We Egyptians will not allow any coloniser, any despot, to dominate us.
GAMAL ABDEL NASSER
Shortly after four o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday 19 July 1956, Ahmed Hussein, Egypt’s ambassador in Washington, strode into John Foster Dulles’s office for an urgent meeting. Hussein, who had recently returned from Cairo, was in good spirits, but the secretary of state was the bearer of bad news: he had, he said, reluctantly concluded that it would not be feasible for the United States government to provide a $56 million loan to help with the construction of a High Dam at Aswan. Dulles explained that the United States was concerned that the economic sacrifices that would be required of the Egyptian people, together with the diversion of national resources while the project was completed, would generate resentments that might sour relations between the two countries. He also made it clear that American public opinion had turned against the project and, as a result, he doubted that the administration could procure the necessary funds from Congress, even if it wished to do so. Hussein was stunned and implored the Americans to reconsider. It was to no avail. The withdrawal of Western support (Britain rescinded its proposed $14 million contribution the following day) caused a $200 million financing deal with the World Bank, the details of which had been worked out meticulously over many months, to collapse, throwing the entire project into considerable doubt.1
The Anglo-American decision was a bitter pill for the Egyptians. The High Dam promised to be the biggest civil engineering project in the world, at 365 feet high and three miles wide – seventeen times the size of the Great Pyramid at Giza – with a reservoir large enough to store 45,890 billion cubic feet of water. But it was not simply a prestige project; it was also seen as central to the country’s efforts to modernise its economy. The High Dam would enable the flow of the River Nile to be regulated throughout the year, opening up seven hundred thousand acres of land to irrigation and reclaiming a further 1.3 million acres for settlement. It would also produce an initial 720,000 kilowatts of hydro-electricity, with capacity for that to be doubled.2
News that the US and Britain had withdrawn their support was greeted with shock and anger in Cairo, and seen as a deliberate slight against Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser.3 The Egyptian leader heard the news while flying back to Cairo from a state visit to Yugoslavia, accompanied by the Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Nasser would later claim that the American decision had come as no surprise: ‘I was sure that Mr Dulles would not help us.’ But what stung was the ‘insulting attitude with which the refusal was declared’. For Nasser, the fact that the State Department publicly cast doubt on the ‘willingness and ability’ of the Egyptians to pull off the project was a ‘slap in the face’.4 On 24 July, while attending a ceremony to open a new refinery and oil pipeline north of Cairo, Nasser broke his silence. Mounting a robust defence of his country’s economic record, he launched a vitriolic attack on the United States – ‘I look at Americans and say: May you choke to death on your fury!’ ‘We, the 22,000,000 Egyptians’, he continued, ‘will not allow any colonizer, any despot to dominate us either politically, economically, or militarily. We shall yield neither to force nor to the dollar.’5 But while Nasser’s ire may have been directed at Washington, he was already planning an audacious strike against his real enemy, Great Britain.
Although Egypt had nominally won its independence from the empire in 1922, it had remained a de facto British possession. The country’s monarch, King Farouk – described by one historian as a ‘gourmand, libertine, kleptomaniac, drug-trafficker and buffoon’ – epitomised the Egyptian government’s impotence while, as late as 1954, the British maintained a sizeable military presence in the land of the pharaohs. A narrow strip of land, 120 miles long, stretching from Port Said in the north to Suez in the south, housed a vast network of airfields, ports, railway stations, roads, hospitals, barracks, storage depots, ammunition dumps and other facilities that, at its height, was home to some eighty thousand troops. The purpose of this vast garrison, which cost £50 million a year to maintain, was to protect the Suez Canal.6 Conceived by the brilliant French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps and opened to great fanfare in 1869, the canal, which linked the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, was one of the world’s most important trade routes: by 1955, two thirds of the oil that fuelled western Europe’s economy, together with other vital goods, passed through this famous waterway. The canal’s operation, meanwhile, was overseen by an Anglo-French joint-stock company, whose concession to run the canal was due to expire in 1968.7
In July 1952, after months of nationalist unrest and violence, the Free Officers Movement – appalled by the abject poverty of the fellahin (or peasantry), outraged by the corruption and incompetence of the government and determined finally to end the country’s subservience to the British – had overthrown King Farouk and established a new military government. Within two years Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, the dashing and ambitious son of a postal clerk from Alexandria, had outmanoeuvred his rivals and established himself as Egypt’s undisputed ruler. He bore down on opposition parties, most notably the Muslim Brotherhood, enacted major agricultural and social reforms and declared Egypt a republic. Nasser, according to one historian, ‘radiated energy. Tall and muscular, he moved like a panther. His olive-skinned countenance, white teeth gleaming between aquiline nose and prognathous jaw, was spellbindingly expressive . . . he behaved like the embodiment of the national will.’8 He quickly became the darling of the Arab world – the personification of anti-colonial nationalism and regional self-confidence, following decades of subservience to the West.9 On 23 June 1956 Nasser, who