The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
Page 72
Warlike noises resounding through Westminster alarmed Eisenhower, then running for a second term, and Dulles. The latter told Macmillan that Britain was making too much fuss about Nasser, rating him ‘a much more important figure than he is’. Both the Secretary of State and the President insisted that Britain held back from war and sought, alongside the United States, to reach a settlement through negotiation.25
Despite a sequence of conferences and exchanges between leaders, there was no sign of any agreement by 15 September, the date originally set for the attack on Egypt, and, interestingly, within the eight weeks Nasser had set for Britain’s mobilisation. The cabinet was now in the grip of its war machine and its immutable timetable. The weather ruled out operations after 21 November, and the service chiefs insisted that 31 October was the final date when they could be commenced with a fair chance of success. At the beginning of October, there were murmurs of discontent among some of the 20,000 reservists who had been kicking their heels for over two months, and were anxious to get back to families and jobs. Manpower had been causing snags from 31 July, when the cabinet had agreed that to make up numbers the lower age limit for front-line national servicemen should be reduced from its Korean-War level, nineteen, to eighteen-and-a-half. Even so, the navy carped about a shortage of trained signallers, disrupted training programmes, and the depletion of the home and Mediterranean fleets. Shortages of ratings meant that the six-inch gun cruisers could fire only two of their four turrets and two, the Jamaica and Glasgow, were unable to defend themselves against attack by modern aircraft.26
Time seemed to be running in Nasser’s favour and against Eden. Unable to gain a favourable solution through diplomacy, he faced either a decision to attack or a climb-down. A gallup poll in August showed that 59 per cent of the country backed his mixture of firmness and apparent diplomatic flexibility but, by the middle of September, this total fell to 49 per cent. There were fresh difficulties at the beginning of October, when there were indications that after the recent upsurge in cross-border raids, an exasperated Israel might attack Jordan, forcing Britain to come to the rescue of its ally. On 11 October, the Israeli government was officially warned that Britain would defend Jordan.27 Three days after, United Nations discussions of the Canal question reached an impasse, when Russia employed its Security Council veto.
For some weeks the French had been courting the Israelis, who they believed could help find a way out of the diplomatic deadlock. It was a simple stratagem, so much so that it convinced no one at the time, although the exact details of the hugger-mugger deal were not known until twenty years after. Israel attacked Egypt and its forces advanced through Sinai, thereby providing Britain and France with a pretext to seize the Canal on the grounds that they were protecting it, as well as separating the combatants. Eden jumped at what was a last-moment chance to avoid a humiliating climb-down, and on 17 October Canberra heavy bombers were on their way to airfields in Cyprus. Six days after, Selwyn Lloyd flew to Paris, where he was closeted with Guy Mollet, the French prime minister, his Israeli counterpart, David Ben Gurion, and General Moshe Dayan in a secret hideaway in the suburb of Sèvres. The outcome was the secret Treaty of Sèvres, of which no copy seems to have survived, but whose outlines were made absolutely clear by the events of 29-30 October.28
* * *
There were two Suez wars in November 1956. The first was fought by British, French, Israeli and Egyptian forces in the Sinai peninsula, Port Said and along the banks of the Suez Canal. The second was fought in the Commons chamber, newspaper columns and everywhere where people gathered in Britain, and concerned whether or not the British government had acted wisely and honestly.
The first war ran according to the Sèvres schedule and took Nasser by surprise for he had never expected Israel to intrude itself into the Canal dispute. Indeed, after September had passed, he had picked up from American sources information which led him to think Egypt would not be attacked. Both Eisenhower and Dulles claimed astonishment as well, which is hard to understand given that an American U-2 spy plane (flown by Gary Powers who was later shot down over Russia) had criss-crossed the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East on 27 September, and its cameras could not have missed the Anglo-French build-up of troops and warships on Cyprus.29 Of course this could have been taken as evidence of sabre-rattling, but British ministers thought they detected nothing in Dulles’s utterances which indicated that America would object too vigorously to armed intervention in Egypt. It was thought, wrongly as it turned out, that Dulles’s main concern was that the outbreak of fighting should not coincide with polling day in America, 6 November. Custom and courtesy had dictated that Commonwealth governments were party to British policy, but after the Sèvres agreement the flow of information ceased.
