Saudi Arabia declares war on Germany

On 1 March 1945 Saudi Arabia announced that it was in a state of war with Germany. According to most lists, including American and United Nations ones, the act of King Abdulaziz ibn Saud also covered Japan; some studies, however, mention only Germany. The act itself took the form of a royal decision announced by the government in Mecca, not a resolution of parliament, which the kingdom did not have. The account that speaks of war with Germany and Japan is therefore consistent with the great majority of sources.

The date was no accident. At the Yalta Conference the Big Three had agreed that the founding conference of the new world organisation in San Francisco would be open to states that adhered to the Declaration by United Nations and declared war on the common enemy by 1 March 1945. In the last days of February several hitherto neutral countries did just that: most of the republics of Latin America, Turkey, Egypt, and Syria and Lebanon. Saudi Arabia was the last to join them, on the very day the deadline expired. Not a single Saudi soldier went to the front, and the declaration changed nothing in the position of the armies in any theatre of operations. What it did change was the kingdom’s standing after the war.

A neutrality friendly to Britain

Ibn Saud, who in 1932 had named his state after his own dynasty, ruled a poor, sparsely populated country dependent on revenue from the pilgrimage to Mecca. In the 1930s he maintained correct relations with Germany and Italy, and in 1939 he even held talks with Berlin about arms deliveries. When war broke out in September 1939, however, he followed the example of Iraq and Egypt and broke off diplomatic relations with the Reich. He declared neutrality, but a neutrality friendly to Britain, to which he was bound by treaties and subsidies. In the spring of 1941 he did not support the pro-German coup in Iraq, although some Arab nationalists had counted on his help.

The war quickly hit Saudi finances. Pilgrim traffic almost ceased, and with it the court’s main source of income. In the first years of the war the country was kept afloat above all by money and grain shipments from London. The war also touched Arabia directly, though only once: on 19 October 1940 Italian bombers attacking the refinery on Bahrain also dropped bombs near the American oil installations at Dhahran. The damage was slight, but the incident showed that even this corner of the world lay within the war’s reach.

Oil and the Americans

It was oil that made the United States begin to take the desert kingdom seriously. In 1933 Ibn Saud granted a concession to prospect in the east of the country to Standard Oil of California (today Chevron Corporation), which operated through a subsidiary, the California Arabian Standard Oil Company (CASOC); in 1936 Texaco also took a stake in it. After several years of unsuccessful drilling, Well No. 7 at Dammam struck oil in commercial quantities in March 1938, and in May 1939 the king personally opened the valve through which oil flowed into the first tanker. At the beginning of 1944 the company took the name Arabian American Oil Company – Aramco.

In Washington there was by then growing talk that domestic reserves would not last long and that after the war the Middle East would become the world’s main reservoir of oil. American oilmen feared that the king’s financial difficulties would push him entirely into British hands. On 18 February 1943 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared the defence of Saudi Arabia vital to the United States, which allowed the country to be brought into the Lend-Lease programme. A permanent American mission was already operating in Jeddah, and in the months that followed money, silver for minting coins, food and advisory missions reached the country. Rivalry with the British for influence in the kingdom continued until the end of the war, but its outcome was becoming ever clearer.

The meeting on the Great Bitter Lake

The symbolic culmination of this rapprochement was the meeting of 14 February 1945. Returning from Yalta, Roosevelt stopped in Egypt and received Ibn Saud aboard the cruiser USS Quincy, anchored on the Great Bitter Lake along the Suez Canal. The king, who rarely left his realm, came from Jeddah aboard an American destroyer; a tent was pitched for him on deck, and his courtiers brought sheep with them for meat. The conversation, interpreted by the American minister William Eddy, lasted several hours. Most of it concerned Palestine: the king firmly opposed further Jewish immigration, and Roosevelt assured him – confirming it later in a letter of 5 April – that he would take no action on the matter hostile to the Arabs without consulting them. A few days later Winston Churchill received Ibn Saud at the Faiyum oasis.

The future world organisation was also discussed. According to many historians, it was in these weeks that the Americans and the British gave the king to understand that if he wanted his state to have a seat at the table in San Francisco, he would have to side formally with the Allies before 1 March. For Ibn Saud, who all his life had taken care not to look like anyone’s client, this was a pragmatic choice: the war in Europe was already decided, Germany and Japan could do him no harm, and a place among the founders of the new organisation gave a small kingdom a voice and international guarantees.

War on paper

The declaration of 1 March brought no military action whatever. Saudi Arabia had neither a modern army nor a navy, and thousands of kilometres separated it from the nearest front. Formal entry into the war did, however, open the way to adhering to the Declaration by United Nations, which was the condition for an invitation to San Francisco. The kingdom thus joined the group of states that declared war in the last weeks before the deadline solely so as not to be left outside the new order – the same calculation the Turks, Egyptians and Syrians had made in February.

In the Arab world the decision met little resistance. Unlike in Egypt, where Prime Minister Ahmad Mahir paid with his life for a similar decision, Arabia had neither a parliament nor an organised opposition, and the authority of the king – guardian of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina – was unchallengeable. The Wahhabi clergy, who might have had reservations about an alliance with unbelievers, had for years accepted the ruler’s pragmatic policy towards the British and Americans.

What came of it

Less than three weeks later, on 22 March 1945, Saudi Arabia was among the seven founding states of the Arab League, established in Cairo. In the spring a Saudi delegation headed by the king’s son, Emir Faisal, the country’s future ruler, travelled to the conference in San Francisco, and on 26 June 1945 it signed the Charter of the United Nations. Saudi Arabia thereby became one of the original members of the United Nations – a status it would not have gained had it delayed by a single day.

Soon after the end of the war the Americans obtained permission to build a military airfield at Dhahran, and Aramco rapidly increased production; the kingdom’s annual oil revenue rose from a few million dollars in 1939 to over 200 million in the early 1950s. The meeting aboard the Quincy and the declaration of 1 March opened a period of close ties between Riyadh and Washington, based on an exchange of oil for security, which outlasted the Cold War. The question of Palestine, which the king had discussed with Roosevelt, was soon to become the main source of tension between the Arab world and the West. Like the other belated declarations of war of late February and early March 1945, the Saudi declaration says little about the war itself and a great deal about the world that was to follow it: about the growing importance of oil, about the United States taking over Britain’s former role in the Middle East, and about how much a place among the founders of the UN mattered to small states.