THE SWEETWATER CANAL : November 1956

Carole Naggar, July 17, 2007


In July 1956, after the withdrawal of British and American funds that would have financed the building of a dam at Aswan on the Upper Nile, Egyptian leader Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser seized control of the Suez Canal and declared it nationalized. To recoup his losses he decided to charge dues on all shipping using the canal. A third of this shipping was British- which is why in October Prime Minister Anthony Eden made a dramatic public declaration:” The Egyptian has his thumb on our windpipe!” (1).

On October 14, Nasser made clear his intent of attacking Israel:” I am not solely fighting against Israel itself. My task is to deliver the Arab world from destruction through Israeli intrigue, which has its roots abroad. Our hatred is very strong. There is no sense in talking about peace with Israel. There is not even the smallest place for negotiation.” (2)

With the backing of Britain and France, Israel attacked Egypt on October 29.

In less than 72 hours, more than 100,000 soldiers were mobilized and the air force was operational within 48 hours.  By November 5, the entire Sinai would be captured. That same day British and French paratroops would land near Port Said and amphibious ships drop commandos ashore.

Chim had spent a good part of October in Rome and in Sicily, where he focused on covering religious festivals, such as his story on Good Friday in San Fratello. Just before leaving Hotel Inghilterra in Rome, on October 22, he wrote George Rodger, expressing his desire to talk things over with him before the annual general meeting in November. He felt close to Rodger and privately admitted to him –Rodger would understand because he had once held the same responsibilities- that the burden of presidency had occasionally been heavy:

“My executive functions were more involving in the past year than you could realize from the outside. Also they were more frustrating than you can imagine. But there is no doubt we are coming to the meeting in good, healthy state, without crises, which usually took all our time and attention in past meetings. The problem of new members is less acute now because after the growing up period, having reached a level of organizational importance which makes our global operation possible, we can be extremely selective and slow in accepting new members…The main problem right now is to take a hard look at the problems of all of us as individuals and figure out how our organizational set-up should function in service and support of Magnum members.” (3)

On the last week of October Chim left Rome for the Peloponnesus. He liked to think of himself as a Mediterranean, and, after Italy, Greece was his favorite country. He found every excuse to return time and again. He felt happy there, his armor of self-restraint slowly melting in the sun. The olive groves were silver, and the late autumn light soft and precise at the same time, the perfect setting for a story. Up at Mount Olympus, he photographed the Olympic torch ceremonies.

Then, 48 hours after the fact, he heard the news about the Egyptian–Israeli war.

Chim had called a Magnum meeting in Paris for the last week in November, but now felt that it should be postponed. On October 31 he wrote Trudy Feliu, then Bureau Chief of the Paris office, a long letter mixing the personal and professional, where, more than usual, he made his feelings and ideas about the profession clear:

“I did not hear the news about Israel until four in the afternoon. My little Olympia story that I found as a lovely excuse to come to Greece suddenly meant nothing. It was clear to me as soon as I had heard the news that I was to return to some basic center of operations.…I immediately started arrangements to hire a car and was finally successful. We drove half the night until we reached Athens…The city is full of frustrated correspondents trying to get to Israel. I have run into many old friends as soon as I arrived and we were all plotting together…I would like to be into things […] At first sight I feel we cannot stay out of world events if we are to grow as a group in world photography.” (4)

Chim was adamant: even though he had not worked as a war correspondent since his days in the Spanish Civil War, he wanted to cover the conflict. Everyone knew about his emotional attachment to the new State of Israel, but nevertheless his decision seemed completely out of character, and his friends tried their best to dissuade him: John Morris and Trudy Feliu, Erich Lessing and Pierre Gassman tried in turn: “I was in Gassman’s office Rue de la Comète” Lessing recalls (5) “and I talked to him on the phone. We both said: “Don’t go, it makes no sense”. We tried to talk him out of it but he said: “I have to go, there is no one else [from Magnum] there.”

In Athens, Chim met up by chance with his friend Burt Glinn who had gotten the last available ticket to Tel Aviv: “In Athens where we had a layover I saw Chim.” Glinn recalls, “He said that he had an assignment from Newsweek. (6) We sat in the Athens airport and talked. He was telling me how I had to be careful and follow my own head- and that was the last time I saw him alive.” (7).