The Suez War started on time, with the Israeli irruption into Sinai on 29 October. The following day, as Israeli troops and armour sliced through the dazed Egyptian army, Britain and France issued an ultimatum, giving both sides twelve hours in which to stop fighting. This was ignored, and on 1 November Canberra bombers began high-level attacks on Egyptian strategic targets and cities, while airborne and amphibious units prepared for the landings at Port Said. The next day, the United States (backed by Australia among others) supported a United Nations motion for an immediate ceasefire by all the belligerents. Britain and France were thrown into a panic. They bargained for time, insisting that they would only agree to an armistice if United Nations forces took control of the Canal, and at the same time hurried forward the deadline for the invasion.
Following a new schedule, the first paratroopers landed on 5 November and the amphibious forces were ashore on the 6th. In the meantime, there had been two further United Nations calls for a truce and, with their forces in possession of Port Said and a twenty-three-mile-long section of the canal, the British and French governments complied on the evening of 6 November. In purely military terms, the operation was a shining success; Egyptian losses had been over a thousand and Anglo-French under a hundred. ‘It was all like a bloody good exercise,’ a colonel told one journalist, ‘a lot of fun and very interesting.’30
The other Suez War also had its moments. Eden’s moves between 30 October and 6 November were a catalyst for a political rumpus which convulsed the entire nation. Inside the Commons, government statements on Egypt were a signal for uproar; fists were shaken and catcalls exchanged. The Conservatives were ‘fascists’ and ‘murderers’ (this from the sturdy Mrs Bessie Braddock) and Labour were ‘cowards’, who had stabbed their country in the back. The press took up the cudgels, mostly for the government, and there were two mass demonstrations, one outside the Commons, the other in Trafalgar Square, where Aneurin Bevan denounced Eden. Eastbourne Methodists marched through the streets and were abused as ‘dirty Nasserites’ by onlookers, who took the view, common enough at the time, that those who condemned Eden were the allies of Nasser and, ipso facto, all but traitors.
There were also many sharp exchanges wherever people congregated and talked. I recollect that in my school, in a predominantly middle-class Conservative area, those who did not take an outrageously gung-ho line were shouted down, sometimes receiving a knock in the process. Conservative MPs believed that the working class was behind the government and angry with Labour for its lack of patriotism. One, with a southern constituency, commented revealingly: ‘I have lost my middle-class followers, but this has been at least balanced by backing from working-class electors who normally vote Socialist and who favour a strong line on Suez.’31
And yet the overwhelmingly middle-class readership of the Observer was disturbed by its editorial of 4 November which alleged: ‘Never since 1783 has Great Britain made herself so universally disliked.’ The country was now in an ‘isolated moral position’, having re-asserted its old belligerent imperialism and discarded the internationalism which had guided its foreign policy since 1945. During the following week, the editor received 866 letters defending the government (including 500 cancelled subscriptions)
and 302 supporting the government.32
The Suez debate of November 1956 was like others which had flared up over the past hundred years, for in essence it was concerned with the nature of Britain’s relations with the rest of the world. In one corner were the raptors who saw the world as a field of ceaseless conflict in which the strongest and most determined survived by a mixture of cunning, ruthlessness and muscle. They believed in imperialism as a reflection of the natural order, and considered expediency and the pursuit of one’s country’s interests the only principles upon which to base foreign policy. In the past, the raptors had cheered victorious generals and admirals home from the wars, as well as Palmerston, Disraeli, Joseph Chamberlain and Churchill; now Eden was their hero. In the other corner were the columbines. They dreamed of a harmonious world in which strife was eliminated through cooperation between countries, and they disliked imperialism as the coercion of the weak by the strong, but tolerated modern forms of benevolent colonialism. Pacifist by inclination, progressive in politics, the doves believed that Britain’s special place in the world derived solely from its moral values. In the past, the columbines had upheld Cobden, Bright, Gladstone and the League of Nations.