was the first native Egyptian to rule the country for more than two and a half millennia, was elected president with more than 99 per cent of the vote (his was the only name on the ballot).10 A week earlier, he had led the national celebrations to mark the departure of the last British troops from Egyptian territory. A three-day public holiday had been declared to mark the start of a ‘bright new era’ in which Egypt would ‘no longer . . . be under the domination of the imperialists’.11 Great celebrations took place in Cairo and Alexandria and in villages along the banks of the Nile. The main ceremony, though, was staged in Port Said. As Nasser made his way in an open car to Navy House – the imposing yellow stucco building that had served as British headquarters – he was greeted by vast, screaming crowds, who swarmed around his motorcade. At one point, the Egyptian leader was reported to have ‘completely disappeared from sight’ as his countrymen, desperate to embrace their hero or shower him with kisses, surged forward. A dishevelled Nasser finally emerged and took his place in front of Navy House. As nine MiG fighter jets flew in formation overhead and a frigate, surrounded by five torpedo boats in the harbour, fired off a salute, he first kissed and then raised the green Egyptian flag, with its white crescent and three stars, declaring: ‘Citizens, we pray that God may forbid any other flag to fly over our land.’12
Nasser had, right from the start, insisted on a complete British withdrawal: ‘We cannot feel free and sovereign until they go.’13 There were actually good reasons for Britain to vacate the Canal Zone: the cost of maintaining the base was prohibitively expensive; the continued presence of British troops in the face of popular hostility was counterproductive; and the realities of the Cold War nuclear arms race, together with Britain’s decline as a manufacturing power, had contrived to reduce the canal’s strategic importance. The British, though, concerned (as ever) about their international standing and anxious about talk of ‘imperial decline’, had departed reluctantly – encouraged on their way by an Eisenhower administration that was keen to distance the United States from European imperialism.14 Speaking in June 1953 following a twenty-day tour of the Middle East and south Asia, John Foster Dulles had made it clear that America had no intention of preserving or restoring the ‘old colonial interests’. Instead, it would pursue its ‘traditional dedication to political liberty’ by encouraging an ‘orderly development of self-government’.15 In October 1954, following months of protracted negotiations, Britain finally signed the Suez Base Agreement, consenting to withdraw its forces within twenty months, while retaining the right to return ‘in the event of an armed attack by an outside Power’ on any member of the Arab League or Turkey.16 Now, declared Nasser, Britain and Egypt would be able to work together ‘on a solid basis of mutual trust and confidence’.17
It was not to be. Over the next eighteen months, Anglo-Egyptian relations deteriorated precipitously. The formation of the Baghdad Pact in 1955 – a security agreement signed by Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and Britain as a bulwark against the Soviet Union – was viewed by Nasser (with some justification) as little more than a front for Western imperialism. Almost immediately the Pact became a major target for Egyptian propaganda and drew London into its own counterproductive media offensive. Britain and then the United States also proved reluctant to sell Egypt much-needed arms (the country was engaged in a tense standoff on its border with Israel, with whom it had fought a disastrous war in 1948–9). Nasser turned instead to Moscow, which arranged for large quantities of weapons – including tanks, fighter jets and bombers – to be supplied via Czechoslovakia. This sparked panic in Western capitals that Egypt might be lost to the Communists – a concern that was further heightened when, in May, Nasser recognised the People’s Republic of China. Britain also (wrongly) blamed Nasser for King Hussein’s decision, on 1 March 1956, to summarily dismiss General Sir John Glubb from his post as commander of Jordan’s Arab Legion – a move that weakened British influence in the region and humiliated the Eden government.18
By the spring of 1956, London’s patience had run out. Writing to President Eisenhower on 5 March, Sir Anthony Eden urged him to ‘accept . . . that a policy of appeasement will bring us nothing in Egypt’.19 The British cabinet had come to the view that Nasser, intent on leading the Arab world, was prepared to accept Soviet help, and that there was no longer any basis on which ‘friendly relations’ with Egypt could be established. Britain now sought to ‘do our utmost to counter Egyptian policy and to uphold our true friends in the Middle East’.20 Eden, though, seemed determined to go further. The prime minister – suave, cultured, fiercely intelligent, vastly experienced and with an unmatched reputation for statesmanship and good judgment – was clearly rattled by Nasser.21 On the evening of 12 March Anthony Nutting, the minister of state at the Foreign Office, was dining at London’s Savoy Hotel when he was interrupted by an urgent call from Number 10. Eden, who had just read a memorandum outlining a long-term plan to isolate Egypt, was furious: ‘What’s all this nonsense about isolating Nasser or “neutralising” him, as you call it? I want him destroyed, don’t you understand?’22 MI6, meanwhile, cooked up wild schemes to assassinate Egypt’s new pharaoh, including one that involved piping nerve gas into his office.23 Nutting – a rising star of the Conservative Party, protégé of Eden and negotiator of the October 1954 agreement with Nasser – now came to the conclusion that the prime minister had ‘completely lost his touch’ and, perhaps affected by illness (a botched gall bladder operation in April 1953 had proved ruinous to Eden’s already frail health), ‘began to behave like an enraged elephant charging senselessly at invisible and imaginary enemies in the international jungle’.24 Unfortunately, all Eden’s fears were about to be confirmed.
