The War that Never Was

by Duff Hart-Davis

  Travelling on Israeli passports via Paris, where Admoni joined them, they flew to Tel Aviv. In the middle of dinner on their first night there, a telephone call came through with the message that General Moshe Dayan, the Israeli Minister of Defence, would like to meet them. A car took them round to his house, and the General’s first words were, ‘I’d like to congratulate you.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Jim. ‘We came to congratulate you on a stunning victory.’

  ‘No,’ said Dayan. ‘Every prisoner we’ve taken has been so terrified by what you did to their army in the Yemen that the whole lot surrendered.’

  Thinking that Jim and Tony ‘deserved to see the fate of the Egyptian army,’ Admoni arranged for them to be flown over the battlefields in a Pilatus Porter light aircraft. Skimming low over Sinai, they saw pockets of Egyptian troops making their way on foot across the desert, and smoke still rising from the wrecks of tanks, armoured troop carriers, lorries and artillery pieces. Shattered vehicles choked the Mitla Pass, a V-shaped rock formation with a winding track going up the middle, through which fleeing combatants had tried to escape towards Suez. So desperate had some of the tank drivers become that they had tried to scale the vertical walls on either side of the pass, and the wrecked vehicles were packed so tightly together that there was no room for humans to walk between them.

  The observers were appalled by the extent of the destruction – but there came one moment of comic relief, when they landed on the captured air-strip at El Arish, near the northern coast of Sinai. As they taxied to the end of the runway, a plump and scruffy Israeli corporal ran towards the plane, waving frantically. At first they thought he was warning of mines or booby-traps – but his anxiety turned out to be very personal: nobody had brought him his rations while he was on guard duty, and he was desperate for something to eat. Luckily they had lunch boxes on board, and handed a couple out. Taking off again, they flew down the Jordanian front from Jerusalem to Bethlehem and up to Nablus, where someone took a photograph of Jim and Tony posing on a burnt-out tank.

  After their battlefield tour, Dayan invited them to his office, where he cracked open the beer and thanked them again profusely for everything they had done to help Israel. For the rest of his life Jim relished the story of ‘the fat corporal of El Arish’ who got his lunch, and he retold it with delight every time he and Admoni met.

  The catastrophic defeat at last forced Nasser to abandon his ambitions for the Yemen, and he began to withdraw his army. Yet for the Royalists and their allies the struggle was by no means over. Seizing the opportunity created by Israel’s victory, Stirling got Bernard Mills to compose a Top Secret document for the Saudi leaders. Headed ‘A Proposal from Watchguard International for the Formation and Deployment of a Task Force in the Yemen’, it ran to a dozen neatly typed foolscap pages and urged immediate action to clear the remaining Egyptians out of the country.

  In effect the paper outlined a substantial upgrading of the mercenary team. It proposed the immediate establishment of a powerful strike force, commanded by Stirling himself and furnished with specially modified jeeps, which could carry out sabotage patrols and repeatedly block the road between Sana’a and Hodeidah, thus cutting the Egyptians’ main supply line. The paper aimed high, asking for an immediate initial payment of £73,000 – some £2 million in today’s terms.

  It is conceivable that, given a rapid mobilisation, some such vigorous initiative might have turned the tide in the Royalists’ favour, but it was too late. In the south – in Aden and the Federation – terrorist activity had been steadily increasing as FLOSY and the NLF (National Liberation Front) jockeyed for position. On 20 June there had been a volcanic eruption of violence: native troops had mutinied and gone on the rampage, killing twenty-two British personnel and wounding twenty-seven – a massacre that led to weeks of bloody fighting in and around the city. On the same day the NLF drove out the two British Political Officers in Dhala and raised their own flag over the market place. By the end of the month the whole of the Federation was crumbling. Many of the rulers had ill-advisedly gone to Europe or the Middle East in the hope of arranging some last-minute compromise that would hold the Federation together, and in their absence their states were seized, one after another:

  Audhali and Lower Yafa soon fell to the NLF and on 13 August they captured the ruler of the Muflahi Sheikhdom. The following day Dathina was taken over, followed swiftly by the Fadhli Sultanate. As the collapse continued there was surprisingly little bloodshed, and despite the sultans’ claims that they had good intelligence, the rulers themselves were surprised by the speed and efficiency of the NLF coups.3

  Among the political casualties was the Yemen mercenaries’ long-term ally, Whiskers – Sherif Hussein of Beihan – who went to Saudi Arabia, apparently hoping to persuade the Saudis to take his state over, only to find, when he tried to return, that the NLF had gained control.

