War Without Medals

The Roots of Jihad - Part One

WAR WITHOUT MEDALS

As Blair's Tommies and Bush's GIs sail east, the men who send them could usefully take time out for a short history lesson. The British have been this way to war before. The outcome was such a disaster that Whitehall is still unwilling to recognise the thousands of deaths that resulted with its most basic, most routine campaign medal. No memorials exist to commemorate the dead. The story has been airbrushed from the UK's history.

The forgotten war was fought from 1951 to 1954, in the featureless desert hills that flank the Suez anal. It ended with an ignominious British withdrawal from a country (like Ireland, like Palestine, like Vietnam) where the "little people" refused to accept foreign domination. The country was Egypt.

The lesson is a simple one, familiar to every soldier from Napoleon, on his long retreat from Moscow in 1812, to the last American Marine scrambling for his place on the final helicopter fleeing from Saigon in 1975. It is that an apparently easy military conquest is, in fact, an illusion to trap the unwary: a political mirage. The real war begins with the occupation. As one of those who took part in Britain's forgotten desert war, I know that the conflict that follows the conquest is one of terror, murder and mayhem, without glamour, waged with increasing savagery by both the occupier and the occupied.

There is a common ingredient that links the scorched earth of Russia (1812 and 1942); the Dublin houses gutted by maritime artillery, 1916, the odour of napalm in the morning, as in Vietnam, 1972 and the stench of Egyptian corpses at Ismailia, 1952. It is a commitment by an entire people to resist for years, if necessary. Commitment to resistance, and Islamic faith were the key factors we discounted in Egypt and, no doubt, will discount again as the oil-driven democracies of the West seek to impose their ideas of government on Iraq.

In the summer of 1951, we - soldiers of 16th Parachute Brigade - sailed aboard the carriers Bulwark and Warrior from that same Portsmouth quay that saw the Ark Royal depart earlier this month, bound for the Gulf. A lone Scottish piper sent us away with the lament, "Yer no awa' tae bide awa'." ("You are not departing for ever"). Around 400 of us would not return.

We thought our final destination was the Gulf, in particular the Iranian Abadan oilfield which a radical politician (Prime Minister Mossadeq) had just seized from a British company. We, the Paras, would snatch the oilfield back by force with a mass drop. A cautious Uncle Sam intervened. The CIA took the job over, and with enough dollars, promoted street riots that demolished Mossadeq's government and replaced it with a Western-friendly Shah.

In time, the Shah was brought down, US embassy staff made hostage and a disastrous Special Forces rescue attempt destroyed an American President.

We, the Paras, were ready for a fight wherever we found it. Out at sea, we did a war dance on the flight deck and sang rude songs about "the wogs". Everyone knew, didn't they, that one of us could take on six of them ? We went ashore at Cyprus. Another war opportunity was just around the corner.

The British had occupied Egypt since 1882, guarding the Suez Canal, the lifeline through which Europe's oil flowed. We were not welcome. Popular riots and a rising body count were a regular part of life there over the next seventy years, as we stuck to our belief, that:

Operation Flatten

In 1951, the Egyptian government revoked an unequal agreement to let 10,000 British troops remain in the Canal Zone (in fact there were 60,000 dug in there). Anti-British riots followed. Three days later, the Paras crept up on key points including bridges and a railway and took them by force. There were not many dead. After that, against diplomatic advice, the generals started what amounted to a private war.

The Egyptians ordered all civilian workers - 10,000 of them - to withdraw from support of British bases. Tommy had to take over everything from dock labour to running water purification plants. You don't survive long in the desert without pure water. The purification plants came under sniper fire. In "Operation Flatten", guarded by the Paras, our tanks erased a village near Suez in an ugly reminder of the Nazi reprisals in Poland, 1943. Sir Thomas Rapp, head of our mission in Cairo - and a war hero - described Flatten as "a diplomatic calamity."

