Marooned in the Suez Canal: Six Days of War, Eight Years of Blockade

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
International Relations, Military history, Regional History

When the dust and sand settled after the lightning strike of the Middle East Six-Day War in 1967, there was an unanticipated outcome with profound ramifications for the Suez Canal. The upshot of that briefest of brief wars left Israel in control of the Sinai Peninsula which included the eastern bank of the Suez waterway✱. Egypt’s response to this unpalatable circumstance was swift and long-reaching.

Immediately at the cessation of hostilities each side of the Suez Canal was cordoned off, Israeli troops massing on the east (Sinai) side and Egyptian troops on the west (African) side. The Egyptian government reacted to the situation by effectively immobilising access to the canal…ships, dredges and other floating water-crafts were sunk to block both ends of the waterway, the task of blockading was completed by placing a number of sea mines in the canal to render navigation an unviable (and dangerous) option.

Aside from bringing an immediate halt to any vessels seeking to use the passage, the unilateral action had the effect of trapping existing shipping already within the canal zone. At the time of the war there was a number of foreign ships, mainly freighters and cargo carriers, steaming their way north through the international waterway. Unable to proceed, those fourteen merchant vessels gathered together in the Great Bitter Lake section of the canal (the widest portion and the midway-point of the waterway).

Great Bitter Lake (sat-map) ⇗

The Yellow Fleet
As time passed it became evident that Egypt was intending to block the canal indefinitely. The ships settled down for a long stay and the ships’ masters and owners devised a strategy to cope with the delay. The crews on the vessels were rotated, initially after three months the original crews were relieved, and then this process was repeated at periodical intervals. Over the next eight years (that’s how long the canal was blockaded and the fourteen ships were stranded in the Bitter Lake) some of the original crew members even returned for a second stint in the canal. So long were the stranded vessels exposed to the harsh elements of the region that the nickname the Yellow Fleet was ascribed to them – due to the fact that over months of remaining motionless the decks of the ships would become completely caked in windblown sand from the adjacent Sinai desert [‘The Yellow Fleet’, www.history.com].

Composition of the cargo container fleet: Vessel nationalities
The stranded Bitter Sea flotilla comprised a miniature “United Nations” of vessels – of the fourteen merchant ships, four were from the UK, two each from West Germany, Sweden, the US and Poland, and one each from Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. In addition to these fourteen entrapped vessels, one other container ship, the Canadian SS Observer, was also immobilised by the Egyptian blockage, but it was separated from the others and forced to anchor in Lake Timsah (AKA Crocodile Lake), near the city of Ismailia.

From the perspective of the ship-owners (who included large shipping companies like the Blue Star Line and Blue Funnel Line), the main priority was to protect as far as possible the valuable cargo onboard the containers. The ships, despite their anchored status needed to be maintained regularly so that they would be immediately ready to go in the event of the Egyptian government lifting the blockage [‘Meet the seafarers who were stranded in the Six-Day War’, (Simon Edge), 03-Jun-2017, www.express.co.uk/].

Despite the difficulties faced by the crews (the presence of Egyptian police guarding the vessels; being stopped from maintaining radio contact with the outside world; the frustration of being confined and entrapped in one spot), the seafarers involved made a really good fist of keeping up morale by keeping busy and engaged in fractional and social activities. Organisational skills were put to good use, in October 1967 a meeting of all officers and crews members on the British MS Melampus resulted in the formation of the Great Bitter Lake Association.

1968: Year of the parallel olympics
Given the trying working conditions that prevailed, the merchant shipmen (there was a solitary woman among all of the crews of workers, a Swedish stewardess) made the best of their time in the Suez…in 1968 with the Summer Olympics playing out in Mexico City the seamen were inspired to concoct their own version of the great quadrennial international sporting event. The GBLA ‘Mini-Olympics’ included the disciplines of sailing (naturally!), diving, soccer, shooting, archery, sprinting, high jump and weight-lifting✧. The ‘athletes’ got right into the spirit of the event, the UK newspaper the Daily Express even sponsored the games, providing kits, footballs and trophies. Overall “winner of the Olympics” was Poland, followed by West Germany [‘Stranded in the Six-Day War: the story of 14 ships trapped for eight years in the Suez Canal – by Cath Senker’, (Company of Master Mariners of Australia), www.mastermariners.org.au/]. Outside of Olympics time crew members would keep active with matches of football (soccer) on the largest of the vessels, MS Port Invercargill.

