Second Lieutenant Khaled Mohi El Din of the Egyptian Cavalry Corps’s First Tank Regiment arrived at his brigade’s barracks one morning and “found several British officers inspecting tanks. I asked what was going on and the reply was like a fatal knife stab: ‘The British are taking our tanks.’” Mohi El Din had graduated from the military academy just a couple of months before. He had felt caressed by admiring glances as he walked Cairo streets in his uniform. Now, “our bitterness and humiliation were indescribable. How could we be an army without arms? How could the occupiers take our weapons?” In his account, the British seized the tanks to make up for their losses at Dunkirk.12
At Mersa Matruh, Anwar al-Sadat was serving as the signals officer in an Egyptian artillery brigade deployed to stop the expected Italian advance. As Sadat saw things, “our enemy was primarily, if not solely, Great Britain,” and to fight the Italians would mean “we were fighting for Britain, in violation of the 1936 treaty which had established the sovereignty of Egypt.” On November 20, his brigade got orders to withdraw, and to turn over its guns to the British. He was “livid with rage” and, like Mohi El Din, felt humiliated. On the other hand, being sent back to Cairo allowed him to meet regularly with one of the men he most respected, the man he hoped would advise him on starting a revolution—deposed military chief of staff Aziz el-Masri. Sometimes they met at Masri’s home, sometimes at Groppi’s cafe in the center of Cairo.13 Groppi’s was either a daring or foolish spot to choose, since it was also a favorite meeting spot of British officers.
THE EMPRESS OF Britain sailed from the port of Suez, at the southern end of the Canal, on September 24, 1940. The Empress was an ocean liner converted to troop carrier, a fast ship that could make the journey from England around the Cape of Good Hope to Egypt in under six weeks. She had just delivered four thousand British soldiers for General Wavell’s forces. On the return trip, very unwillingly, Countess Hermione Ranfurly was sailing homeward.
The title of countess had come with her marriage to Daniel Knox, Earl of Ranfurly, a member of the penniless gentry. He was a lieutenant in the Notts Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, the last cavalry unit in the British military that still had horses. On their first wedding anniversary, in January 1940, his unit had shipped out for Palestine. War Office orders barred wives from following them, with absolutely no exceptions allowed.
Hermione Ranfurly got a job in London as a secretary with a boss who kept asking her out to dine and dance. On her lunch hour, she went to an obscure travel agency—“just one room with a man and a typewriter”—recommended by a friend. The man behind the typewriter had a brother who worked in the Passport Office. He got her the papers she needed to leave England, cross France, and enter Egypt. She pawned the family jewels, which brought her enough only for a third-class ticket. In her girdle she hid the .25 Colt revolver she’d bought when war broke out “for use against [German] parachutists,” as she’d written on her request for a gun license. From Marseilles she caught a mail steamer for Egypt, then boarded the train for Palestine and “sat up all night on a hard seat being serenaded by the Australian soldiers singing ‘Waltzing Matilda.’”
When Dan got leave for three days, they drove to Beirut. They were dancing on the seaside terrace of a nightclub when a Frenchman told them that Germany had invaded the Low Countries and that Churchill had become prime minister. “Dan thought perhaps he was drunk,” she wrote in her diary.
At first the war was something awful she heard on the wireless. Then Italy joined, France fell, and the French colonial rulers in Lebanon and Syria sided with Vichy. Palestine was now “flanked by enemies,” Ranfurly wrote. The Sherwood Rangers at last gave up their horses and redeployed to Haifa, Palestine’s main port and industrial center, to man coastal artillery.
Ranfurly rented a spartan room in a Catholic hospice run by German nuns near the docks. One summer day she heard planes overhead and ran outside to wave at our “our wonderful RAF.” Then came the “crump, crump, crump” of explosions. The bombers were Italian, from the wing of the air force whose insignia was three green mice. They’d flown across the sea from the Italian-ruled Dodecanese Islands off the coast of Turkey to strike Haifa’s oil refineries. On their next raid, the Green Mice hit some of the refinery tanks—and a small open market near the harbor where, the countess wrote, “bits of bodies are spattered all over adjacent buildings.”