‘Alexandria at the end of July’, wrote the Egyptian journalist Mohamed Heikal, ‘is a holiday city, and with its long palm-lined beaches, its brilliantly lit cafés and shops, a place of beauty and excitement.’ On the evening of Thursday 26 July – four years to the day since King Farouk’s expulsion – the atmosphere in the country’s second city was ‘electric’ as President Nasser stood before a crowd of 250,000 in Liberation Square.25 During a speech that lasted for the best part of three hours, and which was beamed across the Middle East and North Africa by Cairo’s ‘Voice of the Arabs’ radio station, Nasser explained that the Egyptian people had been ‘striving, struggling and fighting’ to throw off imperialism and foreign exploitation. After recounting the recent controversy over the High Dam, Nasser turned his attention to the Suez Canal. Although it had been ‘dug . . . with our skulls, bones and blood’, Egypt, Nasser claimed, received just $3 million a year while the Suez Canal Company – which operated as a ‘state within a state’ – pocketed some $100 million (the actual figure was $35 million). But now all that would end. Nasser announced that earlier that day he had signed a decree nationalising the Suez Canal Company, whose revenues would be used to finance the High Dam. ‘The people of Egypt alone’, declared Nasser, ‘shall be sovereign in Egypt. We shall march forward united and in solidarity . . .’26 Even as he spoke, Egyptian soldiers were occupying the company’s offices and installations along the canal.27 The ovation, which lasted for ten minutes, was deafening, and when Nasser attempted to exit the square, the crowds – singing, dancing and chanting ‘Long live Nasser, Lord and Saviour of the Arabs!’ – repeatedly blocked his way.28
Nasser’s audacious gambit stunned even members of his own government. It united the country, and Egyptians of all political leanings and social classes poured onto the streets in jubilation. Even his opponents expressed admiration.29 The following morning, Nasser arrived back in Cairo in triumph. The British Embassy noted that his train from Alexandria had ‘stopped at all stations en route, where he is reported to have addressed tumultuous crowds’.30 In the capital, a crowd of a hundred thousand showered the president with flowers and roared their approval. Standing outside his office, a defiant Nasser proclaimed, ‘Egypt is exercising her sovereignty in full, and will not allow any State or any gang to diminish [it].’ Boasting that the ‘Egyptian people are today one hand, one heart, one hope and one aim’, he declared that ‘the Suez Canal Company has become our property . . . and we shall defend this with our blood’.31
Nasser’s actions were wildly popular across the Arab world. Congratulatory telegrams were despatched from the region’s capitals, glowing newspaper editorials appeared, imams preached approving sermons and spontaneous public demonstrations of support broke out.32 Jordan’s King Hussein offered his country’s ‘wholehearted congratulations and compliments to her sister State’ and declared that ‘the shadow of exploitation is fading from the Arab world’, while crowds took to the streets of Amman and East Jerusalem to cheer Nasser and condemn Western imperialism.33 The response was mirrored in Syria, where the press were unanimous in their approval, and support flowed in from Lebanon and Sudan too. Even Nasser’s most bitter regional rivals felt compelled to offer public endorsement (privately, they continued to denounce the Egyptian leader as a dangerous troublemaker).34
Nationalisation of the canal was also greeted with enthusiasm across much of North Africa. There was ‘delight’ on the streets of Morocco, amidst widespread admiration for Nasser’s open defiance of the old colonial masters. In the northern port city of Tétouan, for instance, the local newspaper declared that Egypt had finally broken free from its chains: ‘Today Colonialism is drawing its last breath; tomorrow it will be dead.’ A British assessment of the popular mood stressed that, as far as ordinary Moroccans were concerned, Egypt could ‘do no wrong’.35 Meanwhile Jacques Chevallier, the liberal mayor of Algiers, informed the British consul-general that, among the Arab population, there had been a ‘swelling of pride in Nasser’s activities’.36
A chorus of approval also rang out from the Communist world. In Beijing, the People’s Daily offered warm support to the Egyptian people in their ‘struggle for sovereignty and independence’. The Egyptians had, the paper claimed, written a new page in their history and struck a powerful blow for the cause of anti-colonialism everywhere.37 Mao’s government, meanwhile, commended the nationalisation of the canal as a ‘righteous action taken by Egypt in defence of its own sovereignty and independence’.38 In Moscow, despite serious disagreements with Nasser, who had an awkward habit of throwing local Communists into jail, Pravda emphasised Soviet sympathy for all those struggling to cast off the yoke of colonialism and declared that ‘military threats, economic pressure or political blackmail’ would not prevent national liberation movements from achieving ultimate victory.39
