SITTING AT HIS DESK IN GHQ Cairo, ‘Sammy’ Sansom felt disappointed to be back in the city. He was away from the action in the desert, where Wavell’s and O’Connor’s troops had chased the Italians over the border. Tobruk had fallen in January and after Beda Fomm in February the Italian 10th Army had virtually ceased to exist. It looked like the war would be over for Egypt, and he ‘did not fancy the idea of taking root in another desk job.’1
However, on the morning of 12 February Lieutenant General Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel had arrived at the Castel Benito airfield south of Tripoli, invigorating all who came into contact with him with his untiring enthusiasm. He was nearly 50, squat and powerfully built; his grey-blue eyes were usually friendly but could blaze with fury if he was provoked.2 There would be more war to fight.
Sansom felt lucky to have Francis Astley ‘Bones’, a six-foot good-humoured giant, as his second in command, who had been teaching at the University of Cairo when the war broke out. They had both joined Intelligence at the same time, responding to the same advertisement. While Sansom was drafted to the desert, Astley went to the Canal Zone. In Cairo they stayed together until the end of the war, which was unusual in the department, where officers changed frequently. By that time Astley had become Sir Francis Jacob Dudley Astley, sixth baronet, an inherited title he was not altogether happy with, due to the ribbing he got within the department. The title expired with him in 1994.
Military security had been in the hands of Astley when Sansom returned from hospital, a huge job that was overwhelming him. There were thousands of British and Commonwealth troops in and around Cairo, as well as Poles and Free French, all with different uniforms. Astley and Sansom decided to test security by dressing two intelligence officers in German uniforms, giving them orders to be ‘conspicuous’. They were to make a list of all those who questioned them or attempted to arrest them. They wandered around Cairo for two days without any reaction before finally giving up.
Following a reorganisation Sansom largely left security of military installations to Astley. The army were housed in camps and barracks around the city, the British mostly at Heliopolis, Helwan held the South Africans, Mera the Indians and Maadi the New Zealanders. The majority lived under canvas, eight men to a tent in the hot and humid conditions. It was hardly healthy. No doubt the troops fresh from Britain found Cairo a culture shock, with its colour and unfamiliar smells of herbs and spices. There was an abundance of foods in the shops, yet poverty was everywhere; beggars were everywhere, crying for ‘baggsies’. Peddlers and hawkers tried to sell them all sorts of goods from shaving brushes to dirty magazines. Prostitutes and pimps could be found on most streets. ‘Hi, George! You want my sister, very clean? Good price for you.’
‘Morals and morale don’t mix’; so began one of Sansom’s reports on morale of the troops.
… the troops spirits depended mainly on the price, quality and especially availability of prostitutes. This was the natural result of separating young and fit men from their wives and girlfriends. In the desert, where women did not exist except as muffled shapeless Bedouin, sex was just a wry joke. It was no laughing matter in Cairo and Alexandria, with all that flaunting of the most powerful of aphrodisiacs, a pair of pretty legs.
He lamented the attempts by moralist pressure groups to kerb this. But he had to admit, ‘Even after the bloodiest fighting there were always more brothel casualties than battle casualties in the service hospitals.’3
VD was a scourge of the troops, despite the efforts at sexual education by the medical officers. There were seven VD clinics attached to hospitals in the city, and with an average of 100,000 troops in Cairo in the years 1941–1942 they were busy. Some brothels were approved, but were pretty uninspiring places run by the RAMC; ‘On the ground floor, sitting on his stool was the RAMC man doling out one French letter, one tin of ointment and one pamphlet to each supplicant.’ In March 1941 the increase in VD coincided with the return of the 7th Armoured Division from Cyrenaica. In Cairo the oldest profession was in demand, centred on the seedy quarter of Clot Bey to the north of Ezbekieh Gardens. The main street was known as Berka.
Berka was officially out of bounds marked by signs, a black cross on a round white background, which applied to all ranks. By entering the area a squaddie risked trouble with the MPs, even arrest, but neither they, nor the risk of VD, seems to have dissuaded those troops looking for a good time. The Berka boomed until two Australians were murdered there in the summer of 1942, after which it was closed down, straight away halving the cases of VD.
It was frowned upon for officers to visit brothels, as it set a bad example to the men. If they contracted VD most would swear that they had picked it up in a private house. Many officers were less streetwise than the men and were more likely to be mugged or robbed, partly because they carried more money and valuables.
To the squaddies the Egyptians were ‘Wogs’, a slang term for a dark-skinned individual with distinctly racist connotations. It was soon attached to anything Egyptian, including ‘Wog Beer’ and ‘Wog Grub’. With so many troops on the streets, many drunk and bored, fights and disturbances flared up frequently. Egyptians got no compensation when the soldiers damaged their property, brawling in their cafes and bars, and the locals were often robbed or attacked. The Egyptians apperently found the Australians the most loutish, although most nationalities could be rowdy.4
Freya Stark liked the vibrant city at this time.
In and out of the official world was the Levantine society of Cairo dripping gems and substantially unchanged from the days when Thais wore Alexandria’s most expensive togas. It would gather in the Muhammad Ali Club where fatherly waiters and huge chandeliers preserved their Victorian solidity, into which cheerful troops broke now and then and asked for drinks. Having got them from the shocked fifth-columnist head waiter, they would ask for women, and the police were sent for: as I left once I found my fat chauffeur with his head in his hands, rather bashed by a South African annoyed with him for not being a taxi.
