Suez 1956, page 43
That might have been the moment to turn back, but one of the marines was convinced that he knew a short cut through the breakwater to the open sea, and after that, it was agreed, finding Tyne would be easy. Stockwell recorded what happened next.
We set off, but no sooner were we through the breakwater than we ran into a heavy sea; the wind had whipped up the waves as they ran on to the shelving beaches. It was pitch dark. Then the pumps went out of action and the steering-gear broke, and soon we were banging up and down with the sea spraying over us. It was impossible to find our way back through the breakwater and it seemed we had little hope of making Tyne. Major Worsley exercised his somewhat limited knowledge of the Morse code with an Aldis lamp to attract someone’s attention.
We altered course to the north to try to keep the sea on our beam and to work our way parallel to the Canal so that eventually we could get back into it and its quiet waters. Suddenly we spotted a starboard light high up on our beam. Evidently some big ship and she was almost stationary. The coxswain managed to manoeuvre us under her lee. A light was flashed on us and a hail from the bridge with an encouraging voice called: ‘Who are you? This is Tyne.’ A stroke of luck indeed for a temporarily lost commander. It would have been an inglorious, moderate end to our adventure to be left wallowing about in the sea. Willing sailors soon hoisted us aboard. I found that the Admiral was a bit touchy about where I had been and what I had been up to.2
Criticism was in order. Stockwell, along with his deputy, had been out of radio contact for the best part of five hours. Yet this was only one of many examples of the amateurish way in which communications were handled. Tyne had only ten wireless channels for all three armed services. Three of these were equipped for teleprinters and just one had an online cipher facility. The recommended minimum was thirty-one wireless channels.
The main Receiving Room was one deck below the Traffic Office, which was one deck below the Operations Room. The most efficient method which could be devised for passing signals from the Receiving Room to the Signal Office was by a runner, or by a string and bucket; and by runner from Signal Office to Operations Room. Limited space available for aerial systems created an acute frequency problem and also mutual interference between sets.3
In Hugo Meynell’s account of Stockwell at sea, the last part of the adventure was not quite so straightforward as his chief made out.
Hughie Stockwell said: ‘Have we got any lifebelts?’ And I said: ‘Yes, we’ve got one, and I’m standing on it!’ – underwater, which caused quite a lot of amusement. Anyway, we then had to get up out of this ghastly thing. I can’t be doing with heights and Tyne was a very tall ship. They put scaling ladders down and of course you were up 30 feet one minute and then down, so you’d get up and grab, and then suddenly the thing would come up underneath you. Anyway, we all climbed on board.4
The end of an exhausting day, thought Stockwell, but there was more to come. ‘All I wanted, at that moment, was a whisky and soda. But my Chief of Staff, Brigadier Darling, appeared holding an urgent signal. So urgent that he insisted on my taking it before doing anything else. I looked at the slip of paper. It read, “Ceasefire at midnight”.’ Stockwell went into shock. It was, he said, hard for him to take in the words, let alone grasp the full impact of the signal.
