Ibrahim Meguid - No One Sleeps in Alexandria

The Russians had retreated behind the Dnepr river and fighting intensified in front of Leningrad. The raids on London ceased and the Battle of Britain ended because the Germans were busy on the eastern front. The American navy declared that it was determined to rid the Atlantic Ocean of Nazi ships after Churchill met with Roosevelt on an American cruiser in the Atlantic Ocean. Roosevelt announced the United States’ resolve to defend the freedom to sail the seas and warned that Axis ships would face destruction if they entered US territorial waters. A German U-boat torpedoed the British aircraft carrier Ark Royal and sank it. Afterward, German U-boats also sank the British battleship Barham; all seamen on board were killed. An Italian submarine came close to Alexandria and torpedoed the British battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant, crippling them. When the British command tried to take its revenge against an Axis ship convoy going from Italy to Tripoli, it assigned the task to a British force comprised of three cruisers and four destroyers. But it was the British force that was ambushed at sea; two cruisers were hit, and the third was sunk with all seven hundred seamen on board, with the exception of one, who was taken prisoner. It was a truly painful end to the English fleet in the eastern Mediterranean.

In France, seventy-two French hostages were shot, execution-style, by the Germans in Nantes in retaliation for their participation in the Resistance. That prompted de Gaulle to declare mourning and called on all the people to demonstrate. The whole of France expressed anger. In India, Mahatma Gandhi’s seventy-third birthday was celebrated in his quiet village where he spent most of his time with his spindle and yarn. Gifts of spindles and yarn poured in from all over the country. In the Pacific, Japanese planes and battleships launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, destroying three hundred American planes and thirty battleships and killing seven thousand. For the United States, it was a day of infamy, and it was the day that the States officially entered the war. Japanese forces spread in East Asia and fighting extended throughout the eastern parts of Malaya and Singapore and to Hong Kong. Russia’s winter began to take its toll on the German troops, whose vehicles stalled and they were unable to enter Moscow even though they had reached its outskirts. The Germans began to retreat. The Slavic nation had awakened. Marshal Voroshilov, commander in chief of the Partisan movement, made a moving appeal to the inhabitants of Leningrad. He said that the enemy was trying to enter the city and destroy its houses and factories and the freedom of the motherland, that Leningrad was the industrial and cultural capital of Russia and it would not fall, and that “the enemies would not set foot in our beautiful gardens.”

Since December the Germans had suffered many defeats. Sixty thousand were killed in twenty days at the outskirts of Moscow, a fact that forced the Germans to relieve Field Marshal von Bock of his command of the Rusisian front. A rumor spread in Egypt that Marshal Timoshenko, one of the most prominent commanders in Russia, was a Muslim and therefore never lost any battle.

In Egypt, the writer May Ziyada had died weeks earlier, as had Talat Harb Pasha, father of Egypt’s national economy. His Majesty King Farouk and the royal family paid a visit to the Farafra oasis, thus completing visits to all of Egypt’s oases, to make sure that his subjects there were all right. There was a big air raid on Alexandria that left a lot of destruction and dozens of casualties as always happened since Rommel appeared in Africa. Clothing was distributed to refugees in the countryside. The Egyptian film Schoolgirl and the American film The Thief of Baghdad were screened. The Shah of Iran abdicated the throne in favor of his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, so Princess Fawziya, King Farouk’s sister, was the first Egyptian princess to sit on the throne of Iran. The vice department celebrated the success of its call for the marriage of single refugee women by having a wedding ceremony for twenty couples on the same night. Two hundred thousand pounds worth of narcotics were seized in the coastal area. There was a surge of interest on the part of Hijazis in the Egyptian takiya, or Sufi lodge, in the Hijaz, and the newspapers called for increasing the budget of the takiya to be able to perform its charitable work. The Feast of the Sacrifice coincided with Christmas, and Dimyan went to Alexandria for two days and returned quickly to keep Magd al-Din company. Measures were taken to protect the bronze statues in Ras al-Tin palace from the air raids. And Rushdi walked along Mahmudiya Canal.

He had decided to make it to the Nile then go south until he arrived at Asyut, and on his way would examine all the corpses that he came across. He was certain that Camilla had been killed and that her body was dumped in the Nile. He was determined either to find her dead or alive. A rumor had spread in the country about a young nun with an aura around her head and face who was healing the sick in Asyut, and people started converging on her place from the surrounding villages. A butcher was arrested and faced a military tribunal for refusing to sell meat. There was meat hanging in his store, and a customer came to buy a kilo, but the butcher refused, saying the meat was not for sale, that it was for display only. The customer felt that he was mocking him so he went to the police station and lodged his complaint. Prices for birds rose: a nightingale was priced at twelve piasters, a canary at thirty-five piasters, and likewise for a parrot. The fighting powers pledged to observe a ceasefire on the last night of the year to celebrate the new year, but most houses in Alexandria were closed, destroyed, or deserted.

The new year started with a big commotion in al-Alamein. German and Italian planes conducted raids on the desert all the way to Alexandria. Anti-aircraft artillery scattered all over the desert kept firing, but no planes were hit.

The number of German and Italian prisoners of war being captured dwindled. It was Rommel now who was trans-porting more prisoners to Germany via Italy and the Mediterranean. Rommel’s name now struck fear in the Allied troops. In the middle of January, in the early hours of the morning, Rommel turned off the little reading light and lay down on the bed in his command post, asking his private secretary, Staff Sergeant Boettichcr, to wake him up in an hour. When he got up he held his morning briefing with his officers and told them, “We will attack at once.” Then he explained to them that the British would exploit any relaxation to make use of the huge supplies that they had started to receive. That would give them vast superiority over the Axis forces, hence their lines and their plans should be penetrated to make it all the way to the Delta.

A major operation to deceive British intelligence from Rome to Libya began. Strong rumors were spread that the Germans were withdrawing. Rommel began to blow up mock ships and mock camps. The rumors were so strong in Alexandria that the Allied soldiers started drinking roasts to the withdrawal of Rommel, who was now reduced to blowing up his own ships. But only the belly dancer Hikmat Fahmi in Cairo knew that this was just a ruse. She lured high-ranking English officers to her houseboat, and gathered information and secrets and conveyed them to the Germans by a secret transmitter with the help of the two spies, Johannes Eppler and Hans Gerd Sandstetter.

After pretending to withdraw, Rommel began his daring and sudden offensive by dividing his armored force into two divisions, one for the coast and the other for the desert. He seized Ajdabiya, then Antalat and Sawinnu. British armed forces retreated in a state of great disarray toward the Egyptian borders. The road to Benghazi on the one hand, and to al-Makili on the other, was now open to Rommel. Toward the end of January he pretended to launch an offensive against al-Makili, so Auchinleck moved his armored force and his infantry there, but, making a tiger-like leap, Rommel changed direction to the coast, cutting off the Indian Fourth Division and taking Benghazi. The Führer promoted him to general. The British had lost their morale and ran away as if bitten by a snake. Rommel had unleashed his eighty-eight-millimeter anti-tank guns on their armored vehicles, then overran them with his heavy Panzer tanks.