Since the war, the columbines had become more and more optimistic about a world which seemed to be moving in the right direction. Imperialism was in retreat, the United Nations was flourishing despite the Cold War, and Britain seemed to be shedding its old domineering ways. Now all this had been changed by Eden. Worse still, the invasion of Egypt had coincided with the final stages of the suppression of the Hungarian uprising by the Soviet army. How could moral outrage at this barbarity be expressed, when the thuggish Russian leader, Nikita Kruschev, could turn round and accuse Britain and France of bullying Egypt?
This loss of the moral high ground was felt most keenly in the United States whose public exposure of Soviet brutality was diminished by its allies’ behaviour in Egypt. When the world should have been concentrating its wrath on Russia, some of the fury was diverted to Britain and France. Even old friends joined in; 3 November was ‘Hate Britain’ day in Pakistan, and the Australian Labour leader, Evatt, denounced Eden’s ‘naked aggression’.
In Britain the raptors, who above all had always counted themselves as realists, were having some nasty shocks. Having agreed to an armistice, the government insisted that Anglo-French units in Egypt should remain, and form part of the United Nations force which would eventually take over the Canal. America stuck out for unconditional evacuation and a brief, one-sided test of wills followed, which brutally exposed Britain’s financial weakness.
In the early days of the crisis, foreign and dominion holders of sterling were extremely jumpy, especially Middle Eastern governments which feared that their assets would be frozen like Egypt’s if they stepped the wrong way. During August £129 million was withdrawn from sterling accounts. The haemorrhage ceased in September, but began again in October when £85 million was removed as the situation worsened. The crash came after Egypt was invaded and £279 million (including India’s deposits of £150 million) was lost by conversion into gold and dollars. By the end of November Britain’s reserves had dropped to £1,965 million, and it seemed possible that the pound’s days as a major international currency were numbered. In desperation, Macmillan appealed to the International Monetary Fund for a $560 million loan. The American government refused his request, relenting only when Britain agreed to pull all its forces out of Egypt. On 10 December, Macmillan heard that $1,300 million had been placed at Britain’s disposal to help shore up sterling. By January 1957 the value of the pound against the dollar returned to its pre-crisis level.
Britain had been undone because of what Macmillan called the ‘inherent weakness of our post-war economy’. This was true up to a point. The disastrous runs on the pound in 1931, 1947 and 1949 were the direct consequences of chronic malfunctions within the economy. That of 1956 was triggered by political fears that Britain would overreach itself and become entangled in a Middle Eastern war which it could not afford.
Even before Macmillan had gone begging to Washington, realists within his party were coming to terms at last with the world as it was. According to Angus Maude MP, the outcome of the Suez War left Britain with no choice but ‘to admit to the world that we are now an American satellite’. Subservience to the United States was, in some ways, harder to swallow than the knowledge that the days of ruling the roost in the Middle East were finally over.
Unofficial empire, as it would have been understood when Wolseley overthrew Urabi Pasha, did not disappear immediately the last British serviceman embarked from Port Said. In February 1957, RAF bombers strafed Yemeni artillery positions on the Aden border in retaliation for recent shelling. Given the present climate of international opinion, punitive bombing of targets in the Yemen was forbidden.33 Soon after, British aircraft were in action again in Oman, helping protect its sultan against his more progressive subjects. Shortly after the 1958 palace revolution which toppled over British client, King Faisal II of Iraq, troops were rushed to Jordan to save his cousin, King Hussain from the same fate. An Iraqi annexation of Kuwait was forestalled in 1961 by the arrival of British units. By Suez standards, all these were small-scale operations, justified by treaty obligations and undertaken with America’s blessing.