In the Sinai, Israeli and Egyptian forces were locked in combat. “Most of us were trying to get onto Israel. Transportation in that direction proved impossible” Frank White, bureau chief of Time-Life, later wrote Trudy Feliu.”We then considered trying to get to Cyprus and from there tying up with the Franco-British invasion force. Dave joined the rest of us in chartering a Greek airline DC3 for Cyprus. We stayed at the Ledra Palace Hotel at Nicosia. The place was a madhouse of frustrated correspondents.” Characteristically, David was cool and reserved, spent his time studying dispatches, evaluating what was going on elsewhere, appraising events…Before dawn on Monday morning, he covered the take-off of French paratroops forces and later that day the return of the transport pilots. On Tuesday, Newsweek’s Ben Bradlee, David and myself negotiated ourselves a flight to Port Said on French Admiral Barjot’s plane. Our accreditation with the French Forces came through that night and we left by plane for Port Said early Wednesday morning.”

The three journalists were not with the original invasion forces. However, thanks to Chim’s diplomatic talents, they had scooped most war correspondents, landing in Port Said on November 7.

Operation Musketeer, intended to topple Nasser- the “Moslem Mussolini” in Allied terms- and control the entire Suez waterway, had started two days before, on November 5, at 4.30am.  It had been met by disorganized and impulsive, but fierce, Egyptian resistance.  Fifteen British amphibious tracked vehicles opened the offensive, making way into the choppy sea while the other landing craft deposited their load at the surf line. Fourteen waterproofed Centurion tanks ground ashore along the canal’s Western breakwater. The Commandos landed on both sides of the casino pier to advance into Said behind the tracked vehicles, while Egyptian snipers harassed them with heavy fire. By early afternoon, the 16^thParachute Brigade’s first and second Battalions and the tank regiment’s A squadron had disembarked into the main harbor. The French, meanwhile, landed with little opposition on the canal’s Eastern breakwater. Aboard the British carriers Theseusand Ocean, the Royal marines of No 45 Commando prepared for the first helicopter-borne assault landing in history. A flight of small helicopters, each with three soldiers aboard, set down in a Port Said sports stadium. Within an hour and a half, 22 choppers had put ashore 415 marines.

As the British fought house-to-house battles, terrifying the civil population and capturing the Egyptian general Moguy, the Egyptian resistance became desperate. In the course of combat, two oil tank farm containers erupted into flames, sending columns of greasy black smoke that lingered for days, blanketing the town. Soon the French paras and a British commando linked up at Raswa Bridge. An Allied Victory was close

But unexpectedly, the war was to be cut short: as the fighting raged in Egypt, Americans began casting their votes for Eisenhower, who was applying intense political and economic pressure on London and Paris to stop fighting and pull out of Egypt. The “cease-fire at midnight” order reached general Stockwell at 7.30 on the evening of November 7. Aghast at being, in Stockwell’s words, “thwarted in the middle of success”, both English and French nevertheless had to comply. They stopped the fighting at 2am that night. Soon after, the first elements of a newly created, blue-helmeted United Nations Emergency Force, soldiers from half a dozen neutral states, reached the Canal Zone, driving Land rovers with white flags. (9)

By then, according to British reports, the Suez troubles were contained within a small area running alongside the canal. But in reality the situation in Port Said was much worse than the British were letting on. ”Port Said was complete chaos,” recalls Ben Bradlee, who then worked for Newsweek.

“People had had nothing to eat for three days and were rioting for food, searching through garbage. The city was in ruins. Electric lines down, street flooded, rubble, dead animals, and sewers broken. There was no police. There must have been thousands of dead and wounded, but the English Generals and the French were both lying about it, giving a figure of one hundred dead.”(10)

Summing up the atmosphere in Port Said, one of the first pictures that Terry Fincher, a 25-year old photographer from Fleet Street on his first assignment abroad, shot at the time was of an Egyptian mother chasing the cart that carried the body of her dead son to a common grave. (1)

On November 9, the correspondents decided to have an impromptu drink at the Casino Palace Hotel to celebrate the cease-fire. By some sort of miracle, there was still electricity. In fact the hotel was the only building still lit in the dark neighborhood. Jean Roy, a young Paris Match photographer with whom Chim, Bradlee and White had teamed up upon arrival, had managed to find cases of beer and bottles of whisky which he had brought in the Egyptian Jeep “requisitioned” a few days earlier.

