The Bitter Sea: The Struggle for Mastery in the Mediterranean 1935–1949

Christie’s thriller was unusually well informed. At the time of publication official opinion had judged that the threat of subversion in Egypt was great enough to require the institution in Cairo of the ‘the only purely MI5 organisation in the area. The real-life counterpart to Colonel Race, Major Raymond Maunsell, was soon ‘deeply implicated in Egyptian politics’. 2 Few informed observers doubted that, by 1937, Britain was faced by a serious crisis in the Muslim Mediterranean. 3 After decades of toying with the Eastern Question the British had definitively displaced the Ottomans as the master race at the end of the First World War. Since then she had requited none of the hopes, bizarre and impractical as her officials saw them, invested in her rule. It was Britain which was seen as a tyrannical and destructive force. Many found her representatives arrogant and hateful. They longed to be done with the British. In 1937 it was hard to judge, however, the depth and importance of such malcontent. Some said that the problem went no further than members of the traditional elite, both secular and religious, disgruntled that the British insisted on a modicum of good governance. Others looked deeper and said that the maintenance of such traditions, especially the indulgence of corruption, was in the British interest. The pashas and notables might make spiteful complaint, plot and curse in private, but in the end they were no real threat. If politics ever took to the street, the masses would not thank Britons for their reforming efforts; rather they would string the unbelievers from the recently provided lampposts. 4

The same informed observers were in little doubt that Britain’s enemies were fishing in these foetid waters. Propaganda, money and weapons flowed into the eastern Mediterranean. Signor Richettis aplenty plied their subversive and violent trade. In 1935 Captain Ugo Dadone, dashing traveller, explorer, journalist and zealous Fascist, set up a propaganda office in Cairo. 5 The Italians financed the radical Young Egypt movement. Young Egypt organized its paramilitary Green Shirts to ape the Black Shirts. The Ministry of Propaganda, then headed by Galeazzo Ciano, set up a radio station, Radio Bari, to appeal directly to Arab malcontents. In the summer of 1935 it began daily broadcasts that proved wildly successful because ‘adapted to the average puerile Arab mind’. Bari declared that: ‘the Arab populations of the Levant must be freed from the yoke of their present masters’. It traded on the message that Arab patriots…all those not contaminated by British gold–know well the consequences of Britain’s rule, they know how much grief and bloodshed Britain has caused…that it is in the interest of Fascist Italy that the Arab nations of the Levant attain their freedom and independence’. 6 The British soon noticed that Bari was ‘becoming increasingly popular in Arab cafes’. Arabs ‘sipped their coffee and swallowed Italian propaganda with every mouthful’. In 1937 it was calculated that over half of all the radios in Palestine were tuned into Bari. 7

Mussolini made a spectacular appeal for a Fascist-Muslim alliance in March 1937. Marshal Italo Balbo, the Governor of Libya, had complained that the dreams of a Fourth Shore were far from realization. Not only was it actually hard to get to Libya from Italy, but it was virtually impossible to travel along the Mediterranean coast. The two halves of Libya, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, were bisected by the inhospitable Sirtean desert. If one wished to travel from the capital in Tripoli to Benghazi, Cyrenaica’s main port, all that was on offer was a weekly boat. He devised a grand plan, a road that would run the length of Libya’s Mediterranean coast, all the way from the Tunisian to the Egyptian border. The gleaming thousand-mile-long highway was completed at the beginning of 1937. An arch of triumph was erected in the middle of the desert. The road was so much Balbo’s project that it was nicknamed the Balbia. Though irritated by the name, Mussolini grasped the symbolic importance of Balbo’s achievement. Determined to claim the glory for this great monument of civilization, he agreed to preside over the festivities. 8

A celebration of the civilizing mission, and the unveiling of plans for a mass influx of colonists from Italy, might have seemed an unlikely occasion for a celebration of Islamo-Fascist friendship. But in Balbo’s fertile mind he was to be the architect of pan-Mediterranean syncretism. Buildings, he decreed, were no longer to espouse European modernism but a ‘Mediterranean’ style. The minaret of the mosque and the tower of the Italian town were part of the same culture. 9 The Islamic part of that heritage must be respected. The Governor funded religious schools and banned the sale of alcohol in Ramadan. What better place than Tripoli,‘the new pearl of the Mediterranean’, Balbo convinced Mussolini, as a centre for mezzi insidiosi. 10

