14

Suez

Late one evening, a voice at the other end of the billet: ‘Eden’s a bloody warmonger. He doesn’t know what it’s like’. It was a moment, a relatively brief moment as it turned out, when history broke through the routine boredom and farce of National Service.

Memoir of national service in the
air force by David Morgan¹

In some lucid intervals not devoted to the Suez crisis, I have been trying to think over matters discussed with the Minister on 20th November … about the future of National Service.

Note by official in the Ministry of Defence, 1956²

Suez was a brief and, in retrospect, disastrous military operation. A coup in 1952, partly provoked by British behaviour in the Canal Zone, brought the army to power in Cairo. Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, an exponent of Arab nationalism, established himself as the most important figure in the regime. For a time, it seemed that the British would accept the new order. In 1954, they signed an agreement with the Egyptian government that committed them to withdraw from the country and they had completed this withdrawal by June 1956. British bases were to be maintained jointly by the British and the Egyptians and the British reserved the right to return if the canal was threatened.

However, Nasser then nationalized the Suez Canal, which was owned by an Anglo-French consortium. The British and French interpreted this as a threat to their links with the Far East and also to their increasingly important oil supplies from the Persian Gulf. They planned a military expedition to reassert control of the canal. To provide them with an expedient to justify the invasion, they came to a secret deal with Israel: Israeli forces were to attack Egypt and the British and French would use this attack as an excuse to intervene and ‘separate’ the two sides. The operation was hampered on the British side by the scarcity of equipment and properly trained troops. In spite of these problems, in purely military terms ‘Operation Musketeer’, as it was christened, should not have been difficult – the British, French and Israeli forces were superior to the Egyptian. Politically, things were more complicated. There was division inside Britain. Much of the left never felt that the invasion was justified and Gaitskell, the leader of the Labour party, denounced it. Anthony Eden, who had succeeded Churchill as Prime Minister in the previous year, had come to see Nasser as a second Hitler and felt that failing to stand up to him would be ‘appeasement’. However, Eden was sick and crushed by years of Churchill’s elephantine condescension. Furthermore, he had misled the House of Commons when he said that there had been no collusion with the Israelis over Suez. Pleading ill health, he resigned in January 1957. Most importantly, Suez divided the western alliance. It was undermined when Eisenhower – the President of the United States and the former commander of Allied forces in the Second World War – denounced it and effectively ordered Britain back into line.

Everyone understood that Suez meant the end of an era, but they did not agree about what that era had been. For some, the humiliation of being overruled by America meant the end of Britain’s pretensions to great power status. For some, the attempt to intervene in another country meant the end of Britain’s pretensions to moral superiority. Many were shocked by what they saw as the incompetence of the British forces and the contrast with what they believed to have been British military prowess in the Second World War. Anthony Howard remembered the landing as being ‘like a comic version of D-Day’³ and, indeed, Howard’s company waded up to the beach purely to provide newsreel footage – the rest of the battalion just disembarked in the harbour.⁴

Some believed that national servicemen had come close to rebelling – or perhaps even, in discreet ways, had rebelled – during Suez. A. J. P. Taylor, who had the previous year bemoaned the political passivity of national servicemen, wrote to his son – serving in the RASC – and offered to stand by him if he was court-martialled for disobeying orders. His son wrote back saying that ‘he and his mates’ were resisting government policy more effectively by loading stores so slowly that they would impede the operation.⁵ Andrew Sinclair’s novel The Breaking of Bumbo (1959) revolves around a moment when a national service subaltern is expelled from his guards regiment after having incited his men to mutiny: ‘Do you think it’s right for us to go and get killed, just to get back a bit of sand that belongs to the Egyptians anyway? … We’ve won every bloody battle for the Establishment in three hundred years. It’s time we asked why.’

It is possible that Taylor fils and his comrades worked with deliberate slowness – though one suspects that the RASC did not function with Prussian efficiency at the best of times. Equally it is possible that Sinclair did deliver a speech like Bumbo’s – though one suspects that it was delivered, not to guardsmen in November 1956, but to his fellow undergraduates at Cambridge some time after Suez. Sinclair was not drummed out of the army and was, indeed, an officer in the Coldstream Emergency Reserve when his novel was published.