Inventiveness and ingenuity of the crews
Improvised Olympic games, football and boat races was one way of making the time pass enjoyably, another more imaginative pursuit was getting into the stamp business! The Yellow Fleet marked its prolonged confinement in the Suez by hand-making and issuing its own stamps…envelopes sent home to family and friends would bear the frank of the Great Bitter Lake Association. These labels were purely decorative, without postal validity and needed the accompanying legal issue of Egypt for delivery – however some letters did apparently make it to their destinations bearing only the GBLA frank! GBLA stamps often contained eagles and seagulls, birds of flight symbolising freedom and escape which the crews undoubtedly longed for whilst passing their days [‘Maritime Topics On Stamps: The GBL Locals!’, (Bjoern Moritz), www.shipsonstamps.org/].

The fleet also maintained its own trading system among the various vessels. The container ship crews fed themselves initially from the plentiful fresh food in the cargos. Beer, wine and other day-to-day necessities were supplied by trade with visiting Egyptian chandlers (suppliers for boats). Captain Kensett of the Port Invercargill estimated that they had to be upward of 1.5 million empty beer bottles at the bottom of the Great Bitter Lake. The food that perished after the refrigeration finally gave out also got dumped overboard [Simon Edge].

As time went on…and on, the situation needed to be rationalised of course. During 1968 the MV Agapenor‘s owner, Blue Funnel Line, considered abandoning the vessel, but the insurers vetoed that! Later on, the Agapenor was placed in the care of the nearby Czech freighter Lednice [Gordon Frickers, ‘Agapenor Manoeuvring in Bombay (Mumbai) Roads’, (Artist Gordon Frickers), 31-Mar-2009, www.frickers.co.uk]. The collection of ships were moored closer together. Consolidation continued with a view to reducing costs to the companies, by June 1969 the number of personnel maintaining and protecting the ships was scaled down to around 200, by Christmas of the same year there was just a skeletal crew of 50 present [Edge].

Egyptian president and Arab unity strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser died in 1970 and gradually the government in Cairo started to soften its hard-line stance on the blockade (plus there was the worrying consideration of the ongoing lost revenue from the canal tolls that Egypt was suffering). For the last couple of years of the closure a Norwegian company took over the management of the fleet. By 1974 work had begun on the extremely onerous task of clearing the scuttled ships and sea mines before shipping in the canal could resume. American naval units and British and French minesweepers assisted the operation, with the salvage job finished by Californian company Murphy Pacific Marine Salvage. With the Suez Canal finally opened again, eleven of the remaining thirteen vessels⊟ were unable to continue their journey unaided, only the two German container ships were capable of making it back to their destination (Hamburg) under its own power.

PostScript: a ‘new’ Suez Canal?
Even by the time of the canal closure in 1967 Suez had become an inferior sea transportation route. Since the 1950s the advent of the supertanker, which is capable of carrying four to six times that of the smaller ships, has been a game-changer. The canal however has been unsuitable for supertankers being too narrow and insufficiently deep in most of the watercourse [‘A “new” Suez Canal shapes up for 1980s’, (John Pearson & Ken Anderson), Popular Mechanics, May 1975]. Accordingly the Egyptian government first mooted the prospect of a new canal in 1974. After many obstacles and delays a multi-billion dollar project was launched. Finally in 2015, a ‘new’ section of the Suez Canal was completed…increasing the canal capacity to accommodate a two lane shipping route (ie, two commercial-scale vessels are now able to pass one another in opposite directions over a longer stretch of the canal) [‘Suez Canal Area Development Project’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

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✱ along with the Golan Heights (taken from Syria) and the West Bank of Jerusalem (wrestled off the Kingdom of Jordan)
✧ oddly swimming is not listed as one of the GBLA’s ‘Olympic’ sports, especially puzzling as the MS Killara (from Sweden) had an onboard pool!
⊟ the US-owned African Glen had been hit and sunk during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. The war came very close to the stranded Yellow Fleet as the Israeli counter-attack took place at the northern end of the Bitter Lake

On the Cuban Guerrillero Cultural Icon Trail: Channelling ‘Che’ in Santa Clara

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Military history, Popular Culture, Regional History, Travel

Having visited the site of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and the Museum that commemorates its triumphant outcome for the Cuban people, our appetite to learn more about “The Revolution” was piqued. The city of Cienfuegos was on our itinerary and as another saga of the war to liberate Cuba from a right-wing dictatorship with US mafiosi connexions was at hand in nearby Villa Clara province, a small detour was in order.

