Murray takes command of all troops in Egypt

On 19 March 1916 General Sir Archibald Murray formally took over from Lieutenant-General Sir John Maxwell the command of all British troops in Egypt. Since January there had been two independent commanders in the country: Murray, who had taken over the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force and was defending the Suez Canal from the east, and Maxwell, who governed the rest of Egypt and was waging war against the Senussi order in the west. Both regarded this arrangement as harmful. In his first despatch from Egypt Murray called it a system of dual control which was necessarily unsatisfactory, particularly from the point of view of economy.

A decision from London

The decision came from the Secretary of State for War, Lord Herbert Kitchener. According to the British official history of the operations in Egypt, the telegram in which he informed Murray that the government had decided to unite the two armies under his command and that Maxwell would return home arrived on 10 March. Murray in his despatch gives the date as 11 March. Both generals had earlier asked London not to take their personal claims into account when making the decision. They settled the details of the handover at a conference on 13 March, and six days later Murray took over all military authority in the country.

With the command came new duties. He was now responsible for martial law in Egypt and for order in the Nile valley and the Delta, as well as for the fight against the Senussi. He also received Maxwell’s additional troops: the 53rd and 54th Divisions, the North Midland Mounted Brigade, garrison battalions and the training centre (Imperial School of Instruction) at Zeitoun near Cairo. He kept his headquarters at Ismailia on the canal. In Cairo he set up the headquarters of the Delta District, which was also responsible for guarding the lines of communication, and for operations in the west he created a new Western Frontier Force, divided into a north-western and a south-western section. The Levant Base was abolished, and the merger of the commands made it possible to reduce the staffs at once. The whole army under Murray’s orders took the name Egyptian Expeditionary Force, after the country to which its operations were henceforth confined. At the end of March, at the request of the Governor-General of the Sudan, Reginald Wingate, Murray also took over the defence of the stretch of the Nile from Aswan to Wadi Halfa, patrolled by armed steamers with naval crews.

Maxwell’s departure

Maxwell had commanded in Egypt since September 1914. In that time he had repelled the Turkish attack on the Suez Canal, turned the country into the base for the Gallipoli expedition and begun building a new line of defence in the desert east of the canal. Finally he left his successor a war won against the Senussi on the coast. Murray acknowledged in his despatch that Maxwell had brought it to a “triumphant” stage with victories that gave the British the capture of Jafar al-Askari at Agagia, the recapture of Sollum on 14 March, the loss of all the order’s guns and the release of the prisoners from sunk ships. According to the information available to Murray, the Senussi forces in the whole of the Western Desert did not then exceed 3,000 men.

Maxwell returned to England. He did not remain without a post for long: at the end of April, after the outbreak of the Easter Rising in Dublin, the government sent him to Ireland as commander of the troops with full military powers. Murray meanwhile had fewer and fewer soldiers. From March further divisions of the imperial strategic reserve left Egypt for France without interruption. With the remaining forces he prepared an advance eastwards, across the northern Sinai towards the Katia oasis, and on 18 March the heir to the throne, Edward, Prince of Wales, joined his staff as a staff captain.