The fondouks of the old town of Tripoli were torn down to make way for the new Mediterranean metropolis. The city was subject to a phantasmagoria of lighting effects. Balbo’s palace, the Cathedral and long stretch of the embankment were floodlit. An immense Dux was laid out in powerful electric lights attached to the newly constructed grain silo. The motto ‘Believe, Obey, Fight’ was picked out in twelve-feet-high lighting on the customs warehouse. A steel tower was erected in the castle square with a huge searchlight mounted on top. The light beam was visible for thirty miles all around. When everything was ready, Balbo left Tripoli for Cyrenaica. At Benghazi, he proclaimed that Mussolini was the ‘Protector of Islam’. Two days later the Duce himself stepped ashore at Tobruk. Accompanying him to Libya was a cruise ship filled with 120 journalists. Each journalist was provided with a car and servants so that they might follow Mussolini along the Balbia from east to west. The journey, by car and aeroplane, took four days.

On the evening of 16 March 1937 Mussolini made a triumphal entrance into Tripoli. He was accompanied by a bodyguard of Arab cavalrymen. The route was lined by tens of thousands of Arabs brought in from the countryside. It was said that political officers had rounded up nearly the entire pastoral population. For weeks afterwards, ‘little columns of dust [would] betray the presence of nomads making the weary journey back’. Each group was equipped with banners to represent their particular Islamic religious society. The procession ended in the castle square. There, Mussolini was greeted by the dug-out son of the last Ottoman ruler of Tripoli and the Kadi, the head of the sharia courts. The Kadi in particular had a major role in driving home the point of the visit. The next afternoon he once more greeted Mussolini, at the mosque. ‘I take the opportunity presented by your presence among us’, the venerable judge intoned via a ‘slick Arabic interpreter’, ‘to express our profound gratefulness for the favour which Fascism has showered upon these our countries which enjoy the benefits of progress, well-being, justice and perfect respect for our Sharia courts.’ ‘We declare’, he continued, ‘that we are truly happy to lie under the shadow of the glorious Italian flag, under the Fascist regime. And how can we forget all that you have said and done in favour of Islam in such important circumstances of international politics, thus acquiring such lively sympathy among the 400 million of Moslem believers.’

Balbo and Mussolini were far from finished, however. On the next afternoon, yet another group of Muslims pledged their loyalty. Arab soldiers of the Italian colonial army were drawn up in mounted array. One of their number rode forward towards Mussolini. ‘In the name of the soldiers and Moslems of Libya,’ he bellowed, ‘I have the honour to offer to you, Victorious Duce, this well-tempered Islamic sword. The souls of the Moslems of all the shores of the Mediterranean…thrill with emotion at this moment, in sympathy with our own.’ Mussolini pulled the sword from its scabbard and ululated a war cry Then the mounted men made a second triumphal entrance into Tripoli, where Mussolini addressed the Muslim crowd from the saddle, his words followed by running translation in Arabic, each sentence being greeted in turn by cries of ‘Dushy, Dushy’. 11

In the wake of Fascism’s victory over the Christians of Abyssinia, important Muslim leaders were ready to heed Mussolini’s appeal for an anti-British alliance. First amongst them was Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, leader of radical Islam in Palestine. The Mufti was an elusive character. People tended to see in him what they wanted. He was regarded by some as a charming moderate. Those who crossed him found that he was cruel, merciless and unbalanced: they would fear his assassins for the rest of their often shortened lives. The British High Commissioner in Palestine, Sir Arthur Wauchope, said of the Mufti that as time passed wicked Dr Jekyll became dominant over the more moderate Mr Hyde. It was a revealing slip: in Stevenson’s original story Mr Hyde is evil personified. Hitler refused to believe that the Mufti was a Semite at all. In the skewed vision of the Nazis he became a blond, blue-eyed Aryan, albeit one spoilt by miscegenation. The Grand Mufti was known to his Palestinian enemies as ‘the spider’ or ‘Rasputin’. 12