Rebellion by conscript soldiers during Suez was rare and rebellion for political reasons by ordinary national servicemen was almost unknown. The Conservative party had won the general election of 1955 and would win the next one in 1959. Since young men voted Labour more than the old and women, national servicemen would have been to the left of the country, but the difference was not marked. The majority of conscripts were too young to vote and they did not on the whole belong to a politicized generation. Most men who expressed political opinions of any kind adopted those of their parents. The mid 1950s was a time when young people were conservative (and often Conservative in the party political sense) in ways that would be inconceivable ten years later. A national service officer in Cyprus wrote to his mother in November 1956:

I have just heard the news that they have at last landed. Jolly good thing too. High time we showed a firm hand, and did something about it. The Labour Party’s attitude makes me angry. I would have loved to have gone myself, and I think all of us would.⁶

Almost everyone came to recognize that the Suez expedition had been a mistake and some left-wingers looked back on the episode as a formative moment in their own political development. However, the civilians who protested against Suez were never more than a minority of the British population. Furthermore, national servicemen were often cut off from contact with the civilian world, so many of them knew nothing of the demonstrations against Suez. Soldiers who protested almost invariably did so because of the effect that the expedition had on themselves, rather than because of some broader political belief.

Those most likely to express hostility to Suez seem to have been the educated men who worked in clerical jobs – these were also the servicemen who were in the best position to listen to radio broadcasts and read newspapers immediately before the operation. Alan Watson was serving, mainly with other grammar school boys, as a personnel selection assessor at RAF Cardington. His unit was riven by fierce division: ‘If the rest of the armed forces were anything like Aptitude Testing, then this would have been a difficult war.’⁷

The rest of the armed forces, however, were not like Watson’s colleagues. Many recalled their opinions of Suez with amusement or embarrassment or did not recall them at all. Francis Holford was a lance corporal in the Buffs and serving in Cyprus at the time of Suez. A public school boy who had failed to obtain a commission and had a place at Cambridge, he explained the unthinking Conservatism of many young men in the 1950s: ‘the first kind of real social life I got was joining the local Billinghurst Young Conservatives when I was in the sixth form. Because that was about the only social life … that and the Young Farmers that’s all there was really.’ He said that he had no ‘political’ views on Suez, meaning it seems that he did not oppose it. He thought that a pilot who was said to have damaged his plane to avoid bombing the Egyptians was ‘a bit off’. Holford thought that he voted for the first time ‘around 1958’ and that he voted Conservative: ‘because you know I was brought up that that was … the only way to vote, and to vote any differently was probably unpatriotic’.⁸

Even men who would later become active on the political left often supported Suez at the time. Michael Harbottle was a regular army officer who eventually rose to the rank of brigadier and founded an improbable organization called ‘Generals for Peace’. However, he admitted that he had had no feeling that Suez was wrong: ‘everyone in the army felt about time Nasser was given a punch on the nose, that feeling of justification stayed with me for quite some time’.⁹ Paul Foot, who later became a campaigning journalist and member of the Socialist Workers Party, was called up into the army in the summer of 1956. At this time he still held the conventional views of his class – he came from a prominent Liberal family and his father was Governor of Jamaica. He admitted that there had been debates among his fellow conscripts over Suez, but ‘I am ashamed to remember what role I played. Every officer was absolutely 100% in favour of the operation’, which was opposed by ‘only the slightly more radicalized of the soldiers’. Foot admitted that he found reading his diary from the period painful.¹⁰

Antony Copley did read the diary that he kept of his time as a national service naval officer and was slightly surprised to discover there was nothing on ‘politics and Suez’ between September (when his ship was being fitted out for the assault) and 1 November, at which time he noted: ‘we are sailing into a war, a war I do not believe in but do not as yet sufficiently disbelieve in to try to leave the Navy’.¹¹ Copley also noted that he had not, at first, known that his ship was sailing to Port Said. Only when they were out of the harbour, did the captain tell them their destination.

