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By Root 1079 0

intervals between battles it was preferable to winter Russia or monsoon Asia. It is sometimes suggested that in North Africa there was ‘war without hate’. This is an exaggeration, because there was certainly fear, which bred spasms of animosity; most men in the heat of action feel ill-will towards those seeking to kill them. But extremes of brutality, especially the murder of prisoners, were generally avoided by both sides. Italians and Germans, British, Indians, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans subsisted and fought in a wild and alien environment where none had any emotional stake. They engaged in a common struggle against sand, flies, heat and thirst, even before the enemy entered the reckoning.

In the autumn of 1940, Mussolini was impatient to the point of obsession to achieve some conspicuous Italian success to justify seizing a share of the booty from anticipated Axis victory. Though ignorant of both military and naval affairs, he craved foreign conquests to ennoble fascism and stiffen the frail spirit of his people at home. ‘The army has need of glory,’ he said. Libya, an Italian colony, adjoined British-controlled Egypt, where Wavell had a small imperial force of one British division, 7th Armoured, together with an Indian and a New Zealand formation, soon reinforced by two Australian divisions. Britain’s presence was anomalous to the verge of absurdity: Egypt was an independent sovereign state ruled by King Farouk, where the British supposedly exercised rights only to defend the Suez Canal. The Cairo government did not formally enter hostilities until February 1945. The sympathies of most Egyptians lay with the Axis, which they believed would liberate them from more than seventy years of British domination. Indeed, such views were widespread among Arab nationalists throughout the Middle East, and were stimulated by Hitler’s 1940 successes. That August, the secretary of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem visited Berlin to discuss fomenting a revolt in Iraq. In addition, he suggested, prospective rebels in Palestine and Transjordan might be armed with weapons provided by the Vichy French in Syria. The aspiring insurgents’ principal demand was that the Nazis should commit themselves to the future independence of the Arab states.

Yet in 1940 Germany’s leaders were not much interested in Muslim revolts, less still in Arab freedom. Moreover, at this stage they conceded to Italy the principal diplomatic role in the region. Mussolini’s ambitions for extending his African empire were wholly incompatible with local peoples’ aspirations: in pursuit of them, his generals had already massacred many thousands of Libyan and Abyssinian tribesmen. Only in 1941 did the Germans engage with Arab nationalists, notably in Iraq and Persia. Their attempted interventions there were late, half-hearted, and easily frustrated by forces dispatched to reassert British hegemony.

In Egypt in September 1939, Britain invoked a clause of its treaty with Farouk which obliged him, in the event of a war, to provide ‘all the facilities and assistance in his power, including the use of ports, aerodromes and means of communication’. Thereafter, the British treated the country as a colonial possession, governed through their ambassador Sir Miles Lampson. They based their Mediterranean fleet at Alexandria, and in February 1942 deployed troops in Cairo to stifle a nascent Egyptian rebellion. In the course of the war, desperate hunger among the peasantry caused several food riots; the plight of the Egyptian felaheen contrasted starkly with the sybaritic lifestyle of the British military colony centred upon Middle East headquarters, Shepheard’s Hotel, the Gezira Sporting Club and a nexus of barracks, supply and repair bases throughout the Nile Delta, where contempt for ‘the wogs’ was almost universal.

American visitors were dismayed by the lassitude and imperial condescension of the British in Egypt, who seemed to regard the conflict being waged in the western wilderness as a mere event in a sporting calendar. This perception was unjust to those doing