THREE DAYS AFTER EPPLER AND Sandy arrived in Cairo, Rommel launched his offensive, which he fully expected would bring his troops to the banks of the Nile. Auchinleck had originally intended to launch his own spring offensive in mid-May; however reports indicated that the Afrika Korps had received strong armoured reinforcements. The Allied Commander in Chief considered his strength to be inadequate and with the agreement of the War Cabinet in London the attack was postponed for a month, a fatal mistake, handing the initiative to Rommel.
Back in April Rommel had planned to attack on 26 May, which he duly did. His tactics for the Gazala battle were to pin the British armour down with a frontal assault in the north, ‘where the Tommies had dug in … a technical marvel’.1 The British defences consisted of a series of boxes, with powerful artillery and infantry dug in to resist even heavy air attacks. Between the boxes were extensive minefields. However the assault was a feint, and Rommel’s main armoured thrust went south around the desert flank.
Auchinleck had instructed Ritchie not to deploy his armour to defend the boxes until he knew the intentions of the enemy, but this order was largely ignored. After three days the British armour had been severely mauled, and Rommel had planted his main force firmly behind the British position in an area that became known as the Cauldron. The battles here were bloody.
The British hoped to pin the German armour in the Cauldron, but one by one their defensive boxes were overrun. By mid-June Rommel was again at the gates of Tobruk. Both sides had suffered heavy casualties in the continuous fighting and Eighth Army’s command structure began to collapse, leaving units fighting in isolation against hopeless odds. This earned them Rommel’s admiration, as he praised the courage of the Allied soldiers.
General Ritchie felt he had no choice but to pull back. Auchinleck reluctantly agreed, but insisted that Tobruk be held at all costs. Defence of the port town was given to the South African Division and by 15 June Eighth Army had pulled back east of the city. The defences and minefields had been neglected since the successful defence in 1941, allowing the Germans to bring their guns much closer to the walls:
Jerry had got a ring of their .88 millimetres right up now and were banging the shells onto the edge of the escarpment. The ricochets – perhaps they were doing it for that effect – were screaming out over the harbour in flat trajectory like a curtain of wailing rain. It was doing no damage, except to minds. But that was far the worst.2
On 20 June the Germans rolled over the defences of Tobruk after heavy air raids by the Luftwaffe. The attack came from an unexpected direction – the southeast. General H.B. Klopper had thought it would come from the southwest, and had promised to hold until ‘the last man and the last round’ but the town fell in a few hours. The German victors took 32,000 prisoners and a huge quantity of materiel, including 2000 trucks and large stores of fuel, food and ammunition.3 It was ‘a staggering blow to the British cause’.4
Rommel’s order of the day for 21 June was as follows:
Soldiers of the Panzer Army Afrika! Now we must utterly destroy the enemy. During the coming days I shall be making great demands upon you once more so that we may reach our goal.5
His officers could almost taste the whiskys and soda waiting for them at Shepheard’s Hotel. Rommel was promoted to Field Marshal by Hitler and the Italian Generals Cavallero and Bastico were also promoted to Field Marshals by Mussolini.
The fall of Tobruk heralded the ‘Flap’ in Egypt; it was not the first in the war, but probably the most serious. Hermione Ranfurly wrote of it in her diary: ‘22 June. The Germans have taken Tobruk. No news has shocked us more since Dunkirk.’6
At the end of June, with Alexandria the first likely target for the Afrika Korps, Admiral Henry Harwood – who had commanded the British squadron at the Battle of the River Plate, and had taken over command of the Mediterranean Fleet from Admiral Cunningham in April – had little choice but to disperse his fleet to other ports. Units were moved to Port Said, Haifa and Beirut without warning; suddenly people found the harbour empty and fear mounted in the city. British government offices began burning their files and British women and children packed up their homes and joined crowds at the station. Others set off across the Delta in cars crammed with possessions. With the loss of the protection of the Royal Navy the European community felt abandoned. The BBC did not help by calling the battle around El Alamein the ‘Battle for Egypt’.7 Meanwhile Egyptian shops and clubs in the city began displaying decorations welcoming the German troops.
On 29 June Alexandria suffered several heavy air raids and the ‘Flap’ quickly spread across the Delta to Cairo. Alfred Sansom was swept up in it:
British wives and children were evacuated to Palestine and to the Sudan, so swiftly that when I phoned my wife to tell her to pack she had already gone. I was told that if Cairo fell I was to stay behind with a few picked men to carry out specified acts of sabotage, after which we were to lie low until our troops recaptured the city.8
1 July became famous in the city as ‘Ash Wednesday’, the day when the British Embassy and GHQ started burning mountains of files. Sansom was engaged in this job:
Meanwhile secret documents were already being burnt. Large incinerators had been placed on the roof of Red Pillars, as the headquarters in Kasr el Aini was called, and I was responsible for the safe transfer of documents scheduled for destruction. This operation was hardly over when one of my NCOs brought some peanuts from a street-vendor and found they were wrapped up in a paper marked ‘Most Secret’.9
It turned out that a strong wind had blown many highly classified papers out of the open incinerators before they were burnt, and scattered them over the city. Afterwards Lieutenant-General T.W. Corbett, Chief of Staff to Auchinleck, was condemned for his handling of the ‘Flap’.
To make matters worse there was a run on the banks. The Note Issue rose from £57 million on 25 June, to £76 million on 4 July, and note production had to be started in Egypt as supplies from England could not keep pace with demand. The Egyptian government considered moving itself and the gold reserves to Khartoum.
