Using primary source information, including interviews with the key decision-makers, this is an examination of the process leading to the British decision in 1966 to abandon its 127 year old military presence in Aden and thereby begin its retreat from East of Suez.
During the early 1960s the Cold War reached its climax. Britain's dwindling power in the Middle East was under siege from Arab nationalism, the Communist bloc and from American designs in the region. Aden, with its strategic military base and old Protectorate buffer zone, was soon the main battleground. The 1962 Egyptian-inspired coup in the neighbouring Kingdom of North Yemen further tightened the noose. So began a bitter and bloody insurgency war in South Arabia. British regular an special forces were soon pitted against growing and formidable insurgency forces, fighting both a war in the mountains and an urban conflict in the backstreets of Aden. Intelligence agencies vied for control of 'hearts and minds'. The British launched a clandestine war in Yemen to keep their enemies at bay. But still the situation in Aden spiralled out of control, culminating in a bloody slaughter in 1967. In that November, the British Army finally withdrew from South Arabia.??Aden Insurgency is the extraordinary story of Britain's last colonial conflict. Using a wide range of recently released archive and eye-witness accounts, the author charts the collapse of the South Arabian state. Set against a background of ruthless political ambition, these events shaped the Yemen of today.
'So we left without glory but without disaster ' Sir Humphrey Trevelyan, the last High Commissioner of the Federation of South Arabia In 1967, 139 years after their arrival in Aden, the British withdrew from the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. Their departure was abrupt, messy and controversial. Using important, previously unpublished material and original interviews with a range of individuals, both British and Yemeni, who lived through this defining period of colonial history, Without Glory in Arabia tells the story of the final few years of British rule in Aden and the neighbouring Eastern and Western Aden Protectorates. While some view British rule, on the whole, as beneficial to the local population, others insist that very little was achieved. Worse, Britain did not provide a structure of government constitution which met the conflicting needs of Aden and the Protectorate. This illuminating book brilliantly sets the 'scuttle – as the epidode came to be known – in context with a thorough re-examination of the background against which the events of the 1960s unfolded in this obscure backwater of the British Empire.
The Gaysh tells the story of the emergence of an army following early attempts to protect the trade routes in and through Aden. From the first commercial treaty with the Abdali Sultan in 1802, various efforts were made to avoid looting, leading to the annexing of Aden Port by the East India Company in 1839. It was not until the Turks threatened to invade in the First World War that a regular army unit was formed. The 1st Yemen Infantry did not see action, and there was a move, on financial grounds, to disband it in 1928. Because a need remained, the decision was taken to replace its policing role by airpower, supported by a small force of levies to defend the bases, including a camel corps. The book takes that story on, chronologically, through the Aden Protectorate Levies' growing strength and its relationship with the British Government and its policies. It includes its part in the Silver Jubilee celebration parade in 1935, pre-1939 military operations, its role in WWII, its involvement in the evacuation of the Jews following the Arab/Jewish riots in Crater in 1947, and on to the creation of the Federation and the withdrawal of the British Army in 1967.
This book tells the story of the Yemeni people, treating them as a single people. It shows that all over South West Arabia a unique civilisation arose in antiquity and many of its manifestations so conformed to the Yemeni temperament that they have lingered, until the present day.
First Published in 1980. The peninsula of Aden, on the south-west coast of Arabia, lies 100 miles east of the straits of Bab al-Mandab at the entrance to the Red Sea. It has an area of 21 square miles, the greater part of which is uninhabitable being covered by precipitous hills, the highest of which is Mount Shamsan, 1,775 feet. This book is a history of Aden from 1839 to 1872.
This is an account of the last years of the British in South Arabia. Michael Crouch joined the Colonial Service and served in South Arabia under Colonel Sir Hugh Boustead. Crouch details the struggle between the British-run administration in Aden and South Arabia and the opposition groups. He tells of the daily danger of assassination by radical nationalist groups, including attempts on his life and the lives of his family, and provides an insight into the violent events leading to British withdrawal and the establishment of the People's Republic of South Yemen. In the final chapter he lays to rest the ghosts of the past when he joins a delegation to the Republic of Yemen in 1993, revisiting the places he once knew and assessing the present-day problems faced by the country, as well as the signs of progress.