The Mufti had once been Britain’s favourite Muslim. The mandatory government had sponsored his rise during the 1920s as a traditional aristocrat willing to collaborate with them in crushing secular militants. In 1934 the Mufti’s power base, the Supreme Muslim Council of Palestine, was given an astonishingly generous financial settlement. The British congratulated themselves that the Mufti’s religious charisma gave him dominion over the peasantry, inoculating them against the dangers of extremism. The Mufti put it differently. He had always hated the English. His goal was their total overthrow, but it was foolish to launch a revolt unprepared. The best approach was to undermine British power covertly, whilst preparing the jihad. With British money the Mufti created cohorts of officials loyal to him. One of his relatives toured the villages around Jerusalem, as a member of the land settlement department, creating a jihadist organization, known as the Sacred Holy War. Sacred Holy War created training camps where members of the Palestine police and the Syrian army trained insurgents. 13 As the Mufti told a Nazi diplomat, the Muslims of Palestine hoped fervently for ‘the spread of fascist and anti-democratic leadership to other countries’. 14

Britain’s second foe was Ali Maher Pasha, minister of the royal household, éminence grise to the monarchs of Egypt. 15 Radio Bari blared that the English hypocrites took risks for infidel savages, the Abyssinians, but reduced civilized Muslims to slavery. Ali Maher’s mobs cheered Mussolini as a Copt killer–the Patriarch of the Abyssinian church being traditionally chosen from amongst the Coptic monks of Egypt. Unlike the Grand Mufti, Ali Maher’s espousal of violent Mohammedanism was not particularly sincere. His loathing of democracy, however, was just as real. In his view the ‘illiterate electorate’ should be no more than the attendees of disciplined rallies as in Fascist Italy. His main purpose was to recruit zealous thugs. Like the Italians he looked to the Green Shirts of Young Egypt as potential shock troops. His alliance with the sheikhs provided him with squads of embittered young men who found that their religious education was mocked by secular technocrats. Ali Maher could put violent gangs on the streets. He knew, however, that he had to bide his time.

The true mass movement in Egypt was the Wafd, ‘the Delegation’, the secular anti-royalist nationalist party created at the end of the First World War. The Wafd, too, was determined to make use of the Abyssinian War to its best advantage. Enemies of the Wafd charged that it was a Coptic conspiracy, its second-in-command and most outspoken radical, Makram Ubeid, was a Christian, reviled as ‘Master William’ by his Muslim opponents. Ubeid too, however, admired the Black Shirts. He raised his own paramilitary militia, the Blue Shirts. Egypt proved one of the most prolific creators of movements which looked to Fascist Black Shirt street violence as a model for emulation. Ciano’s agents had great success in recruiting genuine Black Shirts from amongst the Italian population in Egypt. When Ciano visited in 1936, twenty thousand Black Shirts greeted him. 16 The appeal of Fascist methods was potent. The Wafd leadership remained, however, Italophobes. They saw little advantage in swapping British imperialism for the Italian variety 17 After much thought, the leader of the Wafd, Nahas Pasha, denounced the Italian bogey. The Blue Shirts were turned upon the Green Shirts. Nahas and the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Miles Lampson, agreed that the best answer to ‘Italian intrigue’ was an Anglo-Egyptian treaty 18 The treaty would serve both their interests. The British could tell the world that they had secured untrammelled rights to bases around the Suez Canal. Nahas could tell the Egyptians that he had secured independence. 19

The tawdry insincerity of the Anglo-Egyptian negotiations provided fertile ground for Ali Maher and his Fascist allies to exploit. In Farouk, the boy-king of Egypt, Ali Maher saw the perfect blank canvas from which he could create an Islamo-Fascist monarchy. The Wafd’s elderly candidate for head of the royal household was discredited by his dalliance with a seventeen-year-old Austrian girl. With his competitor disposed of, Ali Maher became once again officially the King’s chief adviser. Farouk invited a circle of Italian Fascist advisers to the Palace. Chief amongst them was the ‘royal architect’. He did little design work. Instead he was a conduit for intelligence and influence to flow between Rome and Cairo. His influence was cemented by his equally important role of royal pander, supplying the young European girls so prized at Court. 20

Fascists in the Palace were not Nahas’s only problem. The Wafd had won power by aping Fascist models of street violence. Yet it was unclear whether they controlled the power on the streets that they had unleashed. The gangs created in the image of the Black Shirts did not necessarily agree with their leader’s contention that the British, although repugnant, were better than the Italians. Although Nahas proclaimed himself‘supreme leader’ of the Blue Shirts, they increasingly appeared as much a threat as a boon. The government of Egypt had declared against the Italians but contained elements of Fascist decay within it. The Blue Shirts turned on their own corrupt pashadom. The Party had to use all the powers of the State to destroy its own mass movement, to the benefit of Ali Maher and the Palace.