When Chim and Roy arrived, the crowd was already dense, with a mix of journalists and Army personnel. Among the correspondents Chim spotted Larry Burrows of Life magazine, a veteran of the Korean war; Ben Bradlee of Newsweek; Frank White, the Time-Life bureau chief; Horace Tonge, a British freelancer; Terry Fincher of Keystone Press; Cyril Page, an ITN cameraman, Daniel Camus, also from Paris Match, Paul Bonnecarrère from Jours de France, Hanson Baldwin of the New York Times, Seaghan Maynes of Reuters,Donald Edgar of the Daily Express,and many others, photographers or journalists that he had met over years of assignments. There would have been even more- Chim’s friend Erich Lessing, for instance – if at the same time, on the other side of the world, Russian tanks had not been entering Budapest, crushing the revolution and the country’s hopes for independence.

In a corner Major General Sir Charles Knightly, British Commander of the Franco-British operation forces at Suez, General Sir Hugh Stockwell, and the stern French General André Beaufre, were deep in conversation. Chim was surprised: Beaufre did not have a reputation for partying. In fact, neither he nor Stockwell could have thought that this particular cease-fire, imposed on them by the United States, was a good reason to celebrate. Maybe their best course was to get drunk.

The next morning Chim, White and Bradley took off with Paris Match’s Jean Roy, who was wearing his usual gear: the flamboyant red beret and full camouflage uniform of the French Para, complete with high laced desert boots. As we can observe on a photograph by Roy’s colleague and friend Daniel Camus (11) over the front bumper of the Jeep Roy  had painted over in large white letters Paris Match’s phone number: BAL 00 24. Frank White writes:” Jean Roy…had liberated two Jeeps and a truck, procured gas by signing chits over the name “Pétain, Maréchal de France”. He offered to show us the remains of Port Said. The three of us took him up.”(8)

Roy had been one of the first photographers in Port Said. Together with French colleague Jean Noli, he had given help to the local population, carrying children to the hospital on stretchers, bringing water and milk to families. He was so devoted that he was nicknamed “the angel in the red beret”. (12)

Chim either did not like to drive, or, maybe, simply did not know how. Roy was at the wheel, Chim in the front in a British khaki uniform, Bradley and White in the back. The “angel” had a propensity for driving at breakneck speed, zooming recklessly over potholes and debris.

They first photographed refugees waiting for evacuation on the Port Said-Port Fuad ferry. On a Port Fuad street, a French flag was spread out on the ground to show a friendly area, glistening like a small pond in the sunlight.

The streets! They were a tangle of powdered brick, collapsed electric cables and debris, some of them transformed into lakes by water-main explosions. Jumping out of the jeep into ashes and rubble that crunched under foot, Chim shot through sheets of smoke the scenes of desolation: collapsed houses, dazed families looking for scraps of possessions in the ruins, rubble and more rubble.

Even though the photographers had tied a wet rag under their nose, the awful smell of burnt flesh wafted through. They saw piles of bodies on the street that the families, terrified of the bombings, had not yet reclaimed. Many of those were women and children. Screaming, hungry crowds were looting trucks, breaking into food stores, even looting army stores on the town’s outskirts.

Frank White recalls that Chim was fearless, and took more and more risks, to the point of frightening his colleagues:

“I remember many occasions when we had driven up to particularly nasty food riots, areas where French and British troops had not yet been but where we had been warned that everybody still had arms. Dave would have already made two, three or a dozen pictures of the scene, but in each case he kept shooting in spite of our entreaties to leave. When making pictures, he seemed to be an entirely different man.” (8)

Ben Bradlee, too, fifty years after the events, still vividly remembers the three days he spent with his colleagues, and especially a scene where a desperate and hungry crowd was looting a truck:

“ When I think of Chim” he told me ( 10),  “I think of the flour…Let me set the scene…Chim, standing on our Jeep, had been photographing while the crowd hauled flour sacks from a truck and ripped them apart.”

