Will the British Army’s Iraqi interpreters be left to swing when we withdraw from Basra?

Those deemed to have collaborated with an occupying power are invariably at the mercy of summary justice when the occupiers leave. This was the case for America’s South Vietnamese helpers when the Vietcong closed in. Their desperate attempts to scale the US Embassy gates and clamber on board the last helicopters out of Saigon in 1975 were among the most harrowing images of the Vietnam War.

There were similar scenes at the fall of Yorktown in 1781. Imminent defeat in the American War of Independence was not a total disaster for the 7,000 British soldiers preparing to lay down their weapons. After a period in captivity, they had the prospect of returning home to Britain. But for those Americans who had loyally fought with them, it was an unmitigated catastrophe. They faced being lynched.

Although George Washington allowed his British opponent, Lord Cornwallis, honourable surrender terms at Yorktown, he refused to extend the same generosity to the American Loyalists in the defeated garrison. While the British troops were accorded prisoner-of-war status, the Loyalists were to be treated as criminals who had committed terrorist acts.

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Multimedia

• Video: the online war

• Pictures: Life in Iraq

Background

• Story of brothers who worked for the British

• I’ve no regrets, says interpreter

• What’s Arabic for ‘we’ll stand by you’?

• Abandoned: the 91 Iraqis who risked all

Unable to improve on the surrender terms, Cornwallis did make an effort to spirit away many of the Loyalists on the naval sloop, the Bonetta. Many, however, were left to their fate. As the ship set sail, these Loyalists tried to row out to it, but the Bonetta did not wait to pick them up. Only 14 made it.

Historians still debate how many colonists backed the British. Estimates range from one fifth to one third of the population of less than three million. At any rate, about 100,000 fled the new United States, which had stripped them of their property and their legal rights.

When the states’ legislatures refused to compensate them, Westminster worried about the cost of assisting so large a number of émigré Loyalists. It was Lord North, the former Prime Minister usually labelled with having “lost America”, who sprang to their defence. “They have exposed their lives, endured an age of hardships, deserted their interests, forfeited their possessions, lost their connections and ruined their families in our cause,” he reminded Parliament. “Never was the honour, the principles, the policy of a nation, so grossly abused as in our desertion of those men, who are now exposed to every punishment that such desertion and poverty can inflict, because they were not rebels.”

Yet in truth they were now a political embarrassment, standing in the way of improving relations with the new Republic. As one Loyalist rued: “Tis an honour to serve the bravest of nations/ And be left to be hanged in their capitulations.”

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