Murray takes command in Egypt

On 10 January 1916 Lieutenant-General Sir Archibald Murray took over command of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force from General Charles Monro. He had arrived in Egypt the day before, 9 January, as the last troops from Gallipoli were leaving Cape Helles. As recently as December Murray had been Chief of the Imperial General Staff in London, but he had had to make way for General William Robertson. Now he was given an army that, after eight months of fighting on the peninsula, first had to be rebuilt.

Two instructions

Murray brought to Egypt two documents dated 29 December 1915. The first, from the Secretary of State for War, Lord Herbert Kitchener, made him commander-in-chief of the forces defending Egypt against attack from the east. He was to place his headquarters in Egypt, at a spot of his own choosing with the approval of the War Office. Kitchener instructed him to conduct the defence as actively as possible: no formed body of the enemy was to come within artillery range of the Suez Canal, and even small parties were not to reach the canal and interfere with shipping. Aircraft were to attack Turkish bases and supply routes in the desert. Murray was also to exercise general supervision over the British troops at Salonika, but on 9 January he learned that for operations they would come under the orders of the French general Maurice Sarrail.

The second document, from Robertson, gave these forces a new role. The forces in Egypt were to be a general strategic reserve for the Empire. No one knew where the Turks, freed from the fighting at Gallipoli, would strike: in Mesopotamia, at Egypt, or perhaps in the Balkans. Robertson reminded him, however, that the government’s War Committee had recognised France as the main theatre of the war. As soon as the situation in the East became clear, no more troops were to remain there than absolutely necessary. Murray’s first task was therefore to put the weary and depleted Gallipoli divisions in order. Robertson also demanded a daily evening situation report.

Two commanders in one country

The new command did not cover the whole of Egypt. General John Maxwell, commander of the troops in Egypt since the start of the war, kept authority over the Delta and the Nile valley, and was responsible for order in the country, for the reserve units and for the defence on the west, where his troops were fighting the Senussi. The boundary between the two commands was drawn roughly eight kilometres west of the canal and the Great Bitter Lake, with the Tell el-Kebir camp and the town of Zagazig on Murray’s side. In practice Murray therefore commanded only the easternmost province of Egypt and the Sinai peninsula, and he set up his headquarters at Ismailia on the canal. On the other hand, all the formed divisions and the supply base of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force came under him.

The British official history of the operations in Egypt calls this division an anomaly. Army headquarters had no say in the affairs of the country in which it stood, and the War Office had to deal with two staffs. Asked for his opinion, Murray replied that there was no room in Egypt for two independent commanders, and offered to step aside himself for the sake of unity. Maxwell too complained of the wastefulness of the arrangement. In March the government merged the two commands under Murray, and Maxwell returned to England.

The canal and the reserve

Murray found a great construction effort under way on the canal. After the Turkish attack at the beginning of 1915 the British had abandoned the idea of defending the canal on its banks. The main line was to run about 10 kilometres east of it, so that Turkish artillery could not shell passing ships. Every day hundreds of Nile boats carried from Port Said stone, rails and pipes for the water mains that were to bring water to the trenches in the desert. The pipes were brought from India, and when supplies there ran out, from the USA. The official history stresses that the foundations of this plan had been laid by Maxwell and that a new commander with a fresh staff could not have set the machine in motion so quickly. A few days after taking command Murray sent his corps commanders to the canal to take over the construction and prepare defence plans.

Fears at the time were great. In December the General Staff in London had reckoned that by the end of January the Turks might throw as many as 200,000 men against Egypt, and a month later 300,000. The official history regards these estimates as greatly exaggerated. The strategic reserve in Egypt, fourteen divisions in all, therefore quickly melted away. Six of them sailed before the end of March 1916, mainly to France, and one to Mesopotamia. Before the end of June four more had left, and Murray was left with only four Territorial divisions. With them and the cavalry he waged the war in the Sinai desert in the following months.