The British command in Jerusalem decided that in the midst of the crisis, it didn’t need the bother of “‘illegal’ wives… those who reached the Middle East… against military orders.” They would be sent home. The order was a strange one. It treated the Middle East as a war front from which British civilians must be removed, either for their safety or perhaps so they would not distract their husbands. Yet when the order was given, swarms of German bombers filled Britain’s skies. At first they struck the airfields of the Royal Air Force, so that its pilots would not be able to strike the boats that would be bringing German troops to British shores. British officers who would command the battles on the beaches were not banned from seeing their wives. Then the Luftwaffe switched to bombing cities. In London, if you had a pint with a friend after work and said good-bye, it might be good-bye forever.
Ranfurly’s best friend, Toby, who’d used the same obscure travel agent to follow her husband, accepted the order to go home. Ranfurly did not. But even a letter from a general’s wife in Cairo saying that Wavell himself thought Ranfurly’s secretarial skills were essential to the war effort did not persuade the brigadier in Jerusalem who told her, “You can’t expect me to believe that a countess can type.”
“Brigadier, if I am forced to leave I will return,” she said as she left his office. It was September 14. Outside, Dan told her that the Italians had invaded Egypt.
When The Empress of Britain docked in Cape Town, Hermione Ranfurly said good-bye to Toby and went to the Barclays Bank branch with a letter of introduction to the manager from his counterpart and old friend at Barclays in Haifa. She asked him if she could get a taxi from Cape Town to Cairo. He laughed. Even in peacetime, that was a drive for crazed adventurers, not cabbies. The only way she could get north, he said, was by flying boat, one of the big airplanes that took off from and landed on water and were the fastest and most luxurious means of long-distance transportation in the world. But she needed to do it quickly, before she was discovered. He said he “loved romance and adventure,” so he lent her £125, actual riches, and equipped her with a letter to his friend, who worked for Cook’s Travel in Durban.
The train to Durban took two nights and days. The Cook’s man said flying boats were booked up for two months. “Mr. Hapgood, my journey is urgent and secret,” she told him. “It is vital I fly out of Durban on the next plane for Cairo.” Either her title, or her exotic looks—dark hair combed back to show a widow’s peak, thin eyebrows flaring upward like a bird in flight, huge dark eyes, lavish smile—or her self-confidence, or all three convinced him that she was the secret agent she implied she was. He got her on the plane leaving the dawn after next and said, “Don’t ask me how.” It cost £115. The flying boat touched down at ports twice a day to refuel and at dusk for an overnight stay. On the third morning, at Lake Victoria halfway up Africa, the commander of the military police in Cairo joined the flight and sat behind her. “I thought all the ladies were going south,” he began a question. She started to say she was airsick, then vomited into her handkerchief. He gave up.
The fourth evening they landed on the Nile at Cairo. She slipped into town and hid out with her husband’s best man and his wife. Two mornings later, he handed her the morning edition of the Egyptian Mail. The front page said that The Empress of Britain had been attacked by enemy planes seven hundred miles from Ireland and had sunk.
Her hostess told her that the news was out in Cairo that she’d returned. The commander of the military police ordered his men to find her. A memo went out to all military offices not to give her a job. Dan, now the aide-de-camp to General Philip Neame, com
mander of the British forces in Palestine, got two days in Cairo. He told her that Toby had gone down with The Empress of Britain.
Ranfurly went for an interview with the head of Shell Oil in the Middle East. He had no opening but made a phone call, then gave her an address on Qasr el-Nil, one of the main streets in Cairo’s central business district. It was for an office on the eighth floor. A tall, gray-haired man asked her questions, then told her she could start work the next day at £25 a month. The workday, as was common in the Cairo heat, was 8:30 till lunch and then 5:30 to 8:30 at night. She’d work seven days a week.
On the way out she thought to ask if this was a spy organization.