“Then in the center of town we came upon a flour depot guarded by British soldiers. The crowd broke in. They were carrying huge sacks of flour away, but as soon as they left, others attacked them. The soldiers finally slashed the sacks open and everybody ran, with baskets, pans, any sort of dirty containers they could put their hands on.

It was a scene of flour. Men, women and children were walking around powdered with flour like so many ghosts, up to their ankles in spilled white. I did not see Chim jump very fast out of the Jeep. Then I saw him- he was very small, walking slowly with his camera, chaos all around him. He was totally calm in the middle of chaos. Standing in the middle of chaos, a lone figure, completely calm, clicking away. It was almost as slow motion. He looked at the scene and raised his camera and took these pictures very slowly.

We had spent the previous night at a hotel. We had looked for some place to eat dinner and ended up in the basement of some bombed out house with no electricity. How the hell they produced an amazing meal with a bottle of wine I have no idea. We ate by candlelight, we were thrilled.”

The four photographers went on to El Gamil airport to photograph Egyptian prisoners. The field was still littered with parachutes and containers after the landing of the French parachutists. Some prisoners were kept in a small aircraft garage; others had been assigned to clearance work. They proceeded to the Egyptian General Hospital. The place was pure chaos. The number of the wounded was so high (Egyptian casualties would climb to a total of 1,650 dead and 4,900 wounded by the end of the conflict) that many were lying on the floor, with just a thin blanket under their body.

Bradlee adds:

“After the flour scene” “I don’t remember if it was the same day  – there was a question of knowing how many people had been killed. I had been told that there were a lot of bodies. The French were lying about the body count. We went to the Egyptian general Hospital. On the ground floor, the wounded were lying all over the place. There was no morphine. Chim walked around photographing. An Egyptian female doctor, Dr Elezdeine Hosny, operated with an acetylene torch.

“I don’t remember if Chim went to the basement morgue where a doctor took us- I think not? Well it was absolute horror. The stench was awful- there were hundreds of bodies piled up on top of each other. At the cemeteries later on we saw hundreds more unburied dead.” (10)

Finishing their rounds at the Civil Governor’s Palace, Chim took pictures of British troops in the bombed out palace, sitting in the few formal chairs that remained intact among blown out window frames.

That night Bradley and White left. Bradlee recalls: “White and I had to file our stories… So it is my memory that we flew back on the night of the flour scene, a Thursday or Friday, to Acrotiri, Cyprus, then onto Hyères and Paris”. It is Ben Bradlee who brought back to the Magnum Paris office Chim’s rolls of films with his story on Port Said.

Late in the evening, Jean Roy got a tip from an informer about an exchange of prisoners that would take place at Al Kantara. A little after noon on that Friday, November 10, Chim and Roy started out towards the outpost, about 50 miles away, to witness the exchange. Even though, excited by the prospect of the story, Chim had barely slept, he was feeling better: it was a pleasure to leave behind Port Said, its lingering stench, smoke and smoldering ruins. The Egyptian countryside was untouched by war and lovely: fellahs in white galabeyas walking behind the water buffaloes, deep green fields of alfalfa, small villages made of mud bricks, their plastered walls decorated with stories of pilgrimages to the Mecca, tame pigeons cooing on the roofs, reminding Chim of his Arturostory in Venice.

El Kantara was the last post before the Egyptian fighting lines. The narrow road they were driving on was parallel to the canal but a little higher. From the Jeep they could see the brownish-green waters flowing between two steep banks.

They stopped at the last outpost of French soldiers. “Be careful,” the legionnairessaid. “With the other Egyptian soldiers we drank coffee and smoked cigarettes, but those are not the same as before. With them we have no contact and they are more nervous.”(13)

On Chim and Roy’s last moments, the accounts diverge.

