During World War II, the Middle East played a vital part in British strategic calculations. As prime minister from May 1940, Churchill placed a high priority on bolstering British power in the region. At a critical phase in the war, he insisted on dispatching large numbers of tanks and men to reinforce British forces confronting the Italians, and later the Germans, on the border between Egypt and Libya.

The British could no longer afford the luxury of a piecemeal bureaucratic approach to the Middle East. Economic planning and supply questions for the entire region were coordinated by the Middle East Supply Center in Cairo. A British minister resident was sent to Cairo to take charge of overall policy making. (One incumbent, Lord Moyne, a close friend of Churchill, was murdered in November 1944 by Zionist terrorists as a protest against British policy in Palestine.)

After Italian entry into the war in June 1940, the danger of attack in the Mediterranean precluded use of the Suez Canal by British ships carrying supplies to and from India and the Far East. Ships carrying reinforcements to British forces in Egypt had to take the Cape of Good Hope route before passing through the canal from south to north.

Except in Egypt, where they built up their forces to confront the Italians and later the Germans, the British could not afford to maintain more than a thin crust of military control in most of the region during the war. Yet by a mixture of diplomacy, guile, and occasional demonstrative concentrations of force, they succeeded in averting serious challenge from nationalist opponents. The two most dangerous threats came in Iraq and Egypt. A pro-Axis coup erupted in Iraq in April 1941, headed by Rashid Ali al-Kaylani, aided by Italian and Nazi agents and by the ex-mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al- Husayni. With pro-Vichy forces in control of Syria and Lebanon, British power throughout the Fertile Crescent seemed for a moment on the verge of toppling. But in May, a small British force from the Habbaniya air base moved into Baghdad. Al- Kaylani and the ex-mufti fled to Germany where they devoted themselves to anti-British propaganda. The following month, British and Free French forces, operating from Palestine, advanced into Syria and Lebanon and installed new French administrations sympathetic to the Allied cause.

The other threat appeared in Egypt, where nationalist elements, particularly in the Egyptian army, were impressed by Axis military successes and sought to take advantage of Britain’s moment of weakness. The British reacted firmly. In February 1942, British tanks surrounded the royal palace as a weeping King Farouk was forced by ultimatum to appoint a prime minister acceptable to the British, Mustafa al-Nahhas, head of the Wafd party. From the British point of view, the Abdin palace coup, as the episode became known, gave a salutary demonstration of British resolve at a time of acute military pressure from the Germans in the western desert.

The battle in the western desert swung to and fro. In the initial phase, between June 1940 and February 1941, a British army under General Archibald Wavell beat back an offensive by Italian forces under Marshal Rodolfo Graziani and advanced into Cyrenaica. In the spring of 1941, however, Axis forces were bolstered by the arrival of the German Afrika Korps commanded by General Erwin Rommel, a brilliant strategist. The tide was reversed: the British were routed from Libya, and the British garrison at Tobruk was besieged and captured. By mid-1942, the Germans had advanced deep into Egypt. Government departments in Cairo began burning secret documents, and emergency evacuation plans were prepared.

In November 1942, the critical battle of the campaign was fought against Rommel at al-Alamayn by the British Eighth Army under General Bernard Montgomery. Months of careful planning coupled with imaginative mobile tactics, intelligent exploitation of ultra signals intelligence, as well as British superiority in numbers of men and machines, brought a decisive victory. This was, in Churchill’s phrase, “the end of the beginning.” Thereafter, the British strategic position in the region eased. Almost simultaneously in Morocco and Algeria, Operation Torch, the landing of U.S. and British forces commanded by General Eisenhower, had opened a new front against the Axis. By May 1943, the Germans and Italians had been cleared out of northern Africa.

Churchill’s preoccupation with the Mediterranean led him up some blind alleys. He tried repeatedly to draw Turkey into the war on the Allied side but without success. Turkey remained neutral until early 1945, when it declared war on Germany at the last moment in order to qualify for membership in the United Nations (UN). The United States opposed Churchill’s Mediterranean strategy both on military grounds and because the United States did not wish to give the appearance of propping up British imperial interests. Ibn Sa’ud, too, remained neutral until the last moment, though he received handsome subsidies from the British and the United States and made some gestures of support for the Allied cause.

Britain did not seek territorial acquisition in the Middle East in World War II. It nevertheless found itself drawn into new responsibilities. Following the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Britain joined the USSR in occupying Iran. Arms and other supplies to the Soviet Union were sent by rail through Iran. With the expulsion of the last Axis forces from Libya in 1943, that country was placed under military administration—French in the Fezzan and British in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. British forces also occupied the former Italian possessions of Eritrea, Abyssinia, and Italian Somaliland. Abyssinia was restored to its indigenous imperial ruler. Eritrea remained under British rule until 1952 when it was annexed by Abyssinia. Italian Somaliland was returned to Italy as a UN trusteeship in 1950. Libya became independent in December 1951, though Britain was granted the right under the Anglo–Libyan Alliance Treaty of 1953 to maintain military installations there. During the war, large reserves of oil in the Arabian Peninsula had come on-stream. Because of the closure of the Mediterranean to British commercial shipping, British use of Middle East oil during the war was mainly restricted to the area east of the Suez. Elsewhere, Britain mainly relied on imports from the Americas. After the war, the balance changed. Over the next three decades, Britain became steadily more dependent on oil imports from the Middle East, especially Kuwait.