There are many people claiming to have unearthed secrets from the past. Some people are mountebanks making it up; some secrets were never a secret; most secrets are nothing more than empty conspiracy theories. It was therefore nice to find a book about a secret war that really happened. It wasn't so much a secret but for various reasons it escaped scrutiny so far.
The War That Never Was by Duff Hart-Davis was published by Century. The author has done his homework. With his collected facts and stories, he produced a book that is enlightening, diverting, and at times amusing despite its subject matter. Let’s go back and take a look at the year 1962.
Egypt was held in the iron fist of pseudo-communist dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser, under direction and with the help of his Russian allies, was dreaming dreams of a great Arabian communist empire under his benign presidency. To this end, he instigated a coup against the Yemeni government. The Yemen was governed by its hereditary leader the Imam of Yemen. To help the rebels, Egypt poured in troops, weapons, and bombs.
The United Kingdom had and needed the strategic port of Aden for its fleet. But 10 Downing Street was kept busy with bed affairs much more important than governments or lives. The soap opera played out in London was called the Profumo Affair. It eventually ousted Prime Minister Harold Macmillan from office. The Imam of Yemen therefore received no help from the British government. At least not officially he didn't.
Unofficially, an old boys’ network started to give assistance to the Yemeni Royalists. They were more interested in the future of the country than in who had slept with whom and why. It allowed the British government to stay officially neutral in the internal affairs of the Yemen. Staying out of the internal affairs was a concept of international law until recently. Nowadays, it has become obsolete as American and British troops just bomb their way to oil resources under the mask of bringing democracy. They only apply it to countries without natural resources they want to plunder. The war in the Yemen was left to OAPs from World War II that used their retirement leisure to coordinate the loyalist troops from their armchairs in their London gentleman's clubs.
The book abounds with details about the people involved. If it reminds of Evelyn Waugh’s Bright Young Things at times, then that is no coincidence. Duff Hart-Davis hasn't copied from Evelyn Waugh, he just states historical facts. It was the way Britain had run wars for a couple of centuries including World War II. Nasser’s secret service was fully aware of the people working behind the scenes in London; the Egyptian president even sent them Christmas cards every year.
Young British officers were (privately) sent to Yemen to train the Royalist troops. They found a rag tag band of medieval warriors armed with Victorian rifles at best. Their equipment got a boost into modernity once Israel started to airdrop guns and ammunition to help their conservative Muslim archenemy on the Yemenite throne. Politics can be deliciously murky, don’t you agree? The most modern way of communication within Yemen available was using runners.
The Egyptians on the other hand were on the height of modern warfare by Russian standards. They used German Enigma machines for their transmission. They were either ignorant of the fact that the British had deciphered that code 20 years earlier or they just weren't caring about it. Nasser later came to call the Yemen war his Vietnam; he didn’t achieve what he had set out to do, and he weakened his position within Egypt and throughout the Arab world dangerously.
Further reading
History Distortion With Criminal Intent
The Catholic Invasion
Don't Speak Well of The Dead
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