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With the British decision to withdraw steadily from their east of Suez commitments, it seemed in 1967 and 1968 as if the former British naval base at Simonstown in South Africa had finally lost all importance for Britain. The Foreign Office at least must have heaved a sigh of relief. For so long as the continuance in operation of the 1955 agreement between South Africa and Great Britain on the use of the base facilities at Simonstown was regarded as of major importance for Britain by the British defense authorities, the South African government retained an instrument with which they could exert pressure to modify British policy towards them.
The South African government had not hesitated to use this instrument of pressure again and again. From the controversy in
Information Service of South Africa
1964 over the British Labor government attempt not to honor their contractual obligations to supply South Africa with 16 Buccaneer bombers to the meeting in October of 1968 at which Dr. Hilgard Muller, the South African Foreign Minister, warned George Thomson, the Commonwealth Secretary, that unless the embargo on arms sales to South Africa was relaxed, South Africa would be forced to denounce the agreement. The existence of the agreement has enabled the South African government to enlist the anxieties of the British defense authorities as a means of pressure on the British government to disregard what it might otherwise regard as its obligation to follow the decisions of the United Nations.
The South Africans have succeeded in enlisting the traditional patriotism of the right wing of the British Conservative party more successfully than they have their anti-Com- inunist anxieties. With the best will in the world, British opinion finds it difficult to regard South Africa in any way as much menaced by international Communism as are, say, Malayasia or even Britain herself. And threats to lease the base to France, such as were heard in October 1967 after Pieter Botha, the South African defense minister, had failed to secure British agreement to South African purchases of warships from Britain, struck British opinion as simply ridiculous. What could or would the French Navy want with Simonstown? A means of
defending their Indian Ocean island 0 Reunion perhaps? . .
In the confusion caused by these vario
conservative forces to make Britain s creep, there is a strong danger that the strategic importance of Simonstown and 1 changes that the events of 1967-68 ha' brought into the situation are being lost sig of. The Conservative press has found the c ■ “Britain’s vital defences are in danger aS useful stick with which to confound the ide ' of their opponents. The latter have IC
Simonstown retains any strategic importa^ of defense experts to see any future con
such controversies, react on one another cause themselves and their opponents to main equidistant and equally out of t°l1 with the true position.
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Aden, the Falkland Islands, or SingaP1 Since no major sea powers maintained t>a within easy striking distance, it was esse1 tially a cruiser station, the job of its squadr being to protect British trade and impe ^ hostile trade in time of war. During VYor j. War II, it became a place for the assembly
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Vere the maintenance of user’s rights, the ahoning of a single liaison officer, and the °"tinuation of British overflying rights. The 0r‘ginal terms of the 1955 agreement, by .moh there was joint Royal Navy-South mrtcan planning for war, in which case ^°uth African naval forces would come under r'tish overall command, seem to have been tak(‘n over into the new agreement, but it aPpears very unlikely at the moment that "ything has been done to remove these '.a"ses from the category of empty aspira- °"s and pious hopes.
The overflying rights were the most im- lJ"rtant element in the new agreement; "ongh here, too, they were in the nature of insurance. The normal British routes for ying air reinforcements to the Far East '"n over Turkey and Persia and down the ersian Gulf or through Libya and the Sudan
The Continuing Strategic Importance of Simonstown 53
oys and a base for cruisers hunting com- jtCe raiders; and when the war was over, \tlaerna'ned the main base of the South th a^c scluadron and the headquarters of ^“ritish South Atlantic command. as aring the 1950s, its main importance was th 3pWay station on the alternative route to uSe ^ar ^ast> should Egyptian action deny the sh^ the Suez Canal to British merchant ^.'Pping or to the Royal Navy. Naval strate- s Postulated its revival as a center for con. - Protection, assuming either a conven- K, a* maritime war with the Soviet Union or °ken-backed” warfare following a nuclear
v *ange. Neither of these were very con- Clng as high priority hypotheses, even °0gh the Soviet Navy, presumably equally a !'eed of arguments to justify its existence at 1Itle when nuclear warfare seemed to have
e it unnecessary, paraded similar hypoth- 0n its side of the Iron Curtain.
^ t Was presumably because these arguments egan increasingly to lose their efficacy that
^ away at the Navy’s tenure of Simonstown. f 1966, when the Simonstown Agreement <^as renegotiated, the Commander in Chief y°uth Atlantic with his headquarters at "Ungsfield airfield, and with offices, stores,
4j, magnificent force of one frigate, occasion- V augmented by a second. The main terms new agreement, signed in January 1967,
Mr. Watt served in British Army Intelligence in Austria from 1946 to 1948, before attending Oxford University, from which he graduated in 1951. He then served in the Research Division of the British Foreign Office for three years. He has been a member of the department of International History, London School of Economics and Political Science, since 1954. Awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship in Social Sciences, he was attached to the Washington Center of Foreign Policy in 1960—1961. He has been a Reader in International History in the University of London since 1965.
to Aden and across to Gan in the Maldives. Both of these, however, could be closed by the denial of overflying rights in moments of crisis; and an alternative island-hopping, “all red” route was therefore worked out, which overflying rights across South Africa from St. Helena or Ascension to Mauritius would greatly shorten.
