The Suez Canal Part 4

The Suez Canal, opened in 1869, soon became one of the key chokepoints of world maritime trade, and proved so vital to the British Empire that the entire region was soon known as "East of Suez". In 1882, the British took informal control over Egypt, assuming formal control in 1914 on the outbreak of war with the Ottoman Empire. After defeating several attempts on the Canal by the Central Powers, the British pushed across the Sinai Peninsula and into the Ottoman province of Palestine. But the war had unleashed nationalism across the region, not least in Egypt, and in 1922, Britain declared Egypt independent, although with reservations regarding defense and Suez because no Egyptian government would agree to such provisions, a state of affairs that left the Egyptian nationalists far from satisfied.

Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and an obscure politician named Winston Churchill

Through the 20s and 30s, Egyptian politics was a strange balance of power, as the King, the elected government and the British all worked to achieve their goals. Things finally began to change in 1936 when the ambitious young Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, managed to use Italian intervention in Ethiopia to convince the Egyptians to sign a treaty which would withdraw British troops to the Canal Zone except in time of war. The arrangement would last for 20 years, and then renewal would be discussed. Eden and the British thought this had solved the problem in the long term, while the Egyptian nationalists believed they had only 20 years of British rule left to deal with. But the treaty required Egypt to give full assistance to Britain in the event of war, a clause that became vital four years later when Italy declared war on Britain and invaded Egypt from Libya. This immediately closed the central Mediterranean to British shipping, forcing supplies for both India and Egypt to go around Africa. Despite this, the Canal remained vital to the British war effort, allowing the Royal Navy to operate in the eastern Mediterranean, where it was able to deliver victories like Taranto and Matapan. The Italians invaded Egypt shortly after entering the war, and for two years, the battle raged in the western desert, with the advantage changing hands several times. Suez itself was subject to air raids and mining efforts, but these were not enough to cut the vital lifeline. Rommel was able to get no closer than 70 miles to Alexandria, whose fall might well have made Suez untenable, and the British were ultimately victorious, first driving the Axis out of Africa and then driving Italy out of the war.

But the war further inflamed tensions in Egypt, where pro-Axis sentiments were strong and the British repeatedly threatened to overthrow governments which didn't back them fully. The country didn't formally enter the war until February 1945, and then only to be allowed to join the planned United Nations.¹ Even this was enough to get the Prime Minister, Ahmad Maher, assassinated the very same day. Postwar, there was hope that the newly-elected Labour government under Clement Atlee would quickly withdraw from Egypt, particularly as it was rapidly withdrawing from British India, thus giving up the usual rationale for control of Suez. But although an agreement for withdrawal by 1949 was nearly reached, it was ultimately thwarted because the two sides were unable to come to an agreement over Sudan, which had been jointly ruled by the two countries since 1899, at least on paper. The Egyptians wanted it, while the British considered themselves bound by the principle of self-determination to give the Sudanese a voice in what happened to them. The end result was that while the British pulled their troops out of Egypt's cities, the force in the Canal Zone swelled to 80,000, the bulk of British strength in the Middle East.

HMS Howe passes through the Canal

Things were made even worse by the fallout of the British departure from Palestine in 1948, where Egypt was dragged into the attempt by the Arabs to destroy the nascent Jewish state in hopes of placating the population with a victory somewhere. This worked about as well as such things usually do, and the British absorbed a large part of the blame for the disaster in the minds of the Egyptian public, while a new player entered the scene in the already-volatile Middle East. The Egyptians then ramped up pressure on the British, first cutting off supplies and withdrawing the local workforce and ultimately waging a low-level guerilla war against the forces in the Canal Zone, which the British were unwilling to move until they had secured an alternate base in the Middle East.

British troops move through Ismailia

By 1952, the British had had enough, and attacked a police station in Ismailia that was harboring some of the guerillas, killing 56 Egyptians. The population of Cairo was not pleased and retaliated by burning down much of their city while the security forces were mysteriously absent. The existing Egyptian government had lost all legitimacy, and 6 months later it was overthrown by a group of military officers. Initially things went well, with the new President, Mohamed Naguib working with Anthony Eden, again Foreign Secretary after a Conservative victory in the 1950 election, to resolve the Sudan issue under the (false) assumption that the Sudanese would agree to join Egypt. Eden realized that the British would have to leave, but attempted to keep the base in the Canal Zone ready in case the Soviets moved into the Middle East and to bring Egypt into a broader defensive alliance in the Middle East. There were two major obstacles to this plan. One was Churchill, Prime Minister again and still clinging to the ruins of Empire. The other was Gamal Abdel Nasser, a key player in the 1952 coup who became president in 1954, and had ideas about Egypt's place as the leader of the Arab world that he thought he could best bring about by opposition to the British.

Nasser gives a speech

As a result, the Middle Eastern alliance was set up in Baghdad between the UK, Iraq and Turkey, with Iran and Pakistan joining shortly thereafter. Eden attempted to persuade Nasser to join personally, but the two men rubbed each other the wrong way, and Nasser's drive to be leader of the Arab world put him in opposition to the British-friendly regimes of places like Iraq and Jordan. He regularly used his Voice of the Arabs radio to broadcast speeches across the region, whipping up the youth against any cooperation with outsiders, to the point that he was able to keep Jordan, traditionally the closest British ally in the region, out of the Baghdad Pact.

Glubb Pasha (left) and King Hussein (center)

The situation finally began to unravel in 1955. Churchill retired, and Eden became Prime Minister, while Nasser became interested in non-alignment, playing both sides of the Cold War off against each other, both for weapons and to build his planned dam at Aswan on the Nile. His purchase of a large shipment of Soviet weapons enraged Eden, heir to the long British struggle to keep Russia out of the Middle East, but it was events the next March that pushed the Prime Minister over the edge into obsession. The Jordanian Army had long been led by British officers and commanded by John Glubb since 1939.² But rising unrest among Arab officers led King Hussein to dismiss Glubb and several other officers. Eden, who was receiving reports from a spy in Nasser's inner circle, blamed Nasser for all of this and decided to teach him a lesson by pulling support for the project at Aswan, a plan the US, tired of Nasser's anti-Western rhetoric, was willing to go along with.

Nasser raising the Egyptian flag over Port Said

The Soviets had already said that Aswan was too big for them to finance, so most observers thought that the failure might well finish off Nasser. He responded with a big speech on July 16th, a month after the last British troops left the Canal Zone. He first told the story of his negotiations with the Western Powers in the style of an Egyptian comedy, then, oddly, slipping in a mention of Ferdinand de Lesseps. This was the signal to waiting troops to occupy the Canal, and Nasser announced the passage of a nationalization law, which would allow the benefits of the Canal to flow to its rightful beneficiaries, the Egyptian people.

https://youtu.be/9rBGG-SwKfU This presented Eden with three main problems. First, the British government owned 44% of the Canal Company, and while Nasser was making noises about compensating the shareholders, it was unlikely that he would do so on terms that either Britain or the other investors would be happy about. Second, Nasser's triumph was likely to inspire young Arab nationalists throughout the region, imperiling the stability of British-friendly regimes like Jordan and Iraq. And third, while the traditional importance of the Canal to Britain as the route to India had obviously lapsed with Indian independence, it had become even more vital as oil replaced coal in the British economy. By 1955, half of the traffic in the Canal was oil tankers, and two-thirds of Europe's oil passed through it. Nasser now held a dagger at the throat of Western Europe, and many in Britain saw him as a new Hitler and backing down as a return to the policy of appeasement that had failed so disastrously two decades earlier. Eden had been a critic at the time, and he gave orders to prepare for military action. We'll take a look at how that played out next time.