Our Letter of the Month is sponsored by Pen & Sword Books
‘Britain at War’ Magazine, PO Box 100, Stamford, Lincolnshire, PE9 1NA | contact@britainatwar.com
LETTER OF THE MONTH
‘Omani’ Wessex
Dear Editor,
I noted in the brief review of unsung RAF workhorse the Westland Wessex mention of its use by the Oman air force. The Wessex HC.2 did indeed fly in the colours of what was then the Sultan of Oman’s Air Force (SOAF), but the facts are more nuanced.
From the mid-1960s, there had been an increasing communist supported insurgency in the southern Omani province of Dhofar. From the early 1970s SOAF had been covertly supported by British forces, mainly on secondment, but also with elements of the SAS, Royal Engineers etc. The RAF maintained two stations at Masirah, and Salalah, the latter being the main airfield in Dhofar. To disrupt the PFLOAG [Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf] supply lines through the Dhofar mountains, a series of defensive lines were pushed north from the coast up through the jebel and deep into the desert. One was the ‘Hornbeam’ line that began at Mughsayl just west of Salalah that ran for 33 miles constructed of barbed wire and mines. Because of the paucity…
