This is a true story. It is drawn primarily from the documents of the time, official and private. Some papers had remained classified for as long as seven decades. I have also consulted, carefully, even warily, the later memories of people who played a part, and have benefited from the research of many other historians. If a conversation appears here, it was recorded by someone who took part; if the temperature on a certain morning appears, it was written down by someone who suffered the heat or cold. To avoid breaking the flow of the story, the attributions and some technical information about codebreaking appear in the notes.
One human lifetime ago, the battle for the Middle East was one of the critical fronts of World War II. Much of what determined the outcome of that battle, and therefore of the war as a whole, remained secret. Quickly shaped legends turned into accepted memory. Today even that misleading memory is fading. Yet what happened then shaped the Middle East, and continues to shape it today.
Stories have lessons. But lessons are best told after the story, not before. Thus have I done.
Daniel, to my great sorrow, is no longer here to read this. Still I thank him for sending me on the journey.
CURTAIN RISING: LAST TRAIN FROM CAIRO
Early Summer, 1942. Cairo.
THE WORLD AS everyone knew it was coming to an end.
In the vast desert west of the Nile, the Eighth Army of the British Empire was in full flight from the German and Italian forces commanded by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.
SMOKE ROSE FROM the grand British embassy facing the Nile. Smoke rose a few hundred yards down the river from the mansions of Garden City that war had transformed into British General Headquarters Middle East. In the Cairo heat, privates fed bonfires with all the paper that must not fall into enemy hands—cables from London, lists of arms, reports radioed in cipher from the battlefield, maps, and codebooks. The flames were too hot, the updraft too strong, and half-burnt secrets floated out over the city.
Smoke rose from the office of the Special Operations Executive, the secret undisciplined unit that backed partisans throughout the occupied Balkans and now was trying to erase its chaotic records. At Royal Air Force headquarters, too many papers were dumped too quickly down a chute to an incinerator. Some wafted whole over the fence and into the streets, which were packed with dusty trucks pouring in from the desert carrying exhausted soldiers, and with convoys evacuating rear units east to Palestine, and with the cars of wealthy Alexandrians who’d fled to Cairo and the cars of rich Cairenes trying to get through the traffic to flee south or east. Everyone honked, as if the horn were the gas pedal.1
The pillars of smoke stood over the city and gave no guidance to the exodus.
ON THE MORNING of her nineteenth birthday, June Watkins emerged from the Metropole Hotel in downtown Cairo. That’s where the Royal Air Force had tucked its cipher office. Around a long table, officers of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force worked as fast as they possibly could, turning words into opaque groups of numbers to be sent out in Morse code by radio, or translating equally opaque numbers from field units back into words. In the summer, the room was too hot, even at night, even if you were wearing a thin cotton tropical uniform. Watkins’s commander was “quite old,” meaning at least twenty-seven, and had once deciphered a list of pilots who’d been shot down. It was from the squadron in which the commander’s boyfriend served. His name was on it. The commander passed on the list and said nothing. No one ever gets a medal for that kind of heroism.2
Watkins’s father had wired her £20 for her birthday, a fortune, two months’ salary for a woman officer, and she headed for the bank to see if it had arrived. The lines outside stretched for blocks.3 When she got inside the grand marble-walled lobby, she found it packed with Egyptian businessmen trying to withdraw their money.
By sheer chance, a large South African captain, an old friend, recognized her and helped her shove through the bedlam to the counter. The man in front of her ranted steadily in French through the grating at the clerk who was counting out his money. The banks had run short of cash and were handing out worn banknotes while waiting for the government map department to improvise printing an emergency supply.4 The man grabbed his notes, accidentally tore some, and started weeping as he cursed the clerk. Calmly, the clerk got Watkins her money. The captain plowed back out through the crowd for her.
Outside they met another South African officer. “What are you still doing here?” he demanded. Women soldiers were supposed to be gone. Five hundred South African women had already been evacuated up the Nile to Aswan.5 Watkins was billeted in the Cairo YWCA hostel, a palace with marble floors outfitted with iron camp beds for soldiers—but nearly all the women were gone.