Bruce Kent, conscripted and commissioned in 1948, had left the army by the time of Suez and would eventually become a radical priest and leader of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Interviewed in 1989, he said: ‘I would have done absolutely anything that I had been ordered to do … I reflected Daily Telegraph values – so apolitical.’ He said of Suez: ‘I remember thinking it good that Nasser and company had got their comeuppance’, but most revealingly he asked his interviewer, ‘Was it 52 or 53?’¹²

Even national servicemen who disapproved of Suez usually expressed their disagreement within the limits of military discipline. John Barnes wrote to his parents in November 1956: ‘I should think you will all be rather shocked by Israel’s action against Egypt. Don’t you think Sir Anthony has put us in a rather sticky position?’¹³ Barnes seems to have assumed that his parents would share his view, itself a revealing sign of how unrebellious national servicemen were. He did not try to hide his opinion – he knew that letters were being censored – but he did not seem to have considered disobeying orders. He became a non-commissioned officer, remembered his time in the navy with affection and admired his commanding officer.

Peter Jay was a national service midshipman who had been born to the purple of the British left. His father had been a Labour minister, Gaitskell had been his next-door neighbour and Richard Crossman once told his mother with characteristic tact, ‘I shan’t mind if that beautiful son of yours get killed by the Cypriots.’¹⁴ Jay was bitterly opposed to Suez and came close to rebellion. He denounced the expedition to Rear Admiral Sir Anthony Miers¹⁵ and in the pages of his own official journal – his superior officer wrote ‘fine stuff’ after a strongly worded attack on British policy.¹⁶ Jay’s most damning assessment of Suez was written, again in his official journal, in December 1956:

[C]onsidered in the light of the advance of human civilization from puerile pugilists to adult arbitration, in terms of peace, posterity and the survival of posterity, in terms of the fight against Communism and for the hand of the uncommitted countries, in terms of England’s traditions of moderation and moral uprightness, can one honestly condone an act of petty indignation and selfish irresponsibility which may at one blow have struck out the credit for peace so dearly earned on many battlefields and seas? I prefer to forgive it as a tragic blunder of a great man whose patience was tried beyond breaking point and whose reason was wracked with every worry known to age and responsibility. It is a human tragedy as well as a tragedy for humanity.¹⁷

However, Jay did not resign his commission, and in the end accepted his father’s view that ‘it was the duty of a member of the Armed Forces to obey orders’.¹⁸

The Suez crisis came and went quickly. No one had much chance for reflection and soldiers who were on the whole confined to bases were in a particularly poor position to know what was going on. Anthony Howard was older than most national servicemen and considerably more politically aware – he had been president of the Oxford Union. At first, he did not take the whole thing seriously because he ‘could not believe that the British government would be so stupid’. While he was on the ship to Suez, the adjutant of his regiment approached him and said: ‘you’re not very keen on this enterprise, are you? If it is any help to you, one or two of us [the regular officers] think the same.’ The adjutant then told Howard that if he were to incite his platoon against taking part in the expedition, he, Howard, would be discreetly smuggled home and discharged on medical grounds – pretty much what happens to the fictional Bumbo in Sinclair’s novel – but the other ranks would get seven years for mutiny. Howard had probably never really contemplated disobeying orders and he had not told the commanding officer of his disquiet. He led his men on to the beaches and even, much to his own distaste, fired a few shots.¹⁹

Fighting at Suez was, for a brief period, intense but confusing. There was something incongruous about a ‘war’ that involved living in the middle of an enemy city. Men in the Royal Fusiliers were rebuked for giving their rations to Egyptian children.²⁰ It was hard to know who was the ‘enemy’. The British believed that some of the men firing at them were not in uniform and that Egyptian soldiers had changed into civilian clothes. After a day’s fighting, a national service officer wrote in his diary: ‘there seemed to be the understanding that “wog” meant an armed wog, all the others being termed “civvies” ’,²¹ but he was uncomfortably aware that his men were not sure whether some of those that they had shot were armed or not. The British never knew how many Egyptians they had killed – some of them reported dark rumours of mass graves – and they did not in the short term have much idea of how bad their own casualties had been either.