In Britain and France, however, it was a very different story. ‘GRABBER NASSER’, screamed the headline of Britain’s Daily Mirror, while the Daily Telegraph suggested that Nasser’s decision ‘should have been announced late on Saturday night, as was the way in Hitler’s and Mussolini’s day’.40 The parallel with the 1930s was pursued on the other side of the Channel too, where France-soir thundered that Nasser was a ‘full-blooded Hitler’.41
Sir Anthony Eden had been hosting a dinner at Downing Street for King Feisal of Iraq and his prime minister, Nuri es-Said, when, at 10.15 p.m., the duty secretary informed him that Nasser had nationalised the canal. As the guests were departing, Nuri advised Eden to ‘hit, hit now, and hit hard. Otherwise it will be too late.’ At 11 p.m., the prime minister gathered his senior advisers in the Cabinet Room for an impromptu meeting: Selwyn Lloyd, the foreign secretary, Lords Salisbury and Kilmuir (the Lord President of the Council and Lord Chancellor respectively), the Earl of Home (secretary of state for Commonwealth Relations) and Sir Dermot Boyle, chief of the Air Staff, who had been at the dinner, were joined by the First Sea Lord, Earl Mountbatten, and Sir Gerald Templer, chief of the Imperial General Staff, as well as the French ambassador and the American chargé d’affaires. Eden dominated the meeting and, according to notes taken by his press secretary, was clear that military action would be necessary and that Nasser would have to be removed. The Egyptian leader, Eden declared, could not be allowed ‘to have his hand on our windpipe’. But when he turned to his military chiefs for options, their response was rather disheartening. Mountbatten explained that the Mediterranean Fleet, which was anchored off Malta, could set sail within hours and would be able to land 1,200 Royal Marine Commandos at Port Said within three or four days. However, this daring mission would secure only a portion of the canal, while leaving the Marines dangerously exposed. A full landing force, with the requisite air and naval support, capable of taking control of the entire Canal Zone, would not, Eden was told, be ready for at least six weeks.42
Nevertheless, Eden’s view that Nasser had to be stopped commanded broad political and public support – at least for now. Speaking in the Commons on the morning of 27 July, the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell deplored the ‘high-handed and totally unjustifiable step by the Egyptian government’.43 Nasser was widely viewed as a menace who threatened to destabilise the entire Middle East, while the seizure of the canal not only dented Britain’s prestige, it threatened vital national interests including the security of her oil supplies. The arguments were set out clearly at the first cabinet meeting after the crisis broke. Eden and his ministers accepted that they would ‘be on weak ground in basing our resistance on the narrow argument that Colonel Nasser had acted illegally’ since, technically, ‘his action amounted to no more than a decision to buy out the shareholders’. Instead, the case had to be made on ‘international grounds’: the Suez Canal was a ‘vital link between the East and the West’ and an ‘international asset of the highest importance’. Moreover, Eden and his colleagues doubted whether the Egyptians had the necessary technical expertise and resources to run the canal efficiently or to undertake the improvements (such as widening and deepening the waterway to accommodate more modern ships) that would be necessary over the next ten years. In light of Nasser’s recent behaviour, they were also understandably sceptical that the Egyptians would ‘recognise their international obligations in respect of it’ (the Convention of Constantinople, signed in 1888, guaranteed that the canal ‘shall always be free and open, in time of war as in peace, to every vessel of commerce or of war, without distinction of flag’).44 The cabinet thus concluded that ‘every effort must be made to restore effective international control over the Canal’ and accepted that ‘our essential interests in this area must, if necessary, be safeguarded by military action . . .’45 The military chiefs were promptly tasked with drawing up a plan to retake the canal, and a cabinet sub-committee, known as the Egypt Committee, was established to oversee planning and co-ordinate policy. On 2 August, thousands of military reservists were called up.46
