Salvage Job

The nearer the British and French got to their final pullout from Suez, the more boldly the Egyptians displayed resentment of their presence in Port Said. A British lieutenant was kidnaped in broad daylight, a major seriously wounded when a bomb wrapped in a bread loaf was tossed into a crowded staff car. When 600 British troops ransacked the Arab quarter and rounded up 1,000 men and boys in a dead-or-alive hunt for the lieutenant and his kidnapers, Egyptians carried out a dozen or more grenade, small-arms and even rocket attacks on British and French night patrols. After Egyptian snipers killed one British patrol commander, Lieut. General Sir Hugh Stockwell carried out his threat to "meet force with force," sent a tank-supported battalion on another Arab-quarter roundup. The raid turned into a street battle in which, according to one U.N. officer, 27 Egyptians were killed.

As the British withdrew behind barri cades to the piers where their transports lay waiting, units of the U.N. Emergency Force also came under fire for the first time. A jeepful of Norwegians and a Swedish patrol emerged unscathed from two street-corner ambushes. "Fire was re turned," said next day's U.N. communique. Making his rounds in a new blue, gold-tabbed uniform of his own design and a car bearing license UNEF-i, U.N. Emergency Force Commander E.L.M. Burns assured the Egyptians that he would pull his 1,600-man U.N. detachment out of Port Said as soon as the British and French left. Their assignment after that: chivying the Israelis out of Sinai.

The big job in Egypt was to clear the canal. Arriving in Cairo with 19 other experts under U.N. auspices, Lieut. General Raymond A. Wheeler, U.S.A. (ret.) drew up plans to turn over the job to a consortium of three U.S., Danish and Dutch firms. When the British and French protested at exclusion of the 18-ship salvage fleet that was already at work raising wrecks at Port Said, General Wheeler cautiously suggested that six of Britain's salvage ships might be used--without their British crews. This was too much for First Lord of the Admiralty Viscount Hailsham who huffed that Wheeler "seems more concerned with placating Cairo than with carrying out U.N. wishes for speedy restoration of the canal."

But with the U.S. applying pressure for action, Nasser might well accept a compromise under which British salvage ships and their crews would serve in General Wheeler's forces. After all, Nasser, rather than having "gained strength" from the past month's events, has had a sizable part of his army and air force chewed up. The closing of the canal, and the consequent loss of revenue, hurts his badly strained economy.

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