“You’ll soon find out,” he answered, smiling.
She said she was “prepared to do anything except sleep with people.”
“Okay,” he said.
Her diary says nothing of a name on the door. If there was one, it almost certainly did not say Special Operations Executive or more specifically, SO2, meaning the second branch of the SOE, the wing responsible for sabotage behind enemy lines, political subversion, and organizing resistance movements. She had come to the right place, though. The SOE was not an agency inclined to follow an order from General Headquarters Middle East. In fact, the order may have been an incentive to take her. Her new boss, George Pollock, was a London lawyer who’d been given the rank of lieutenant colonel and who answered to the SOE main office at the Ministry of Economic Warfare in London. The job meant she could repay the Barclays man in Cape Town and get a visa saying “civil servant” instead of “officer’s wife,” meaning she could stay. A week after she started work, she turned twenty-seven.14
RANFURLY’S DIARY DOES not include the worst of the Italian air attacks on Palestine, against Tel Aviv, a city that had no military targets. The bombs killed 125 people.
Hajj Amin el-Husseini, the former mufti of Jerusalem, congratulated Mussolini on striking the Jewish city. His message to the Duce ignored the Arab deaths in Haifa, a mixed city. Husseini had been the most prominent leader of the Arab revolt in the late 1930s in Palestine, which Ciano’s Foreign Ministry and SIM, Italian military intelligence, had secretly subsidized. Now, in exile in Baghdad, he hoped that British defeats would help renew the revolt.
But the air raids had the opposite effect. The mayor of Jaffa, the Arab city next to Tel Aviv, came to the funerals for the Tel Aviv victims. The Jaffa Arabic newspaper Filastin slammed the “criminal Italian bombardment,” and a campaign by the Jewish Palestine Post to help pay for building British warplanes brought donations from Arabs as well as Jews.15
In British security agency reports and in the minds of British generals and politicians, the potential for a new revolt loomed constantly. For good reason: it had taken Britain three years and an ever-growing contingent of combat troops to extinguish the previous uprising.16 The Mufti—as Husseini was almost always called—was the face of the fears.
In the early days of the war, Jewish leaders in Palestine debated whether to encourage young Palestinian Jews to enlist in the British army or to build up their own underground militia, the Haganah, to fight a possible pro-Axis Arab uprising. There were really two arguments, tangled together—which danger you believed was more immediate, and how passionately you dreamed of Jews finally defending themselves, on their own. A militia would be useless against Axis divisions but could fight Arab irregulars. The Jewish Agency, the quasi-government of the Jewish community in Palestine, urged enlisting in the British military. The British insisted at first on mixed units with an equal number of Jews and Arabs, lest they appear to be creating a Jewish army and thereby push Palestine’s Arabs into the arms of the Axis and the Mufti.17
In historical memory, Hajj Amin el-Husseini would virtually become the face of Palestine’s Arabs during the war. Memory would mislead. The Mufti had been absent for two years when the war began. A British intelligence report may have been accurate when it said that the “Mufti’s propagandists” organized secret meetings at the Nabi Musa religious celebrations in May 1940, “at which the villagers and tribesmen were told that the revolt must be renewed at the earliest opportunity.” But no revolt followed.