The agreement was to be profoundly affected by two major sets of events during the last six months of 1967. The first of these was the Arab-Israeli conflict with its resultant closure of the Suez Canal and the short-lived Arab attempt to apply economic pressure against Britain and the United States. The other was the British financial crisis of Novem- ber-December 1967 and the consequent British decision to abandon the East of Suez strategy by 1971.
The effect of the boycott and the closure of the Canal was greatly to enhance the importance of the new Simonstown agreement. The Libya-Sudan air reinforcement route became temporarily unusable, the Suez-Red Sea route permanently so. All trade between west European and British ports and places east of the Suez isthmus was forced to take the Cape route. So were all British warships. Between June and December 1967, over 30 British warships called at Simonstown en route between Britain and Southeast Asia or Australia. In 1968, even more British warships paid such calls. The abandonment of the plan to build an air shuttle force of F-llls based on airfields in the Indian Ocean, greatly enhanced the value of the overflying
waters. Under such conditions, there must a residual fear of a revival of the piracy
rights in South African air space provided for in the new agreement. The maintenance of the naval patrol off the seaport Beira in Portuguese-owned Mozambique as part of the oil sanctions against Rhodesia added still further to its importance.
It seemed at first sight as if the run-down of British responsibilities and the abandonment of a permanent naval presence East of Suez would operate in the opposite direction, to reduce the value of Simonstown entirely. But in the opinion of many naval experts at least, this is not the case. Both Denis W. Healey, Secretary of State for Defence, and Edward Heath (in his tour of South East Africa and Australia in the summer of 1968) have made it clear that the withdrawal from the East is contingent and not absolute, and that at the very least naval units in some force will be maintained. Both made it clear that if a major threat developed to the Commonwealth strata in Southeast Asia, Britain could well intervene, and in any case would wish to hold open her option to intervene. Such intervention depends even more on the unhindered availability of staging posts and staging rights to be available without strings in the event of emergency than does the maintenance of a permanent British amphibious force in the Indian Ocean. Without Simonstown or its equivalent, talk of intervention is meaningless and unreliable.
Two other considerations operate to reinforce the increased importance of Simonstown to contemporary British strategy. The first of these is the fact that Simonstown is, geographically speaking, an Atlantic rather than an Indian Ocean port. It thus escapes the East of Suez decision and can be related to the problem of the defense of British interests in the South Atlantic. This is not without its importance in the Royal Navy’s struggle to retain its option to use Simonstown in a case of emergency.
The other consideration is that the withdrawal of the British naval presence from the Indian Ocean will leave that vast expanse of water without any naval control whatever. The naval forces of the riparian powers, even including those of Australia, India, and
Pakistan, are small and adapted mainly ^ the defense of their coastlines and territorl‘
which the Indo-African coasts were once infamous.
This idea may seem, at first sight, so $ fetched as to deserve only ridicule in the dA of long distance air patrols and all-wean1 radar. But a little serious consideration sho' that in the form, for example, of hijack"1?' only a minimum degree of internal disort11 along the East African Coast would be quired, to make this a sufficiently lucratj' business to warrant its appearance. Hijack>"' of air liners is proving impossible to preve11^ Hijacking of coastal shipping was so regula* ‘ feature in Chinese waters in the late 19* and early 1930s as to prove almost impossi^ to stop. Add to this the probability, shall '' say, of anti-Portuguese or anti-Rhodes^ paramilitary organizations operating, 11 , al-Asifah in Jordan, with the acquiesce" and tolerance of the Adeni or Tanzaui*'1
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authorities and one can see that there are ‘ least a range of possible contingencies hef, sufficient to make the naval authorities vvT not to abandon entirely the chance to moy1 ize force to defend Britain’s maritime act1' ities in the Indian Ocean.
All in all, the conclusion must be ^ I Britain must continue to remain vulnerable t£) South African pressure over the Simonsto''1 agreements. To judge from Sir Alec Dougl*1' Home’s remarks in February 1968 on 4'' need to involve NATO in the defence of d' Cape sea route and from Mr. Heath’s speed'1 in Australia, a future Conservative regi"lf would take a much more active part in meet ing South African demands for a quid pro ?!/l1 to offset against the agreement. What a futi"c Labor government will do is more diffic1’ to predict; though it will be under stroll pressure from its strategic advisers to accep the fact that even the limited facilities pr°’ vided for in the 1967 Agreement are pote"j tially so useful as to warrant the avoidance 0 any actions likely to lead to the terminatin'1 of the Agreement.
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