  High-level diplomats were still struggling with the question of whether or not they should impose sanctions on Egypt in retaliation for the gas attacks, and London, as usual, was lily-livered on the subject. On 2 August 1967 a secret telegram from the Foreign Office to the Embassy in Washington considered that ‘a direct lead by Britain or the United States would achieve little and probably damage our interests in the wider problems of the Middle East’, and feebly suggested that ‘a Scandinavian initiative is a possibility’.4

  In the Yemen, on 26 August 1967, the mercenaries suffered their most serious loss of the entire campaign. Three men – two of whom had only recently come out – were on their way from Amara, where they were based, to Abdullah bin Hassan’s headquarters at Ketaf. Allen Havelock-Stevens (Adze), Tony Parsons (Parsnip) and Terry Falcon-Wilson (Taxi) set off in the Land Rover allocated to Frank Smith, without his permission, and took along just one escort – Frank’s tea-boy, Ali, who was fifteen or sixteen. They should have had warraqas for passing through tribal territories, but they had not bothered to acquire any. Although Ali carried a rifle, he plainly should have had reinforcements, and when the party stopped for coffee with Bernard Mills and Jimmy Knox, Bernard was furious to find them so poorly protected. He knew Havelock-Stevens, who had served under him on an earlier assignment in Aden, and now told him, ‘It’s a long journey – about five hours. Take two or three of my bodyguard.’ But, in Bernard’s words, ‘He didn’t feel he needed any instructions from me. “Oh,” he said, “it’s quite safe”’ – and off they went.

  About 12 miles short of their destination, at a point where the track ran through a narrow defile with high ground on either side – a perfect setting for an ambush – they were stopped by three armed tribesmen. When the leader, who spoke a few words of English, asked where they were going and they said, ‘Ketaf’, he told them they could not carry on, because they had no permission: they must leave their weapons in the Land Rover and walk up to the village with him, to get warraqas.

  Little Ali later told Bernard that he had tried to warn the mercenaries by saying, ‘Jimhouri – enemy. Not go – dangerous.’ But the British ignored him. Leaving their rifles in the vehicle, they started walking towards the houses, together with the Arab who had held them up. After only fifty yards or so he suddenly broke back and ran towards the Land Rover, whereupon gunmen concealed in the rocks higher on the wadi sides opened up with rifles, killing one man and wounding the other two, who were finished off by a grenade. Ali, who had refused to hand over his rifle, was saved by a girl who had been herding goats and bravely ran down, calling out to the assassins, ‘He’s only a boy! Would you shoot one of your own kind?’ – whereupon she took him to her house.

  Word of what had happened soon reached Amara. At first Frank could hardly believe that experienced soldiers would have done anything so foolhardy as to allow themselves to be separated from their weapons: they had Spanish self-loading rifles, each with two twenty-round magazines taped together for rapid reloading, and if a firefight had broken out they could have defended themselves ferociously. But as soon as word came back
, he prepared to recover the bodies. Prince Mohamed told him not to go on his own, but he was so incensed that he set out nevertheless.

  At the scene of the ambush Frank found his Land Rover still standing there, its dashboard and bonnet riddled with bullet holes. He could only assume that the tribesmen had shot it up to make sure the soldiers did not escape; but, as he said, it was a stupid thing to have done, as they had effectively destroyed a vehicle worth a great deal in that environment. The only other thing he found at the site was a set of false teeth, which had belonged to Falcon-Wilson.

  One of the Prince’s lorries brought the bodies back, hugely inflated by the gas that had built up since death, and Frank and his colleagues had the grisly task of bayoneting the stomachs before they could wrap the men in blankets and send them on to Bernard. By the time they reached him, their features were so bloated that he had a job to identify them, but he put tags on them, and Jimmy took them to the French wadi near Najran, hoping to get them onto an aircraft and fly them back to Britain. That, however, proved impossible, so the French helped bury them, with a slab of concrete on top of the graves.

