The Red & the White

So hot was it in Muscat and Oman that their swords melted in the scabbards and gazelles fell down, roasted in the desert.

--Old Arab Chronicle

For four weeks Britain had conducted its scuffle-sized war in Oman with the on-again-off-again hesitation of a small boy who has tied one end of the string to his aching tooth, the other to the doorknob.

When Said bin Taimur, Sultan of Muscat and Oman, appealed to Britain for help in subduing the rebellious and elusive Imam of Oman, no one thought that the affair would require much more than a few passes by R.A.F. fighter planes to scare the rebels into pledging loyalty to the red flag of the Sultan. In the House of Commons, Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd was the very model of long-distance assurance. "It would be an example of military futility," he intoned, "to seek to employ ground forces in those temperatures in desert areas."

"Miscalculation." Last week, in just such an exercise of military futility, some 200 British ground troops (infantrymen of the Cameronians and the 15th/19th King's Royal Hussars) were not only in action in Oman, but had been forced into a brief but prudent retreat. Casualties among British regular forces: six cases of heat prostration.

What had happened? "Miscalculation," said an editorial in the Times of London. "Mishandled from the start," snapped the Daily Mail. Far from being frightened off by the first sorties of fighter planes (with instructions to strafe only unoccupied forts, cars and donkey carts), the Imam's men had proved themselves much more adept at the use of automatic weapons than anyone had suspected.

In Whitehall the hand-wringing over the prospect of killing anyone changed to hand-wringing over not bringing the silly little war to an end. At last, British military commanders ordered ground and aerial fire against the rebel stronghold of Firq, believed to be held by the Imam's brother, an ambitious scalawag named Talib bin Ali. British commanders also ordered bombing missions against the presumed stronghold of the Imam himself, a palm-ringed, fortified village called Nizwa, ten miles from Firq.

Denunciation. Late in the week, as the fighting stepped up in the orange and pomegranate groves outside of the village of Firq, a company of the King's Shropshire Light Infantry arrived in Bahrein from the British base at Nairobi. Firq finally fell after a concentrated attack by Trucial Oman Scouts, covered by machine gunners and mortar barrages from the Cameronians and Hussars.

This left Nizwa, still flying the white flag of the Imam, for the British and the Sultan's troops to conquer. But no one was sure that the Imam was really in Nizwa. Perhaps he was at Izz. But no, when the British got there, he was not to be found. In fact, no one knew positively where the

Imam was, or if in fact he existed at all--(his despite the fact that the Imam's "representative" in Cairo had busied himself with appeals for aid to both President Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin. and Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser saw to it that seven Arab nations issued a ringing denunciation of British "aggression."

At week's end Nizwa surrendered at the sight of a line-up of Muscati infantrymen, supported by Trucial Oman Scouts and British regulars. The Muscatis, wearing plaid skirts and checkered headcloths, were flanked by British armored cars and machine-guns. Down came the white flag of the Imam, up went the red flag of the Sultan. But holed up in the Oman mountains other rebel forces were still hiding and the Imam himself was yet to be found--or even heard from.

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