Suez Crisis (1956)

British troops had protected the neutrality of the Anglo-French-owned Suez Canal for nearly 70 years, but in June 1956, Britain handed that responsibility to Egypt under the terms of a treaty (stating that control of the waterway should remain with the international Suez Canal Company) signed 20 months earlier.

Eleven days later, Colonel Gamal Abd al-Nasser was elected  President of Egypt, and a month after that, he triggered an international crisis when he nationalised the Canal in direct breach of the 1954 treaty.

President Nasser’s move was aimed at raising alternative funds to pay for the construction of Egypt’s Aswan Dam following the withdrawal of financial aid by the United States and Britain, who objected to Egypt’s purchase of arms from the Soviet Union.

Britain, however, did not want to lose influence over the canal or pay exorbitant fees to send their ships through the vital route linking the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. Meanwhile, France was convinced that Nasser was arming and inciting the rebels against French rule in Algeria, and Israel sought to strengthen its position in the Middle East before Egypt received its Soviet arms.

And thus a secret plan was hatched between this rather odd coalition of the willing: The Israelis would invade Egypt, and their allies would intervene and take control of the canal in the guise of peacekeepers.

The British insisted on utter secrecy about this arrangement. They even destroyed their copy of the agreement between the three sides signed at Sèvres near Paris (the French merely lost theirs). When the French generals visited British Prime Minister Anthony Eden at Chequers, the page they signed in the visitors’ book was torn out.

Most of the Cabinet were not told. Foreign Office officials were not told. Eisenhower was not told.

The need to maintain the pretence meant the British flotilla could not leave Malta until after the Israelis had started marching, and had to proceed at the pace of the slowest landing craft.

The fighting went quite well, considering. The Israelis raced through Sinai; the British and French bombed the Egyptian bases, gave Port Said a bashing and got a fair distance down the canal before the politics and economics became impossible.

On 3 November, under pressure from both the US and the USSR, Britain and France agreed to withdraw – an agreement widely regarded as a major defeat, but one which ended the crisis and spared the invaders from having to cope with what would have followed success: if Nasser – popular at home – was overthrown, they had no way of governing the country.

And the timing was terrible. Eisenhower was livid about the distraction from his election week. Much worse, it coincided with, and gave cover to, Moscow’s brutal invasion of its rebellious quasi-colony, Hungary. This was the final proof that Stalin was no aberration and that Soviet Communism was irredeemable.

British, French, and Australian relations with the USA were greatly strained during this period, and the crisis (and the Anglo-French-Israeli deception) resulted in the resignation of British Prime Minister Anthony Eden on 9 January 1957.