Beyond these quarters, the whole of Cairo itself buzzed like a hive, carrying from age to age, from foreigner to foreigner, from dynasty to dynasty, its blind traditions and long poverties. In these crowded quarters I came to have many committees-teachers, clerks, workmen or the lesser rank of government servant, living in small alleys up narrow stairs, hard lives not untouched by dreams.5
When on leave, many of the soldiers went to see the sights. Unsurprisingly the Pyramids were the greatest draw. A horse-drawn gharry would be hired in the late afternoon to avoid the heat, and from Gezira Island they would drive over the English Bridge and south along the Nile past the Foud I University to Giza. The climb to the top of the Great Pyramid took about half an hour. A couple of locals could be hired to help a weary soldier if necessary. In 1905 Elizabeth Cabot Kirkland made the climb and noted that ‘The fatigue was great, the charges small. We had three Bedouin Arabs, one on each side and one behind. Many of the stones are four feet high and it would be impossible to climb them without this assistance.’6 Having reached the top and admired the view the sightseers sometimes carved their initials alongside those of Napoleon’s troops. After descending many went to see the Sphinx, looking rather sorry behind the British-built blast wall, sandbags piled up to the 4000-year-old chin. Many then had their photograph taken sitting on a camel with the Pyramids in the background.
Daphne du Maurier disliked Egypt; during a visit in 1936 she found Cairo no more to her liking than Alexandria. She described the Pyramids as ‘just like a couple of slag heaps’ and swore never to go on any more foreign postings as an army wife. Her husband Fredrick ‘Tommy’ Browning also disliked the country.7
G.C. Norman, a desert soldier, described those Cairo days:
Life at the base, ‘the rigours of the Cairo campaign’ as the English language newspaper cartoonist put it, gave us our first real taste of the totally unreal life which was being lived back there, while we were ‘up the blue,’ Cairo was a dream world of music, theatres and opera, cafes and cinemas, museums and mosques, where we strode the crowded, unblacked-out streets like conquerors, accepting the homage of shop keepers, dragomen and shoe-blacks as to the manor born.8
G.S. Fraser, a wartime clerk at GHQ, found Cairo had a voice of its own.
Every street in Cairo has the character of Cairo, but hardly any street has the character of itself. Everything, every note that at first seems distinctive, is repeated again and again.
The tenement which is crumbling away at one side, like a rotted tooth; the native restaurant open to the night, from which there comes a soft clapping of palms on tables and a monotonous chanting; the maze of narrow streets that leads to a cul-de-sac, where a taxi has gone to die, the sudden green and red glitter of lights, glimpsed through a curtain from a cabaret; the sudden patch of green wasteland, the glimpse of the river, the white glitter of buildings on the other side, the curved mast of the feluccas, pulled down at the top as if by invisible strings; these things, and not things only, but people and incidents, are repeated, the baldish purple-looking ox that has collapsed in the gutter and is having its throat cut; the street accident with twenty shouting spectators in white galabeyas; the woman in black, sitting on the pavement, nursing her baby at a dusty breast; the legless beggar propelling himself forward, on a little wooden trolley, with frightful strength, with his hands. Unknown districts of Cairo, as I used to pass them on the crowded, clattering trams, would terrify me; so much suffering, unexplored, inarticulate life.9
As the city filled with troops, Sansom quickly developed a plain-clothes section for the civilian side of intelligence work. Although personnel could be interchanged easily, a section consisted largely of one officer, a warrant officer and ten NCOs. Soon Sansom had five sections in his department, but this was not even 100 men to cover security within the city. They used informers and spies, but there were few of these when Sansom first took up the reins, ‘and some were of doubtful use and reliability’, so he began to recruit more. There was no lack of volunteers; some were only interested in pay while others worked free of charge. ‘We had to sift the good from the bad, reliable from unreliable, and especially the genuine from the double agent and the plant.’ In this Sansom had a distinct advantage, not only because he knew the country and the people well, but because he had – through social contacts made before the war – unofficial as well as official means of checking credentials.
Thanks to this close screening I quickly learnt that almost all who volunteered their services were unsuitable for the work. On the other hand recruited agents were not so keen on proving themselves and their information on the whole proved more reliable.10
In March 1941 many in the Egyptian military, including Sansom, felt that the war was over for Egypt; however, things were about to change. On 22 February, ten days after Rommel arrived in Africa, Mr Anthony Eden, Foreign Secretary, Sir John Dill, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Wavell, Air Chief Marshal Longmore and Captain R.M. Dick RN (representing Admiral Andrew Cunningham) with their staffs, had secretly arrived in Greece by air. During meetings with the Greeks, Eden, with the full agreement of the Chiefs of Staff and the Commanders-in-Chief Cairo, told them that maximum help would be given to them as soon as possible, as Greece faced the prospect of German invasion.11
Some 100,000 men, many from the Western Desert Force, were committed to the campaigns in Greece and Crete. O’Connor’s men were experienced and Wavell had to draw on them to form the core. But Greece and Crete were by no means the only campaigns the Middle East High Command had to deal with. By the time the Germans invaded Greece in April the British had lost part of Cyrenaica. Malta was under heavy air attack and there was also unrest in Iraq. Wavell had seen no option but to try and defend Greece although he lamented ‘that this war was not “one damned thing after another” it was everything in all directions at once.’12
See here for a list of abbreviations used in the below notes
1 Sansom, p.45
2 Pitt, p.241
3 Sansom, p.40
4 Cooper, p.115
5 Stark, F., Dust in the Lion’s Paw p.60
6 Pick, C., Egypt a Traveller’s Anthology p.95
7 Forster, p.128–129
8 Pick, p.79
9 ibid, p.81–82
10 Sansom, p.49
11 Playfair, Major-General I.S.O., The Mediterranean & Middle East Volume 1 p.377
12 ibid, p.389