The Suez Canal in the First World War

During the First World War the Suez Canal was the most important line of communication of the British Empire: the shortest link between Europe and India and Australia, through which troopships sailed to the fronts. That is why the Turks and the Germans twice tried to cut it, in February 1915 and in August 1916, and were beaten back both times. The British began by defending the banks themselves and ended by marching across Sinai into Palestine. The canal stayed open throughout the war, and a great base of the imperial armies grew up around it.

The road to India (1914)

The canal, opened in 1869, was run by a French company. It ran through Egypt, which was formally still subject to the Sultan but had been occupied by the British since 1882. A convention concluded at Constantinople in 1888 guaranteed freedom of navigation in war and in peace, and Britain agreed to bring it into force only in 1904, in its agreement with France. The Germans called the canal the “jugular vein” of the Empire. The British official history of the operations in Egypt writes that, lying halfway between England and India, it was the most vital focal point on the world’s communications.

When the war broke out, enemy merchant ships fled into the canal from British cruisers. Some captains misused their wireless, so it was dismantled. In the end it was decided that the canal gave no right of asylum: the Egyptian government ordered the ships to leave its waters and escorted them beyond the three-mile limit, where Allied warships could seize them. In the autumn of 1914 troops from India bound for France passed through Suez, and on 1 December ships carrying Australians and New Zealanders, who were kept in Egypt, anchored in the Suez roads.

The war with Turkey in November 1914 changed the canal’s position. The British proclaimed martial law in Egypt and in December a protectorate, cutting the country’s tie with the Sultan. The canal company, until then careful towards the warring sides, now put its resources, including its small craft, at the disposal of the Allies. From the east the canal was now threatened by the Ottoman army in Palestine, separated from it only by the Sinai desert.

Defence on the banks (1914–1915)

The British decided to defend the canal on its own line. Two Indian divisions, reinforced by Egyptian artillery, manned the banks, and British and French warships took up positions on the canal and the lakes to serve as floating batteries. At the end of November 1914 the embankment was cut near Port Said, and water flooded the low-lying plain to the east, barring the approach to about 20 miles of the canal.

The first attack came at the beginning of February 1915. The army of Djemal Pasha crossed the desert with metal pontoons and on the night of 2–3 February tried to cross near Ismailia. Only three pontoons reached the west bank, and after a day of fighting the Turks withdrew. Shipping suffered little, because in the days of danger the canal was closed at night and reopened in the morning. Egypt, contrary to Turkish hopes, did not rise against the British.

For the rest of 1915 the Bavarian officer Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein sent small detachments across the desert to lay mines and harass the defenders. Once they succeeded: on 30 June the steamer Teiresias struck a mine in the Little Bitter Lake and swung across the channel, but the canal company reopened it the same night. Egypt meanwhile became the base of the expedition to Gallipoli, and at the turn of 1915 and 1916 the troops evacuated from the peninsula returned to the canal.

Defence from the desert (1916)

At the end of 1915 the British concluded that the line of defence had to lie so far to the east that enemy artillery could not reach the canal. In March 1916 General Archibald Murray took command of all the troops in Egypt and went further. From Qantara he built a railway and a water pipeline deep into Sinai, to occupy the oases in the north of the peninsula and deny the enemy their water. In July a second Ottoman expedition set out across the desert, supported by the Germans and the Austrians. On 4–5 August it broke down at Romani, some 35–40 kilometres from the canal. It was the last Ottoman attempt to threaten the canal.

A great building effort followed the troops. According to the official history, hundreds of miles of railway, road and piping were laid across the desert, and Qantara, a desert village on the canal, grew into a great port. The burden of the work fell largely on Egyptian labourers. In the autumn of 1916 the Labour Corps alone numbered some thirteen thousand men under Murray, and in the following years peasants were recruited into it more and more often by compulsion.

Base of the Palestine front (1917–1918)

After Romani the initiative passed to the British. Even the march on El Arish at the end of 1916 was only meant to cover the canal better. According to the official history, the government began to think of conquering Palestine only after the First Battle of Gaza in March 1917. From then on the canal was the base of the Sinai and Palestine campaign. The railway along it linked Port Said, the main base of the troops in Palestine, with Suez, where supplies from the East arrived, and in July 1918 a railway bridge was built across the canal.

The canal was also an argument in politics. Palestine under British protection was to shield it from the east, and this was one of the reasons why London backed the Zionists with the Balfour Declaration in November 1917. After the war the advocates of concentrating on the Western Front argued that Britain should have done nothing throughout but keep the canal open, because nothing else in the Middle East was worth the cost or the risk.

After the war

The war strengthened British control of the canal. The bitterness of Egyptians over years of martial law and forced labour erupted in a revolt in 1919, but under the treaty of 1936 the British kept their hold on the canal. Their military presence in Egypt lasted until 1956. In the same year Egypt nationalised the canal company.