Britain Refused Nasser Rifles So He Took the Suez Canal | THE DREAM BRITAIN FEARED Part 2 of 4

History Onion · Part 2 · 2:40

In the winter of 1948 an Egyptian major named Gamal Abdel Nasser was surrounded at Faluja, holding rifles that jammed — bought through a procurement racket that ran to the palace. That defeat is why, four years later, Egyptian officers took Cairo and sent the king into exile. By 1954 Nasser was running Egypt and wanted an army that worked. Britain refused to sell him modern weapons, citing what Egypt might do with a real army — Britain had owned the largest share of the Suez Canal Company since 1875 and still kept a garrison on the canal. So Nasser bought tanks, fighters and bombers from the Soviet Union through Czechoslovakia, paid for in Egyptian cotton. Washington and London responded by withdrawing the money for his dam at Aswan. Britain's last troops had left the Canal Zone six weeks earlier under an agreed withdrawal. On 26 July 1956, in a square in Alexandria, Nasser told a vast crowd Egypt was taking the canal, and its tolls would build the dam. Britain, France and Israel signed a secret protocol outside Paris and invaded. Then the United States turned on its own allies: Eisenhower condemned the invasion at the United Nations and the American Treasury threatened to sell its holdings of British currency, which would have collapsed the pound. Britain stopped within a day — with the canal in its hands.