Wherever we went from now on, we were walking targets for assassination, usually in the back, or abduction. One British officer was bayoneted to death, slowly, his face brutally pressed down into the desert sand. Others, including a two-star Air Force general, vanished never to be seen again. Our enemy - Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas of the Moslem Brotherhood - crept in the darkness into the space between our wired camps, fired a few bullets in each direction and withdrew, leaving the British to react by shooting at one another.

Our commander General Erskine despised both "Gippos" and British diplomats who advocated a non-military approach. He had a personal ghost to exorcise. In Normandy, 1944, he had been criticised for an over-cautious approach to battle. He was dismissed from his command. Six years later in Egypt, in place of hardened Panzers, he faced ragged trousered guerrillas and half trained, poorly-armed auxiliary police officers. Erskine now went into overdrive, and overkill.

The desaster

Our most depressing outpost was Tel El Kebir, a patch of nothing, parked nowhere. It was an ordnance depot, twenty-five miles in circumference, freezing cold at night and punishingly hot by day, exposed to constant sandstorms. After each storm came the next plague: sandflies. They ate our food, and grazed on our sweaty bodies. For some young conscripts (as most of us were) the only way out of this hell was at the end of a length of rope suspended from the camp water tower.

To these horrors was now added the threat of "Youth Commandos". They ambushed a military train, blew up a Scottish Highlander patrol on its way to the rescue. We ran the commandos to earth in an oasis, called up tanks and hit the place with mortars. The day's body count (all Egyptian): twelve plus fifteen wounded. Later we used heavy artillery against a nearby village concealing snipers.

Much worse followed a few days later at Ismailia, a leafy market town on the banks of the Canal. The Egyptian police, holed up in their barracks, were ordered to give up their rifles. On orders from their own government, they refused.

We brought up tanks and hit the building at point blank range with anti-tank missiles and mortars as well as the tanks' own heavy guns. Then the Lancashire Fusiliers, an infantry regiment, attacked with bayonets fixed, hurling grenades. Afterwards, according to one eye-witness, "dead and wounded Egyptians littered the barrack rooms" surrounded by "a pathetic jumble of blood soaked blankets."

The "wogs" had stood their ground bravely and defiantly for five hours armed only with rifles and a few sub-machine guns. They lost more than forty dead and seventy wounded. As the London Daily Mirror reporter David Webster said at the time (in a despatch not welcomed by Whitehall): "Whether we like it or not the Egyptian police, both regular and auxiliary, stood and fought to a degree that our authorities had not for one moment expected.""

Black Saturday

We lost three dead and thirteen wounded. We also lost all moral authority in the Middle East. Sir Cecil Campbell, president of the British Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, said: "The use of force at Ismailia ... has united all Egyptians against us. We lost Egypt politically and finally at Ismailia." Sir Alexander Keown-Boyd, former head of British intelligence in Egypt, described Erskine's operations as political disasters. The British ambassador concluded that his country's senior general in the region was "conducting an extreme policy on his own account." But in London a newly re-elected Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, applauded the military.

The day after Ismailia, a mob took control of Cairo, led by mutinous and embittered police officers demanding arms to avenge their comrades. The crowd burned down 750 foreign-owned businesses including such colonial icons as Shepheard's Hotel. Much of westernised Cairo went up in smoke. The 26 dead included the Canadian Trade Commissioner, burned to death in the Turf Club. The day entered local folklore as "Black Saturday". We, the Paras, prepared for an air drop on Cairo's principal airfield. In the event, wiser counsels, advising against a full-scale war with Egypt, prevailed.

The British now had no future in Egypt. Overkill had achieved the opposite of the intended result. Within two years of the military crackdown in the Canal Zone, we had accepted the inevitable outcome and had agreed to move out. In spite of the insane attempt to reinvade Egypt (with Israeli and French collusion) in 1956, the British were out for good.

The only significant difference between then and now is that then, Americans, for their own, devious reasons, opposed British oppression in Egypt. Now, the US is the imperial power, armed with the Maxim gun, and nukes, and ready to use them without calculating the bottom line. My own guess is that the upcoming war will run for at least half a century. In the Middle East, that is nothing special. They have been here before. But unlike the Anglo-Saxons, they do not forget.