I was cold and tired and wet, yet also exhilarated after seeing my soldiers in action all day at Port Said. We were on the verge of complete success. Wednesday, Nov. 7 would have found us well established on the Ismailia–Abu Sueir line. By Thursday night we surely would have been down to Suez. Lives had been lost, but Britain had shown her worth. Now, just as we were reaping the reward of all the effort and the months of preparation, we were to be thwarted of our prize.5
Beaufre too could not immediately bring himself to believe that the game was up. Having scrambled aboard the Gustave-Zédé after rolling about in the rough sea for over an hour, he assumed that the message from Barjot calling for a ceasefire was merely a typically over-hasty reaction to the negotiations that had just failed. The truth only dawned on Beaufre when he heard a BBC announcement that the fighting was over. The temptation to ignore the order was strong. In his ‘suppressed rage’ he imagined a short burst of energy for British and French forces, or even the French alone, to cover the rest of the distance between Port Said and Qantara and thus to control the entire length of the canal. Much the same thought occurred to Stockwell, though in his case he was inclined not so much to disobey the order as to follow it to the letter. Reverting from local time to Greenwich time gained more than two hours before midnight. Butler was told to make haste along the causeway with all the vehicles they could muster. When they ran out of time they had reached El Cap, less than 4 miles short of their objective. Stockwell was philosophical. ‘Disappointments and setbacks have to be faced in life. There must be no recriminations. I had learnt this lesson when I was dropped from the Marlborough XI on the morning of our match against Rugby at Lord’s. There is always something else ahead.’6
What was ahead for the troops at El Cap was a railway and an embankment, both, as far as anyone could see, undefended. ‘There was a Swedish journalist who came by and asked why are you stopping here; there’s no one between you and Suez. Then gradually Egyptian forces crept back and took up strong defensive positions along the embankment.’7
As frustration turned to grievance and to anger in the higher command, the feeling of let-down spread throughout the ranks. What were the politicians up to? Then, as later, few were willing to accept the simple, obvious explanation that the frail, vain, silly man who had started it all had finally lost his nerve.
No one can doubt the pressures on Eden. The Soviet threat of starting a third world war could be discounted as bravado bluster to distract attention from their own problems, but the public was made nervous, the more so because it was now general knowledge that the USA was not about to help Britain and France out of their self-made troubles, at least until they submitted to the will of the United Nations.
Even while the news of the military action at Suez was encouraging for the allies, those near Eden could see that he was close to breakdown. Patrick Reilly, a deputy under-secretary at the foreign office, was with the prime minister on the afternoon of 6 November. Bearing his draft reply to the Bulganin letter threatening war, he was admitted to the Cabinet Room.
Eden was sitting there, and Lloyd was there too, not sitting but walking about the room. I put my draft reply before Eden, and I was there for an astonishingly long period of time, not less than three quarters of an hour, perhaps more. Eden started to look at my reply, and then his concentration wandered, and he would make inconsequential remarks, like: ‘Poor Selwyn, how tired you must be.’ Selwyn, I don’t think, ever looked at the draft at all, but he kept saying he must go to the House of Commons, where he had an appointment with the Venezuelan Ambassador. From time to time, Eden would look at my draft, and I remember him occasionally cutting out a sentence or two rather testily, but I don’t remember him adding anything at all.8
By then, though Reilly did not know it, the decision to cease fire had already been taken. There was nowhere Eden could turn for comfort. His government was in disarray, the parliamentary opposition, unusually in a national emergency, was solidly against him, most of the oil-producing nations and nearly all the oil-importing countries were convinced that he was trying to wreck their economies, the Commonwealth, on which the Tories set great if exaggerated store, was lobbying against him, and from the UN, a near-desperate Pierson Dixon was warning of a joint resolution to impose sanctions on Britain and France if they did not agree to an immediate ceasefire. There were already indications that the USA would hold back on oil supplies to Europe if the fighting in Egypt continued, and Nasser’s friends in the Middle East had already declared a comprehensive oil boycott. But the clincher was the prospect of a breakdown in confidence in the pound and a collapse of the sterling system.
Like the preservation of Anglo-French control over the canal, sterling was seen as a measure of Britain’s international prestige. Also like the canal, sterling was associated with British prosperity. Given that it was a world currency, so the argument ran, failure to protect sterling would be to invite a collapse of industrial society and a catastrophic fall in living standards. The economic logic underpinning this assertion was never clearly spelt out, possibly because it could not bear serious analysis. Who, after all, could explain convincingly why it was so beneficial to hold interest rates high to support an overvalued currency (one pound was worth 2.80 dollars in 1956)? What the British economy needed was low interest rates to encourage investment and a weaker pound to give exporters an advantage in highly competitive markets. But the mythical virtues of a strong currency were so ingrained in official thinking (devaluation was the dirtiest word in the Treasury vocabulary) as to subjugate plain reason. Hence, when the pound wobbled and the Bank of England began to fear a run from the currency that would clear out its reserves, there was consternation in financial circles.