In fact, the number of British dead at Suez was small, but one national serviceman came to epitomize the tragic futility of the operation. Anthony Moorhouse was the son of a wealthy businessman (a manufacturer of jam) and an officer with the West Yorkshire Regiment. On the 11 December 1956, a week before his twenty-first birthday, he returned alone in an army Land Rover to a building that he and his men had raided the previous day. He was acting without orders and there was no obvious reason for him to go back. He was overpowered by the crowd and abducted. For some time, the British tried to find him and/or negotiate his return but, on Christmas Eve, Nasser told a UN representative that Moorhouse was dead. He had been hidden in a trunk or cupboard and, because his captors had been prevented from returning to him by the British searches, he had suffocated. It was a horrible and squalid death and his only lasting memorial was to inspire the character of Mick Rice in John Osborne’s The Entertainer (1957) – a play that seemed to epitomize the association between Suez and indignity.

Most commanders in combat units at Suez did not worry much about the political views of their soldiers. The brunt of the fighting was borne by the Parachute Regiment and the Royal Marines Commandos, units that contained a smaller proportion of national servicemen than most ordinary infantry regiments. General Sir Michael Gray, a company commander in the Parachute Regiment in 1956, said that he did not ‘recall any feeling about the political influences that were going on in the United Kingdom’.²² Alun Pask was a national service paratrooper who went to Suez. He and his friends knew nothing about the mood in Britain or opposition to the expedition. They did not understand why it was suddenly curtailed: ‘there we are, all psyched up and ready to go, and then the rumour came: “Cease-fire.” “Christ! What the hell’s happening?” we thought.’²³

A. R. Ashton was a national service marine. His unit was sent to Malta ‘ostensibly for training’ but had ‘no inkling’ of what was really happening. General Sir Hugh Stockwell, the commander of the British and French land forces, visited them on 27 September and invited them to ‘gather round’ à la Montgomery, but their first real information came when they heard a BBC broadcast piped from the governor’s palace: ‘we felt aggrieved that, like cuckolded husbands, we were the last to know’.²⁴ Only when they were on the boat to Suez did they receive proper briefings – first from their own lieutenant and then from a more senior officer: ‘we knew a little by now of the raging political controversy that was occupying the political stage at home.’²⁵ Ashton’s commanders suspected that national servicemen might disapprove of the expedition. Nicholas Vaux was a lieutenant in 45 Commando during Suez. Interviewed in 1992, by which time he had risen to the rank of major general, he said that his unit was more or less evenly divided between national servicemen and regulars and that many of the former were ‘very intelligent and well educated’. He thought that ‘any disquiet on political grounds would have been confined very much to the national service element’ but that he had not seen any concrete manifestation of such disquiet.²⁶ Ashton was certainly an intelligent and well-educated man and he wrote movingly about the carnage at Suez. He saw a corporal weeping after he had lost most of his section and a trail of blood ‘a foot wide and thirty feet long’,²⁷ where a wounded soldier had been dragged to safety:

All during one’s formative years one had been brought up to respect human life and value property: now suddenly we were plunged into a complete reversal of these values. Buildings shattered; vehicles burning; homes ransacked and looted, bodies of young men bleeding to death in filthy gutters. The man who described war as a mass nervous breakdown was not far wrong.

None of this, however, translated into political opposition on Ashton’s part. On the contrary, he and his comrades were ‘straining at the leash’ before the operation. After it, they thought ‘thank Christ it’s over’ but they also ‘had a feeling of unfinished business’.²⁸

Other national service marines had similar feelings. Peter Mayo was an upper-middle-class second lieutenant in the corps. He understood rather earlier than Ashton that war was coming. On 22 September, he wrote in his diary that his life might end ‘with an Egyptian (or Russian) machine-gun bullet through me’. Like many men of his background, he was curious and anxious. On 31 October he had a ‘tautening feeling’ and hoped that the young marines would ‘hold up’. On 2 November he wrote: ‘I wish I were happier about the cause we are to fight for. The legal rights of the case are fairly plain. But, even so, where does it all lead?’ Mayo’s young marines did ‘hold up’, and, for all his doubts, Mayo never came close to suggesting that he or his men should not fight. After having been debriefed with other officers in Malta, he noted on 4 December that he had learned ‘quite a lot that is still secret’. He regarded the operation as a military failure but felt, like Ashton, that it ‘should have gone further’.²⁹