Egyptian Islamo-Fascism emboldened others. 21 The Mufti of Jerusalem himself had never had much in common with his fellow Islamic militants in Egypt. Egyptian clerics dreaming of a Caliphate in Cairo distrusted their more charismatic Palestinian brother, who made no secret of his own ambition to lead Sunni Islam. The Egyptian Islamo-Fascist successes, however, egged on the Syrians. The Syrian National Bloc created its own paramilitaries on the Fascist model, the Steel Shirts. 22 The Syrian Emir Shakib Arslan, the best-known spokesman of militant Arab nationalism, whose anti-French, anti-British propaganda was financed in equal measure by Mussolini and Hitler, goaded the Mufti in the Palestinian press. 23 The circumstances overrode the Mufti’s preference for mezzi insidiosi. 24 The terrorist cells were activated. In April 1936 the Mufti himself arrived on the Mediterranean coast. Arabs started murdering Jews. The Mufti emerged as the head of the Arab Higher Committee. A general strike was declared. 25 The priority of the strike was to close down Palestine’s modern commerce. The first target was the Mediterranean ports, and the railways which took imports inland. The struggle centred on Haifa, Palestine’s great hope for modernity. It contained a new port built by the British and the railway workshops, the largest industrial site in Palestine. 26 Old Haifa was the base of the most notorious Islamic terrorists, the Black Hand. Modern Haifa was a heterogeneous place with many new immigrants. There, where the strike could have had most effect, its hold was patchy. On the other hand, the old Arab port of Jaffa was completely closed down. In order to solidify the strike in Haifa, and maintain it in Jaffa, the leaders of the revolt required a great deal of money. They needed to offer wavering Arab workers alternative incomes. Appeals to fellow Muslims raised very little. 27

The Italians, on the other hand, were more than willing to provide the Mufti with ‘millions’. Both the Italians and the insurgents got what they wanted. British troops were transferred from the Egyptian-Libyan border to Palestine, where they struggled to deal with terrorism. At last it seemed that money and violence would close down Haifa. In extremis, the British Army acted decisively. It sent troops into Haifa to protect those who kept working. But British success in Haifa provoked even more violence. Insurgents took to the countryside. If they could not close the ports they would sabotage the economy inland. In the towns the paramilitaries forced shops to close, preventing what arrived at the ports from being sold. Foreign fighters arrived from around the Arab world. Those with military training were able to deploy heavier weapons such as machine guns, making the bands even more deadly.

The British response was hobbled by disagreement over the nature of the revolt. Sir John Dill, the officer dispatched from Britain to deal with the insurgents, argued that the surest and most effective way of crippling the uprising was to decapitate it. He wanted to eliminate the Mufti. The High Commissioner in Palestine, Sir Arthur Wauchope, however, remained the Mufti’s dupe. Wauchope’s own desire that Palestine should become a peaceful, multi-racial, multi-religious society, led him astray. 28 The effect, one of his senior police officials remarked, was a policy of glossing things over’. 29 In the autumn of 1936 London finally agreed to overrule Wauchope. He was ordered to extirpate the leaders of the revolt. Despite these orders Wauchope remained determined to subvert the ‘hard policy’. His first response was to wash his hands of his responsibilities, for he must remain ‘the Kindly Father’ of the Arabs. As the day of martial law drew near, he warned the Arab Higher Committee that he would soon be unable to protect them. The Mufti heeded Wauchope’s warning. Just before the Army moved in to arrest the leaders of the revolt, the Arab Higher Committee decreed that they had won and the strike would end. With his power intact the High Commissioner was able to override any plans to hunt down the insurgents. Foreign fighters merely crossed the border into Syria whilst home-grown terrorists returned unmolested to their day jobs. As Dill bitterly observed, a great proportion of the fighting power of the British army had been deployed to achieve a paper victory 30

