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The Abandonment of Aden 35

Northumberland Fusiliers. During the previous twenty years Mitchell had
seen service with his battalion in Palestine, Korea, Cyprus, Kenya and Borneo.
As a great deal of the ist Argyll’s campaigning had been concerned with the
suppression of outbreaks of internal violence or guerrilla activities in British
colonies and territories before and after independence, the battalion was
probably the most experienced in the British Army in the mounting and
maintenance of internal security operations. An officer and two men of the
Argylls had been killed in the ambushes in Crater on 20 June, and Mitchell was
understandably anxious to see that their deaths did not go unpunished.
Though he knew little of the intricacies of the situation in Aden, he was
convinced from past experience of similar disturbances that prompt, sharp and
firm military action would not only succeed but it would also prevent worse
bloodshed. He had no doubts that the Argylis would quickly gain the upper
hand: the wail of the pipes alone, he predicted, would suffice to frighten ‘a lot
of third-rate, fly-blown terrorists and mutineers’.
Faced with these alternatives Trevelyan chose a third course - to stay out of
Crater for the immediate future. He had an assortment of reasons for his
decision. Though the federal ministers pressed him to be allowed to send in the
South Arabian Army and Police to clear Crater, he did not feel he could entrust
the town to them. ‘The Khormaksar airport was in mortar range of Crater. We
had to keep control of Crater to protect the evacuation.’ The alternative of
sending in the British Army did not appeal to him either: it would almost
certainly alarm and provoke the South Arabian Army and Police, causing them
either to mutiny or to fall apart. ‘If they did,’ Trevelyan solemnly avowed,

it would . .. have meant our early withdrawal, the victory of the dissidents, the
abandonment of most of our stores and, most important, a civil war and the probable
massacre of many British still in an exposed position up country or in the Federal
capital.

Consideration had also to be given to the probability of heavy casualties among
the inhabitants of Crater if British troops had to fight their way into the town,
and to the inevitable outcry this would arouse at the United Nations and other
resorts where the arbiters of international morality are accustomed to congre­
gate.
So Crater was left in the hands of the NLF and FLOSY gangs, who spent
their days in hunting down and killing each other, when they were not robbing
and abusing the frightened populace, while the police stood idly by. To
Mitchell, as to many others, it appeared a ‘fantastic, nightmarish situation,
where in the middle of a British Colony in peacetime the rule of the Queen is
abandoned. And worse,’ as he noted bitterly, ‘it was about to be condoned by
Her Majesty’s Government with twenty-two dead British soldiers to prove it.’
It was, indeed, a most peculiar state of affairs, with the high commissioner

apparently allowing his understandable anxiety for the safety of British soldiers