Antony Copley opposed the expedition and was disgusted by much of what he heard:

Reports creep in about action ashore. Our losses total just over a hundred but no one is perturbed by hundreds of ‘gyppos’ lying dead about the street. S [a regular midshipman] laughs hollowly about the smell of flies over pus-running bodies – why cannot they see the tragedy of it all? Listen to our smart jargon, ‘gyppos’, ‘wogs’ … I am ashamed of my country and ashamed of myself.³⁰

Copley, however, never disobeyed orders, and like many servicemen he felt that the British had made things worse by not even finishing the job: ‘Butler is a complete British moron. Why in the hell didn’t he at least press on to Ismailia?’³¹

Overt rebellion by politically aware national servicemen was rare, but grumbling was common. Particularly important were reservists, men who had undertaken their service some time before but were recalled to the forces in 1956. Discontent seems to have been greatest, not in the front-line units, but in those concerned with logistics. The reservists in such units were often relatively old men who had been dragged away from jobs and families. They were not as disciplined as infantry soldiers and, unlike marines or paratroopers, they felt no thrill at the idea of combat.

Nick Harden was called up as a national serviceman in 1956 and posted to Maidstone, where he joined a field engineering regiment that was short of men. He found the base in ‘utter chaos’. There were three classes of men there. Some were regular soldiers, usually in the army since they were boys, who were willing to accept discipline. Some were national servicemen, who often felt that it was de rigueur to complain – though Harden admitted that he actually enjoyed his service. The third were reservists: ‘If the national servicemen were resentful of army discipline, they were angels compared [to the reservists].’ For three or four weeks, his unit was not told where they were going but then they were suddenly moved and Harden, a Liverpudlian, realized that they were arriving at Liverpool docks. Once they were on the ship, an education officer told them that Nasser was a ‘usurper’: ‘we were all fairly politically naive – so he could tell us anything really’. Harden remarked that this was an ‘untold story of Suez’, but he also made it clear that there were limits to the rebellion of the soldiers. For one thing, the engineers were more awkward than the combat troops, and particularly than the marines, alongside whom they were stationed when they arrived in Malta. Furthermore, few men translated their discontent into political form or did anything that would impede military operations – rather than just demonstrate their contempt for the more ostentatious manifestations of army discipline. Harden himself felt ‘no resentment at all’. He recalled that ‘Occasionally someone would stand up [in discussions about the expedition] and then they [presumably his comrades] would say “Communist” or “Bolshevik”.’³²

There were mutinies provoked by Suez. A group of reservists from the RASC were court-martialled after incidents at a base at Minden in Germany in early October 1956. The men, all apparently expecting to be sent to the Middle East, had been insubordinate and gone to the sergeants’ mess shouting ‘We want the CSM [company sergeant major]’. Four reservists, including a corporal and lance corporal, were convicted by court martial.³³ Men from the RASC were also court-martialled after events at Platres in Cyprus on 1 October 1956. The commanding officer said that the unit had mobilized in a hurry and arrived in Cyprus between 6 and 9 September 1956. A group of reservist NCOs ‘created a disturbance’ and he, the commanding officer, ‘was faced with the problem, therefore, that the majority of the unit had a loyalty to a faction calling themselves reservists … Many of the reservist NCOs were loathe to take disciplinary action against a fellow reservist.’ One of the reservists had written a letter, which was not published, to the Daily Mirror. Men presented grievances that were similar to some that had been published in the Daily Sketch. There seemed to have been communication between reservists in various units. A letter was intercepted from 54 Company of the RASC saying ‘there will be a mutiny here as well as Cyprus if they are not careful’.³⁴

One should not take this apocalyptic talk at face value. Few protests had much explicit political content. A group of men on parade sang ‘The Red Flag’ but this was part of a general display that the soldiers were ‘truculent, cheeky and obviously thought they were on top’, more than an expression of Marxist principles. One reservist told the regimental sergeant major: ‘it is the government we are after and Antony Head [the Secretary of State for War]’, but other soldiers disassociated themselves from his remarks.³⁵ Discontent sprang from the conditions of British soldiers rather than any interest in the case for or against the Suez operation in itself. Many of the grievances were simply to do with the rapid mobilization of men under awkward conditions.

