By 1967, there were still a dozen British mercenaries in the Yemen, training the royalists, laying mines and setting up ambushes. More than 20,000 of Nasser’s troops had been killed, while the Yemeni royalists had lost 5,000.
In June that year, as Nasser and his allies prepared to go to war with Israel, the Israelis launched pre-emptive air strikes, destroying the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian air forces.
With their total air superiority, they were able to decimate Nasser’s army as it advanced, wrecking its tanks and killing more than 15,000 men. Thousands more surrendered.
The Six Day War was a resounding victory for Israel — and spelt the end of Nasser’s dreams of dominating the Arabian peninsular. He withdrew from Yemen and after four years the Egyptian occupation was over.
I have not been able to get my hands on this book and read it, but it definitely caught my eye after reading this review below. These guys remind me of such famous and highly effective private fighting forces like the Flying Tigers or Executive Outcomes. This private army had a huge impact on events in the region as you can see from the quote up top, and this book supposedly lays it all out.
Probably the one story in this article that caught my eye was the event where they cut out the lungs of a poison gas victim, to send it back to Britain and prove that Egypt was using poison gas in Yemen. That is news to me and I did not know that Egypt was using WMD’s during that war.
I also thought it was funny that Saudi Arabia Royalty funded the operation, which also included an Israeli air supply contingent. Like the article mentioned, Saudi Arabia did not know this little fact and I am sure they would have cut off funding if they had found out. lol Cool book and if any of the readership has anything to add, please feel free to comment. –Matt
Buy the book here.
Jim Johnson, the leader of this private army.(he passed away in 2008)
How a rag-tag team of SAS veterans changed history in a secret war Britain STILL won’t admit
By Annabel Venning17th February 2011
Crouching behind rocks in the rugged mountains that rose abruptly out of the Yemen desert, were three British soldiers, former members of the SAS, together with their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Johnny Cooper.
They had lain in wait, machine guns at the ready, all through the cold desert night. At 9am the first Egyptian soldiers advanced into the wadi (gully), their infantry packed shoulder to shoulder, followed by tanks and artillery.
Behind the rocks, nobody moved. The success of the ambush depended on surprise. Then, as the enemy reached a small plain that Cooper had designated as the ‘killing ground,’ he gave the signal.
A rattle of machine gun fire cut through the wadi, bullets sending geysers of sand into the air, amid screams of pain and terror.
The Egyptians’ front ranks tumbled, Cooper remembered: ‘Like ninepins. Panic broke out in the ranks behind and then their tanks opened fire. Their shells were exploding?.?.?.?among their own men.’
In the ten-minute firefight that ensued, many of the Egyptian casualties were from their own guns. All day they fired on Cooper’s positions. But he and his men, with their Yemeni comrades, were dug well into their ‘funk holes’. As night fell the Egyptian force withdrew back to their base in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a, leaving 85 bodies behind.
It was a rout, the first of many successful engagements that over the next four years would see a small force of British soldiers fight fiercely in a desert war of which most of their countrymen were unaware.
Wearing Arab dress, like latter-day Lawrences of Arabia, the men, mostly ex-SAS, fought in a savage, dirty war of poison bombs, secret airdrops and desert shoot-outs.
It was an operation that began with a deal made over gin and tonics in a Mayfair gentlemen’s club and progressed into arms smuggling, ambushes and the existence of a private army, directed from a one-room basement headquarters in Chelsea by a debonair former Army officer and his sidekick, a beautiful former debutante.