[ 13 June 1965 ] Today in 1965, Labour MP Tony Benn noted in his diary, regarding the situation in Vietnam, that ‘the Americans are now deciding to invade in full strength and we are left in the embarrassing position of appearing to support them.’1 Washington’s role had previously been limited to deploying military advisers and…
7 September 1963 On 7 September 1963, there was a secret meeting in Aden’s Crescent Hotel, between Colonel David Stirling, who had founded the Special Air Service (SAS) in 1942, Peter de la Billiere, a junior intelligence officer, Tony Boyle, a junior RAF officer, and Ahmed al-Shami, the foreign minister of the former Yemeni royalist…
19 March 1969 In February 1967, the British government had allowed the Caribbean island of Anguilla a degree of self-government on condition that it accepted a subservient status as an associated state of the larger island of St. Kitts, 112 miles away. In July, the islanders voted overwhelmingly to reject a new constitution dictated from…
20 December 1961 Today in 1961, the British ambassador in Saigon, Henry Hohler, wrote to Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home, advising that ‘we should not be too greatly moved by complaints that the Vietnamese authorities are holding large numbers of individuals in detention camps.’ He reminded the foreign secretary that ‘At the worst period in Malaya…
18 December 1965 On 18 December 1965, medical reports by the Aden Director of Health Services were submitted which corroborated allegations of torture made against the British run interrogation centre at Fort Morbut in Aden.1Â A representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was eventually authorised to visit the prison to investigate on…
10 December 1963 On 10 December 1963, Britain’s high commissioner, Kennedy Trevaskis, declared a state of emergency in Yemen in order to crush a nationalist insurgency against British rule. Within hours, the British army was rounding up dozens of trade union officials and members of Yemen’s People’s Socialist Party.1 The emergency laws gave Trevaskis and…
4 December 1967 On 4 December 1967, Commonwealth Minister George Thomas urged Denis Healey, the Defence Secretary, to step up Britain’s military aid to Nigeria’s Federal Military Government. Five months earlier, Nigeria’s generals had launched a full scale invasion against the province of Biafra, which had dared to assert its right of self-determination. Over the…
3 December 1963 On 3 December 1963, just nine days prior to Kenya being granted independence, hundreds of files of documents were packed into four large wooden packing crates and loaded onto a British United Airways flight to London’s Gatwick Airport. They related to the administration of the colony during the brutal crushing of the…
27 October 1962 At 1.00 pm on 27 October 1962, Air Marshal Sir Kenneth Cross placed RAF bases, housing sixty H-bomb tipped missiles and over 100 RAF nuclear V bombers, on to alert level three. It was the highest state of alert Britain ever went to during the entire Cold War. Its nuclear strike force…
14 October 1964 On 14 October 1964, in his final dispatch as Britain’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Sir Colin Crowe declared that the Saudi regime was ‘about as satisfactory as any we could expect’ as it was ‘friendly to the West and strongly anti-communist.’ In numerous reports since he had been appointed ambassador in April…