  Prince Mohamed, distressed by the murders, wrote a note in his faltering English:

  Dear Frank, I am sorry for what happened. I have ordered strongly to Brigedier Sirag to do a certain action and hold the responsible for the accident and he will give complete report. Again I am sorry, In the future we have to be mor caution.

  Next day he wrote again, asking Frank to give Sirag ‘the Denanyat [dynamite] and fuse to destroy the houses of the kellers in the villages’. The identities of the murderers had been discovered; but, as Frank pointed out, there was no point in blowing up their homes, as they had already departed, and explosions would only have left their families without shelter.

  The disaster shocked everyone in the mercenary organisation, from Jim downwards. Reporting immediately after the incident, Mike Gooley cabled:

  After every conceivable effort to move the bodies to UK, it has now been necessary to bury them at Najran, Saudi Arabia . . . I have promised ALL concerned the best possible effort at security in face of this tragedy . . . All my men/stations here absolutely steady and stalwart. So far Saudi reaction has been heartening, and nothing has been spared to help us . . .

  Cannot express adequately all our feelings here. This has been unexpected in some senses, as the men were in a recognised ‘safe’ area and on a routine journey. Indeed a stunning and tragic blow to all. May we do all humanly possible for the next-of-kin. My immediate duty to get the highest compensation figure. Negotiations in progress at present.

  On 3 September Jim sent a message agreeing with Mike that if the press got hold of the story, the official line would be that the three men had been killed in a motor accident; in the event, no mention of their deaths found its way into the newspapers. A requiem mass was held in England on 12 September.

  Forty-five years later Bernard Mills pointed out that no area in the Yemen should ever have been considered safe – and it was something of a miracle that during the entire war only three British soldiers and one Frenchman (Tony de St Paul) were lost. The main reason for the survival of the rest was the outstanding loyalty of the tribesmen assigned to guard them. Far from having any fight with the Yemenis, the mercenaries owed their lives to their escorts’ courage and lack of veniality. The volunteers were literally in the hands of the Royalists, and could have been murdered for the gold in their escape belts at any time, especially when travelling at night.

  Luck sometimes also played a part. David Bailey was once climbing towards a ridge to site a 75mm anti-tank gun, when he paused for a minute a few feet below the crest to retie a shoelace. As he bent down, an incoming tank shell blew the top off the ridge just above him, sending a hurricane of rock and steel fragments over his head: had that lace not come undone, he would have been annihilated.

  The war went on. Later in September the mercenary organisation produced yet another ambitious plan: the top-secret Operation Day-Spring, designed ‘to deliver arms and ammunition by air to selected Royalist Princes in the Yemen’. Three possible methods were suggested: landing aircraft at Najran, parachuting supplies into the Yemen, and landing in the Yemen itself. Of these, the last was recommended as potentially the most effective, and the brief suggested that a trial should be held in the Jauf, on a desert strip prepared to a standard fit for a C130 Hercules transport. The aircraft (it was assumed) would be provided by the Royal Iranian Air Force and flown by an Israeli crew. The landing would be at sunset minus thirty minutes, and takeoff either immediately after unloading or at any time up to first light.

  The blueprint for the landings clearly reflected the cooperation not only of Israel, but also of Iran, where the Shah had become increasingly apprehensive about Nasser’s aggressive ambitions. Yet this plan, too, failed to materialise.

  During the autumn of 1967 the mercenaries’ role finally withered away. On 1 November a one-word message went out from Bosom to all stations – TERMINATE – and that was that. Jim Johnson’s war was over. Withdrawal was a huge disappointment to his team, especially as he had promised all ranks that one day they would take part in a victory parade along the main street in Sana’a.