Jean-Pierre Biot, an ex-Para present at Suez, now a consultant to Paris Match, remembers it like this:

“The Egyptians did a summons shooting. The Jeep stopped. Roy and Chim waved a white shirt several times. The Egyptians did not react. Roy and Chim continued going forward and when they were at 50 meters the Egyptians shot at the Jeep that toppled over in the canal.”(13)

Another witness, a British lieutenant, was quoted as saying:” We tried to stop them but they were driving hell-for-leather and they crashed right by us. Then we heard shots from the Egyptian side and the two men did not come back.”(14) Some other British soldiers followed the scene with binoculars and saw the Jeep zigzag and topple into the canal. When the Jeep was retrieved from the Sweetwater canal, the Jeep’s windshield had imploded from the bullets impacts.

Three days after the cease-fire, Chim and Jean Roy were dead.

But recently a witness came forward from the Egyptian side, and the story he has to tell is quite different. According to him, in one of war’s tragic mistakes, the British forces shot Chim and Jean Roy.

Dr Yahia Al Shaer (15) a student at the time- he and his older brother were part of the Underground Freedom Fighters- had  met Chim in Port Said and was so impressed by his personality that he has since made thorough inquiries on his death. According to him, two different versions of Chim’s death were circulated immediately. He heard them “ first on the Egyptian News, then the contrary story on the British Broadcasting from Cyprus”.

According to Al Shaer, it would have been impossible for the photographers to have been shot by Egyptian soldiers because there were no Egyptian positions or military personnel in the area where Chim and Roy were traveling.  Al Shaer writes:

“The Western side, between Manzalah Lake and the Sweetwater Canal was fully occupied by the Allied units. The Eastern side, including the Canal Way, a very narrow driveway along the Suez Canal itself, was under the control of the French Para and tanks, the Légion Etrangère, under the command of Colonel Joubert and General Giles.”

He retraced Chim and Roy’s itinerary: they must have passed through Mohammed Ali Street, then El Moahda road, leading to the Raswa Bridge area, the only bridge left to connect the Suez Canal with the Internal Basin, leading to the Suez Canal Road, “known as the Pilots’ Way, because the Suez Canal Company had constructed it along the canal for its Ships Pilots Skippers, who took care of guiding the passing ships through the Canal. The road passes by the Sweetwater Preparation and Pumping Station, the villa of the Station director, and the basins for cleaning and preparing the drinking water.”

Al Shaer stresses that:

“They were driving an Egyptian Jeep, and the Egyptian Saaka, a Military Unit that was fighting hard against the French in Raswa, do have the same red color beret [than Roy was wearing]…. The speed with which Chim was driving drew the attention of the Brits… an empty road, a speedy Jeep, enemies in the back and maybe around somewhere, suspicion, all are inconvenient error factors…He did not hear the “Halt!” shouting due to the loud noise of the motor…he was shot with a salve of 0,303 shots fired by a Bren gun and Lee-Enfield rifle directed at the Jeep…He lost control and fell in the Sweet Water canal. It took time for the British to come across the “tondra”- muddy and salty ground west of the Sweetwater canal- to cross it, to try to rescue them…but that took a longer time…and when they found out which fatal mistake they have done…they could not believe their eyes.”

So, what are we to believe? The British or the Egyptian version?  Fifty years have passed, and Chim’s untimely death must probably remain a mystery:  there is little chance to solve it unless, very improbably, the decision is made to perform an autopsy to find out which kind of bullets riddled his body.

The rest of the story is told by Jean-Pierre Biot:

“That day, I was on duty for twenty-four hours. My captain got the order of getting the bodies of the two men that had been shot near the canal. We went there in the afternoon. I took a group of armed men with me and two 4 x 4… Along the canal we passed United Nations Observers. We brought the bodies back…” (13)

In the Sweetwater canal’s shallow waters, the top of the Jeep had been visible. The two bullet-ridden bodies were slumped in the seats. Says Bradlee:” If White and I had stayed on with Chim and Roy, we would have been in that Jeep.” (10)

France-Soircorrespondent wrote in his dispatch:

