustrating life – Johnny.

  He was certainly enjoying himself – but he was also being pursued by demons from his past. He knew that Colonel Waterfield, the Military Secretary in Oman, who controlled the money for contract officers, was determined to end his term with the Sultan’s armed forces, even though his own former Commanding Officer, Colonel Oldman, was doing all he could to protect his position. In his report to London, Johnny appealed to Johnson and Stirling for help:

  I must stay on to honour our contract. Be it on my head. But if you can write to Col. Oldman (who knows all) and stress national or anti-Nasser importance, and [say] that I will leave here without fail on 10 July . . . and will forfeit all the time against my leave in September. If I am sacked by Waterfall, that is my lookout.

  Sacked he was – though not until September – by a sharp letter from Waterfield, who sent copies to every address he had (five in all), in the hope of catching him:

  My dear Cooper, I am instructed to inform you that your service with the Sultan’s Armed Forces has been terminated with effect from 6th June, 1963, in view of your unauthorised departure and absence from the Sultanate. I am further instructed to say that you may not return to the Sultanate. Please inform me what is to be done with your heavy baggage.

  For the time being, Johnny was beyond reach. In spite of the problems of communication, he and his colleagues began to give the tribesmen basic training in guerrilla warfare. The Yemenis’ normal form of attack was to rush forward, barefoot and screaming, brandishing their jambiyas or firing rifles (if they had any), and to overrun an enemy position, seizing more weapons as they went through. Johnny now began to instil more sophisticated techniques, particularly that of fire and movement, in which one section puts down covering fire while the other advances. Another major advance was the use of Bren guns – light machine guns fitted with bipods – which, with their 28-round magazines, could maintain a far higher rate of fire than rifles. The Arabs had a natural aptitude for shooting and soon, with their the new weapons, were organised into small fire-sections of five or seven men apiece.

  One morning three Il-28s – twin-engined jet bombers, with cannons fore and aft – dropped bombs and strafed the village of Gara with 20mm rockets. Behind them came piston-engined Yaks, fighter aircraft agile enough to fly right down into the wadis and machine-gun any target that presented itself. The attack caused no casualties, because the people had withdrawn into caves; but the raid no doubt sharpened Johnny’s appetite for a scrap, and after only a few days he devised a plan ‘to tickle up the opposition’: he would get the Prince’s men to lay mines, thereby provoking the Egyptians to attack, and so lead them into a chosen killing ground.

  He set up the ambush in Wadi Thoul, between Abdullah’s headquarters and Sana’a, at a point where the rising valley split into a Y on a steep slope. The arms of the Y petered out into unassailably steep little ravines, but between them was an area of level ground some 50 yards across. This Johnny designated the killing zone, and he marked it out with little cairns of stones. Above it, looking down, he placed three gun-sections in camouflaged spots protected by rocks, with ‘funk holes’ behind, into which the riflemen could withdraw ‘when the real shit came in’. His own report gave a vivid idea of the action – and of the enemy’s incompetence:

  At about 0900 hours the Egyptians moved into the wadi in great strength, with a parachute battalion up front and a force of T-34 tanks and light artillery bringing
up the rear. They were still unaware of our presence further up the wadi, and were nosing around. Half-way up the wadi the tanks and artillery pulled up and the infantry advanced in extended order, packed shoulder to shoulder. They were carrying a lot of heavy clobber, and were dragging heavy Soviet machine guns along on wheels.

  As the enemy reached the markers, our men opened up with devastating effect, knocking down the closely-packed infantry like ninepins. Panic broke out in the ranks behind, and then their tanks opened fire, but their shells were exploding not on our positions, but among their own men. The light artillery also joined in, and most of the casualties they took during the ten-minute firefight were from their own guns.

