Former Intelligence Officer, Nick Van Der Bijl, tells of a deadly ambush as British troops went about their routine near the end of a prolonged and bloody insurgency, despite their impending withdrawal.
AMBUSH
In 2013, Colonel Nicholas Beard, a former officer of the Royal Corps of Transport (RCT), wrote a letter to The Times in which he recalled events in Aden on 20 June 1967, events which had cost the lives of 23 British soldiers in three incidents. He wrote: “The BBC World Service had announced… due to an unfortunate mistake, [that] Arab troops opened ire on British attacking their camp. The idea it was due to their thinking we were attacking them that resulted in the ambush, which seems to have been accepted by people, I ind hard to understand.”
Aden had been a British colony since 1839. As Great Britain withdrew from its Empire after theSecond World War, the Federation of South Arabia was formed in April 1962 from the 15 South Yemen Protectorates and the merger, in January, 1963, with the Crown Colony of Aden and the Upper Aulaqi tribe Sultanate. But tension between the National Liberation Front (NLF) and the Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen (FLOSY) in Aden and the Radfan escalat…
