Suez 1956 — Nasser's Codeword That Seized the Canal

History Onion · 16:12

For 74 years, the most important canal on earth was run by men 3,000 miles away who had never set foot in Egypt. On July 26, 1956, an Egyptian president named Gamal Abdel Nasser walked up to a microphone in Alexandria and took it back — in a single speech, using a French diplomat's name as a real-time codeword for engineers seizing the canal company offices as he spoke. The British conspired with the French and the Israelis to take it back by force. Eisenhower threatened to crash the pound. The British prime minister resigned within weeks. The Suez Crisis is widely regarded as the moment the British Empire ended as a global power. But the canal kept teaching. In 1967 Egypt sealed it. Fifteen ships from eight countries were trapped for eight years. The crews held their own Olympic Games on a cargo ship deck. In 2021 a single container ship turned sideways and stopped a tenth of world trade for six days. This documentary tells the full story across 150 years — labor, empire, speech, war, withdrawal, eight years of stillness, and the day a ship turned the wrong way.