Her team would remain till headquarters pulled out, she said. “And I want to stay,” she added. “I can look after myself.” She tapped the bulge of a pistol under her shirt. She did not tell him that the same week, on the roof of the Metropole, the women of the cipher room had received a lesson in using pistols.
Among other things, they learned how to shoot themselves. Women who knew the ciphers were not to fall into enemy hands.
Her friend the South African captain took her to Groppi’s café, a favorite among British officers. They wanted to drink iced coffee in the garden but were told it was closed, so they sat inside. From the window of the ladies’ room, Watkins looked into the garden. The restaurant staff was out there, painting welcome signs in German for Rommel’s officers.
At stores that sold suitcases, as at the banks, crowds of people pushed to get in.6
OUTSIDE CAIRO’S TRAIN station stood the granite colossus called Egypt’s Awakening—a sleek, angular sphinx rising on his outstretched forelegs, facing east toward the dawn, next to the taller figure of a woman lifting a veil from her face. The woman was inspired by Egyptian feminist Huda Shaarawi, who in 1923 had returned from a women’s conference and demonstratively removed her veil in the train station.7 The station itself, studded with arches and intricate carved arabesques, was modeled on the mosques of Cairo’s medieval Mamluk sultans.8 Together, the sculpture and the railway hall formed a temple to Egypt, its future, its incomplete independence.
Inside, the god of chaos ruled. Trains from Alexandria disgorged anxious mothers and fathers dragging suitcases and children. They had to shove their way out through the wave of soldiers and families from Cairo trying to board trains headed south or east. South lay Aswan in Upper Egypt and, much further, Khartoum in Sudan. East lay the port of Suez, for the fortunate who had managed to book passage to Eritrea, Kenya, or South Africa.9 Or you could gamble on safety in Ismalia, on the Canal. Even if the Eighth Army lost the Nile, surely it would hold the Canal.
If that seemed a poor wager, there was the all-night express to Jerusalem.
For Palestine, you needed the right papers. Halfway across the Sinai, police boarded the train to check everyone.10 The British consulate, war correspondent Alan Moorehead found, was “besieged with people seeking visas to Palestine.”
The British ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson, reported to London that “there has been a panic among the Jews, who are naturally apprehensive of their fate in the event of a successful Axis invasion.”11
Jews taking refuge in Palestine, however, might end up staying. This was a risk that British authorities did not want to take. Since 1939 British policy had been to allow very little Jewish immigration, in the hope of keeping Palestine’s Arabs from supporting the Axis. “If we must offend one side, let us offend the Jews rather than the Arabs,” Neville Chamberlain had declared while he was still prime minister.12 For July, August, and September 1942, the government of Mandatory Palestine allocated just nine hundred permits for Jews to immigrate. A permit, or “certificate,” could cover a whole family, but most were reserved for Polish Jewish refugees who had made it through the Soviet Union to Tehran.13
“The number of Egyptian Jews who desire… visas for Turkey is increasing every day. As at present, no arrangements have been made for these, pleas
e let me know what should be done,” the head of the Turkish legation in Cairo cabled the Foreign Ministry in Ankara.