Soon after Eppler arrived in Cairo (in early June) he had observed that ‘If it had not been for the presence of so many British soldiers, you would never have thought that a few hundred kilometres to the west a dreadful war was raging in Libya.’10 By 10 June ‘Cairo was in turmoil … foreign currency on the black market dropped 50 per cent and the true value of British money could only be had from the paymaster corps.’ Amongst the thousands of ‘Jews, Greeks, and the flotsam of various nationalities – that is, amongst those who had enough money – the cry went up: “Let’s get out!”’11
As in Alexandria, the native Cairo civilian population viewed the likely arrival of the Germans with mixed feelings. Many, although they hated the British, felt they were on to a good thing business-wise and doubted that the Germans would be such a soft touch. Shares slumped on the stock exchange while property prices dropped to pre-war levels. Strangely enough, many Jews elected to stay in Cairo rather than go to Palestine – where sooner or later they thought there would be trouble with the local militant Jews – and furthermore the Palestine administration was slow in issuing visas. However, news of the German treatment of Jews had travelled as far as Cairo, and many others sold their properties and businesses at a loss before fleeing.
Sansom and the Field Security Service were at full stretch, carrying out a series of arrests of people sympathetic to the Germans. The information they obtained was generally trivial, such as the list compiled by the Endozzi Sisters – who had worked at the Italian Legation – which detailed members of the Italian community who were sympathetic to the British, and which they intended to hand over to the Axis forces when they arrived. Relatives betrayed relatives for all sorts of ulterior motives. ‘Another faithless wife offered to let me sleep with her every Friday if I would lock up her Italian husband, who happened to be a loyal member of the anti-Fascist group that helped us to compile the lists.’12 These more harmless suspects were housed at the Italian school at Boulac.
It was a rough business for Sansom, who was beaten up twice in a short period of time. On the first occasion he was attacked by an Italian fascist who had escaped internment from Boulac; Sansom caught up with him in a bar and ‘all hell broke loose.’ He suffered a black eye after being hit with a beer bottle, but he got his man. The second occasion was more serious. He came across a group of drunken New Zealanders who were beating up a gharry driver, and when he went to the man’s assistance he got the worst of it. Fortunately he was rescued by two policemen but ended up in hospital with two broken ribs, ‘and my face looked as if I had just made an unsuccessful challenge for the World’s Heavyweight Championship.’13
A more important aspect of Sansom’s work was keeping the militant nationalist Egyptians under observation, in particular the Free Officers movement within the army. Anwar el Sadat was one of the movement’s members, then a Lieutenant in the signals branch. He and a group of likeminded officers had penned a treaty ready to place before Rommel, stating that the German commander could count on them and their resistance movement. He was in contact with the Axis forces, a fact he rather foolishly confided to his diary, which was found along with an English translation of Mein Kampf in which some paragraphs were underlined in red ink, when he was later arrested.14
Sansom had put one of his best men, Sergeant Wilson, on the job to watch El Sadat. ‘Without knowing it I had started on what was to be my biggest spy-catching operation of the war.’ While undercover, Wilson was approached by an attractive Arab girl called Zahira Ezzet, the sister of a Copt that Sansom had advised might be a good contact to cultivate within the Sadat group. She told him she wanted a plan of GHQ, saying rather lamely that she just wanted to see it. Wilson reported this to Sansom, who encouraged him to cultivate the relationship.
Zahira’s brother, Lieutenant Hassan Ezzet, was soon convinced that Wilson knew GHQ like the back of his hand. Sansom was surprised at this; surely they already knew the place well?
GHQ had always been my main security headache. So many people, including a lot of civilians, were going in and out all day that I was always afraid of a leakage at the top. The very fact of working at GHQ made people careless, and officers would exchange information over the internal telephone, for example, without a thought about the girls on the exchange. As far as possible these were ATS girls from Britain, but quite a few were locally enlisted. And then there were all the civilian employees. Of course they had been carefully vetted, but no security screening system in the world is fool proof …15
Sansom told Wilson not to give into the girl too easily or it might arouse suspicion. Wilson played hard to get but finally agreed to supply a plan to her brother for £100, although naturally it would be completely fabricated.
Sansom had a trap laid to pick up Ezzet at the handover in a cafe. However the Lieutenant slipped the net, as he found a ‘big Chevrolet car waiting for him with three men inside’. The British gave chase through the streets and alleys of the city, which only ended when Ezzet and his companions finally abandoned their car and fled into a house.
Some shots were fired, I received a glancing blow from a chair on the side of my head as we forced an entry, but no serious damage was done. We arrested the four men with the worthless plan which Ezzet had carefully preserved throughout the chase. With this evidence against him we were able to get him a sentence of five years hard labour.
However, something struck Sansom as odd about the whole affair: what did Ezzet want a plan of GHQ for? He concluded it must mean
… a German paid spy was planning to penetrate the building and steal information, and he wanted to know the location of the offices most likely to provide it. I could not see the Copt playing the role himself.16
Field Security had been alerted to the possibility of a German spy within the city.
See here for a list of abbreviations used in the below notes
1 Carell, p.159
2 Landon, C., Ice Cold in Alex p.1
3 Neillands, p.131
4 Playfair, Major-General I.S.O., The Mediterranean & Middle East Volume 3 p.274
5 Carell, p.199
6 Ranfurly, p.134
7 Cooper, p.193
8 Sansom, p.96
9 ibid, p.97
10 Eppler, p.218
11 ibid, p.226
12 Sansom, p.96
13 ibid, p.100–101
14 KV/2/1467 16A
15 Sansom, p.103–104
16 ibid, p.106–107