Macmillan was the first of the doom merchants. He had shared in the general misunderstanding of US policy, having persuaded himself that if the money market did react badly to the attack on Egypt, Washington would come to the rescue of the pound with a hefty loan from the International Monetary Fund. So confident was he that he made no approach to the IMF before the critical decision to invade was taken. Indeed, there had been some amusement at the haste with which France had secured its lifeline to the IMF. Now, as it dawned on Macmillan that America was not about to throw its financial weight behind sterling, he must have wished that he had followed the French example.
But was there any reason to act precipitately? In the first two days of November the Bank of England lost nearly £20 million, and losses continued to mount in the days that followed. Subsequently, Macmillan asserted, and it was a line followed by his official biographer, that it was this setback which persuaded him that the Suez operation had to be called off. At the crucial cabinet meeting on 6 November, ‘He told the Cabinet that there had been a serious run on the pound, viciously orchestrated by Washington. Britain’s gold reserves, he announced, had fallen by £100 million over the past week or by one eighth of their remaining total.’9 Herbert Hoover, standing in for Dulles, was seen as the villain of the piece. As under-secretary of state he was responsible for foreign economic questions. Moreover:
Hoover was a difficult man, in the sense that he was not accustomed to diplomatic negotiations – he was an oil executive. He was not particularly well disposed to the United Kingdom. He was not, at least at first, antagonistic, but he was not sympathetic. He not only had the handicap of no experience of the diplomatic world, but he was also very hard of hearing, and that was a great handicap to him. The combination of these factors meant that he was both rather inflexible and rather obstinate.10
But for whatever panic was created Macmillan must take a large share of the blame. Unforgivably, the guardian of the nation’s finances had his figures wrong. The treasury could not have lost £100 million in the time specified because on the day following his dramatic announcement, Macmillan was told by his civil servants that the loss for the week was just £30.4 million.11 On the 16th, the treasury updated the figure to £71 million, while on the 20th Macmillan himself speculated that losses for the month ‘might go as high as £107 million’.12
There can be little doubt that Macmillan misled his colleagues on 6 November. Britain’s financial plight was nowhere near as serious as the chancellor made out. Yet it was on his say-so that Eden, Lloyd and Butler agreed to the UN demand for a ceasefire. Though the suspicion that it was all a Machiavellian plot to accelerate Eden’s departure continues to surface, it is hard to see how Macmillan could have been sure that he would be the beneficiary. A more probable explanation is that Macmillan, despite his early hawkish sentiments, had convinced himself that the government was in an impossible position. Maybe he exaggerated the figures, maybe he muddled the figures. The certainty is that he feared a collapse of confidence that could ruin the country. In this he was seriously misguided.
The muddle theory gains credibility with the testimony of Roger Makins, who, after three years as ambassador to the USA, was appointed joint permanent secretary to the treasury. When in the second week of October he flew home to take up his new job he was surprised that no one in government seemed too interested in his arrival.
Although I was to be Harold Macmillan’s principal official adviser, he was at Birch Grove and he didn’t want to see me. I met Anthony Eden and his wife at a cocktail party soon after I returned, and he came over and said how delighted he was to see me back and that he hoped I would be happy in the Treasury and so on, but he did not want to talk about anything. It was a very odd situation.13
Being, as he said, ‘an old Whitehall warrior’, Makins soon found out what was going on, and when, eventually, Macmillan sent for him to reveal that the invasion force was at sea, he put up a warning signal.