  For the rest of the day the Egyptians kept fire on the top of our hill, but we were well covered in our funk holes. The bodies that had fallen on the killing ground – we counted some eighty-five afterwards – were left where they had fallen and by nightfall the whole Egyptian force had left the wadi, returning to Sana’a with a very bloody nose indeed.38

  Johnny’s second offensive was almost as successful: a mortar attack launched at dawn on an Egyptian garrison on top of a hill, encircled by barbed wire and mines, and overlooked by a still higher hill. It was, in his eyes, ‘a beautiful target’. After an approach march with camels carrying the mortar and ammunition, Geordie Dorman – an expert at this form of warfare – got the range with his second round, and followed up rapidly with thirty more bombs:

  Observed from the top, the panic was fantastic. It was obvious that the enemy thought they had been attacked by a force of infantry, as they started to blaze away in all directions. It was quite some time before their artillery started to follow up the wadi behind, but such was their state of turmoil that by then we were three or four miles away. They even kept on shelling the wrong valley for the whole of the rest of the day.39

  Another engagement, on the night of 6–7 July, elicited the approval of Kim d’Estainville, one of the French mercenaries, who later told Tony Boyle that ‘when the tribesmen fight . . . they are jolly good’. When the Egyptians launched a heavy attack with T-34 tanks and artillery (Kim reported), the Royalists showed ‘very high fire control’ in letting them come on; then, for once, the enemy ‘sent infantry up the hills’, and again revealed a fatal ignorance of basic tactics:

  Like on a promenade [he meant ‘parade’] those troops were not in proportion to the artillery, tanks and air forces engaged. Anyhow they met with disaster. We saw and counted forty bodies on two hills . . . and for the following week the Royalists ate Egyptian rations, carrying round automatic rifles, six radio sets (Russian), five calibre .30 machine guns and four bazookas.

  In spite of these successes, the Yemenis were curiously disinclined to give the mercenaries a free hand in the fighting. As Kim recorded:

  We tried several times to use bazookas against the tanks – crazily exposed by the Egyptians, but each time [got] opposition from our [own] side – they seem terribly reluctant to engage us directly [that is, to let us take a direct part]. We therefore keep up with wounded and try what we can to repair guns and teach etc.

  Johnny – who now styled himself Abdullah bin Nasser – was in his element; the violently steep nature of the mountainsides meant that the environment was ideal for cutting roads, sections of which would fall away for hundreds of feet if an explosive charge was detonated at the right point. He himself spent several nights climbing down precipitous slopes on exploratory sorties, to determine which spots were most vulnerable; but his brief was to return to England as soon as possible and present the BFLF with an Egyptian ORBAT, or order of battle. In a short time he had obtained such excellent results from the tribesmen that Abdullah bin Hassan was reluctant to let him go; but Johnny promised he would return and, leaving the two Frenchmen in situ, he and his British companions walked back the way they had come, to the border of Beihan and Nuqub, whence they were flown to Aden and the United Kingdom.40

  In a three-page report for Jim he summed up his experiences. The attack on Sana’a airfield, which they had adumbrated at the first meeting in Paris a year earlier, had proved to be ‘a pipe dream’, although within a few months it might become a reality. In fact, Abdullah bin Hassan – keen as he was to rout the invading forces – had advised against an attack, on the grounds that even if they managed to destroy a few planes, the Egyptians would quickly fly more in; he would rather Jim sent out men to train the various Royalist tribal armies.

  Johnny reported that his first deployment had turned into a reconnaissance, and at the same time a military mission to advise Abdullah bin Hassan on tactics – and it had proved ‘100 per cent successful’. Corporal Chigey had dealt with thirty major cases of wounded soldiers, and lost only one: a ‘great effort’. Overall, Johnny reckoned, ‘We honoured our agreement with Feisal, and created a great feeling of trust between the Royalists and the British & French.’ Having seen both the Egyptian Air Force and the Army in action, he reckoned them ‘fourth rate in all departments’, and recorded that some Egyptians working for the Yemenis in the outstations were being paid in food only. At the end of his report he added a warning for anyone who followed in his footsteps:

  Entry to Jebel Sihan area takes between five and eight days, when fit! One has to be prepared to ride camels for eight hours the first night and ten hours the second. The towns of Marib, Sirwah and el Argoub en route are garrisoned and need to be passed with care, as tanks and mobile patrols are active. Water is scarce en route. We nearly came unstuck the last day of our exit near Harib, not a funny experience as a khamseen [sand storm] was blowing.