The answer came three days later. Say no, it said.14
At General Headquarters, the British war cabinet’s Cairo representative, Minister of State Richard Casey, met with military commanders. There were people who had to be evacuated, they decided—technicians whose expertise was too valuable to lose, “anti-Fascist Italians and anti-Nazi Germans… Egyptians whose lives would be in danger on account of their pro-British attitude… compromised persons, agents.” The British embassy compiled the lists. Over three nights, sixteen hundred people boarded trains for Jerusalem.15
By one account, Mandatory officials in Jerusalem vetoed bringing the hundred or so German and Italian Jews on the lists from Cairo; the crisis in Egypt was no reason to change policy. A defiant captain in Cairo began ferrying them across the Sinai in his own car. The Jerusalem bureaucrats demanded to send them back. An Italian Jew tried to kill himself rather than return to Cairo. At last, the Jews were allowed temporary refuge, as long as they promised not to stay permanently.16
“The situation is very serious,” the Persian ambassador to Egypt cabled Tehran. “Alexandria is in danger.” The diplomats of the Albanian, Yugoslavian, and Czech governments-in-exile left for Palestine. Air raid sirens sounded every night in Cairo, but no bombs fell. The Saudi ambassador stayed in Cairo. King Abdulaziz ordered him to report daily on “the truth about conditions… Be diligent about this.”17
The messages were sent in the secret codes of their nations so that they could be read only by the people for whom they were intended in scattered capitals. At an unmarked government building on Berkeley Street in central London, men and women broke the codes, translated the messages, printed them on paper marked “most secret” in red letters, and sent them to a tiny elite list of addressees.
The SOE, the Special Operations Executive, moved its Middle East headquarters to Jerusalem, despite a cable from London warning that Palestine “may also be occupied by the enemy.” The SOE’s work included preparing for what to do if a country was overrun. This meant destroying things that could help the enemy and training locals to act as partisans. As late as April 1942, an order from the main office had said to give a “post-occupational” plan for Egypt low priority. Concentrate on Turkey, Iraq, Persia, Syria, and Palestine, it said. If the Nazis invaded the Middle East, they’d come from the north through Turkey, or from the sea, or from the air as they had come in Crete. In April, it had seemed that Egypt wasn’t in immediate danger. Everything had changed too quickly.
Before pulling out, the SOE left instructions for how to set fire to stores of cotton, Egypt’s prime export. “The stocks of cotton in Egypt… amount to two years’ supply for the Axis,” the memo said, and the Axis was short on textiles.18
“WOUNDED ARE POURING into Palestine because the hospitals in Egypt are overflowing,” Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly, recorded in her diary. Hermione’s title came from her husband, Daniel Knox, Earl of Ranfurly, who had the rank of lieutenant and the present status of prisoner of war in Italy. Her position as assistant private secretary to Sir Harold MacMichael, the high commissioner of Palestine, resulted from following Daniel to the Middle East when war broke out and staying on in hell-bent defiance of every effort of the British high command to get her back to England.
Now she left the office to spend four hours every day in the hospital wards, “washing soldiers, making beds and emptying things. Today I washed four heads which were full of sand.” The wounded men were constantly joking, she wrote. “Only when they ask me to help them to write home do I glimpse their real misery: some of them are so afraid their families will not want them back now they are changed.”
Evacuees from Cairo and Alexandria kept arriving in Jerusalem, by train and in caravans of cars. Many were second-time refugees—Greeks, Czechs, Poles, Belgians, and Serbs who’d fled the Nazi conquest of their own countries and settled in Egypt. The YMCA in Jerusalem filled up, then the hotels and pensions, then apartments in the city and in Bethlehem and the summer hilltop resort town of Ramallah. “People are sleeping on the floors in the passages of the King David Hotel,” Ranfurly recorded. Convents in Bethlehem took in two thousand of them.
In the evening, Ranfurly went to farewell parties for men leaving for the front. The battle was “now only 400 miles away,” she wrote. Rommel’s tanks had covered nearly that distance in the last week.