Oil and the Cold War meant that there was work for small, often highly-specialised British detachments in southern Arabia. Having lost the centre of its old Middle Eastern sphere of influence, Britain had withdrawn to the periphery where there were nervous Arab autocrats who needed protection from the twentieth-century and its ideas. There was plenty of scope for G. A. Henty-style skirmishes on bare hillsides, camping out under the stars like Lawrence of Arabia, and commanding bands of irregular tribesmen who accepted the old hierarchies and had never heard of Nasser. The modern, and, as it turned out, the last practitioners of old-fashioned imperial soldiering once showed their native levies the film Zulu. As expected, it stirred up their fighting spirit and several fired at the charging Zulus on the screen.
Operations in southern Arabia were undertaken for Sultan Taimir bin-Said of Oman, a mediaeval despot who, fortunately for his embarrassed British sponsors, was deposed in 1970 and packed off to exile in the Dorchester Hotel. His son, Qabus, began a programme of reform, using his principality’s oil revenues, and limited modernisation. Unlike Africa or India, Arabia and the Gulf had never felt the weight of Britain’s ‘civilising’ mission, and so local rulers were allowed to maintain old customs, which would have been abandoned elsewhere at the insistence of British residents. Slavery was not officially abolished until 1949 in Kuwait and 1952 in Qatar. It was still common in the antique sheikdoms of the Aden protectorate in the early-1950s and in Oman until 1970. Whether or not rulers in these states and Saudi Arabia meant what they said when they proclaimed an end of slavery and slave trading is still a matter of great contention. Large numbers of Asians, particularly Filipinos, are imported into this region as labourers and domestic workers under conditions which Victorian philanthropists and consuls would have called slavery.
In the post-Suez, Cold War years, Britain needed as many friends as it could get in the Middle East and therefore could not afford to take a high moral line with those it had. Between 1965 and 1975, British forces helped preserve the Omani monarchy against Marxist partisans, and, until 1967, attempted to hold on to Aden and its hinterland. After various political stratagems designed to preserve the local and loyal sheiks, and a guerrilla war in and around the port, the government gave up a base which was now strategically redundant. As the last detachments left, a band played ‘Fings Ain’t What They Used to Be’. After a brief internecine war between the partisan factions the People’s Republic of South Yemen was declared. It did not join the Commonwealth.
5
The Old Red, White and Blue: Reactions to a Dying Empire
The wrangling over the rights and wrongs of Suez gradually ceased once the British army had withdrawn from Port Said. The eve
nt passed into history, where its significance was plain: it had been a very prominent signpost which simultaneously indicated a turning point, warned against reckless driving, advised giving way to more powerful vehicles, and announced that from now on the way was all downhill. In other words, Britain had at last to say goodbye to the days when it had been free to do what it liked anywhere in the world. It had come unstuck, and now was the moment to allow the more powerful American car to overtake and speed ahead. Decline in power and status were a fact of life which Britain would have to get used to.
As well as coming to terms with the reduction of their country’s international power and standing, the British people also had to face the disappearance of its territorial empire. In the thirteen years following Suez, nearly all the African; Far Eastern and West Indian colonies received their independence and became part of an enlarged Commonwealth. The trauma, both in Britain and the colonies, was remarkably mild. Outsiders were astonished, the more so since the Algerian war brought about the downfall of the Fourth Republic in 1958, a large-scale mutiny by the French army in 1961, tumults in Paris, and a spate of terrorist outrages undertaken by the Algerian settlers movement, the OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète) during 1961–2. Portugal’s farewell to empire was equally turbulent and bloody: between 1960 and 1976 135,000 Portuguese troops were deployed against nationalist partisans in Moçambique and Angola. There were also repercussions at home with a revolution which overthrew the right-wing régime of President Caetano in April 1974. Within a month of Belgium granting independence to the Congo (Zaïre) in June 1960, the new state had disintegrated into anarchy and civil war with massacres of white settlers.