The reference to left-wing newspapers suggests paranoia on the part of some officers about political rebellion in the army. In truth, though, the most severe resistance to military discipline did not involve Daily Mirror-reading national servicemen; it did not even involve the kind of trade unionist mentality that had been seen in the air force at the end of the Second World War. On the contrary, the typical ‘mutineer’ was usually from one of the least prestigious units – the RASC or the Catering Corps – and was often a reservist who had formerly been a regular soldier. Some men already had a number of disciplinary offences on their record, and sometimes the ill-discipline that accompanied mobilization around the Suez expedition was not that different in type from the ill-discipline that occurred in such units much of the time.

Women – often conspicuous by their absence in the lives of national servicemen – were important during the Suez crisis because many reservists were married. When seven men were prosecuted for mutiny, it emerged that two of them had got married in the very week they were recalled to the army.³⁶ One woman was found guilty of removing £3 and 15 shillings from a gas meter; her husband was a lance corporal who had been recalled to the RASC and had not, apparently, passed on his pay to his wife.³⁷ One reservist prosecuted for mutiny during Suez had received a letter from his wife saying that she had pawned her wedding ring because he had failed to provide money: ‘I expect you have either gambled it, or spent it out enjoying yourself, drunk most of the time, because from what I hear … all you blokes are on is one long holiday.’³⁸

‘Mutiny’ was a loose term. It could be applied to any act of collective insubordination. For this reason, good officers used it sparingly. They sought to assuage or negotiate when dealing with minor discontents, to isolate the few men who might be determined enough to mount real resistance and to avoid confrontation with large groups of soldiers. Many officers understood the difference between disquiet and disobedience and their own duty to prevent the first from turning into the second. Ill-discipline in prestigious infantry units during Suez was treated differently from ill-discipline in the RASC. There was trouble in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps at Derna in Libya in the last week of September 1956, and eventually, as the official report put it: ‘[A] spontaneous voicing of dissatisfaction with existing conditions arose.’³⁹ This was, however, presented as a manageable and, indeed, managed problem: ‘The following morning the Commanding Officer saw all those involved and addressed them and, as far as is known, the whole matter was quietened down and no further trouble arose.’⁴⁰ The fact that the news had spread outside the regiment at all was presented as an unfortunate accident.⁴¹

Similarly, a protest which involved about 150 men in the Grenadier Guards about ‘bull’ was treated as relatively minor. The men were told that kit would not be inspected and the authorities considered that there was: ‘no sign of indiscipline or lack of morale in the battalion.’⁴²

The fact that at the time discontent rarely took an explicitly political form, and did not actually impede the operation, does not mean that it was not significant for the participants. G was recalled to the Royal Engineers after having completed his full-time national service. His regiment, concerned with port operations, was largely made up of dockers and was ‘pretty bolshie’.⁴³ They threw stones and booed when they were addressed by ‘General Somebody or Other’.⁴⁴ Like many soldiers they seemed to have little idea where they were going when they embarked.⁴⁵ At the time, G and his comrades were bitterly aggrieved at their treatment but did not consider mutiny and did not see their actions as related to political opposition to the war. At the end of the operation, they were given a £5 bounty and tempted to burn their uniforms. G spoke of his unit having ‘contempt for officers’, but he understood little of the political context and was surprised to discover that there had been demonstrations against Suez.⁴⁶

Like many of those involved in Suez, G became more consciously left-wing as time went on and he did come to express outright opposition to the operation. He seems to have been influenced partly by the fact that he eventually married into a family which had been opposed to Suez. He came to feel that he would not have gone if he had been ‘more politically aware’.⁴⁷ In the short term, however, G’s main reaction to Suez was to take refuge in drink and brawling. He summed up his return to the reserves thus: ‘National Service taught me to lie, cheat and steal and get out of work … It also made me extremely and perhaps sometimes unreasonably suspicious of any authority because I’d seen authority in all its ludicrous glory.’⁴⁸