Rewriting history? Admiral Lord Mountbatten's efforts to distance himself from the 1956 Suez crisis

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Description/Abstract

The First Sea Lord's offer to resign as an Anglo-French taskforce sailed to seize the Suez Canal in November 1956 became known following his retirement in 1965. Mountbatten oversaw naval preparations with consummate professionalism, although his praise for British forces' seizure of Port Said was tempered by admiration of the French, and not shared by all Combined Operations veterans. David Astor of the Observer actually opposed the invasion, and was passed information by a dissenting Mountbatten. An ageing Mountbatten's criticism of British–French–Israeli collusion led to his advancing an alternative version of events highly favourable to himself, which protagonists such as Lord Hailsham publicly contested.