What about the Americans? What have you done in Washington about all this? Then he suddenly came to, as it were. I suggested that we had better take some pretty urgent action in Washington about all this, and we drafted some telegrams, although I don’t know if they were ever sent. I then went back and prepared for the worst. I suggested that I should talk to Norman Brook about it, but Macmillan said that I could not talk to anyone. I then said that I had to talk to the Secretary of the Cabinet [Brook] about these issues, and he said: ‘Oh, very well.’ I then went back, and we set up a sort of little committee of Permanent Secretaries, which, as soon as the war was over, met regularly to deal with the economic consequences.14
Even if he had got his figures right, Macmillan was almost certainly in a stronger position than he imagined. However tough the American stance, it was unlikely to have been sustained to the point of allowing the downfall of sterling. The effect on world markets, with so many countries holding sterling reserves, could easily have produced harmful fallout for the American economy. At the same time a Suez-induced devaluation of sterling would have served Britain well. Apart from making exports more competitive, it would have increased the cost of imports, a welcome corrective for a country with a serious balance of payments problem. The price of oil would have had to go up but, contrary to popular conception, cheap energy is not the sole determinant of economic growth. If there were many good reasons for ending the Suez adventure, the fear of a financial Armageddon was not one of them. But tied as it was to nineteenth-century economics, the British government was putty for America to mould as it pleased.
At 9.45 a.m. on 6 November, Eden addressed the cabinet. Alongside him was Sir William Dickson, chairman of the chiefs of staff. No one had to be told the subject to be discussed. In the UN America was backing the almost unanimous call for economic sanctions against Britain and France. Macmillan then weighed in with his misleading and inaccurate account of Britain’s finances. There was only one way to stave off national ruin – or so it was claimed by Eden and Macmillan. The responsibility for the shame of it all was loaded on to the USA. In the following weeks anti-Americanism became more virulent than at any time since the early post-war years, when Gls had defied the austerity of Britain and France with their wads of dollar bills and their talent for snatching the best girls.
In seeking to escape responsibility for what one observer called an ‘eruption of the irrational’, the politicians pointed the finger at Eisenhower and Dulles. ‘If they had not led the pack against us,’ opined Selwyn Lloyd, ‘I think that the international situation would have been tenable until we had the Canal, and then we would have been in the position to bargain for an agreement.’ Lloyd made these comments twenty years on from Suez, when he was still holding to the illusion created in early November 1956 that had Nasser been overthrown there would have been no Six Days War or Yom Kippur War and that peace would have prevailed across the Middle East.15 More immediate reaction came from Julian Amery. ‘The British have never before been treated so badly by an ally.’16
Having made the decision to call off the war, Eden faced the embarrassment of breaking the news to Mollet. The French prime minister was not entirely unaware of Eden’s capacity for double dealing, but hearing of a ceasefire just at the point of an allied victory still came as a stupefying blow. Pineau was with Mollet when the call came through. ‘After a few seconds Mollet passed the telephone to me . . . I heard the broken voice of a man who was at the end of his tether and ready to let himself sink.’17
Mollet’s first assumption was that Eden had lost his nerve in the face of the Soviet threat. Playing for time, he summoned the American ambassador, Douglas Dillon, to the Matignon Palace. He was asked a straight question. If Britain and France were attacked by Russia, would the USA come to thier aid? Mollet must have known the answer. It had been made clear often enough. The choice between Russia and Europe was, for Eisenhower, no choice at all. The communists were the first enemy. But if Mollet believed that this assurance would be enough to steady Eden’s nerve, he was disappointed. Even while Mollet and Dillon were conferring, Eden came back on the line to declare that there was no going back on the ceasefire. Mollet begged for a delay of two or three days on the final decision. Eden refused. While Mollet remained relatively calm, Pineau matched the British response with a diatribe against the USA. The stories he put about, including a totally unsubstantiated pronouncement that on 3 November Nasser had been ready to resign until the American ambassador had assured him of US support, were, said Dillon, ‘past belief’.18
It was now the turn of the UN to get in on the act. Eden’s message to Dag Hammarskjöld was couched in a way that suggested not so much a climb-down as a willing handover of responsibilities that up to now Britain and France had carried alone. Implicit was the assumption that the two countries would have UN approval to participate in the peacekeeping force proposed by Canada. As a start, British and French salvage teams could begin work on clearing the canal. But on 7 November the General Assembly resolved that UN involvement in the next stage of the Suez drama was dependent on the withdrawal of Anglo-French and Israeli forces. Clearly, a face-saving compromise would not be easy to achieve.