The pueblo of Santa Clara is inextricably woven into the story of Ernesto Guevara and his victory in the decisive battle of the civil war against the Batista regime. Guevara or simply ‘Che’ – the image that launched a million T-shirts, and the man who signed many more million pesos’ worth of Cuban bank notes!✱ – is proudly remembered and commonly revered, especially in this part of Cuba, as two separate Santa Clara monuments testify.

The first is in the centre of the township itself, a monument to the final victory of the war (Battle of Santa Clara, 31st December 1958) when a Cuban battalion under Comandante Che derailed a train carrying government troops, ammunition and heavy weapons, intended to reinforce Batista’s embattled army in Havana.
A portion of the captured train still sits on the site, now part of a monument to the battle which clinched victory for Castro and the Cuban rebels. In Spanish the monument is called Monumento a la Toma del Tren Blindado (literally “Monument to the Taking of the Armoured Train”)

The other tangible tribute to the legendary Cuban revolutionary líder is more personal, not far from the city is Guevara’s sombre but impressive mausoleum (Mausoleo de Ernesto Guevara). The monument was originally conceived as a memorial to the charismatic maestro guerrillero who was executed and buried in the Bolivian jungle in 1967… thirty years later the Cuban government retrieved his exhumed body and returned it to Santa Clara. The remains of Che and 29 of his fellow guerrilla fighters are interred here in a large burial vault (in area a decent sized lounge room).

The mausoleum remains a popular place to visit for tourists as well as Cubans, there were several big tourist buses and umpteen dozen cars in the parking lot when our group visited. The immediately noticeable feature of the mausoleum building which is set down on a wide patch of land is the extra-large statue of Che. Cast in bronze, it is 22 feet high and characteristically depicts Che armed and dressed in army/militia fatigues. The statue officially goes by the somewhat ‘highfalutin’ title Ernesto Guevara Sculptural Complex (AKA Complejo Monumental Ernesto Che Guevara).

Security around the mausoleum entrance was pretty tight, more guards than you think might be necessary hovered around the entrance portal. We all lined up and were soon ushered in by a bevy of serious-faced officials and whisked out again fairly rapidly. There was not a lot to see inside in any case, it was dimly lit and unnervingly cold. We glanced at the photos of the 30 dead comrades on the wall and spotted a few pieces of Che paraphernalia on display – such as Che’s handgun (Czechoslovakian), his water canteen and field glasses.

There’s not much else to the complex (a lot of vacant space actually) but there is a gift shop (Tienda Artex) (opportunity to get that authentic “Che in classic Guerrillero Heroico pose” T-shirt on Che’s own turf!) and a restaurante/cantina. There’s another, official looking building close to the arched entrance to the shops but I couldn’t work out what it was used for.

The museum maintains a strict prohibition on the taking of photos within the burial vault, so I didn’t even give a thought to trying to sneak a quick ‘Polaroid’ (even if I had one) – the officials, all wearing the same “not happy Juan” face, gave the impression they meant business!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/

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✱ from when he was governor of the National Bank of Cuba and succinctly signed his nickname ‘Che’ on all legal tender

Mantanzas’ South Coast: Dive Sites, Beach Resorts, the ‘Bay of Triggerfish’ and a Monument to National Memory

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
International Relations, Military history, Regional History, Travel

From rustic Viñales we did a long trek by road (some eight hours) to the province of Mantanzas, our ultimate stop was a resort spot on the south coast called Playa Larga (Eng: ‘Long Beach’). This picturesque coastal village was the scene of the explosive Cold War incident in April 1961 when a CIA-financed and US-trained force of exiles attempted to invade Castro’s Cuba from the south (Playa Larga was one of the two beaches that the mercenaries landed at✱). Courtesy of the media and publicity at the time, westerners know this area as the Bay of Pigs…in Spanish the name is Bahía de Cochinos. ‘Cochinos’ does translate to ‘pigs’, but in Cuban Spanish ‘Cochinos’ can also mean ‘triggerfish’. Given the abundance of colourful fish (including triggerfish) we saw whilst swimming in the bay (and the visible lack of pigs at the site!), the term ‘Bay of Triggerfish’ sounds infinitely more apt!

