1956
Anthony Nutting
Suez: The Double War Roy Fullick and Geoffrey Powell (Hamish Hamilton £7.95) Roy Fullick's and Geoffrey Powell's book on Suez is a useful addition to the literature available on this sad and sordid episode. Although the authors have relied largely on secondary sources with occasional anecdotes from servicemen who took part in the fighting they have put together an account of the planning and execution of the Anglo-French landings which should be compulsory reading for all who aspire to authority over Her Majesty's armed forces. For the tale they have to tell is truly an ominous one both of muddle and confusion in the political direction of the Suez operation and of the total unpreparedness of the army for the task in hand. And the reader is inevitably left wondering just how our forces would acquit themselves today if they were called upon to fight another war.
As the authors recall, the 1956 White Paper on Defence stated that the army should be 'primarily organised so that it can bring force to bear quickly in cold or limited war', and that to this end strategic reserves would be maintained which were 'flexible, mobile, well-trained and versatile'. Yet when the Suez crisis broke a few months later, the government were to find that there was neither an effective strategic reserve nor the necessary sea and air transport to convey it to its destination. The quality of the army's equipment was lamentable, in some cases inferior to that of the Egyptians, and consisted largely of left-overs from the second World war. There was a shortage of ships and aircraft to transport an invasion force, with the number of troop-carrying planes sufficient only to lift a single parachute battalion. And since it was found that the vehicle designed to replace the jeep was too bulky for parachuting, the army was forced to buy back the old jeeps which had earlier been sold as surplus to local farmers around the Middle East Command.
Thus, even if the Anglo-French retaliation for Nasser's nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company had been an immediate clear-cut invasion of the Canal Zone, without any subterfuges involving Israel, it seems likely that, for Britain's part, the military operations would still have been something of a shambles. But, as things worked out, our invasion, when it came, was anything but a clean-cut affair. And because of the need to maintain the pretence that we were separating the Israeli and Egyptian combattants and saving the Canal from damage due to the fighting, confusion in the political direction of the invasion was added to that already existing in the military planning.
Indeed, such was the secrecy on the British side about our collusive dealings with the Israelis that not even General Stockwell and his fellow commanders of the invasion forces were told, even though Stockwell's French deputy, General Beaufre, knew all about it. Small wonder that he wrote ten years later that, had he known of the Anglo-French arrangement to use the Israelis as their stalking-horse and 'had we been allowed to use their attack to our advantage, I would have been ready to accept the risks that an airborne operation presented'. Instead of wasting valuable time consolidating the position in Port Said, Stockwell asserted that he would then have launched the Anglo-French paratroops in depth down the Canal, which might have enabled them to capture at least Ismailia before the invaders were obliged to pull out.
But this was not to be because Eden, in his desperate attempts to cover up our collusion with Israel, insisted that the sordid secret be known only to the barest minimum of people. Even our Ambassador in Cairo had to be kept in the dark, despite my pleadings with the Prime Minister that he be informed, if only to enable him W take whatever action he could to safeguard the 12,000 British and colonial subjects living in Egypt. As a result both they and the 470 British civilian contractors operat ing our ordnance workshops in the Canal Zone were, as the authors rightly point out, subjected to mortal peril at the hands of the Egyptian populace. By far the most extraordinary facet of the whole Suez fiasco was the way in which Eden', the supreme tactitian in international affairs, failed to think through the political implications of his decisions. Although he accepted that the Arab world would be up in arms when they saw he was allying himself with Israel against an Arab state, he firmly believed that he could topPle Nasser and that, when he had done so, the Arabs would calm down and accept the situation, some of them with relief if not gratitude. But here he failed to see how resolutely the Americans would opposei and frustrate him which, for a statesman ei his experience, was an unforgiveable calculation. Here too he failed, as the authors rightly point out, to think through just how he was going to topple Nasser bY merely occupying the Canal Zone or, if he could have got away with going on to ail ture Cairo, how a small Anglo-Freneo invasion force could have coped with the anarchy and terrorism which would have broken out throughout Egypt whether Nasser had been removed from office or merely from his capital. Perhaps the most tragic mistake of ait was that, far from carrying the countrY behind him, Eden divided it as it had never been since the days of the Boer War. Lea"; ing aside all the moral considerations o' what we did at Suez, the fact remains tba,t, British troops were being asked to ris' their lives in a venture which a large pror ortion of the population, together with the Labour and Liberal parties and a number of Conservatives in the House of Conlmons, condemned as being both reprehasible and idiotic. No government has the right to put British fighting men in such a situation. And if, in this new account of the Suez operations, there is one passage, which sums up the whole sad tale, it is that in which the authors describe the scenee where a company of paratroopers weriv listening to the BBC news on the morr° a of their landing at Port Said.' After II report about the "heavy fighting" in whi,,ce their battalion had been involved, t"A announcer went on to describe the frenzie" uproar of the previous evening in Pat; ment when the rights and wrongs a in fighting had been debated. Behind the lisi tening soldiers lay the shrouded bodies °e two of their friends, killed the day bef°„rs and awaiting a plane to fly them to CyPr" for burial.' A n's Probably the only calculation of E-e 0 which proved correct was that the Russia°, would not intervene, except by way of Firretest, if only because they were too occupied with their own troubles in Pnla rod and the rebellion in Hungary. Hence I must flatly contradict the authors' conclusion that the 'major' reason why we would not go along with the French idea of striking at the Canal within a few weeks of Nasser's seizure of the Company was 'the fear of Eastern European "voluntaries" intervening to help Egypt'. In fact, apart from Britain's unpreparedness, the real reason for the delay was that Eden, for all his determination to topple Nasser, had no answer to the pertinent question put by his Defence Minister, Walter Monckton, who, on being shown the original invasion plans, remarked, 'Very interesting, but how do we actually start this war?' Which meant that, since Nasser would not oblige with a pretext by, for instance, stopping a British or French ship passing through the Canal, Eden was constrained to wait until the Israelis obliged by starting the war for him.
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