Tiny Iceland beat the Royal Navy in every round of the Cod Wars
Iceland had a handful of patrol boats and one flying boat. Britain sent dozens of warships to guard its trawlers. Yet each clash over fishing grounds between 1958 and 1976 ended in Iceland's favour, largely because Reykjavík could threaten to leave NATO and close a vital Cold War submarine chokepoint.
English boats had fished off Iceland since the end of the fourteenth century, and friction started almost at once. In 1414 the Danish king, who ruled Iceland, banned Icelandic trade with England and complained to Henry V about overfishing. Steam trawlers later extended the reach of British fleets, and between the world wars their catches off Iceland were more than double those of all their other distant grounds combined. When a Danish gunboat tried to arrest the Grimsby trawler Caspian in 1899, the crew fled under fire while their skipper was left behind, tied to the gunboat's mast.
The modern quarrel began in 1952, when Iceland widened its limit from 3 to 4 nautical miles. Britain answered with a ban on Icelandic fish landings, but the Soviet Union stepped in to buy the catch, and the United States, worried about Soviet influence, did the same. In 1958 Iceland jumped to 12 miles and Britain escorted its trawlers with the Royal Navy. By February 1960, 53 British warships had taken part. The British ambassador reportedly answered protesters outside his embassy by playing bagpipe music on a gramophone.
Later rounds turned physical. Icelandic coast guard vessels cut trawl nets with long hawsers, and ships on both sides rammed each other. Remarkably, only one death was confirmed: an Icelandic engineer killed by accident in 1973 while repairing damage after a collision with a British frigate.
A NATO-brokered deal in 1976 accepted a 200-mile Icelandic fishery zone, ending more than 500 years of unrestricted British fishing there and costing British fishing towns thousands of jobs. Since 1982 the UN law of the sea has made a 200-mile exclusive economic zone the global norm.
Source: Cod Wars
