UK ‘an hour away from war’: the battle for the airport

Not only did it involve the worst friendly-fire incident of the whole conflict, not only did it prompt an unusually bold UN initiative which continues to this day – but it also came very close to precipitating a wider war between Britain and Turkey.

“Apart from the lunacy at Suez, that was probably the nearest that Britain came to war with another nation since 1945,” wrote then-prime minister Harold Wilson in his 1979 book Final Term: The Labour Government 1974-1976. Asked about that statement on BBC Radio (The World This Weekend, 14/10/79), Wilson estimated that the UK came “within an hour of war”.

Nicosia’s ghost airport, exclusive video

That was during the endgame, the ‘diplomatic battle’ waged, behind the scenes, from July 23 to 25. The friendly-fire incident, on the other hand, came near the beginning of the skirmish.

On the night of July 21, a battalion of Greek commandos from the A’ Raider Squadron were flown to Cyprus in an airlift operation. On arrival at Nicosia airport, however, the planes were hit with anti-aircraft fire by the National Guard, who mistook them for a Turkish assault. One plane (the ‘Niki 4’) was downed, two others had to make emergency landings. Thirty-three men were killed altogether.

In between the ‘Niki’ fiasco and the perilous endgame came two days of waiting and wandering – an almost dreamlike fugue state vividly recalled by Nicos Chrysostomou, a garrulous 70-year-old who was 20 at the time.

Chrysostomou was an anti-aircraft gunner (not one of those who’d shot at the Greek planes). He also had access to a civilian car, so he did a lot of moving around on July 22-23 – and in fact the airport itself was, in many ways, the eye of the storm, the area around being more unstable as the Turks positioned themselves for a frontal assault.  

Chrysostomou had arrived with five other soldiers on July 20, bringing ammunition. They found their officer huddled under a table. Everyone was expecting bombs to fall at any moment – and indeed, just as they started to unload, the first planes appeared, flying so low their pilots were visible in the cockpits.

How does one feel in the middle of an airstrike? Oddly unfazed, it seems. “The whole experience was so unreal,” he recalls in the Nicosia office where he works as an educational consultant, “that we didn’t react – most of us, at least – with any fear. We just froze.”

On the afternoon of the 22nd, despite a ceasefire having ostensibly been agreed, the runway and the whole surrounding area were bombed again, “using bombs, rockets, cannon and napalm” according to a 2004 book called A Business of Some Heat: The United Nations Force in Cyprus Before and During the 1974 Turkish Invasion by Brigadier Francis Henn, Unficyp’s Chief of Staff at the time.

That night – a moonless night; “I remember that detail” – Chrysostomou recalls the road to Paliometocho packed with people who were fleeing the bombs, with bicycles and donkeys amid the throng.

He spent most of the night driving around, having been instructed by his CO to help a Greek officer whose family had come from Greece the week before and somehow disappeared. (The family were found, to much rejoicing, with a neighbour in Paliometocho.) It was 2am, but the village kafenio still had some customers. No-one could sleep. The atmosphere was electric.

Again and again, what emerges from these recollections is the chaos and disarray of wartime. Chrysostomou had no specific orders to stay at the airport (he should probably have been at the air force base in Lakatamia), but no-one was really keeping track. Death was a kind of background hum, not delivered – at that point – in any structured way but more the consequence of trigger-happy men reacting badly to any uncertainty, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time.   

At one point, the officer looking for his family had an out-of-nowhere panic attack, so they turned the car around. It may have been a premonition. An hour later, at the same exact spot, two of Chrysostomou’s comrades – having commandeered a Cyprus Airways car and driven into town to see their wives – were shot dead by enemy troops.  

Further down, near where the University of Nicosia is now, the car was flagged down by a man in an unfamiliar uniform. “At first, I thought about running him over,” admits Chrysostomou; he stepped on the gas, but the others protested. He recalls rolling down his window to show ID, not knowing if the man was a Turk who would put a bullet in his head. Fortunately, he turned out to be one of the Greek commandos.

The battle itself, the actual assault on the airport – which took place in the late morning of July 23 – was almost an anti-climax, and indeed Chrysostomou makes it clear that he wasn’t in the thick of the action, holed up further down the runway with the anti-aircraft guns.

“Those who saved the airport were the commandos of the A’ Raider Squadron,” he says, praising them as soldiers “who were more ready to die for [our side] than I was”. He pauses, as if realising how it must sound: “I was ready too, in theory – but my whole relationship to what was going on was a bit superficial, because it still felt like I was watching a bad movie”.

The Greek Cypriot side sounds a bit disorganised – but the Turks, too, seem to have laboured under some confusion, especially when it came to the attack itself. Soldiers advanced into open ground, seemingly not caring that the enemy could use the airport buildings for cover. They immediately came under fire from three sides, and were swiftly mown down.

“There wasn’t a single one left,” recalls Corinth-born Vasilis Saisanas, one of the Greek commandos at the time. (He later returned to Cyprus to live, and is now 70 years old and working as a security guard.) 

Indeed, the assault was so reckless it makes one wonder if the Turkish commanders thought they wouldn’t encounter much resistance – and in fact Saisanas confirms as much.

“The Turks didn’t know we were there,” he told the Cyprus Mail, explaining that the commandos had been bussed to a camp near Metochi Kykkou after their difficult landing, and only deployed to the airport on the morning of the 23rd. It still seems extraordinary that Turkish intelligence didn’t monitor their movements enough to know who was there, but everything seems to become quite haphazard in wartime.     

The failed assault on July 23 wouldn’t have been the end of it, of course. The airport was too valuable a prize to be abandoned – but this was where the big guns intervened, starting with Prem Chand, the Indian commander of the UN force, who took the bold step of declaring that Unficyp would be taking over the airport to prevent further bloodshed, and that it was henceforth “a United Nations internationally protected area”.

The idea wasn’t wholly unprecedented (the UN had done something similar in the Congo in 1960), but still very risky – and, though both sides reluctantly agreed, it soon became clear that there was discord in the Turkish camp. Reports filtered through of the Turks’ intention to seize the airport at the earliest opportunity. Radio Ankara reported, falsely but ominously, that it was already in Turkish hands.

“Alarm bells were now ringing in New York, Washington, London and Brussels with the realisation that a fight between the Turks and the UN Force was looming perilously close,” writes Henn in his book.

“There was alarm in London as realisation grew of the vulnerability of British troops at the airport… The prospect of British (and other) UN troops coming under Turkish air attack galvanised Whitehall.”  

This was the endgame, a potential conflagration. On July 24, the Turkish side threatened to attack Unficyp unless it had vacated the airport by morning.

Both Wilson and foreign secretary James Callaghan spoke on the phone with Turkish prime minister Bülent Ecevit, making clear that Britain would respond to any attack. Twelve RAF Phantoms were ordered to be deployed to Akrotiri. Nato secretary-general Joseph Luns also sent Turkey a veiled warning, urging caution.

In the early morning of July 25, Turkey finally climbed down – which of course is no surprise to anyone in 2024, since the airport remains a UN protected area to this day.

The five days of the Nicosia airport battle are a kind of historical footnote, a war averted at the last minute. For those who fought in the invasion like Nicos Chrysostomou, though, they remain both vivid and blurry, a jumble of often contradictory events that resist any kind of logic.

“All these things we’re talking about…” he muses, 50 years later. “I have the image in my head, but I can’t describe what I felt at that moment.

“I’m sure I don’t remember being scared… But then, if I wasn’t scared, what was I feeling? I don’t know.”