Intervention at Abadan: Plan Buccaneer PDF
Preview Intervention at Abadan: Plan Buccaneer
INTERVENTION AT ABADAN Also by farnes Cable GUNBOAT DIPLOMACY THE ROYAL NAV Y AND THE SIEGE OF BILBAO GUNBOAT DIPLOMACY 1919-1979 (second edition) BRITAIN'S NAVAL FUTURE DIPLOMACY AT SEA THE GENEVA CONFERENCE OF 1954 ON INDOCHINA POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS AND ISSUES IN BRITAIN NAV IES IN VIOLENT PEACE As Grant Hugo BRITAIN IN TOMORROW'S WORLD APPEARANCE AND REALITY IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Intervention at Abadan Plan Buccaneer James Cable Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-11915-8 ISBN 978-1-349-11913-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-11913-4 © James Cable 1991 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1991 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1991 ISBN 978-0-312-06220-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cable, James, 1935- Intervention at Abadan: Plan Buccaneer / James Cable. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-06220-0 1. Anglo-Iranian Oil Dispute, 1951-1954. 2. Äbädän (Iran) -History. 3. Great Britain-Foreign relations--United States. 4. United States--Foreign relations--Great Britain. 5. United States--Foreign relations--1945-1953. I. Title. DS318.C34 1991 955.05'3-dc20 91-8156 CIP Für Viveca, as always Contents Preface ix 1 Verdict in Dispute 1 2 Oil 9 3 Thunder in the Air 20 4 Uncertain April 30 5 Seconds Out of the Ring 38 6 Buccaneer is Conceived 51 7 Decisions, Decisions 64 8 Second Thoughts 74 9 Holidays for Some 89 10 Final Spasm 95 11 Aftermath in Retrospect 104 12 One Answer to the Question 116 Notes and References 124 Bibliography 139 Index 142 vii Preface Coercive diplomaey is aresort to specific threats or to injurious actions, otherwise than as an aet 0/ war, in order to seeure advantage or to avert loss . . . James Cable Diplomacy at Sea This book relates how, in 1951, Britain planned to use force in order to retain control of the world's largest oil refinery at Abadan. Units of the British navy, army and air force were deployed, given their preparatory orders and, at one point, brought to three hours' notice. After many months and under strong pressure from the President of the United States, British forces were stood down, British subjects withdrawn from Abadan and oil-wells, pipelines and refinery aban doned. It is a story, not previously told in any detail, of international poker for high stakes. It is also a case history of coercive diplomacy, a field in which the analysis of failure is no less instructive than the sparse record of success. This analysis will not be ethical or legal or ideologie al. The focus is on technique: political, diplomatie and military. The treat ment aspires to be historieal, issues being presented as they were seen at the time. Inevitably the story is told from a British perspective, the main source being the British documents in the Public Record Office at Kew. Transeripts of Crown copyright records in the Public Record Office appear by permission of the Controller of HM Stationery Office and all otherwise unidentified references in the notes are to the files in which such documents are classified in the Public Record Office. Various participants in the events of 1951 have been kind enough to assist the author with information and advice, particularly on those human factors that are often inadequately reftected in official reports. The author would like to renew his thanks to Captain A.V.M. Diamond, Mr C.T. Gandy, Mr J. Homersham Golds, Commander G. Harris, Rear-Admiral R. Hill, Mr N. Hillier-Fry, Rear-Admiral H. Hollins, Group-Captain K.G. Hubbard, Admiral Sir Rae McKaig, Sir George Middleton, Group-Captain R. Morris, Captain ix x Preface A.J. Oglesby, Mr L. Pyman, the Ron. Sir Peter Ramsbotham, Lieutenant-Commander D. Randall and the late Captain A.R. Wal lis for allowing hirn to draw on their recollections. Unless directly quoted none of them bears any responsibility for opinions or state ments of fact in this book. The author's debt to writers of works previously published is acknowledged in the notes and bibliography, but is throughout great. Thanks thus too concisely concluded, a word of explanation is needed about proper names and spelling. When documents are quoted, as with books, their words and spelling are reproduced. Officially Persia was already called Iran in 1951, but most Britons continued to use the name Persia. The practice had political over tones. Nor was there much uniformity in the transliteration of proper names. Writers in European languages spelled the name of Mos sadegh, the Persian Prime Minister, in many different ways. James Cable 1 Verdict in Dispute I cannot recall any large matter o[ policy which has been so mis handled as this dispute with Persia. Winston ChurchilF Censure was understandable. The 1951 dispute had cost Britain a rieh oilfield, the world's largest refinery and a major source of much needed dollars. Historians have mostly agreed with Churchill in blaming the British Government led by Attlee,2 but for different reasons. They believed Ministers could and should have resolved the crisis by forcing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company3 to make large and early concessions to Persian nationalism. Churchill's complaint was that the Government 'had scuttled and run from Abadan when a splutter of musketry would have settled the matter'. 4 That was a picturesque exaggeration. The military operation con sidered at the time by Ministers was Plan Buccaneer. This would have committed many warships and aircraft, as well as two or three brigades, to the task of seizing and holding the refinery island of Abadan at the head of the Persian Gulf. The forces needed were deployed in the Middle East, kept at short notice for many weeks and not stood down until 4 OctobeT. Who was right - Attlee, who eventually insisted on cancelling the project, or his Foreign Sec retary, who predicted that the spectacle of a 'feeble and ineffective' British government would only encourage Egypt to follow the Per sian lead?5 Could Buccaneer have regained the oil for Britain and averted the consequences of capitulation? For thirty years such questions were seldom asked. Armed in tervention overseas was out of fashion. Plan Buccaneer was dis missed, by the few historians who had any inkling of its existence, as an aberration doomed to failure. The success of Operation Corporate for the liberation of the Falkland Islands in 1982 was not the first incident to cast doubt on the conventional wisdom, but it provided a partieularly striking exception to the supposed rule. Corporate suggests the need for a fresh look at Buccaneer in an altered perspective. Did Attlee prudently avoid a damaging fiasco in 1951 or did he let opportunity slip and set an unfortunate example? These are not easy questions and they cannot be answered without 1
The list of books you might like