  ‘So much,’ he concluded, ‘now depends on support given to Abdullah bin Hassan by the other armies.’

  3

  Mountain Warriors

  On his return to London in the autumn of 1963 Johnny was extensively debriefed by Stirling and Johnson, and his report made it clear that the scope for action in the Yemen was enormous. Jim therefore at once began arranging for him to return; but it was also evident that the Royalists urgently needed better communications, so he despatched Johnny to Kent to collect radio equipment. To give him some semblance of cover, he was provided with a 16mm movie camera and tripod – the idea being that he could pose as a cameraman, and also with luck obtain footage of Egyptian bombing attacks on the mountain villages.

  Meanwhile, the French mercenaries sent in useful information about Sana’a and its surroundings. The town was relatively low down, laid out in the centre of a long plateau – but even that was 6,000 feet above sea-level. It then had about 120,000 inhabitants, and was dominated by a high mountain 2 kilometres to the east. Sallal’s house and the Egyptian headquarters were well guarded, but the cantonments outside the town were practically unprotected, and had no defence works or barbed wire. Soldiers were walking out unarmed, and lorries were leaving unescorted. The radio station was also lightly guarded – ‘One could easily reach the radio from outside the town’ – and several little hills that ‘descend with a gentle inclination towards Sana’a . . . could easily be used for night approaches’.

  On the Al-Adeni military airfield half a mile south-west of the town there were twelve Russian helicopters, twelve Yaks and eighteen transport planes, but no jet fighters. It was thought that some twenty MiG 17s were stationed at the new airport being built by the Russians 15 miles to the north, and that about 1,000 Egyptians were working there. All the aircraft were marked with the green Yemeni star. The road from Sana’a to Hodeidah, on the coast, was of special interest to the mercenary force, since it offered rich opportunities for mining and ambushes. Along its 137 miles, which took a Land Rover nearly six hours to negotiate, there were only seven or eight Egyptian garrisons, and many weak points – not least the pass 6 miles from Hodeidah, which overlooked the inland plateau and was dominated by peaks to north and south, but was not guarded.

  To someone as combative as Johnny Cooper, all this looked very enticing. As soon as possible he flew from London to Aden, and he described his return to the
Khowlan as ‘uneventful’. This time, though, he acted as a gold-carrier. Behind his riding camel came another, attached by a rope, loaded with bags of sovereigns and half-sovereigns to pay Abdullah bin Hassan’s soldiers. Ahead of his group went a decoy caravan, its camels carrying bags that looked as if they contained gold, but in fact were full of stones. His journey took nine days, for two of which he had to wait in the neighbourhood of Marib while trouble with the camel-men was sorted out.

  At the Prince’s headquarters in the caves at Gara he was reunited with two of the Frenchmen from the Deuxième Bureau, Philippe Camus and Tony de St Paul. Together they built a stone radio shack on the mountain at one end of the village, near the grape vines, some 200 yards from the house in which they lived. The radio station was tucked in against a rock, with a co-axial aerial run out across the hillside; as they were 9,000 feet above sea-level, they got excellent reception from Aden, and were delighted with their position. They began to make regular contact with Tony Boyle, who kept the MI6 resident in Aden informed of their activities.

  When not devising new ways of discomfiting the enemy, Johnny spent much time doing medical work, which he found enjoyable and satisfying. Like all former SAS personnel, he had had some medical training, and now found unlimited opportunities for practising his skills.

  Together with a boy of about fifteen called Ahmed, he set up an al-fresco surgery under a tree in a nearby wadi, where he worked from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. daily; and as word went out, men, women and children came from miles in search of treatment. Eye complaints were their most common affliction, but he also treated one bad case of phosphor burns from a bomb, and one gunshot wound in the knee. Because none of the patients had ever been given antibiotics before, a single shot of penicillin usually had a miraculously swift effect on ailments such as boils or skin infections.