Another intelligence report said that “representatives of the Mufti’s followers” met in early 1940 in Lebanon with a messenger from Husseini. He told them to spread Husseini’s instructions that “Palestinian Arabs were not to volunteer to serve with the British forces.”18 Filastin, on the other hand, prominently covered public meetings led by the Mufti’s opponents urging men to join up. By the end of 1940, close to twenty-five hundred had done so—whether for money or adventure or because they believed that Italy and Germany were enemies worth fighting. There were fewer Arab volunteers than Jewish ones. But Husseini hardly had long-distance control of Palestine’s Arabs.19 Indeed, one reason for the lower Arab recruitment level, according to the British military, would turn out to be a widespread “failure to reach requisite physical standard” among Arabs who did want to sign up.20
Meanwhile, the war was transforming Palestine. If you had a job building an army base, or you worked in an army workshop, or you opened a bar, you were better off. If not, the little money you had bought less rice or flour. Troops poured in from England, Australia, New Zealand, and India. The Australians made the strongest impression: they were huge, loud, and happy and drank prodigiously.21
ANTHONY EDEN RETURNED to London in early November with word from Wavell. A messenger was the only means of communication that Wavell trusted. Italy had cut Britain’s undersea cables in the Mediterranean, and Wavell feared the treachery of wireless. Anything sent by it, even in the best code you had, could give you away.22 Churchill heard the general’s plans and “purred like six cats,” as he said himself.23
By the light of a half-moon, the thirty thousand men of the Western Desert Force marched forward on the night of December 7, passing between Graziani’s isolated fortified camps. When day came, they laid down on the cold sands. The big lumbering Matilda tanks stilled their double engines. The next morning the attack began, striking the Italian bases from behind. The Italians had far more men, but they were facing the wrong way, and when they got their antitank guns turned around, their shells were too weak for the heavy armor of the British tanks. Maletti, the Italian general who hadn’t bothered with Arab guides, was wounded but kept firing a machine gun until he was killed in the Nibeiwa camp, where he had his headquarters.24
“I have been advised in strict confidence by the British General Headquarters that the Maletti group consisting of 2 regiments, 2 Libyan divisions, half the entire Italian artillery and half of all Italian mechanized units have been captured or destroyed,” Fellers radioed the War Department in Washington at noon on December 12. Fifteen thousand Italians were prisoners, including four generals. Eight hours later, Fellers sent an update: the number of Italian prisoners had doubled. Whole Italian divisions were annihilated. Sandstorms cloaked the battlefield in dust and deep yellow light, adding to the chaos.25
The news from Egypt “comes like a thunderbolt,” Ciano wrote. It was made all the worse by the news from the Balkans. Ciano, like his father-in-law, had expected that grabbing Greece would be easy. Instead, the Greeks had counterattacked and invaded Albania.
“I visit Mussolini and find him very much shaken,” Ciano wrote. “I have nothing to tell him, but desire only by my presence to make him understand that I am with him more than ever.” The more reason he had to doubt the Duce, it seems, the harder Ciano tried to preserve his faith.26
Moorehead, the war correspondent, drove into Nibeiwa camp and found a soldier’s vision of paradise disappearing under the wind-driven sand. Officers’ beds were “laid out with clean sheets… Parmesan cheeses as big as small cart wheels and nearly a foot thick lay about in neat piles.” There were bottles of cherries, and of red and white “wines from Frascati and Falerno and Chianti” and casks of brandy. Every Italian soldier had abandoned his personal espresso percolator. Maletti’s armored division, Moorehead w
rote, had been “as tame as an old lion in the zoo.”
Sollum fell to the British a week after the offensive began. The surviving fragments of the Italian army fell back to Bardia, where a “picturesque Fascist settlement of white-walled houses” stood on cliffs above the first harbor inside Libya. Beyond Bardia on the coast lay Tobruk. Seventy-eight British soldiers had died so far in the desert. In a time of vast dying, it was a tiny number, for all but each of those seventy-eight men.27 With secrecy, surprise, and better-built tanks, Wavell and Major General Richard O’Connor, commander of the Western Desert Force, were providing a very rare gift: British victory.
Ralph Bagnold’s Long Range Desert Group, the LRDG, could act with even greater secrecy, since so few people needed to know what the small unit was up to. In late December, two LRDG patrols headed west out of Cairo under Captain Pat Clayton, the former desert surveyor. When they passed the pyramids, they’d already left the narrow green belt of the Nile for the desert. They drove thirteen hundred miles into the emptiness—across the Great Sand Sea into Libya, then in a wide arc to avoid the Italian garrison at Kufra oasis, all the way south to the border with the French colonial province of Chad. In all that way—a journey equivalent to driving from Miami to New York—they spotted three natives leading camels, and no other human beings.
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