In the summer of 1967, 14 ships embarked on a northward passage along the Suez Canal. Passage of the canal usually takes between eleven and sixteen hours at the low speed of eight knots (fifteen kilometers per hour), but it would be over eight years before these ships finally emerged.

Midway through their journey, Israel launched a preemptive strike on Egypt’s tanks that were massing in the desert near the Israeli border, successfully taking over the Sinai up to the canal itself. To prevent its use by Israel, Egypt’s President Gamal Abdul Nasser blockaded both ends of the Suez Canal, trapping those ships in the middle. Forced to anchor in the Great Bitter Lake (known in Islam as the lake in which the Pharoah Merneptah died while following the Children of Israel out of Egypt) until the conflict was resolved, the ships gathered such a quantity of desert dust that they became known as the Yellow Fleet.

In October of 1967, the crews and officers of the ships formed an organization in order to provide mutual support. As Wikipedia explains:

In the time to come, the crew members regularly met on board their ships, organised social events, founded a yachting club and held the “Bitter Lake Olympic Games” to complement the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.

Members of the Yellow Fleet created their own unofficial postage stamps, and as crewmembers were permitted to return home and as those remaining formed groups in order to more easily maintain the ships, they grouped their postage stamps accordingly.

In spring of 1975 the Suez Canal was opened once again to international transport, and in May the German ships Münsterland and Nordwind finally returned home (the only ships to do so under their own power), to the cheers of over 30,000 spectators, and now the stamps made by the crew of the Yellow Fleet are tremendously valuable.

Of the many results of war throughout history, I would bet that the time these sailors spent on the Great Bitter Lake is among the most whimsical, and least bitter.

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