As we came off the Autopista Nacional and headed south, passing a vast area of wilderness and swampland on our right (Parque Nacional Ciénega de Zapata). A short while later we reached Boca de Guamá (Mouth of the gulf), known for its resorts and boat rides through the massive great swampy peninsula. When we got to ‘Long Beach’ we stopped near a scuba dive-and-snorkel hire kiosk where there was an entry point into the bay to swim. To get into the water we had to cross a narrow but jagged rocky shore. Halfway across the rocky ledge, the folly of not bringing rubber-soled aquatic shoes to Playa Larga became painfully apparent to me (ouch!). The Caribbean water was a beautiful turquoise colour but I found it a bit choppy for swimming (explains why there was only a couple of other people swimming there when we visited). This didn’t seem to deter the snorkellers in our group who thoroughly enjoyed plunging under to explore the delights of the bay’s coral reefs❂.

A stopover here also offers you an alternative to swimming or snorkelling in the bay. If you cross back over the coastal road, passing the dive and snorkel kiosk and head in an inland direction, the short trail through the wilderness will land you at another aqua delight of Playa Larga, a swimming-pool size natural cénote♉! After experiencing the joys of swimming in cénotes in Southern Mexico, I had been anticipating trying out a cénote in Cuba. Unfortunately two things soured the experience – the cénote (unlike the ones in Mexico) didn’t have a cavernous limestone roof and a deep well where you had to descend down a spiralling staircase – elements contributing to a large part of both the fun and the atmosphere! Also, access to the natural pool was inhibited by the existence of a razor-sharp corridor of more jagged rocks. Although the pool looked enticing I didn’t much fancy trying to negotiate the pointy edges, so, my enthusiasm dampened, I hastily turned tail and headed back to the shore.

After spending the night in a casa particular in nearby Caletón we made for Playa Girón to re-live the Cuban regime’s most treasured moment in it’s 60-year revolutionary history. The Bay of Pigs Museum (AKA Museo Girón) in  casts a different light on a tense Cold War moment, one that narrowly skirted a global confrontation, to that portrayed at that time by the news medias of First World countries. The museum’s narrative recounting the Bay of Pigs incident describes a episode of national defence against US aggression and imperialism. The exhibits, the photos, letters, maps and diagrams are intended to celebrate the heroic efforts of Cubans, soldiers and civilians, in patriotically repelling the invasion of the homeland.

The surprisingly small museum (just two rooms) displays many black-and-white photos of the episode, various uniforms and medals, examples of the combat artillery, mortar guns and rifles used in the conflict, many of these weapons look like they’d have been considerably old even in 1961! Note: the taking of photos inside the BoP Museum is not permitted unless you pay a 1CUC fee up front at the entrance table.

Outside the museum entrance, there are a couple of props that add gravitas and dramatic colour to the museum’s “mission statement”. In pride of place, on display is a Hawker Sea Fury F-50 fighter plane (the type of British-manufactured aircraft purchased by Premier Castro and used by the Cuban forces in countering the invasion). To the right of the entrance are two Soviet era tanks, all weaponry associated with the 1961 event.

The work put into Museo Girón demonstrates how seriously the government took the incident – and still do! The minutely detailed story of how the Cuban government and people foiled a bungled American attempt to invade Cuba makes an unambiguous point about national memory…unencumbered by subtlety: both the citizens of Cuba and the outside world dare not forget La Victoria! and the country’s no pasarán resolve when it comes to repelling outside invaders. The museum revels in reminding visitors of a nadir reaching low point in US policy towards Cuba from the not-so-distant past which brought international disapproval and opprobrium down on the Kennedy administration and the CIA.

PostScript: Australia, Cuba
On the way to visit Museo Playa Girón we didn’t expect to pass a sign on the road saying ‘Australia’ but that is the name of the tiny hamlet and consejo popular (People’s Council) near the Bay of Pigs Museum. The Cuban aldea Australia has no tangible connection to Australia in the Southern Hemisphere, but was named for its relationship with the original sugar factory located there (the practice at that colonial time was to name the locomotives hauling the sugar to market after the continents of the world, hence ‘Australia’). During the 1961 invasion by the US-backed rebels, Comandante en jefe Castro based his defence headquarters in the old ‘Central Australia’ sugar mill.