General Henry Maitland Wilson, commander of the Ninth Army, which held Syria and Palestine, passed through Jerusalem. Wilson, known to all as “Jumbo,” was coming from the Sinai Desert, where he “was preparing a line… in case the Germans break through” in Egypt. In Syria and Lebanon, his army had defensive positions facing north, against invasion via Turkey. Wilson ordered them turned southward, in case the Germans took Palestine.19
Tel Aviv’s buses, several hundred of them, were outfitted with stretchers strapped to the roofs. By quickly removing the seats, the buses could be transformed into ambulances. The Palestine government issued a decree “empowering it to take over control of any enterprise in the country… for the efficient prosecution of the war.” The chief rabbis announced that to help the war effort, religious Jews could put aside the normally strict prohibition against working on the Sabbath. Factories producing military supplies upped employees’ workweek to sixty-four hours. “The question of whether the Middle East is reaching its ‘zero month’”—like the zero hour—“is on the lips of every resident of Palestine,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported.20
A few days earlier, the agency had carried an item from London. “More than 700,000 Polish Jews—a third of the entire Jewish population—have been massacred in Poland since last summer,” it said, citing a report “received here… through underground channels” by a Jewish member of the Polish government-in-exile, Samuel Zygelbaum. “In the city of Lodz alone 35,000 Jews were executed in gas chambers carried in trucks,” it said. Elsewhere Jews were loaded onto sealed trains headed for an “unknown destination.”21
Hebrew newspapers in Palestine published the story—and doubted it, as they had earlier reports of atrocities in particular towns. “These items,” said the editorial in the Tel Aviv daily Hatzofeh after the Zygelbaum report, “come as rumors taken from the air, passed from one informant to another, one writer to another.” News agencies should behave more responsibly, the editorial said. Such stories were likely to lead to despair or to apathy. The Nazis were certainly murdering Jews, but these numbers defied belief.22
DOWNTOWN CAIRO WAS put under curfew from 8:00 at night to 7:00 in the morning. Officers were told to carry their pistols at all times. The two orders were like signal flags announcing “Situation Dire.” They came from General Headquarters, from the officer temporarily filling in for General Claude Auchinleck, commander in chief for the Middle East.23
Auchinleck had flown to the desert to take personal command of the Eighth Army. His departure was another distress flag. Ambassador Lampson sent an urgent cable asking the Foreign Office to get the BBC to stop using “Battle for Egypt”—a term he called “singularly unhappy”—to describe what was happening. “We have a highly sensitive and excitable public to consider here,” he said.
In subsequent cables, Lampson himself sounded less excitable. Despite “panic amongst all classes,” Egyptians “have taken [a] fatalistic attitude” toward the Axis advance, he reported. If unrest broke out, it would be over the shortage of wheat, sugar, and maize.24
Colonel Bonner Frank Fellers, the American military attaché in Egypt, painted the picture in stronger colors. “Although life is always very hard for ninety percent of the people, today in villages wages are low[er], prices higher, people hungrier than normal,” he reported. “Should Axis advance on the Delta, first reaction [of] the masses is likely to be looting of warehouses containing food.”25
Most Egyptians were desperately poor. The poor do not have cars, and do not buy train tickets. T
hey are the last to flee in war. They wait, and they trade rumors. The rumors, according to informants run by a British secret office called Security Intelligence Middle East, said that the British “had begun to seize all essential commodities, such as wheat and vegetables.” Among the peasants, it was said that “after the German occupation, there would be a general and free distribution of agricultural implements.”26
Lampson told London that he was sending brief assessments of the military situation to Egyptian prime minister Mustafa el-Nahas, who passed them on to King Farouk. A worried answer came back: Since they were going to the palace, was Lampson sure that they “contain nothing that could in any way serve the enemy?” Not to worry, they were “worded… so as to give nothing away,” Lampson answered. The twenty-two-year-old Farouk was dithering about what to do if the Germans occupied Egypt, the ambassador said: whether to leave with the retreating British “and lose his throne in the event of a final German victory, or to stay and lose his throne in the event of a final British victory.”
Unstated in Lampson’s cables was the question of where Farouk’s loyalties actually laid. Perhaps the ambassador believed the king when he said that “bygones were bygones and everyone must now pull loyally together.” Or perhaps Lampson only thought he heard Farouk say that. Lampson had a tendency to believe that conversations ended with everyone agreeing with him, and with Rommel at the gates he did not need another bout with the king of Egypt.27
War of Shadows Page 2