The French also viewed the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company as intolerable. Speaking late on the morning of 27 July the French foreign minister, Christian Pineau, told reporters that his government considered it ‘quite impossible for us to accept the unilateral action decided by Colonel Nasser . . . [which] did considerable injury to French rights and interests’.47 France had long harboured suspicions of Nasser’s brand of Arab nationalism and, while the government in Paris also worried about the risk to oil supplies, its main focus was on the danger that Nasser posed to French interests in North Africa – particularly Algeria. Nasser’s vocal support for the FLN (he allowed their leadership-in-exile to operate from Cairo) and the belief that he was furnishing the rebels with arms hardly endeared him to the French. Many leading politicians apparently convinced themselves that if Nasser was destroyed the FLN insurgency would collapse, and Pineau told the Americans that ‘one successful battle in Egypt would be worth ten in North Africa’.48 Mollet’s Socialist government was keen on military action.
In the White House, however, it was seen rather differently. On 31 July President Eisenhower received the latest report from Robert Murphy, the deputy under-secretary of state, who had been despatched to London at the start of the crisis. The previous day, Murphy had lunched with Eden, Pineau and Harold Macmillan, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in Downing Street where, Macmillan recalled, ‘we did our best to frighten [him] all we could . . . We gave him the impression that our military expedition to Egypt was about to set sail.’49 Murphy duly informed his superiors that ‘the British government has decided to drive Nasser out of Egypt. The decision, they declared, is firm.’ He also described how Macmillan had ‘stressed that if [Britain] had to go down now, the Government and . . . British people would rather do so on this issue than become perhaps another Netherlands’.50 Eisenhower, who believed that such action would be ‘extremely unwise’, was appalled. It was a view widely shared. The CIA’s Allen Dulles, for example, warned that the entire Arab world would unite behind Nasser, and the Treasury secretary George Humphrey declared that ‘it looked as though [the British] were simply trying to reverse the trend away from colonialism, and turn the clock back fifty years’.51 Although the Americans were concerned by Nasser’s decision to nationalise the canal, they did not view the seizure of the waterway – in and of itself – as ‘sufficient reason for military action’.52 John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s somewhat brusque secretary of state, was immediately despatched to ‘persuade the British from their course’.53
On arriving in London on 1 August, Dulles handed Eden a letter from President Eisenhower. Although Eisenhower recognised the ‘transcendent worth of the Canal to the free world’ and understood that ‘eventually the use of force might become necessary in order to protect international rights’, he argued that resorting to military action at this point would be imprudent. Indeed, he warned that it might have ‘the most far reaching consequences’ for the transatlantic relationship. The president was clear: military action ‘should not be undertaken until every peaceful means of protecting the rights and the livelihood of great portions of the world have been thoroughly explored and exhausted’.54
Four days later, Eden replied. The British government sought not only to compel Nasser to ‘disgorge his spoils’ and restore international oversight to the canal, but to replace the Egyptian regime with a government ‘less hostile to the West’. Nasser, Eden explained, had ‘embarked on a course which is unpleasantly familiar’ and was seeking to use the canal to ‘further his ambitions from Morocco to the Persian Gulf’. ‘I have never thought Nasser a Hitler’, he explained, ‘but the parallel with Mussolini is close. Neither of us can forget the lives and treasure he cost us before he was finally dealt with.’ If Nasser succeeded in retaining his ‘loot’, or if he managed to drive a wedge between the Western powers, then, Eden warned, ‘the consequences . . . would be catastrophic and . . . the whole position in the Middle East would . . . be lost beyond recall’. The British people, though not ‘eager to use force’, were ‘grimly determined that Nasser shall not get away with it this time because they are convinced that if he does their existence will be at his mercy. So am I.’55
South African women march on the Union Buildings in Pretoria, to oppose the extension of the pass laws, 9 August 1956.
© Drum Social Histories / Baileys African History Archive / Africa Media Online