“With all the French and English correspondents present, a moving ceremony took place yesterday afternoon in Port Fuad, dedicated to the memory of our two comrades Jean Roy and David Seymour whose bodies were finally given back by the Egyptians yesterday morning at the El-Gamil cemetery. Remission was given at afternoon’s send to Jean Roy and David Seymour in the presence of Generals Beaufre and Stockwell, close to the shore where the French commandos disembarked ten days ago.  Two coffins covered with the national flags, two sections of Para and Marine commandos presenting arms, the psalmodies of the Catholic and Jewish chaplains carried by the breeze in front of us, this knoll of ocher earth from which the” To the Dead” trumpet call was rising, further still this surging sea where warships were silhouetted, such was the setting where we said goodbye to our two comrades. Last night we took turns in mounting guard near the coffins. On special request of the United States consulate in Port Said, the embalmed body of David Seymour will be shipped to the United States. That of Jean Roy will be brought back to France on a military carrier.”(16)

The words of Rabbi Khalifa and Father Delarue’s homily did not reach us. Chim’s body was flown through Nicosia, Cyprus, to New York, where he was buried at Cedar Park on November 26, after a ceremony at Riverside Chapel conducted by Rabbi Louis J. Newman, where members of his family and colleagues took turn to speak and his brother-in-law, Samuel Shneiderman, said Kaddish.

Letters and telegrams poured in from all over the world: it seemed as if everyone had loved Chim, even those with whom he had been only in fleeting contact. Articles about his death appeared in the press all over the world, many of them featuring his most famous photographs of the Civil War or the Children.

In Paris Henri Cartier-Bresson, summing the feelings of many who saw Chim as a gentle and sensitive person, not possessing the habitual personality of a war photographer, said that in a way he could understand Capa’s death at war- everyone almost expected it- but that Chim’s violent death was out of character.

But then again, it was Chim alone who had decided to go on his dangerous assignment. “ He kept saying: ‘This is a great story’ Frank White recalls. I got the impression that he felt this made him somehow impervious to risk”.

Behind the large glasses, the round face where dreamy eyes belied sensuous lips, in life as in death, a nugget of mystery will remain. Like a stone containing a secret landscape, it encloses the emotional reasons that impelled Chim to leave the safety and beauty of Olympus and board a flight to Egypt on that day of November 1956.

“ I would like to be into things” he had written in his last letter to Magnum. In these words we may read wistfulness, but also a passionate desire to belong to the select club of war photographers that his association with Jean Roy, physically and emotionally his opposite, may well symbolize.  The desire to belong came from a man maybe wary of a distance he felt between the world and himself, the distance of subtlety, ambiguity even, reflection, irony and wisdom for which he and his photography were known and admired, but that ultimately may have become to him a burden he wanted to shed in action.

• Terry Fincher and Tony Lynch “The Fincher Files”, Quartet Books, London, 1981. With thanks to Jimmy Fox for leading me to Fincher.
• “The Suez War of 1956”, in The Jewish Virtual Library.
• Letter to George Rodger, October 22, 1956. Rodger archive, Smarden, Kent. With thanks to Jinx Rodger for her communication.
• Letter from Chim to Trudy Feliu, October 31, 1956. The John G.Morris archive, University of Chicago. With thanks to John Morris.
• Interview with Erich and Traudl Lessing, New York, June 20, 2005.
• Probably not- since Bradlee was then writing for Newsweek.
• Interview with Burt Glinn, New York, May 12, 2005.
• Letter from Frank White to Trudy Feliu, November 14, 1956. The Rodger archive, Smarden. Kent.
• “Operation Musketeer: Duel for the Suez Canal”, by Wilfred P.Deac, in Military History, April 200x
• Interview with Ben Bradlee, Washington D.C., November 9, 2005.
• Paris MatchArchives, Levallois-Perret, France, negative# OR 56/3.
• Paris Match#398, November 24, 1956.
• Phone interview with Jean-Pierre Biot, April 14, 2005.
• From John Morris archive (source not found).
• Correspondence with Dr Yahia Al Shaer, December 20,2005, January 11, 2006 and January 13, 2006.
• France-Soirdispatch, November 15, 1956.