Egypt declares war on the Axis

On 24 February 1945 the Prime Minister of Egypt, Ahmad Mahir, laid before the deputies in Cairo the government’s motion to declare war on Germany and Japan. The Chamber of Deputies met behind closed doors; the Prime Minister explained what Egypt stood to gain from formal participation in the war and won almost unanimous support. He then set off for the neighbouring chamber of the Senate to repeat his speech there. As he was passing through the so-called Pharaonic Hall, which connected the two chambers, a young man approached and fired several pistol shots at him. Mahir was killed on the spot.

The popular version, in which the Prime Minister fell moments after delivering the declaration to parliament, is therefore not quite accurate: Mahir managed to win over the lower chamber to war, but not the Senate, and the formal declaration of war was announced by his successor. Sources differ on the date of that act – some studies give 24 February, the day of the vote in the Chamber of Deputies, while others give 26 February, when the new government of Mahmoud Fahmi al-Nuqrashi issued the relevant statement. Whatever the discrepancy, Egypt met the 1 March deadline set at the Yalta Conference for states wishing to take part in the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco – as Turkey had done the day before.

A neutral country full of foreign soldiers

Egypt had been a formally independent kingdom since 1922, but British influence there remained overwhelming. The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 allowed Britain to keep troops in the zone of the Suez Canal and, in the event of war, obliged Egypt to place its ports, airfields, roads and communications at its ally’s disposal. When war broke out in September 1939, Cairo broke off relations with Germany but did not declare war on the Reich. It was the same with Italy in June 1940: Egypt broke off relations but remained formally neutral – even when, in September that year, the Italians crossed into its territory and took Sollum and Sidi Barrani.

For the next three years Egypt was the main base of Britain’s war in the Middle East and North Africa. Cairo housed the headquarters of Middle East Command, Alexandria was the base of the Mediterranean Fleet, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers from all over the Empire passed through the country, including Poles of the Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade. Egypt’s elites viewed this presence with mixed feelings. The young King Farouk I surrounded himself with Italians, and some politicians and officers hoped that an Axis victory would free the country from the British.

The sharpest expression of this tension was the Abdin Palace incident. On 4 February 1942, when Erwin Rommel was once again pushing east through Cyrenaica and demonstrators in Cairo were cheering his name, the British ambassador Sir Miles Lampson surrounded the royal palace with tanks and gave Farouk an ultimatum: either appoint a Wafd government under Mustafa al-Nahhas or abdicate. The king gave way. The British gained a loyal government for the period of decisive fighting, but paid for it with a humiliation of the monarch and the army that Egyptian nationalists did not forget. In the autumn of 1942 the victory at El Alamein removed the danger of invasion from Egypt, and in May 1943 the fighting in North Africa came to an end.

Ahmad Mahir

Ahmad Mahir was born in Cairo in the late 1880s (sources give 1885, 1886 or 1888) into a wealthy family with political traditions; his elder brother Ali Mahir headed the government several times. He studied law and economics at Montpellier, where he took a doctorate, and then lectured in Cairo. In 1919 he joined the national movement of Saad Zaghlul and the Wafd party. In 1924 he was Minister of Education, but he was soon accused of involvement in the conspiracy that led to the assassination of Sir Lee Stack, the British Sirdar (commander-in-chief) of the Egyptian Army and Governor-General of the Sudan; the court acquitted him. In 1936 he became President of the Chamber of Deputies.

Rivalry with the Wafd leader Mustafa al-Nahhas led to a split in 1937–1938. Mahir and his long-time associate al-Nuqrashi founded the Saadist Party, so named to emphasise their loyalty to Zaghlul’s ideals. In the years that followed Mahir served as Minister of Finance and again as President of the Chamber. In October 1944, when the front had moved away from Egypt and the British no longer defended the Wafd government at any price, Farouk dismissed al-Nahhas and asked Mahir to form a cabinet. The new Prime Minister was regarded as a politician well disposed towards Britain. The elections of January 1945, boycotted by the Wafd, brought his coalition a decisive victory.

Why war in 1945

Mahir had long favoured Egypt’s entry into the war on the Allied side. According to his biographers, he argued that taking part in the fighting would give the Egyptian army combat experience, and that the British could no longer justify keeping their troops on the Suez Canal on the grounds that Egypt could not defend itself. In 1945, however, the political argument mattered most. The war in Europe was drawing to a close, and the victorious powers were creating an organisation that was to have a say in the post-war order. Egypt, which wanted a revision of the 1936 treaty, the withdrawal of British troops and union with the Sudan, needed a seat at the table. The Yalta decisions left no room for illusions: whoever had not declared war on the common enemy by 1 March would not be invited to San Francisco.

The step was unpopular at home. To the nationalists, declaring war on Germany at a time when North Africa had long been free of Axis troops looked like yet another concession to London – dragging Egypt into “the British war” with no benefit to the country itself. The government, for its part, stressed that the point was solely participation in the peace conference and the new organisation, not sending troops to the front.

The assassination

The assassin turned out to be a lawyer in his twenties, whose name is rendered in some sources as Muhammad al-Isawi and in English-language ones most often as Mahmud al-Isawi (El Essawy). He was seized on the spot. His political allegiance is disputed. According to some accounts he was an activist of the nationalist Young Egypt organisation, possibly also linked to the Muslim Brotherhood; other sources state that under interrogation he described himself as a member of the National Party and testified that he had wanted to prevent Egypt from entering the war alongside the British. Immediately after the assassination the police arrested the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, and several other leaders of the organisation, but released them a few days later. Later accounts, including the memoirs of one Brotherhood activist, linked the assassin to the organisation’s secret apparatus, which was supposedly taking revenge for al-Banna’s defeat in the elections in Ismailia; this thesis remains disputed. Al-Isawi was sentenced to death.

Mahir’s murder was the first assassination of a serving Egyptian prime minister since the killing of Boutros Ghali in 1910. Leadership of the government and the party passed to al-Nuqrashi, who continued his predecessor’s policy and brought about Egypt’s formal entry into the war.

Place in the war

Militarily, the declaration of war changed nothing: the Egyptian army sent no units to the front, and hostilities in Europe lasted only another ten weeks. Politically, however, Egypt achieved what Mahir had sought. It was among the states invited to San Francisco, signed the Charter of the United Nations and became one of the founding members of the UN. As early as 22 March 1945, in Cairo, al-Nuqrashi signed on Egypt’s behalf the founding pact of the Arab League, whose headquarters was established in the Egyptian capital.

Hopes of quickly freeing the country from the British were not fulfilled. In December 1945 al-Nuqrashi demanded a revision of the 1936 treaty, the withdrawal of British troops and recognition of the unity of Egypt and the Sudan, but the negotiations failed and the country was engulfed by riots. Mahir’s murder also opened a wave of political violence. The Muslim Brotherhood, ever stronger and armed, carried out a series of assassinations; on 8 December 1948 al-Nuqrashi banned the organisation, and on 28 December he himself was killed by one of its members. In February 1949 Hassan al-Banna was shot dead.

The humiliation of 1942, defeat in the war with Israel in 1948 and disillusionment with the political elites of the monarchy led in July 1952 to the Free Officers’ coup, which overthrew Farouk. The death of Ahmad Mahir in the Pharaonic Hall, on the day Egypt formally declared for the victors, became one of the first signs that the end of the world war would not bring peace to the countries of the Middle East.