By the time Mussolini unsheathed the sword of Islam in Tripoli, the Mufti was planning an even greater uprising in Palestine. His Italian lire funded a meeting of militants at Bludan, well recorded since the ‘Colonel Race’ of Syria, Colonel MacKereth, managed to sneak in an agent disguised as an ice-seller. 31 Compromised, the Mufti fled. In the first of the escapes that added glamour to his sinister fame, he climbed down the walls of his Jerusalem mosque, sped to the Mediterranean coast by car and boarded a boat for Lebanon. Once safely in Beirut he declared Jihad against the British. It was launched on 26 September 1937. 32 In November 1937, when the British decided to send more troops to the eastern Mediterranean, the reinforcements went to Palestine. Far from deterring Mussolini, the so-called ‘Middle East strategic reserve’ was tied down by his Islamic allies in emergency counter-insurgency Twenty thousand troops, including eighteen infantry battalions, were deployed in the country 33 Mussolini’s jihad even won the admiration of Hitler, who had previously dismissed the Arabs as lacquered apes. 34

Ciano, famously, dismissed the efficacy of political mezzi insidiosi. ‘For years,’ he moaned to the German ambassador in Rome, ‘he had maintained constant relations with the Grand Mufti, of which his secret fund could tell a tale.’ Sadly, Ciano lamented, ‘the return of his gift of millions had not been exactly great’. Militarily, all he had got for his money was a few bands of Muslim insurgents willing to sabotage the oil pipeline that ran from northern Iraq to the Mediterranean coast at Haifa. But Ciano was speaking after Italy had declared war on Britain. Subversion was then of little importance to immediate military campaigns. 35 As Otto von Hentig, the premier German expert on oriental subversion, pointed out, the erosion of British power in the Mediterranean would take years rather than months. In Egypt, Ali Maher was Prime Minister, although he was too wily to twit British power openly. With the greatest difficulty the British had been able to smother the second intifada. 36 It was only in July 1939 that Britain, at last, managed to transfer troops from Palestine to the Egyptian-Libyan frontier. A remarkable amount had been achieved in only four years. Mussolini had acted as a beacon of hope for all those who hated the British. The tangible links between Islamic militancy and Fascism were actually less important than a vision of the future. The Italians had shown that British rule was not inescapable. ‘The old impression of invulnerability has gone,’ concluded one intelligence report, ‘and while there are many who believe that England can still hold her own in the Mediterranean, there are just as many who question her ability to do so.’ 37 It was possible to plan, and fight for, the illiberal, undemocratic bright horizon. 38

THREE

Of Mice and Men

In the spring of 1939 the great Mediterranean navies had a burst of enthusiasm for killing each other. The Royal Navy found release from its own problems in fantasizing about giving the despised ‘Itiy’ a good drubbing. 1 The Regia Marina reached the height of its fervour for Fascist manliness. The most enthusiastic champion of a Mediterranean war was, however, the French Marine and in particular its charismatic leader Jean-François Darlan. Darlan had furiously politicked his way to the top. He cultivated an image as a ‘liberal’ ready to bring the navy out of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. His fellow admirals did not altogether trust him. Most of them respected or feared his skills. They knew he had the ear of their political masters. They realized that Darlan had sedulously placed his own allies in positions of influence during his rise to the top.

The royal republicans of the Marine understood that France’s best guarantee against Italian belligerence was the dominant power of Britain in the Mediterranean. This knowledge did not make them happy. France should have had a great role in the Mediterranean. She had a powerful fleet. That fleet had modern bases to both the north and the south: Toulon in metropolitan France, Oran in Algeria, Bizerta in Tunisia. Bizerta was the ‘key naval base of the Middle Mediterranean’, commanding the narrow seas between Sicily and Tunisia. Bizerta struck one British observer in the spring of 1939 as ‘the most magnificent harbour on the whole African coast’. The bay was large and deep enough to accommodate the entire French fleet. Unlike the main British naval base in the central Mediterranean, Malta, its Tunisian hinterland could provision and support that fleet even in time of war. 2