FORUM: Illtyd Harrington: ‘as i please’

Published: 31 March, 2011
by ILLTYD HARRINGTON

That rush for the gush is happening all over again 

THE plane rose sharply from the RAF base El Adem, then headed back north-west over the Suez Canal. 

I was the only passenger. Suddenly out of the burning desert the mirage of the green fertile Nile delta.

We flew on aligning ourselves with the road running along the North African coast and dropping in, for some reason, to Tobruk, where a few years earlier the young blood of 54,000 soldiers stained the soil. There Rommel lost his reputation and the English general Montgomery puffed himself up.

Airborne again, beneath us were the four million inhabitants of Libya, scraping a living from that barren land.

A fierce sandstorm made us land at another air strip in Castel Benito, named after the bullfrog Fascist Duce of Italy whose vanity extended to attempting to recreate the ancient Roman Empire here.

This was a historical arena. The triumphant march of Islam passed along on its way to completing the Red Crescent from the gates of Vienna to the walls of Cordoba.

Now it was spring time in 1951 for Aircraftsman Second Class Harrington 2493347, and an unexpected and enthralling day. I was told that my presence in the flight operations room was no longer required. The intelligence officer, a man working under false pretences, had evidently got wind of me – my reading of the Daily Worker when it arrived challenging the CO’s version of Stalin as Peter the Great in the camp meeting; my friendship with young Egyptian army and air force officers, conspiring under the guise of a Bible class.

That Tuesday I was ordered to report back to the main base in Ismailia: my kit bag had already been packed. I picked up my identity papers and was driven very courteously down the right bank of the canal to El Adem.

Come Thursday I had still no idea of my destination. Perhaps I was going to be assassinated by MI6. But I landed eventually in Malta during a frightening electrical storm.

I read later that my Group Captain who had looked at me with wanton eyes in the swimming pool and volunteered to read Jane Eyre’s part to my dark brooding menacing Heathcliffe, had concluded apparently that “Harrington and men like him could endanger peace in the Middle East.”

He’d never objected to me when I delivered top secret messages to his headquarters.

Later he was involved in putting the fatuous King Idris on the non-existent Libyan throne.

That was long before 1969 when the young revolutionary Gaddafi arrived.

Our current “liberation” of Libya by 350 Nato planes is another puzzling patch in the quilt of our relationship with the Middle East.

For myself I have made time to reread some of the forgotten history of the war in Iraq from 1914 to 1921, waged as the slaughter continued in Europe. It took the opening of the Suez Canal to wake up the Indian Office and the Indian Army to the land of Mesopotamia lying between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. It reads like Carry On Up the Khyber.

Sadly thousands of men contracted malaria. My father, a company sergeant major was one.

“Flies existed in millions” but Whitehall ingenuity had the answer. 

They bought thousands of automatic Japanese fly-trap machines. Echoes of poor equipment in 2010 Afghanistan.

It was Winston Churchill who was the first politician to see the strategic value of the Middle East. He was in 1912 the first Lord of the Admiralty, worried about the future without coal for the ships. Perhaps the ex-foreign secretary David Miliband on his next teaching hour in Haverstock School, will bring up the biography of Rear Admiral Sir Edmund 

JW Slade, who told the War Cabinet in 1916 to grab all it could in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) Kuwait, Bahrein and South Africa. An uncompromising tiger in your tank merchant was Churchill. And we’re still at it in 2011.

This was more exciting than the Klondike gold rush. Churchill, egged on by Lawrence of Arabia decked out in his keffiyeh and thawb, carved up the land and its potential rulers like a Christmas turkey.

Our last really great throw was in 1956 in Suez.

My father’s own experience perhaps exemplifies the arrogance and brutality of colonial rule at that time.

In 1920 he was in charge of escorting 20 ”nationalists” down the Euphrates to prison. This took several nights and the men began exchanging views. Two of them were in fact identified as eminent Persian poets. 

He realised they were cultural men and honest in their nationalism. He delivered them to a barking Regimental Sergeant Major at the prison assuming they were to serve a period of imprisonment.

He was horrified to learn that they were to be summarily hanged. A rope and noose were suspended down the well of a spiral staircase where they were to be hanged in quick rotation, the second witnessing the death of the first.

My father, an exemplary soldier and a boxing champion remonstrated with the RSM  and, in plain language, beat hell out of him.

He was deemed to be emotionally tired and sent back to India.

Outrageous things are still being done in the name of freedom. But oil and its profits predominate and never mind the slaughter of innocents.

Bush senior and junior, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice were all of them closely tied to the oil industry.

That’s not a moral. That’s the obvious.