  Extraction, however, proved anything but easy. As soon as the tribes realised that the British were about to desert them, they turned hostile – and when Alastair Macmillan and his two colleagues tried to leave the Khowlan by walking out to the east, they were challenged and arrested three times. Each time they were stopped the tribesmen demanded, ‘Chi, chi – give!’, pointing at their rifles to which they replied ‘Abudan – never!’; and they bluffed their way out of the encounters by saying (in Arabic), ‘We’re very good shots, and if you attack us, each of us will kill three of you.’

  Nasser’s ruinous occupation of the Yemen was almost over. Mohamed bin Hussein – who had become in effect Commander-in-Chief of all the Royalist armies – had been proposing to open a general offensive in November, and told Feisal as much; but the idea displeased the King, who (ridiculous as it seemed, after so much expenditure and bloodshed) was reluctant to provoke the Egyptians into further fighting, and now preferred to use financial incentives to ease them out of the country. Thus he promised Nasser that he would cut off the subsidies on which the Royalists had depended for so long – but not until the last of the Egyptians had departed. He also pledged to pay Egypt compensation for loss of revenue from the Suez Canal, which had been out of action since the Six-Day War – but only at the end of the quarter, if the withdrawal was well under way.

  For months Egyptian troops had been pulling back from their outposts in the east and north, in what they called their ‘long-breath policy’, and now accumulating pressures at last forced Nasser to accept defeat. On 3 November 1967 his puppet Sallal flew out of Sana’a, heading for Moscow, where he hoped to attend the celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. But he got no further than Baghdad, and on 5 November, when he heard that there had been a coup d’état in Sana’a, he went to ground in Iraq.

  In the Yemen a new government was led by a presidential triumvirate – but the Republicans’ main allies were deserting them. For once keeping to an agreement, the Egyptians were pulling out down the road to Hodeidah and taking ship for home. At the same time large Royalist forces, roused by Mohamed bin Hussein, were closing in on the capital from three sides. In the words of the American author Dana Adams Schmidt:

  Prince Mohamed had taken personal command. He was reported at Al Arush, he was reported in [the] Khowlan, he was everywhere, directing the emplacement of guns, organising a growing force around the hard core of the semi-regulars he had been training since 1964. Town after town around Sana’a fell to the Royalists. They took Amran, fifteen miles north of the capital and occupied mountains fifteen miles to the south-west of the city. They brought sporadic gunfire to bear on Rahaba, the main airfield outside Sana’a. They cut the road from Sana’a to Hodeidah on the coast. They sent commando groups
up to the walls of the city and even into its streets at night to harass the Republicans with bazooka shots at government buildings.5

  Had Hussein pressed home his attack, he might have changed the course of his country’s history. As it was, his resolve was undermined by the jealousy of fellow commanders, and by the collapse of British influence in the south: the dismantling of the Federation and the evacuation of Aden. As the military historian Jonathan Walker noted:

  By September 1967 George Brown [the Foreign Secretary] had clearly washed his hands of the South Arabian commitment, confiding [to his Cabinet colleague Richard Crossman] ‘it can’t be helped – anyway, we want to be out of the whole of the Middle East as far and as fast as we possibly can.’ And there were members of the Wilson Government who were delighted when the Federation collapsed.6

  On 13 November HMG formally recognised the NLF as the successor administration in the former colony, and at talks held in Geneva agreed to hand over all its assets. A powerful naval task-force was assembled, in case further violence broke out during the final withdrawal, but in the event the retreat proceeded peacefully, and the last British soldier left Aden on 29 November 1967.

  In the north, Sana’a held out for seventy days: then in February 1968 the Republicans, deserted by the Egyptians but bolstered by a fresh infusion of Soviet weapons and instructors, managed to reopen the road from Hodeidah, and the siege of the capital was over. In March 1969 Saudi Arabia cut off the supply of weapons and money to the Royalists, and they, no longer able to retain the allegiance of tribes through bribery, quickly lost their ability to fight. At a conference held in Jeddah King Feisal brought together the leaders of the rival factions, creating a coalition government of Royalists, Republicans and Third Party, but specifically excluding members of the royal family from holding office. So the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) was born. In July 1969 Abdullah bin Hassan was assassinated, and Mohamed bin Hussein at last abandoned the cause for which he had fought so long, going to live in Saudi Arabia.