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✱ the other being in the cove named after 17th century French pirate Gilberto Girón, Playa Girón, 35km further south
❂ in the bay there’s a 300m long coral wall a short swim away from the shoreline
♉ a deep, natural well or sinkhole formed by surface limestone rock caving in and exposing ground water

Wall’s End: The Great Wall, Laolongtou, Hushan/Bakjak and the Goguryeo Question

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Archaeology, Built Environment, Military history

The “Long Wall” – the world’s most famous, most myth-engendering bulwark

China’s most distinctive and enduring icon is the Great Wall of China, it is of course also sui generis as the world’s Great Wall. The Wall, Chángchéng 長城 – or as sometimes described Wan-li Ch’ang-ch’eng 萬里長城 (10,000-mile Long Wall✱), is incontrovertibly one of the wonders of both the ancient and modern worlds. Starting in the west in Gansu Province at Jiayuguan Pass, the wall(s) meander east over mountains and through passes to they reach the sea in the country’s east (a journey of over 21 thousand km). The oldest sections of the Wall date from the Warring States era (circa 214 BCE).

Laolongtou ⍗

Shanhaiguan and ‘Old Dragon’s Head’
If we follow the extravagating course of the wall east from the Badaling section (near Beijing) for about 300 kilometres, we’ll come to Shanhaiguan (literally “mountain – sea – pass”) in Liaoning Province, one of the Great Wall’s major passes (acclaimed as “the first pass under Heaven”). This section continues to Laolongtou (‘Old Dragon’s Head‘⊟), where the wall enters the sea (Gulf of Bohai) and spectacularly and abruptly terminates! The wall at Shanhaiguan and Laolongtou snaking as it does between mountains on one side and water on the other, has been strategically important to the Chinese Empire eastern defences since the 1600s.

Hushan Great Wall

The setting that greets visitors to Laolongtou Wall end-point (Estuary Stone) looks like a most appropriate setting for the eastern terminus of the Great Wall. The reality is however that the Great Wall/s are not a continuous linear structure, they are actually characterised by numerous gaps in the sections…and where the ‘Old Dragon’s Head’ ceases at the sea is one more break in the line, albeit a dramatically evocative one! Before 1989 the conventional wisdom was that Laolongtou was the most easterly point in the Walls, but in that year Chinese archaeologists excavated 600m of a hitherto undiscovered section of the Great Wall 540km east of Laolongtou. The Hushan Wall (extending over a mountain, Hushan or Tiger Mountain) lies just north of China’s eastern border city, Dandong (which eyeballs North Korea just across the Yalu River). In 2009 the Chinese government, based on Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) research, recognised the wall as the most eastern point of the Great Wall (and ie, the end-point). Beijing’s classifying of the wall (so close to the Korean border) as Chinese contradicted the North Korean view that the wall was originally Korean (the Bakjak Fortress) and provoked a hostile North Korean reaction. [‘Hushan Great Wall’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]

PostScript: Dandong discovery reignites the Goguryeo controversy
The Dandong wall conflict reignited the controversy over the Goguryeo Kingdom that previously had inflamed tensions between the two countries. Background: the historic Goguryeo Kingdom (1st century BC to 7th century AD) encompassed an area comprising all but the tip of the Korean peninsula and a portion of both Russian and Chinese Manchuria. Both Koreas view the historic Goguryeo Kingdom as having been the ‘proto-Korea’ state. The Chinese perspective (which the Koreas label as revisionism) is that Goguryeo was only ever a vassal state of the ‘Middle Kingdom’, moreover one occupied largely by Tungusic people, an ethnic minority of China. The wall kerfuffle fed into this controversy, stirring up feelings of nationalism on both sides, the fallout being that Sino-Korean relations took a nosedive. Mutual distrust lingers over the matter…fears of irredentist claims on each other’s territory, and for PRC the perennial bogeyman of the spectre of Korean reunification. [‘Goguryeo controversies’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]

(Source: Man, ‘The Great Wall)

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✱ chéng in Chinese can also mean city or city wall…or more aptly to describe China’s wonder building – walls in the plural, John Man, The Great Wall (2009)

⊟ so-called because the structure’s end part (above the sea) is thought to resemble a dragon (long) resting its head (tou) on the ground

❂ the Chinese media going so far as to tag the kingdom as ‘China’s Goguryeo’ (Zhongguo Gaogouli) [Korea and China’s Clashing Histories’, (Yong Kwon), The Diplomat, 11-Jul-2014, www.thediplomat.com]